We handpick and explain the most important stories at the intersection of climate, land, food and nature over the past fortnight.

This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s fortnightly Cropped email newsletter. Subscribe for free here. This is the last edition of Cropped for 2025. The newsletter will return on 14 January 2026.

Key developments

High Seas Treaty enters force

OCEAN BOOST: The High Seas Treaty – formally known as the “biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction”, or “BBNJ” agreement – entered into force on 17 January, following its ratification by 60 states, reported Oceanographic Magazine. The treaty establishes a framework to protect biodiversity in international waters, which make up two-thirds of the ocean, said the publication. For more, see Carbon Brief’s explainer on the treaty, which was agreed in 2023 after two decades of negotiations.

DEEP-SEA MINING: Meanwhile, the US – which is not a party to the BBNJ’s parent Law of the Sea – is pushing on with an effort to accelerate permitting for companies wanting to hunt for deep-sea minerals in international waters, reported Reuters. The newswire described it as a “move that is likely to face environmental and legal concerns”.

UK biodiversity probe

SECURITY RISKS: The global decline of biodiversity and potential collapse of ecosystems pose serious risks to national security in the UK, a report put together by government intelligence experts has concluded, according to BBC News. The report was due to be published last autumn, but was “suppressed” by the prime minister’s office over fears it was “too negative”, said the Times.
COLLAPSE CONCERNS: Following a freedom-of-information (FOI) request, the government published a 14-page “abridged” version of the report, explained the Times. A fuller version seen by both the Times and Carbon Brief looked in detail at the potential security consequences of ecosystem collapse, including shifting global power dynamics, more migration to the UK and the risk of “protests over falling living standards”.

News and views

• OZ BUSHFIRES: Bushfires continued to blaze in Victoria, Australia, amid record-breaking heat, said the Guardian. A recent rapid attribution analysis found that the “extreme” Australian heat in early January was made around five times more likely by fossil-fuelled climate change.
• MERCO-SOURED: On 17 January, the EU signed its “largest-ever trade accord” with the Mercosur bloc of countries – Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay – after 25 years of negotiations, per Reuters. On 21 January, amid looming new US sanctions, EU lawmakers voted to send the pact to the European Court of Justice, which could delay the deal by almost two years, according to the New York Times.
• SOY IT ISN’T SO: Meanwhile, the Guardian reported that UK and EU supermarkets have “urged” traders who had “abandoned” the Amazon soya moratorium to stick to its core principles: “not to source the grain from Amazon land cleared after 2008”. 
• WATER ‘BANKRUPTCY’: A new UN report warned that the world is facing irreversible “water bankruptcy” caused by overextracting water reserves, along with shrinking supplies from lakes, glaciers, rivers and wetlands, Reuters reported. Lead author Prof Kaveh Madani told the Guardian that the situation is “extremely urgent [because] no one knows exactly when the whole system would collapse”.
• KRUGER UNDER WATER: Flood damages to South Africa’s Kruger National Park could “take years to repair” and cost more than $30m, said the country’s environment minister, quoted in Reuters. Rivers running through the park “burst their banks” and submerged bridges, with “hippos seen…among treetops”, it added.
• FORESTS VS COPPER: A Mongabay report examined how “community forests stand on the frontline” of critical-minerals mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s copper-cobalt belt.

Spotlight

Nature’s coast guard, with backup

This week, Cropped speaks to the lead author of a new study that looks at how – and where – mangrove restoration can be best supported across the world. 

Along Mumbai’s smoggy shoreline, members of the city’s Indigenous Koli community wade through the mangroves at dawn to catch fish. Behind their boats, giant industrial cranes whir to life, building new stretches of snaking coastal highway that blot out the horizon. 

Mumbai’s mangrove cover is possibly the highest for any major city. With their tangled, stilt roots, mangrove species serve as a natural defence for a city that experiences storm surges and urban flooding every year. These events disproportionately affect the city’s poor – particularly its fishing communities.

This mangrove buffer is being increasingly threatened, as the city chooses coastal roads and other large development projects over green cover, despite protests. But can green and grey infrastructure coexist to protect vulnerable communities in a warming world? 

A new global-scale assessment published last week tallied the benefits of mangrove restoration for flood risk reduction, factoring in future climate change, development and poverty.

It advanced the idea of “hybrid” coastal defence measures. These combine pairing tropical ecosystems with modern, engineered defences for sea level rise, such as dykes and levees.

When Carbon Brief contacted lead author and climate scientist Dr Timothy Tiggeloven of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, he was in Kagoshima in Japan, home to the world’s northernmost mangrove forests. Why combine mangroves and dykes? Tiggeloven explained:

“Mangroves are like active barriers: they reduce incoming energy from waves, but they will not stop the water coming in from storms, because water can flow through the branches. But wave energy can still be overtopped. So if you reduce wave energy via mangroves and have dykes behind this, they very much have a synergy together and we wanted to quantify the benefits for future adaptation.”

According to the study, if mangrove-dyke systems were built along flood-prone coastlines, mangrove restoration could reduce damages by $800m a year, with an overall return-on-investment of up to $125bn. 

It could also protect 140,000 people a year from flood risk – and 12 times that number under future climate change and socioeconomic projections, the study said. 

According to the study, south-east Asia could reap the “highest absolute benefits” from mangrove restoration under current conditions. Countries that could see the “highest absolute potential risk reduction” – considering future climate damages in 2080 – are Nigeria ($5.6bn), Vietnam ($4.5bn), Indonesia ($4.3 bn), and India ($3.8bn), it estimated.

Maharashtra – which Mumbai serves as the state capital for – is one of two subnational regions globally that could reap the largest benefits of restoration.

Tiggeloven emphasised that the goal of the study was to examine how restoration impacts people, “because if we’re looking only at monetary terms, we’re only looking at large cities with a lot of assets”, he told Carbon Brief. 

A pattern that his team found across multiple countries was that people with lower incomes are disproportionately living in flood-prone coastal areas where mangrove restoration is suitable. He elaborated: 

“Wealthier areas might have higher absolute damages, but poor communities are more vulnerable, because they lack alternatives to easily relocate or rebuild, so the relative impact on their wellbeing is much greater.”

Poorer rural coastal communities with fewer engineered protections, such as sea walls, could benefit the most from restoration as an adaptive measure, the study found. But as the study’s map showed, there are limits to restoration. Tiggoloven concluded:

“We also should be very careful, because mangroves cannot grow anywhere. We need to think ‘conservation’ – not only ‘restoration’ – so we do not remove existing mangroves and make room for other infrastructure.”

Watch, read, listen

DU-GONE: A feature in the Guardian examined why so many dugongs have gone missing from the shores of Thailand.

WILD LONDON: Sir David Attenborough explored wildlife wonders in his home city of London. The one-off documentary is available in the UK on BBC iPlayer.

GREAT BARRIER: A Vox exclusive photo-feature looked at the “largest collective effort on Earth ever mounted” to protect Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.
‘SURVIVAL OF THE SLOWEST’: A new CBC documentary filmed species – from sloths to seahorses – that “have survived not in spite of their slowness, but because of it”.

New science

• Including carbon emissions from permafrost thaw and fires reduces the remaining carbon budget for limiting warming to 1.5C by 25% | Communications Earth and Environment
• Penguins in Antarctica have radically shifted their breeding seasons in response to rising temperatures | Journal of Animal Ecology
• Increasing per-capita meat consumption by just one kilogram a year is “linked” to a nearly 2% increase in embedded deforestation elsewhere | Environmental Research Letters

In the diary

• 31 January: Deadline for inputs on food systems and climate change for a report by the UN special rapporteur on climate change
• 1 February: Costa Rica elections
• 2-6 February: First session of the plenary of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Panel on Chemicals, Waste and Pollution | Geneva
• 2-8 February: Twelfth plenary session of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services | Manchester, UK
• 5 February: Future Food Systems Summit | London

Cropped is researched and written by Dr Giuliana Viglione, Aruna Chandrasekhar, Daisy Dunne, Orla Dwyer and Yanine Quiroz.  Please send tips and feedback to cropped@carbonbrief.org

The post Cropped 28 January 2026: Ocean biodiversity boost; Nature and national security; Mangrove defence appeared first on Carbon Brief.