Wildfires have burned through more than 1m hectares of land in the EU this year, making 2025 the worst year on record, according to the Guardian. The newspaper says the fires “have engulfed four times as much land this year as the average for the same period over the past two decades”. It continues: “The destructive blazes have pumped out 37m tonnes of carbon dioxide – about as much as the yearly CO2 emissions of Portugal or Sweden, each home to 10 million people…Wildfires ripped through swathes of southern Europe this month as a heatwave made longer and stronger by fossil fuel pollution pushed temperatures above 40C across much of the Mediterranean and the Balkans. The drawn-out spells of blistering heat dried out vegetation, which in countries such as Spain and Portugal had grown rapidly after a wet spring, allowing fires to burn hotter and spread farther.” Euractiv says the “brutal heatwave roasting Spain and Portugal this month has finally begun easing as weather conditions improve and firefighters make progress in their battle against deadly wildfire”. The Guardian reports that Spain’s 16-day heatwave this month was “the most intense on record”. Bloomberg says: “Scorching temperatures are hurting the European Union’s corn crops, putting the bloc on track for its largest imports in three seasons.” Euractiv reports that “more than half of Europe and the Mediterranean basin was affected by drought in the first 10 days of August”. The Associated Press says: “Southern Europeans’ resistance to air conditioning is waning as temperatures soar.”

MORE ON EXTREME HEAT

• The Guardian covers new research on its frontpage finding that “repeated exposure to heatwaves is accelerating ageing in people”. The New York Times adds: “​​Scientists analysed 15 years’ worth of health data from nearly 25,000 adults in Taiwan and found that two years of exposure to heatwaves could speed up a person’s so-called biological ageing by eight to 12 extra days.”
• BBC News covers a new report from the World Health Organization and World Meteorological Organization finding that “workers worldwide need better protection from extreme heat as climate change causes more frequent heatwaves”.  Politico, the Times of India and Climate Home News also cover the report.
• The Associated Press reports that “green spaces are key to combating record heat in marginalised communities”. 
• The Financial Times reports on the “global push to keep classrooms cool as heatwaves force closures”.
• The Associated Press says: “Residents in the western US are enduring a heatwave, with temperatures reaching dangerous levels across Washington, Oregon, Southern California, Nevada and Arizona.”
• Bloomberg has a piece with the headline: “Heat kills when sweat can’t evaporate. In India, it’s a deadly reality.”

Current and former members of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) have written an open letter to Congress and the White House’s FEMA review council warning that “the Trump administration’s policies have undermined the nation’s ability to respond to natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina”, Politico reports. The outlet continues: “The 181 signatories said that under Donald Trump, FEMA has abandoned the reforms designed to correct the agency’s mistakes in responding to the 2005 hurricane.” It adds that the government’s handling of Hurricane Katrina “sparked a national conversation about FEMA’s role” and “shined a light on the nation’s preparedness for disasters that are becoming increasingly severe due to warming from climate change”. According to the New York Times, the letter was titled the “Katrina Declaration” and was published days before the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. It adds that the letter “rebuked Trump’s plan to drastically scale down FEMA and shift more responsibility for disaster response – and more costs – to the states”. The Hill adds: “The FEMA staffers, which included 143 current and 38 former employees, had additional concerns that they outlined, including cuts to risk reduction programmes, climate science and the agency’s workforce.” The Associated Press, the Guardian and Al Jazeera also cover the news. 

MORE ON US

• Bloomberg reports that insurers’ catastrophe models “failed” when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. The piece says that insurance models have improved, but warn that there are still “blind spots”, such as climate change. 
• The Guardian reports that “15 young climate advocates, aged eight to 17, on Friday sued the state of Wisconsin over its pro-fossil fuel policies”. Inside Climate News says the “youth climate activists” argued that state laws “perpetuate a fossil fuel-dominated electricity sector and undermine renewable energy”.
• The Washington Post reports that the Trump administration is rolling back “rules meant to keep politics out of climate research”. 
• The Guardian says: “Wildfires raging in northern California wine country and central Oregon have destroyed multiple homes and threatened thousands more”.
• The New York Times reports that Trump’s budget cuts “may spell the end for America’s only Antarctic research ship”. 
• Bloomberg reports that US investment in renewable energy projects fell by 36% in the first half of this year, compared to the prior six months. 

Shares of Ørsted, Europe’s largest wind power company, have hit an “all-time low” after the Trump administration ordered the company to “stop work on a near complete windfarm”, the Guardian reports. The newspaper continues: “The order to down tools came despite the fact that the project is 80% complete, with 45 out of 65 wind turbines installed. The US government issued its stop-work order late on Friday, citing a need to ‘address concerns related to the protection of national security interests’, although it did not provide any further detail.” The New York Times says the $6.2bn project, which is being built off the coast of Rhode Island, aimed to supply electricity to 350,000 homes in Rhode Island and Connecticut by next spring. Reuters says shares of Ørsted have dropped 17%. The Financial Times, the Financial Post, CNBC, the Times the Daily Telegraph, ABC News and the Associated Press also cover the news. The Guardian reports that the Democratic governors of Rhode Island and Connecticut promised on Saturday to fight the order, saying the project “is essential to their climate goals”. The Associated Press reports that “the states’ Democratic governors, members of Congress and union workers are calling Monday for the Trump administration to let construction resume”. 

Meanwhile, Reuters reports that the Trump administration intends to withdraw federal approval for another wind farm off the coast of Maryland. Bloomberg says: “The project – which is being developed by US Wind and will consist of as many as 114 wind turbines about 10 nautical miles off the coast of Ocean City, Maryland – was approved by the Biden administration in 2024 and was set to begin construction next year.”

MORE ON WIND FARMS

• The New York Times has a story with the headline: “Law firm pressures Brown University to erase research on anti-wind groups.”
• The Daily Mail reports that “plans for a $10bn wind farm off Australia’s east coast have been scrapped”.
• The climate-sceptic Daily Telegraph publishes an unbylined story claiming that “offshore wind farms could pose a health risk by poisoning shellfish eaten by humans”. The newspaper quotes a scientist who says: “We are definitely not saying stop building offshore wind farms, we just need to monitor them appropriately – especially as they continue to expand.”
• Climate sceptic Kathryn Porter has penned a comment piece in the Daily Telegraph  saying that “Labour is throwing money at wind power despite growing barriers to success”. 

China’s cabinet said yesterday that the country will “tighten its carbon trading market by introducing absolute emissions caps in some industries for the first time starting by 2027”, Reuters reports. The newswire continues: “The absolute caps will be implemented first in industries with relatively stable carbon emissions by 2027, according to the opinion from the State Council. By 2030, China’s nationwide carbon market or emissions trading scheme (ETS) will be basically established with absolute emissions caps and a combination of free and paid carbon emissions allowances (CEAs), it said.” Bloomberg says the measures “will help deliver Xi Jinping’s pledge to peak China’s emissions by the end of the decade”.

MORE ON CHINA

• Energy Monitor reports that China has seen a “boom” in its commissioning of coal power projects in the first half of 2025, “suggesting a resurgence in coal dependency despite the nation’s clean energy advancements”.
• Politico has a story with the headline: “China races to build world’s largest solar farm to meet targets”.

Typhoon Kajiki hit Vietnam’s coastal province of Ha Tinh on Monday, “with strong winds and rains felling trees and tearing the roofs off houses”, BBC News reports. According to the broadcaster, “schools and airports were closed and almost 600,000 people across the country were ordered to leave their homes” ahead of the typhoon’s arrival. It adds: “It comes less than a year after the country was hit by Typhoon Yagi – its most powerful storm in 30 years – which killed 300 people in Vietnam alone…Meteorologists say that as the world warms, typhoons can bring higher wind speeds and more intense rainfall, although the influence of climate change on individual storms is complicated.” The New York Times says the typhoon “arrived with gusts of more than 120 miles per hour and was expected to be a slow-moving, damaging storm that would weaken as it crossed land and headed for Laos”. Reuters reports that, according to the country’s weather agency, “rainfall could reach 500mm from Monday afternoon until the end of Tuesday in several parts of northern Vietnam”. TIME says that, in a statement on Sunday, the Vietnamese government called the storm “extremely dangerous” and “fast-moving”. 

MORE ON EXTREME RAINFALL

• Bloomberg says: “Billions of people rely on the South Asian monsoon to nourish crops and replenish reservoirs each year, but climate change is often turning the seasonal rains from welcome relief to life-threatening deluge.”
• Al Jazeera has ongoing coverage of the flooding in Pakistan, saying that the nationwide death toll over the last week has risen above 400 “as floods and landslides continue to devastate large parts of the country”.

Brazil has “won the formal backing of other Amazonian countries” for a $125bn fund “to finance forest conservation worldwide”, Bloomberg reports. The outlet continues: “The initiative, known as the Tropical Forest Forever Facility, aims to bankroll tropical forest protection through investment returns in high-yield, fixed-income assets. It seeks to secure long-term funding for as many as 74 developing countries to halt deforestation, beyond traditional grants and carbon credit programmes, which have so far proved insufficient. The fund secured the support of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization during its summit, held in Bogota on Friday. Along with Brazil, the bloc includes seven other members: Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela.” Inside Climate News calls the declaration “a major vote of confidence for one of Brazil’s flagship initiatives as host of the COP30 UN climate talks in November”. 

MORE ON BRAZIL

• Climate Home News reports that “countries remain at loggerheads with the Brazilian government team organising COP30 logistics in the Amazon city of Belém, after concerns that some delegations, especially from poorer countries, will not be able to afford to attend the annual UN climate talks in the numbers they view as necessary”.
• In coverage of a COP bureau meeting on Friday, Reuters reports that Brazil’s government has “ruled out the idea of subsidising all delegates’ hotel fares” in Belém.

Some areas of the UK faced their hottest bank holiday temperatures on record, BBC News reports. The outlet continues: “Prolonged dry periods throughout this summer have led to a significant shortfall of water in England, with hosepipe bans declared for millions – some of which are set to remain into the winter…Scientists say that climate change is generally making bouts of hot weather longer, more intense and more frequent. Four summer heatwaves in quick succession after an unusually warm spring suggests climate change is having some effect on 2025’s weather.” The Independent reports that the UK is “on course for one of its worst harvests on record after dry conditions and drought hit staple crops”. According to the outlet, the UK could see its fifth worst harvest this year since “detailed records” began in 1984. It adds: “The anticipated poor output marks a second difficult year for farmers following the third worst UK harvest on record in 2024”. BBC News reports that Scotland’s rivers are “way below average after the driest spring since 1964 and a hot summer”. The Times has a story with the headline: “Inside the Essex ‘drought room’ testing crops for climate change.”

MORE ON UK

• The Guardian reports that carmakers in the UK “claimed that leaving electric car sales rules unchanged would threaten British jobs and cost them hundreds of millions of pounds, according to documents that show the private lobbying for a slower transition away from fossil fuels”. 
• BBC News reports that Richard Tice, the deputy leader of hard-right Reform UK, has claimed that the UK has “got potentially hundreds of billions of energy treasure in the form of shale gas”. [Carbon Brief previously factchecked UK fracking claims.]
• “Developers looking to set up big data centres in Britain are exploring linking them up to the country’s main gas pipelines,” the Financial Times reports. 
• The Times reports on the “National Grid’s battle for 50m pylons to deliver clean energy”. 
• The Financial Times reports that “UK lenders have pulled back from the green mortgage market, prompting questions over its role in Britain’s drive to decarbonise the economy”. 
• The climate-sceptic Daily Telegraph says Britain’s leading trade union has accused Keir Starmer of breaking his “£200m promise on net-zero jobs”. It also has a story that is critical of the UK’s clean energy partnerships with Zimbabwe and another on “Blair’s fateful green energy decision that left households on the hook for billions”.

The German Green party is calling for a “turbo for the energy transition” with more solar panels, more digitalisation, and more storage, reports Die Zeit, referring to the party’s position paper cited by Süddeutsche Zeitung. “Anyone who invests in energy should continue to have the right to a fast and unbureaucratic connection to the grid, as well as, of course, compensation for solar power produced and fed into the grid at home”, the paper says, according to SZ. However, the German economy minister “has expressed doubts” about whether new private solar installations still need support, it adds. Stern quotes Green’s representative criticising the energy policy of the governing coalition, calling it “an attack on Germany’s energy transition”. Berliner Zeitung says that the “feed-in of wind and solar power is increasingly causing overloads in the electricity grid and unpredictable price spikes, due to a lack of storage capacity”. 

MORE ON GERMANY

• Deutsche Welle reports that electricity prices in southern Germany may rise as the debate over splitting the bidding zone intensifies.
• Reuters says that a German company cancelled the order of Chinese turbines for one of its North Sea offshore wind farms, substituting them with the German Siemens Gamesa turbines, noting that improved security was “a positive side effect”.
• Germany’s gas reserves are currently at 65%, significantly lower than the over 90% levels seen in August 2023 and 2024, according to Handelsblatt.

Gina McCarthy, the former head of the US Environment Protection Agency, writes in the Guardian that Donald Trump’s “fossil-fuel obsession can’t stop global progress”. McCarthy says: “Our president is obsessed with fossil fuels. He wants to resuscitate what everyone knows is a dying coal sector while turning a blind eye to the health, environmental and economic downsides of the climate crisis.” She continues: “No matter how much the administration tries to prop up the fossil fuel industry, US states, cities, communities, businesses and institutions know that the world is not as Trump defines it. Clean energy is and must be our future.”

MORE COMMENT

• Valérie Masson-Delmotte, former co-chair of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report and member of France’s High Council on Climate, tells Le Monde that “the climate situation will keep getting worse, but the danger also comes from collective denial”. 
• Lisa H Sideris, professor and vice-chair of the Environmental Studies Programme at the University of California, writes in the Hill that “Trump’s bogus claim about a ‘climate religion’ is a pathetic political dodge”. 
• Mafalda Duarte, head of the Green Climate Fund, “the world’s largest climate fund on the economic consequences of extreme weather”, tells the Financial Times that a “different scale of investments” is needed to tackle climate change. 
• Michael Dorsey, a member of nonprofit Club of Rome and Pallavi Phartiyal, vice president of programmes, policy and advocacy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, write in the Hill that Trump’s executive order to “attack states’ powers to file climate cases against oil companies” may have “an unintended consequence, opening a legal window into the inner workings of the coal industry”.
• Alejandro E Camacho, a professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, writes in the Hill that Trump is undertaking a “record-breaking race to wreck the planet”. 
• Gideon Rachman, the chief foreign affairs commentator at the Financial Times, writes that “China has laid a rare earths trap for the west”, explaining that “the American military and Europe’s green transition both rely on critical minerals from Beijing”. 

Magnus Linklater, writer and editor for the Times in Scotland, writes for the newspaper saying: “Reform UK leader [Nigel Farage] says net-zero could be ‘the new Brexit’. Other parties should be challenging him with facts, not fantasies”. He says that climate change “leads to a general air of fatalism, one that climate change deniers like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage play on, peddling the insidious message that all this woke-ish talk of global warming should not only be ignored but actively rejected”. He continues: “How, then, to respond to Farage’s siren call on climate change, without tipping over into the kind of uncosted and untested programme that made the Green Party a laughing stock, and brought an end to its alliance with the SNP?…One way of reclaiming ground that is being surrendered to Reform is to remind voters that what is at stake is not simply the protection of party fortunes, it is the rather larger goal of protecting the planet.” He concludes that “any party standing for election in 2026 has to demonstrate that it has a workable alternative” to Farage’s messaging.

MORE UK COMMENT

• The Guardian publishes an excerpt from an upcoming book by Peter Betts, a long-serving UK climate diplomat who died in 2023.
• Analyst and researcher Rian Chad Whitton writes in the climate-sceptic Daily Telegraph that “without immediate and continuing government support, the steel industry’s existence could be measured in months”. He blames this on “green levies”, which he falsely claims have caused high electricity prices. 
• Former Conservative secretary of state John Redwood writes in the Daily Telegraph that “the net-zero drive is worrying the markets”. 
• Daily Telegraph columnist and assistant editor Michael Deacon writes about the Green party’s proposal to rule that “a business’s highest earner could be paid no more than 10 times as much as its lowest earner”. He calls the suggestion “insane”  and “even worse than net-zero”.

This edition of the Daily Briefing was written by Ayesha Tandon. It was edited by Daisy Dunne.

Subscribe for free.