Climate Home News

12/08/2025

For nearly 15 years, Climate Home News has provided trusted, award-winning climate coverage — completely free. This September, we begin a new chapter: introducing a subscription model to help sustain us and do even more. Stay with us as we expand our reporting and deepen our climate coverage.

After almost 15 years of providing our valuable news and analysis completely free, we will be introducing and testing a subscription model.

11/08/2025

While there's a deadlock in UN plastics talks, Panama warns: the worst outcome is a weak deal that changes nothing.

Panama's climate envoy said his country would reject a weak deal on plastics at the UN talks held in Geneva

11/08/2025

Talks on a global plastics treaty remain deadlocked in Geneva, with fossil fuel producers pushing to limit the deal to waste management. Panama’s climate envoy told a Climate Home News webinar his country will reject any pact that ignores production cuts, warning the “worst outcome” would be a weak deal that changes nothing. Nearly 100 nations are demanding the treaty address plastics’ full lifecycle, from fossil fuel-based production to disposal.

11/08/2025

Brazil will now allow some projects to issue their own environmental licences, a change campaigners warn could weaken oversight.

Lula da Silva partially vetoed a "devastation bill" passed by Congress, but Brazil still allowed weakened environmental controls

11/08/2025

Lula has trimmed — but not stopped — Brazil’s “devastation bill.”

On the last day for him to make a decision on what environmental campaigners have dubbed the ‘devastation bill’, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva vetoed 63 of the text’s nearly 400 provisions, while giving a green light to the rest. Approved by Congress on July 17, the bill proposes streamlining environmental licensing in the country.

Read more here 👉 https://buff.ly/2uWASE6

07/08/2025

Worsening fires in Brazil’s Amazon are a threat to new initiatives to raise finance for rainforest protection – including carbon credits and investment funds – due to be showcased at COP30 in November, local climate experts say.

Fuelled by a severe drought linked to climate change, fires in the Brazilian Amazon burned a record 15.6 million hectares (38.5 million acres) last year – an area roughly the size of the US state of Georgia, according to the MapBiomas mapping initiative. Almost half of that was forest, as opposed to pasture or other land.

Fires not only devastate the forest and increase carbon emissions from the burned trees, but could also undermine longer-term efforts to fight deforestation. Learn more here: https://buff.ly/Dbnu58k

06/08/2025

Nigeria has appointed a new head for its climate policy council for the third time in as many years, raising concern among campaigners who say frequent leadership changes could undermine the country’s efforts to tackle climate change.

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01/08/2025

The energy transition will be a hot topic at COP30... but Brazil just hired Edelman, a PR firm that works for fossil fuel giant Shell, to hone its media strategy. The same executive overseeing Edelman’s work with Shell in Brazil will now help craft the summit’s messages.

As calls grow to keep fossil fuel influence out of UN climate talks, campaigners say Edelman’s partnership with the oil and gas major raises an alarming conflict of interest As calls grow to keep fossil fuel influence out of climate talks, campaigners say Edelman’s partnership with the oil and g...

24/07/2025

This week, the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi) launched a net zero standard for banks, asset managers and insurance companies, which requires them to end financing for firms that are expanding coal projects immediately and for those expanding oil and gas projects by 2030.

SBTi, a non-governmental organisation funded by corporations and philanthropies, said that nearly 135 financial institutions on six continents have signed up to the new standard, which was four years in the making.

Approval by the SBTi boosts companies’ reputations for behaving sustainably and can attract green-minded investors and customers.

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24/07/2025

The European Union and China promised on Thursday to demonstrate joint leadership on driving a “global just transition” and said the “defining color” of their cooperation would be green, in a statement issued after their leaders met in Beijing.

They also confirmed they would submit their updated national climate plans for cutting emissions through to 2035 before the COP30 climate summit in Brazil this November. Those plans, known as NDCs, will cover all economic sectors and all greenhouse gases and align “with the long-term temperature goal of the Paris Agreement”, the declaration added.

That goal is to limit global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius and make efforts to keep it to 1.5C above pre-industrial times.

23/07/2025

In a progress report released last Friday, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said the number of Africans without access to clean cooking on the continent has continued to grow, reaching around 1 billion people and affecting four in every five households.

IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said in a statement that lack of clean cooking “remains one of the great injustices in the world”.

Based on current policies and trends, Daniel Wetzel, head of the IEA’s unit to track sustainable transitions, estimated that “hundreds of millions will still lack access to clean cooking by 2030”. He told Climate Home in emailed comments that only three unspecified countries in sub-Saharan Africa are now on course to reach clean cooking for all their people by 2050 – 20 years after the original deadline.

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A shortage of funding and infrastructure means sub-Saharan Africa will have to push back the deadline by a decade to 2040, the International Energy Agency estimates A shortage of funding and infrastructure means Africa will have to push back the deadline to 2040, says the International Energy Agency

23/07/2025

Governments of countries that have driven global warming with their planet-heating emissions could be held legally accountable for the damage caused to other nations, after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that harming the climate is a breach of international law.

In a landmark case brought by the sinking Pacific island nation of Vanuatu, the ICJ’s 15 judges decided unanimously that governments have a legal duty to protect the climate. Breaching that duty, they said in a keenly awaited advisory opinion, could result in the affected countries claiming compensation.

The ICJ says its advisory opinions are not binding. But legal experts stress that while they do not create new law, they clarify it, and the opinion will be referred to as authoritative guidance in future domestic and international climate lawsuits, as well as during UN climate negotiations.

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