Forest carbon credits promise to fund healthier, more resilient forests while offsetting emissions—but many programs still fall short. In a new interview, Clean Air Task Force scientist Rebecca Sanders-DeMott explains why today’s protocols often overstate climate benefits and what to do instead. She highlights four pillars that determine credit quality: durability, additionality, leakage, and long-term monitoring and verification. The proposed fixes include using up-to-date risk maps, revisiting baselines regularly or measuring them with comparison forests, tailoring leakage assumptions to local markets, and tightening monitoring as new tools emerge. Some registries and state programs are already moving, and buyers are demanding higher-quality credits, according to Yale Climate Connections.
A new analysis of chemical “tree rings” in long-lived clams points to mounting instability in a key North Atlantic current that helps regulate global climate. The study finds that freshwater influx has been disrupting the subpolar gyre since the 1950s, weakening the circulation that ferries heat northward and shapes weather across Europe and beyond. Researchers say the signal adds to mounting evidence that multiple Earth systems are edging toward dangerous tipping points. Coverage of the findings is available at Inside Climate News, while the peer-reviewed paper appears in Science Advances. A related review of destabilization signals across several tipping elements was published in Nature Geoscience.
A new analysis from Imperial College London’s Climate Damage Tracker, reported by Yale Climate Connections, finds that human-driven warming measurably intensified Super Typhoon Ragasa. At landfall near Yangjiang, Guangdong, on September 24, climate change increased the storm’s winds by about 7% and its rainfall by 12%, together lifting the overall damage by an estimated 36%. The storm killed at least 29 people and caused losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars, according to insurance broker Aon. The study also shows such intense winds are now 49% more likely than in a cooler, preindustrial climate, shortening their expected return period from roughly 33 to 17 years. Heavy rains that once occurred every 8.8 years are now expected about every 6.7 years.
Spain and Portugal’s catastrophic 2025 wildfire season unfolded under heat and drought that scientists say were supercharged by human-driven warming. A new rapid attribution analysis finds the hot, dry, windy “fire weather” fueling the blazes is about 40 times more likely today and roughly 30% more intense than in a cooler, preindustrial climate. As fires swept Galicia, Asturias and northern Portugal, officials and media reported massive fatalities, including firefighters and residents, underscoring how climate-amplified extremes translate into deadly outcomes. Spain also recorded its hottest summer on record, compounding risks for responders and communities, according to the state weather agency AEMET.
A new Planetary Health Check 2025 assessment warns that Earth has breached seven of nine planetary boundaries that keep the planet stable and liveable. Ocean acidification has officially moved outside the safe range for the first time, joining earlier transgressions in climate, biodiversity, land use, freshwater, nutrient pollution and novel chemicals. The report highlights record-high CO₂ concentrations, accelerating warming, shrinking and degraded forests, and growing disruptions to rivers and soils, while noting two bright spots: a recovering ozone layer and declining aerosol pollution. The authors warn that rising pressures increase the risk of tipping points but emphasize that targeted action can still steer the system toward safety.
Europe’s push for HVO100 diesel leans heavily on used cooking oil (UCO), but new evidence shows demand now dwarfs sustainable supply and imports dominate the market. A new analysis finds Europe’s UCO appetite far exceeds what can be sustainably collected. In 2023, Europe burned close to seven million tonnes of UCO-based biofuels—around eight times what it actually collected domestically—driving a surge of shipments from China, Indonesia and Malaysia and sparking fraud suspicions and anti-dumping probes. With airlines and shipping joining the queue, cheap “waste” oil is scarce, costly to verify, and vulnerable to mislabeling with virgin palm, undermining climate claims. Add in the PFAD (palm fatty acid distillate) controversy—classified as a by-/co-product rather than a waste in the Nordics—and the climate math for HVO100 looks shaky when indirect land-use change and offshored emissions are counted. Europe’s own investigators and auditors have started to push back.
Biogas and biomethane are often billed as cleaner stand-ins for fossil gas, but a sweeping analysis suggests their methane leaks are bigger than many think. By pooling on-site and whole-site measurements from dozens of studies and running Monte Carlo simulations, researchers find that real-world emissions could be more than double earlier estimates. The heaviest losses cluster at the digestate stage—the handling and storage of leftover material after digestion—while a small group of “super-emitters” (about 5% of sites) accounts for roughly 62% of total methane released. Although total methane from biogas/biomethane is lower than from oil and natural gas, the percentage of gas lost is higher, threatening climate gains unless targeted fixes are deployed.
A summer-long remote-sensing campaign in Paris measured exhaust from more than 180,000 vehicles and uncovered stark gaps between lab promises and street reality. Petrol cars’ NOx fell steadily with each Euro standard, but diesel cars showed little improvement from Euro 2–5 and only modest gains at Euro 6—still averaging 4.8× the NOx of Euro 6 petrol and roughly 6× the lab limit. Heat mattered: Euro 5–6 diesel NOx rose 20–30% when ambient temperatures topped 30°C. Euro 5–6 diesels, though classed as Crit’Air 2, accounted for an estimated 63% of passenger-car NOx at the sites. Euro VI buses cut NOx sharply vs. Euro V, and early Euro 6d-TEMP diesels lowered NOx about 70% vs. earlier Euro 6 but still trailed petrol.
Europe’s forests are absorbing mounting economic damage from climate-driven disasters, and the bill is set to swell. New continent-wide modelling finds historical disturbance losses around €115 billion, rising to €146–€247 billion under future climates depending on emissions, with annual costs climbing from roughly €1.7 to as high as €3.7 billion a year. Central Europe emerges as the hotspot, while Northern Europe often gains more from productivity than it loses to disasters; Southern Europe trends the opposite way. Across the continent, higher tree growth can partly or fully offset disturbance losses, but only reliably under milder warming. The study couples high-resolution growth simulations, more than 150,000 disturbance runs, and economic cash-flow models to translate shocks into euros.
A new analysis extends the classic DICE climate–economy model to directly account for heat-related mortality—and puts a stark number on carbon’s human cost. The study introduces a “mortality cost of carbon” (MCC): in 2020, each additional metric ton of CO₂ is linked to 2.26×10⁻⁴ expected deaths, implying roughly one excess death per 4,434 tons emitted between 2020 and 2100. Incorporating these mortality damages boosts the 2020 social cost of carbon from $37 to $258 per ton and flips the “optimal” policy from slow cuts to full decarbonization by 2050. Under that path, the model projects warming near 2.4 °C and 74 million fewer deaths this century.
A growing body of research suggests the world passed “peak agricultural land” in the early 2000s, with total farmland slowly shrinking as yields rise and some pastures are abandoned. Efficiency gains and crop substitutions have spared vast areas: higher yields alone may have kept over a billion hectares from cultivation, while synthetic fibres and flavours have eased pressure on land-intensive staples like wool and vanilla. Not all freed acres revert to wild nature—plantation forests often replace them and support less biodiversity. Climate impacts, dietary shifts, and policy choices will determine what happens next. From lab-grown feed and food to greenhouse and vertical farming, technology could accelerate land release—but biofuels, urban growth, or policy rollbacks could reverse the trend according to peak agricultural land research.
A Nature Climate Change study links tropical deforestation to about 28,000 additional heat-related deaths annually (95% CI: 23,610–33,560). From 2001–2020, 345 million people were exposed to deforestation-driven warming; affected areas saw 0.27°C average daytime warming, with 0.45°C directly attributable to forest loss. Mortality is highest in Southeast Asia, then Africa, then the Americas.
