Environmental News
Breaking environmental news, policy updates, and ecosystem changes worldwide
The hidden toll of wood pellet power
After the world’s largest producer of wood pellets built what it called a state-of-the-art biomass facility near Ruby Bell’s home in Faison, North Carolina, she started organizing. Bell told her...
Prof Philippe Ciais: The world's most highly cited climate scientist
Phillipe Ciais has spent almost four decades researching the planet’s carbon cycle – and the ways in which humans have been impacting its balance. Based at the Laboratoire des Sciences...
Prof Detlef van Vuuren: The climate scientist most cited by the IPCC
Detlef van Vuuren is one of the world’s leading climate modellers and, as a result, a high-profile focus of his life’s work – the ‘RCP8.5’ scenario – has recently been...
A super El Niño threatens disaster. Trump is handling it recklessly | Terry Garcia
The administration interrupted data streams that are key to forecasting. These systems should not be vulnerable to political whimsIn 1877, North Americans experienced an unusually mild winter – it was...
Majority of datacenters are vulnerable to climate threats like floods and fires, study finds
Study warns AI datacenters are vulnerable to the climate hazards that their global greenhouse gas emissions bolsterAmid rising concern that the artificial intelligence boom is fueling the climate crisis, a...
Scientists alarmed after two wildfires hit Greenland within a week
Researchers say it is ‘quite wild’ to see fires at such high northern latitudes happen so early in the yearScientists have expressed concern after two wildfires broke out within a...
Women in Jamaica are opening eyes with climate photography
Raymond’s hands look worn from sourcing water for people in his community. In an image, his left hand is shown draped over a block of wood, reflecting years of hard...
'Climate change is a form of oppression': the voices affected most by environmental crisis
In HBO documentary The Welcome Table, director Josh Fox brings together people from across the world whose lives have been dramatically altered by the climate crisisIn an age of division,...
The Invisible Infrastructure of Climate Resilience
Katharine K. Wilkinson’s new book explores the movement through climate grief and describes how to look inward with care and outward with curiosity and courage.By Claire BarberAfter years working in...
The Colorado River is vanishing — and the fixes are getting weird
The crisis on the Colorado River is simple: The seven Western states that border the essential waterway use more water than it contains. Chronic overuse has drained its two largest...
UN chief says fossil fuel industry must cut methane for warming 'relief'
UN chief António Guterres called on Tuesday for stronger action to cut emissions of planet-heating methane, taking aim at the fossil fuel industry’s practices and profits, and pointing to coal,...
Outrage rescued an important ocean research program. Crucial ones remain at risk.
Just a few weeks ago, the Trump administration said it was going to pull hundreds of scientific instruments out of ocean waters near the Pacific Northwest, North Carolina, and the...
As the world warms, the risk of snakebites is rising
On a humid Thursday morning, the Ramathibodi Poison Center in Bangkok thrums with activity. Four staff members field roughly 130 emergency hotline calls every day. By 11 a.m., they have...
Europe heatwave live: UK issues rare red temperature warnings; French PM to hold crisis meeting after heat deaths
Temperatures could hit 38-40C in parts of England and Wales, smashing June record set in 1976; red alerts in France after 19 heat deathsTwo children found dead in car in...
Extreme heat: is the UK becoming a 40C country? – podcast
Met Office forecasters have issued a rare red weather warning for England, with temperatures potentially reaching 40C (104F) in some places. Europe is also dealing with a debilitating heatwave, with...
A thousand years old and 20 storeys high: tracking down Taiwan's tallest trees
The country’s biggest tree – named Heaven Sword of the Da’an River – is a carbon-storing behemoth hosting whole neighbourhoods of wildlife. But this and other giant trees are under...
A Trump Ally's Rise in Colombia Could Mean the End of Landmark Climate Policies
Abelardo de la Espriella, the apparent winner of the presidential election, has vowed to expand oil, gas and mining production, alarming activists in the world’s deadliest country for environmental defenders.By...
China's coal-chemicals boom risks repeating the mistakes of the past
Aiqun Yu, Christine Shearer and Joe Hittinger work at Global Energy Monitor, a US-based organisation that seeks to provide the worldwide energy transition with transparent data and analysis. With global...
Trapped by floods and fearing death in the heat: the Australians taking legal action over the climate crisis
Ten people affected in different ways by extreme weather are taking a case against the federal government to the UNGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastAs...
Project Cosmos
Welcome to the Project Cosmos homepage. The project was launched by Carbon Brief in June 2026 following an 18-month research and development effort. The aim: to build the world’s largest...
Mapped: Inside Carbon Brief's Cosmos database of 1.8 million climate studies
This is the vast ‘cosmos’ of academic literature and evidence that underpins humanity’s knowledge of climate change. Every ‘star’ – all 1.8m of them – represents one of the studies...
Introducing Project Cosmos: Carbon Brief's 'universe' of climate science
Carbon Brief’s Project Cosmos is a major collaborative effort to build the world’s largest and most complete database of climate change research. The Cosmos database – which features more than...
Carbon Brief's ranking of the most highly cited institutions
Analysis of Carbon Brief’s Cosmos database reveals the world’s leading ‘institutions’ for climate research. There are more than 40,000 institutions in the Cosmos database, ranging from universities and research laboratories,...
Carbon Brief's ranking of the most highly cited climate publications
The most highly cited publications in Carbon Brief’s Cosmos database reveal the building blocks supporting so many elements of climate science. Every year, thousands of new scientific documents are published,...
Carbon Brief's ranking of the most highly cited climate scientists
Carbon Brief’s Project Cosmos is the largest known database of climate change research, featuring more than 1.8m individual publications. Every publication has a list of authors – the experts who...
UK Met Office issues rare red weather warning for Wednesday and Thursday
People in southern Wales and area of England from Kent and Sussex to Somerset and Birmingham urged to protect themselves from extreme heatThe UK’s Met Office forecasters have issued a...
Europe suffers under record heatwave as temperatures forecast to reach 44C
Rail services, schools and sports events hit, with deaths of three elderly people in France partly blamed on intense heatWestern Europe is enduring a ferocious heatwave forecast to break temperature...
How a Tiny Texas River Agency Plans to Build the Largest Desalination Plant in the Country
Officials from the Nueces River Authority collected millions of dollars from cities and utility districts near San Antonio and Austin before they partnered with an Israeli desalination giant.By Arcelia Martin,...
Environmental Defenders Remain Among World's Most Targeted Activists
A new report found that environmental defenders are increasingly encountering overlapping networks of government officials, corporations, criminal groups and private security forces.By Katie SurmaEnvironmental and Indigenous rights defenders remained among...
The Water Is Rising in Chesapeake Bay. Can Tangier Island Be Saved?
As the barrier island loses land and residents, engineered efforts could combat the rising sea water that surrounds it.By Charles PaullinTANGIER, Va.— Terry Parks stood in the rear of a...
America's data center backlash is bipartisan — can it stay that way?
This month, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump, unveiled a set of sweeping recommendations to rein in rampant data center development, urging Texas lawmakers to...
Nearly 1.5M people in Louisiana depend on this strip of marsh. But it needs saving.
There’s an increasingly narrow strip of marshland in New Orleans that hardly anyone lives on, but without it, hundreds of thousands of people in Louisiana will face far greater risks...
Two to tango: How governments can unlock private investment for national climate goals
Even the most ambitious national climate plans aimed at cutting emissions to meet the 1.5C global warming goal in the Paris Agreement often lack a vital ingredient for success: private...
Trump wants to unleash 'America First' fishing. What's he really doing?
When Kekuewa Kikiloi boarded a research vessel to visit the northwestern Hawaiian islands in 2002, he didn’t know what to expect. Kikiloi grew up on Oʻahu, but like a lot...
From mobile jungles to shadow art: how Dutch people try to beat the heat
A national heatwave plan has been activated to help people stay cool during the Netherlands’ increasingly hot summersHouseholds in Amsterdam are being urged to hang their curtains outside their windows...
How India's heatwaves are shutting schools – and pushing women out of the workforce
Forced to stay home or switch jobs, working mothers are bearing the brunt of the climate crisis as classes go online for weeks or months at a timeOutside, the temperature...
Record-breaking heat expected across UK this week, says Met Office
Health alerts are in place as very high humidity adds to danger of heat stress for the most vulnerableThe Met Office has expanded its extreme heat warning for the UK,...
El Niño is back with a vengeance – and fears of 'Godzilla' strength may be the least of our worries
UN’s World Food Programme and agriculture agency issue joint appeal for funds to avert global hunger crisis before it happensAdugna Woyessa was a little boy the first time drought tore...
Efforts to save kelp forests from ocean warming are ramping up
In the coastal waters off British Columbia, tribal volunteers from the Haida Nation dive for purple sea urchins amid a dense forest of rippling golden-brown kelp fronds. Sunlight filters through...
Greenpeace's Dutch Anti-SLAPP Case Against Oil Pipeline Giant Advances
But a $345 million U.S. verdict against the environmental group hangs over the case.By Dana DrugmandA lawsuit filed by Greenpeace International against the U.S.-based fossil fuel company Energy Transfer in...
The Search for Super Reefs
Go behind the scenes with executive editor Vernon Loeb and oceans correspondent Teresa Tomassoni as they discuss the search for heat-resilient coral reefs that are somehow defying the odds to...
Is New England's new hydropower transmission line paying off?
When the New England Clean Energy Connect transmission line started carrying electricity from Canada into Maine in January, supporters hailed the project as a triumph for renewable power. Now, after...
Planning For Life After Coal Cost a Montana County Commissioner His Seat
The fiscal future of Musselshell County is uncertain after the coal mine that anchors its economy helped defeat the official working to diversify the area’s revenue streams.By Jake BolsterRobert Pancratz...
El Niño Is Here and Will Have 'Big Consequences' for Global Weather
A deep pool of warm water that forms in the Western Pacific could bring strong storms to Southern California and throughout the South while increasing the risks of Western wildfires.Interview...
DeBriefed 19 June 2026: Bonn talks end in 'gridlock' | Energy's 'new era' | Oceans in climate negotiations
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed. An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change. This week Bonn talks close ‘SIDE-STEPPING AND STALLING’: UN climate talks in Bonn...
Bonn climate talks: Key outcomes from the June 2026 UN climate conference
Two weeks of tense UN climate talks in Bonn, Germany, have produced few tangible outcomes as diplomats faced ‘gridlock’. Negotiators failed to find agreement in numerous areas, such as scaling...
Say what?! New insults to use in 2026 | Fiona Katauskas
The news is providing a lot of material to work withSee more of Fiona Katauskas’s cartoons here Continue reading…
Two World Cup matches were played in 'severe heat', analysis finds
Games in Miami and Monterrey were at heat level a players’ union had warned in the past should trigger delaysTwo of the first round of matches at the World Cup...