Israel has committed hundreds of ceasefire violations since October 2025, thwarting the possibility of advancing to phase two of the talks
Three months after the US-brokered Gaza ceasefire deal took effect, the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) continued carrying out grave violations across the besieged enclave.
At least three Palestinians were killed in an Israeli drone strike that targeted a group of civilians in the Al-Balad area in Gaza’s southern city of Khan Younis on Monday, January 12.
A woman also sustained injuries on Monday after being shot at by Israeli soldiers in the Al-Batn al-Sameen area of Khan Younis.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian Interior Ministry in the Gaza Strip announced that the police chief of Khan Younis, Lieutenant Colonel Mahmoud Al-Astal, was assassinated by an Israeli-backed militia in the Al-Mawasi area west of the city.
21 Palestinians, including 18 children, freeze to death
As the blockade imposed by the IOF on the war-torn territory still persists, the humanitarian crisis has aggravated, leaving many displaced people without shelter and heating during the cold weather.
The Gaza-based Palestinian Health Ministry reported that three Palestinian children, including a newborn and a two-month-old baby, have frozen to death since Sunday, January 11.
The ministry added that 21 Palestinians, including 18 children, died in Gaza due to the cold weather since the beginning of Israel’s genocidal aggression on October 7, 2023.
In a statement released on Monday, the ministry further indicated that 442 Palestinians died, while 1,240 others were injured, as a result of Israeli violations of the truce agreement that came into force in October 2025.
This takes the official death toll of Palestinians, who were killed by the IOF across Gaza in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks to 71,419 people.
In spite of Israel’s continued atrocities, mediators and guarantors of the ceasefire deal, above all the Trump administration, remain unmoved, crushing every hope for advancing towards phase two of the agreement.
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAKeir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Orcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.
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A view of fighter jet being prepared ahead of Israeli army’s attack on Iran, on October 26, 2024 in Israel. [Israel Defense Forces (IDF) – Anadolu Agency]
Israel has raised its alert level for the Air Force and army troops in anticipation of a possible US strike on Iran, media reports said Tuesday, Anadolu Agency reports.
The Maariv newspaper, citing Israeli military sources, said the alert level was raised in the Air Force, the Military Intelligence Service and the Northern Command.
No decision, however, was made to change the level of readiness on the home front.
The army “continues to closely monitor developments in Iran amid concerns that the US military may launch an attack on Tehran,” said the newspaper.
Israel’s army is currently coordinating with US Central Command (CENTCOM) regarding any possible attack on Iran, according to the report.
Reports have emerged of a potential US strike on Iran, where anti-government protests have continued since late last month.
Iranian officials have accused the US and Israel of backing “riots” and “terrorism.”
There are no official casualty figures, but the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), a US-based rights group, estimates that the death toll has reached more than 2,000, including security forces and protesters.
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Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends his trial on corruption charges at the district court in Tel Aviv, on April 21, 2025. [Moti KIMCHI / POOL / AFP / Getty Images]
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared Tuesday before the District Court in Tel Aviv for the 70th time as part of his ongoing corruption trial, Anadolu reports.
Independent Israeli journalist Orly Barlev, who has closely tracked the case since its outset, said the latest session marked the 70th day of Netanyahu’s courtroom testimony.
“Today marks the 70th day of testimony by the defendant Netanyahu, with questioning continuing in Case 4000,” Barlev wrote on the US social media company X.
The hearing comes as Israeli society remains divided over Netanyahu’s request for a presidential pardon from President Isaac Herzog, a move that has drawn both political backing and sharp criticism.
Netanyahu formally submitted the pardon request on Nov. 30 last year, seeking relief from the corruption charges without admitting wrongdoing or withdrawing from public life.
Since the trial began, Netanyahu has consistently denied all allegations. Under Israeli law, however, a presidential pardon can only be granted following an admission of guilt.
The prime minister is facing charges in three separate cases, commonly known as Case 1000, Case 2000 and Case 4000. The indictments were filed in late November 2019 by then-Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit.
Case 1000 centers on allegations that Netanyahu and members of his family received costly gifts from wealthy businessmen in exchange for political favors.
Case 2000 involves claims that Netanyahu held talks with Arnon Mozes, publisher of the privately owned Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, in an effort to secure favorable media coverage.
Case 4000 focuses on accusations that Netanyahu granted regulatory benefits to Shaul Elovitch, former owner of the Walla news website and a senior executive at Bezeq telecommunications company, in return for positive press.
Netanyahu’s trial has been underway since 2020 and remains unresolved. He continues to dismiss the charges, portraying them as a politically motivated effort to force him from office.
Beyond the domestic proceedings, Netanyahu is also facing international legal scrutiny. In November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against him over war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Gaza, where more than 71,000 people have been killed, mostly women and children, and over 171,000 others injured in a brutal assault since October 2023.
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Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.
Mobilization in Venezuela for the return of President Nicolás Maduro from US captivity. Photo: Francisco Trias
The US has essentially declared that sovereignty itself for any nation that refuses subordination to US imperialism, holds no weight.
On January 3, 2026, the United States did not merely bomb a sovereign country and capture its president. It displayed, in the most unambiguous terms, a total defiance of the post-War international order that it helped create. When US special forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife and National Assembly deputy Cilia Flores from Caracas and transported them to a Brooklyn jail, they did not simply violate Venezuelan sovereignty. They declared that sovereignty itself, for any nation that refuses subordination to US imperialism, holds no weight.
As Nicolás Maduro Guerra, the president’s son, stated before Venezuela’s National Assembly: “If we normalize the kidnapping of a head of state, no country is safe. Today it’s Venezuela. Tomorrow, it could be any nation that refuses to submit.”
The response to this act, regardless of one’s political orientation or views on the Maduro government, will determine whether the concepts of international law, multilateralism, and the self-determination of peoples retain any meaning in the twenty-first century. This is not a question for the left alone. It is a question for every nation, every government, and every citizen who believes that the world should not be governed by the principle that might makes right.
The logic of hyper-imperialism unveiled
What distinguishes the current phase of US foreign policy from earlier periods of intervention is its brazenness. When the CIA orchestrated the overthrow of Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz in 1954, Washington maintained the pretense of responding to communist subversion. When American forces invaded Panama in 1989 to capture Manuel Noriega, the justification was framed within a discourse of law enforcement. The history of US intervention in Latin America spans over forty successful regime changes in slightly less than a century, according to Harvard scholar John Coatsworth.
But Trump’s announcement that the United States would “run” Venezuela represents something qualitatively different. Here there is no pretense. When asked about the operation, Trump invoked the Monroe Doctrine and said that these are called “Donroe Doctrine”, signaling that the Western Hemisphere remains a zone of US dominion – an assertion clearly made in the National Security Strategy launched in November 2025. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s subsequent clarification that the US would merely extract policy changes and oil access did nothing to soften the nakedness of the imperial project.
This represents what we at the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research have identified as “hyper-imperialism”, a dangerous and decadent stage of imperialism. Facing the erosion of its economic and political dominance and the rise of alternative centers of power (mainly in Asia) US imperialism increasingly relies on its uncontested military strength. The Chatham House analysis is unequivocal: this constitutes a significant violation of Venezuelan sovereignty and the UN Charter. There was no Security Council mandate, nor any claims to self-defense.
The post-1945 international order established the formal principle that states possess sovereign equality and that force against another state’s territorial integrity is prohibited. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter was designed precisely to prevent the powerful from treating the world as their domain, which the US has now blatantly ignored.
The test for Global South solidarity
The kidnapping of President Maduro poses an existential question to the discourse of “multipolarity”. While the seeds of a multipolar world order may exist (China’s economic rise, the increasing political assertiveness of Global South countries, BRICS and its expansion, the increasing trade in local currencies) they have proven to be extremely limited in the face of the US unilateral use of force. This is an uncomfortable truth.
The initial responses from governments suggest the difficulty of moving from rhetorical condemnation to material constraint. Brazilian President Lula correctly identified the stakes when he condemned the capture as crossing “an unacceptable line” and warned that “attacking countries, in flagrant violation of international law, is the first step toward a world of violence, chaos, and instability”. Colombian President Petro rejected “the aggression against the sovereignty of Venezuela and of Latin America.” Mexico’s President Sheinbaum declared that “the Americas do not belong to any doctrine or any power.” China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi condemned US military intervention and called for the release of President Maduro, saying that, “We don’t believe that any country can act as the world’s police.”
The groundswell of opposition confronts a structural problem: the institutions designed to prevent such actions are incapable of constraining the permanent members of the Security Council. The United States can veto any resolution condemning its behavior. The emergency Security Council meeting convened at the request of Venezuela and Colombia produced denunciations but no enforcement mechanism.
Every government that has sought to develop independently, that has attempted to control its own natural resources, that has resisted subordination to Washington, must recognize that what has happened in Venezuela could happen to them. Trump’s threats against Cuba and Colombia underscore this point.
Sovereignty, resources, and the right to self-determination
The pattern is well established with the successive overthrowing of heads of states when they tried to implement land reform like Árbenz in Guatemala, nationalize national resources under Allende in Chile and Mosaddegh in Iran. The thread continues to the present situation in Venezuela.
Venezuela possesses the world’s largest proven oil reserves, estimated at 303 billion barrels. Trump made no effort to disguise the centrality of oil, announcing that American companies would rebuild Venezuela’s oil industry and the US would be “selling oil, probably in much larger doses”. The maritime blockade preceding the military operation served the explicit purpose of strangling the country economically.
Yet the entire trajectory of the US Venezuela policy since 2001, from funding opposition groups to the 2002 coup attempt, to Operation Gideon in 2020, to the “maximum pressure” sanctions, has been designed to prevent Venezuela from making free choices. The assault accelerated after Venezuela enacted its 2001 Hydrocarbons Law asserting sovereign control over oil resources.
Conclusion
The kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro and National Assembly deputy Cilia Flores should compel a fundamental reassessment of the state of the international order. The formal institutions and legal frameworks that were supposed to prevent great power aggression have failed to constrain Washington’s imperialist aggressions. This places an enormous responsibility on the governments and peoples of the Global South. The debates around multipolarity, BRICS, South-South cooperation, and de-dollarization are rendered academic if they do not translate into the practical capacity to impose costs on actions like the invasion of Venezuela. Ultimately, the imperialist aggression against Venezuela has repercussions for governments and peoples around the world, regardless of their ideological orientation or views on the Maduro government. While the real limits of “multipolarity” in this stage of US hyper-imperialism have been laid bare, we must continue building our collective capacity to resist. The defense of Venezuelan people’s sovereignty, after all, is a defense of the sovereignty of all our nations.
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The year 2025 saw the return to power of Donald Trump, a jewellery heist at the Louvre museum in Paris and an engagement that “broke the internet”.
Amid the biggest stories of the year, climate change research continued to feature prominently in news and social media feeds.
Using data from Altmetric, which scores research papers according to the attention they receive online, Carbon Brief has compiled its annual list of the 25 most talked-about climate-related studies of the past year.
The top 10 – shown in the infographic above and list below – include research into declining butterflies, heat-related deaths, sugar intake and the massive loss of ice from the world’s glaciers:
Later in this article, Carbon Brief looks at the rest of the top 25 and provides analysis of the most featured journals, as well as the gender diversity and country of origin of authors.
New for this year is the inclusion of Altmetric’s new “sentiment analysis”, which scores how positive or negative a paper’s social media attention has been.
The top-scoring climate paper of 2025, ranking 24th of any research paper on any topic, is the annual update of the “Indicators of Global Climate Change” (IGCC) report.
The report was established in 2023 to help fill the gap in climate information between assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which can take up to seven years to complete. It includes the latest data on global temperatures, the remaining carbon budget, greenhouse gas emissions and – for the first time – sea level rise.
The paper, published in Earth System Science Data, has an Altmetric score of 4,099. This makes it the lowest top-scoring climate paper in Carbon Brief’s list since 2017.
(An Altmetric score combines the mentions that published peer-reviewed research has received from online news articles, blogs, Wikipedia and on social media platforms such as Facebook, Reddit, Twitter and Bluesky. See an earlier Carbon Brief article for more on how Altmetric’s scoring system works.)
Previous editions of the IGCC have also appeared in Carbon Brief’s list – the 2024 and 2023 iterations ranked 17th and 18th, respectively.
Many outlets led their coverage with the study’s findings on the global “carbon budget”. This warned that the remaining carbon budget to limit warming to 1.5C will be exhausted in just three years if global emissions continue at their current rate.
“It is also now inevitable that global temperatures will reach 1.5C of long-term warming in the next few years unless society takes drastic, transformative action…Every year of delay brings reaching 1.5C – or even higher temperatures – closer.”
Forster, who was awarded a CBE in the 2026 new year honours list, tells Carbon Brief that media coverage of the study was “great” at “putting recent extreme weather in the context of rapid long-term rates of global warming”.
However, he adds:
“Climate stories are not getting the coverage they deserve or need at the moment so the community needs to get all the help we can for getting clear consistent messages out there.”
The paper was tweeted more than 300 times and posted on Bluesky more than 950 times. It also appeared in 22 blogs.
Using AI, Altmetric now analyses the “sentiment” of this social media attention. As the summary figure below shows, the posts about this paper were largely positive, with an approximate 3:1 split of positive and negative attention.
Altmetric’s AI-generated summary of the sentiment of social media posts regarding the Forster et al. (2025) paper. Totals may add up to more than 100% because of rounding. Source: Altmetric
Butterfly decline
With an Altmetric score of 3,828, the second-highest scoring climate paper warns of “widespread” declines in butterfly numbers across the US since the turn of the century.
The paper, titled “Rapid butterfly declines across the US during the 21st century” and published in Science, identifies a 22% fall in butterfly numbers across more than 500 species between 2000 and 2020.
(There is a higher-scoring paper, “The 2025 state of the climate report: a planet on the brink”, in the journal BioScience, but it is a “special report” and was not formally peer reviewed.)
The scale of the decline suggests “multiple and broadly acting threats, including habitat loss, climate change and pesticide use”, the paper says. The authors find that “species generally had stronger declines in more southerly parts of their ranges”, with some of the most negative trends in the driest and “most rapidly warming” US states.
The paper was also mentioned in 13 blogs, more than 750 Bluesky posts and more than 600 tweets.
The sentiment analysis reveals that social media posts about the paper were largely negative. However, closer inspection reveals that this negativity is predominantly towards the findings of the paper, not the research itself.
For example, a Bluesky post on the “distressing” findings by one of the study’s authors is designated as “neutral negative” by Altmetric’s AI analysis.
In a response to a query from Carbon Brief, Altmetric explains that the “goal is to measure how people feel about the research paper itself, not the topic it discusses”. However, in some cases the line can be “blurred” as the AI “sometimes struggles to separate the subject matter from the critique”. The organisation adds that it is “continuously working on improving our models to better distinguish between the post’s content and the research output”.
Altmetric’s AI-generated summary of the sentiment of social media posts regarding the Forster et al. (2025) paper. Totals may add up to more than 100% because of rounding. Source: Altmetric
On the attention that the paper received, lead author Dr Collin Edwards of the Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife says that “first and foremost, people care about butterflies and our results are broad-reaching, unequivocal and, unfortunately, very concerning”.
Edwards tells Carbon Brief he hopes the clarity of the writing made the paper accessible to readers, noting that he and his co-authors “sweat[ed] over every word”.
The resulting news coverage “accurately captured the science”, Edwards says:
“Much as I wish our results were less consistently grim, the consistency and simplicity of our findings mean that even if a news story only provides the highest level summary, it isn’t misleading readers by skipping some key caveat or nuance that changes the interpretation.”
The findings suggest that the cooling effect of aerosols – tiny, light‑scattering particles produced mainly by burning fossil fuels – has masked more of the warming driven by greenhouse gases than previously estimated by the IPCC.
As efforts to tackle air pollution continue to reduce aerosol emissions, warming will accelerate further – reaching 2C by 2045, according to the research.
The paper was covered by almost 400 news stories – driven, in part, by Hansen’s comments in a press briefing that the Paris Agreement’s 2C warming limit was already “dead”.
Hansen’s analysis received a sceptical response from some scientists. For example, Dr Valerie Masson-Delmotte, an IPCC co-chair for its most recent assessment report on climate science, told Agence France-Presse the research “is not published in a climate science journal and it formulates a certain number of hypotheses that are not consistent with all the available observations”.
In addition, other estimates, including by Carbon Brief, suggest new shipping regulations have made a smaller contribution to warming than estimated by Hansen.
Hansen tells Carbon Brief that the paper “did ok” in terms of media coverage, although notes “it’s on [scientists] to do a better job of making clear what the core issues are in the physics of climate change”.
With more than 1,000 tweets, the paper scored highest in the top 25 for posts on Twitter. It was also mentioned in more than 800 Bluesky posts and on 27 blogs.
The sentiment analysis suggests that these posts were largely positive, with just a small percentage of negative comments.
Altmetric’s AI-generated summary of the sentiment of social media posts regarding the Hansen et al. (2025) paper. Totals may add up to more than 100% because of rounding. Source: Altmetric
Making the top 10
Ranking fourth in Carbon Brief’s analysis is a Nature paper calculating changes in global glacier mass over 2000-23. The study finds glaciers worldwide lost 273bn tonnes of ice annually over that time – with losses increasing by 36% between 2000-11 and 2012-23.
The study has an Altmetric score of 3,199. It received more news coverage than any other paper in this year’s top 25, amassing 1,187 mentions. with outlets including the Guardian, Associated Press and Economic Times.
Carbon Brief’s coverage of the report highlights that “a global shift towards ‘healthier’ diets could cut non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions, such as methane, from agriculture by 15% by 2050”. It adds:
“The findings build on the widely cited 2019 report from the EAT-Lancet Commission – a group of leading experts in nutrition, climate, economics, health, social sciences and agriculture from around the world.”
Also making the top 10 – ranking sixth and eighth – are a pair of papers published in Nature, which both link extreme heat to the emissions of specific “carbon majors” – large producers of fossil fuels, such as ExxonMobil, Shell and Saudi Aramco,.
The first is a perspective, titled “Carbon majors and the scientific case for climate liability”, published in April. It begins:
“Will it ever be possible to sue anyone for damaging the climate? Twenty years after this question was first posed, we argue that the scientific case for climate liability is closed. Here we detail the scientific and legal implications of an ‘end-to-end’ attribution that links fossil fuel producers to specific damages from warming.”
The authors find “trillions (of US$) in economic losses attributable to the extreme heat caused by emissions from individual companies”.
The paper was mentioned 1,329 times on Bluesky – the highest in this year’s top 25. It was also mentioned in around 270 news stories.
Published four months later, the second paper uses extreme event attribution to assess the impact of climate change on more than 200 heatwaves recorded since the year 2000.
The authors find one-quarter of the heatwaves would have been “virtually impossible” without human-caused global warming. They add that the heatwaves were, on average, 1.7C hotter due to climate change, with half of this increase due to emissions stemming from the operations and production of carbon majors.
This study was mentioned in almost 300 news stories – including by Carbon Brief – as well as 222 tweets and 823 posts on Bluesky.
In seventh place is a Nature Medicine study, which quantifies how heat-related and cold-related deaths will change over the coming century as the climate warms.
A related research briefing explains the main findings of the paper:
“Heat-related deaths are estimated to increase more rapidly than cold-related deaths are estimated to decrease under future climate change scenarios across European cities. An unrealistic degree of adaptation to heat would be required to revert this trend, indicating the need for strong policies to reduce greenhouse gases emissions.”
The paper in ninth place also analyses the health impacts of extreme heat. The study, published in Science Advances, finds that extreme heat can speed up biological ageing in older people.
Rounding out the top 10 is a Nature Climate Change study, titled “Rising temperatures increase added sugar intake disproportionately in disadvantaged groups in the US”.
The study finds that at higher temperatures, people in the US consume more sugar – mainly due to “higher consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages and frozen desserts”. The authors project that warming of 5C would drive additional sugar consumption of around 3 grams per day, “with vulnerable groups at an even higher risk”.
In 13th place is a Nature Climate Change study that finds the wealthiest 10% of people – defined as those who earn at least €42,980 (£36,605) per year – contributed seven times more to the rise in monthly heat extremes around the world than the global average.
The authors also explore country-level emissions, finding that the wealthiest 10% in the US produced the emissions that caused a doubling in heat extremes across “vulnerable regions” globally.
In 15th place is the annual Lancet Countdown on health and climate change – a lengthy report with more than 120 authors.
The study warns that “climate change is increasingly destabilising the planetary systems and environmental conditions on which human life depends”.
This annual analysis from the Lancet often features in Carbon Brief’s top 25 analysis. After three years in the Carbon Brief’s top 10 over 2020-23, the report landed in 20th place in 2023 and missed out on a spot in the top 25 altogether in 2024.
In 16th place is a Science Advances study, titled “Increasing rat numbers in cities are linked to climate warming, urbanisation and human population”. The study uses public complaint and inspection data from 16 cities around the world to estimate changes in rat populations.
It finds that “warming temperatures and more people living in cities may be expanding the seasonal activity periods and food availability for urban rats”.
In 21st place is a Nature Climate Change paper, titled “Peak glacier extinction in the mid-21st century”. The study authors “project a sharp rise in the number of glaciers disappearing worldwide, peaking between 2041 and 2055 with up to ~4,000 glaciers vanishing annually”.
Completing the top 25 is a Nature study on the “prudent planetary limit for geological carbon storage” – where captured CO2 is injected deep underground, where it can stay trapped for thousands of years.
In a Carbon Brief guest post, study authors Dr Matthew Gidden and Prof Joeri Rogelj explain that carbon dioxide removal will only be effective at limiting global temperature rise if captured CO2 is injected “deep underground, where it can stay trapped for thousands of years”.
The guest post warns that “geological carbon storage is not limitless”. It states that “if all available safe carbon storage capacity were used for CO2 removal, this would contribute to only a 0.7C reduction in global warming”.
Top journals
The journal Nature dominates Carbon Brief’s top 25, with seven papers featured.
Many other journals in the Springer Nature stable also feature, including Nature Climate Change (three), Communications Earth & Environment (two), as well as Nature Ecology & Evolution, Nature Medicine and Nature Reviews Earth & Environment (one each).
Also appearing more than once in the top 25 are Science Advances (three), Science (two) and the Lancet (two).
This is shown in the graphic below.
All the final scores for 2025 can be found in this spreadsheet.
Diversity in the top 25
The top 25 climate papers of 2025 cover a huge range of topics and scope. However, analysis of their authors reveals a distinct lack of diversity.
In total, the top 25 includes more than 650 authors – the highest number since Carbon Brief began this analysis in 2022.
This is largely due to a few publications with an exceptionally high number of authors. For example, the 2025 report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change has almost 130 authors alone, accounting for almost one-fifth of authors in this analysis.
Carbon Brief recorded the gender and country of affiliation for each of these authors. (The methodology used was developed by Carbon Brief for analysis presented in a special 2021 series on climate justice.)
The analysis reveals that 88% of the authors of the climate papers most featured in the media in 2025 are from institutions in the global north.
Global South: The “global south” is a term used to broadly describe lower-income countries in regions such as Africa, Asia and Latin America. It is often used to denote nations that are either in… Read More
Carbon Brief defines the global north as North America, Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. It defines the global south as Asia (excluding Japan), Africa, Oceania (excluding Australia and New Zealand), Latin America and the Caribbean.
The analysis shows that 53% of authors are from European institutions, while only 1% of authors are from institutions in Africa.
Further data analysis shows that there are also inequalities within continents. The map below shows the percentage of authors from each country, where dark blue indicates a higher percentage. Countries that are not represented by any authors in the analysis are shown in grey.
The number of all authors from the climate papers most featured in the media in 2025. The designations employed and the presentation of the material on this map do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of Carbon Brief concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries. Map by Carbon Brief using Datawrapper.
The top-ranking countries on this map are the US and the UK, which account for 26% and 16% of the authors, respectively.
Carbon Brief also analysed the gender of the authors.
Only one-third of authors from the top 25 climate papers of 2025 are women and only five of the 25 papers list a woman as lead author.
The plot below shows the number of authors from each continent, separated into men (dark blue) and women (light blue).
The number of men (dark blue) and women (light blue) listed as authors in the climate papers most featured in the media in 2025, shown by continent. Chart by Carbon Brief using Datawrapper.
The full spreadsheet showing the results of this data analysis can be found here. For more on the biases in climate publishing, see Carbon Brief’s article on the lack of diversity in climate-science research.
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