Seabird populations were soaring: a breeding colony of 2,000 sooty terns had established themselves on Bikar, whereas the year before there had been none. Jacques saw greater crested terns and brown noddies nesting on the ground, a Christmas shearwater — a dark-brown seabird which he says has never been recorded on Bikar before — and species of geckos and land crabs that were absent in 2024. “(Species) that were undetectable before, because they were so suppressed by the rats, were re-appearing,” he says.
Pakistan’s story is unique, said Mustafa Amjad, program director at Renewables First, an energy think tank based in Islamabad. Solar has been adopted at mass scale in countries including Vietnam and South Africa, “but none have had the speed and scale that Pakistan has had,” he told CNN.
The world’s top greenhouse gas emitters denied they had any obligations beyond the UN framework convention on climate change (UNFCCC) and the 2015 Paris agreement. The court resoundingly rejected that argument, saying a range of other treaties applied, including the UN convention on the law of the sea, the Vienna convention for the protection of the ozone layer, the Montreal protocol, the convention on biological diversity and the UN convention to combat desertification.
The latest data, for the first quarter of 2025, shows that China’s CO2 emissions have now been stable or falling for more than a year, as shown in the figure below.
PieFed
Rimu
𝔗𝚎𝚑 𝔅𝚊𝚖𝚜𝚔𝚒
LadyButterfly she/her
Blaze (he/him)
Blaze (he/him)
Lady Butterfly
Ludrol
Blaze (he/him)