Rachel Sherrington

EU Called Out at COP30 as Denmark Leads on Food Transition | Agricultural and Rural Convention Rollbacks in Brussels overshadowed Europe’s presence at COP30 in Belém, while Indigenous movements, civil society and frontrunner nations pushed forward plans for agroecology, plant-rich diets and fai...

Rollbacks at home and funding shortfalls undermined the EU’s leadership on food and farming at COP30, but even as negotiations stalled, calls for food systems transformation gained momentum.

New from me for @arc2020.bsky.social👇

www.arc2020.eu/eu-called-ou...

More than 300 big agriculture lobbyists have taken part in Cop30, investigation finds Lobbyists representing industry responsible for a quarter to a third of global emissions participated in key talks at the UN climate summit

It was a real pleasure to work on this story with the Guardian's @ninalakhani.bsky.social; you can read our writeup in the Guardian here
www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Despite calls for curbs on the participation of businesses who have a history of lobbying against environmental action, this COP offered new platforms and avenues for agribusiness to influence the debate - including via a new side venue - the COP30 "Agrizone"

www.desmog.com/2025/11/10/c...

Brazilian Confederation of Agriculture and Livestock (CNA) Background  The Brazilian Confederation of Agriculture and Livestock (originally the National Confederation of Agriculture — CNA) is the largest representative entity of Brazilian agribusiness.  Accor...

Companies with a long history of lobbying against climate action - as well as powerful industry groups that represent them - were among those bringing delegations, raising concerns about the presence of actors that have worked against regulators 3/ www.desmog.com/cna/

Analysis: Which countries have sent the most delegates to COP30? - Carbon Brief According to the provisional figures, 193 countries, plus the European Union, have registered a delegation for the COP30 summit.

Attendance from the world's largest and most damaging agricultural companies - including industrial meat, synthetic fertiliser and pesticide firms - outnumbered that of several major economies and rose by 71 percent since COP27, our investigation found 2/
www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-whi...

More Than 300 Lobbyists for Industrial Agriculture Attend COP30 Presence of high-polluting companies erodes trust in the UN process, say campaigners.

NEW: > 300 lobbyists representing industrial agriculture have attended this year’s UN climate talks taking place in the Brazilian Amazon, where the industry is the leading cause of deforestation 1/
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www.desmog.com/2025/11/18/m...

More than 300 big agriculture lobbyists have taken part in Cop30, investigation finds Lobbyists representing industry responsible for a quarter to a third of global emissions participated in key talks at the UN climate summit

Revealed: >300 Big Agriculture lobbyists have participated at this year’s UN climate talks taking place in the Brazilian Amazon, where the industry is the leading cause of deforestation, a new investigation by me and @rachelsherrington.bsky.social has found.
www.theguardian.com/environment/...

In Brazil, Agribusiness Giants Hire Celebrity Influencers to Win Hearts and Minds Doctors and models extol the virtues of meat as climate impacts of industrial farming face scrutiny at COP30 — the global climate summit.

🔴 NEW 🔴

In Brazil, Agribusiness Giants Hire Celebrity Influencers to Win Hearts and Minds

📝 @tjjordan.bsky.social @akhilr23.bsky.social @rachelsherrington.bsky.social @clarecarlile.bsky.social

Published in partnership with @apublica.org

www.desmog.com/2025/11/16/i...

Built to Fail: Rules at UN Climate Talks Favor the Status Quo, Not Progress - Inside Climate News Experts say stifling bureaucratic procedures that are disconnected from the climate crisis have consistently stalled COP negotiations.

How the disadvantaged are disadvantaged here at #COP30

Great piece featuring insights from two of our leading @cssn.org scholars @daniellefalzon.bsky.social and @maxboykoff.bsky.social

insideclimatenews.org/news/1211202...

COP30’s agriculture showcase sponsored by agribiz interests linked to deforestation and anti-conservation lobbying Sponsors of the sustainable agriculture pavilion at COP30 will include pesticides giant Bayer, alleged by campaigners to be driving “massive deforestation” on the continent, and a branch of Brazil’s l...

NEW: The "Agrizone" at COP30 is supposed to be a showcase for sustainable agriculture 🌳

But its sponsors are powerful agribusiness interests linked to deforestation and anti-conservation lobbying who have paid for visibility and "image gain"

Read more 👇:

Mapped: Big Food’s Routes to Influence at COP30 In the city of Belém, at the mouth of the Amazon rainforest, Brazil has kicked off the COP30 climate conference, a summit framed as a pivotal moment to reduce emissions and keep the Paris Agreement al...

🔴 NEW 🔴

Mapped: Big Food’s Routes to Influence at COP30

Interactive map shows the food & farming corporations, trade groups and initiatives at COP30 in Brazil and how these are set to navigate the summit

📝 @rachelsherrington.bsky.social & Gil Alessi👇

www.desmog.com/2025/11/10/m...

Intensive Livestock Farms Fail to Declare Climate Impacts in ‘Emissions Scandal’ Plans for intensive livestock “megafarms” are omitting crucial climate impacts, it can be revealed. Campaigners last year celebrated a “beginning of the end” to polluting factory farming, after the la...

Plans for intensive livestock farms in the UK could lead to over 35million more 🐷 + 🐔 farmed here each year.

Councils are green-lighting these operations despite with patchy or non-existent data.

✍️ for @desmog.com @theguardian.com on research by @sustainweb.org
www.desmog.com/2025/11/05/i...

Look Out for These 8 Big Ag Greenwashing Terms at COP30 Food and farming companies will claim agriculture is the solution to the climate crisis at the Brazil summit — even though food drives a third of global warming.

🔴 NEW 🔴

From regenerative agriculture to ‘efficiency is enough' and ‘we feed the world’ narratives - check out these 8 big greenwashing terms ahead of COP30 👇

📝 by @rachelsherrington.bsky.social & @hazelhealy.bsky.social

www.desmog.com/2025/10/26/b...

Methane, Money & Metrics: Inside Big Ag’s Plan to Hide Its Climate Impact in South America The livestock industry is pushing to change how its methane emissions are measured in Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil, with help from researcher Frank Mitloehner.

Brilliant piece by @maximanzoni.bsky.social documenting industry-driven efforts to "rethink methane" in Latin America via the use of the GWP* metric, & illustrating how this new lens essentially serves to let major polluters off the hook sentientmedia.org/inside-big-a...

Revealed: How the Meat Industry Uses Environmental Groups to Make Beef Seem Climate-Friendly Expert says non-profit partners provide a ‘fairy dust’ of legitimacy to beef industry.

New at DeSmog: @rachelsherrington.bsky.social reveals how the meat industry might have teamed up with prominent environmental groups to convince consumers that beef can be "climate friendly," even as the industry's emissions of planet-heating pollutants increase. #climatechange

In Ingleside, Texas, chemical companies Yara + Enbridge have launched initiatives touching every aspect of life, from gifting children's schools to running a blood donation drive

The reason: they want to build a 'low-carbon' ammonia plant that resident say could cost their health and coastline 🧵

Food Giants’ Climate Plans Lack Credibility, New Report Finds Food firms are inflating their climate targets with carbon removals and weak deforestation claims, according to a report from the NewClimate Institute and Carbon Market Watch. With the COP30 climate s...

🔴NEW: Major food firms like Nestlé, PepsiCo and JBS are overstating progress on their climate goals, a new report finds

Firms are criticised for a reliance on vague carbon removals, weak no-deforestation claims and a lack of progress on key transitions

www.desmog.com/2025/06/03/f...

The EU’s largest fertiliser producer, Yara, is quietly relying on fracked shale gas from Texas to power “sustainable” ammonia production

Over the last 9 months, we traced Yara’s supply chain from the Permian shale Basin – known as a “carbon bomb” – to fertiliser bags in Europe’s fields 🧵

Revealed: UK Supermarket Seabass Linked to Devastating Overfishing in Senegal Waitrose, Co-op, Lidl, Asda and Aldi among retailers selling fish fed on west African catch

Just published in collaboration with The Guardian our two-year investigation linking Turkish seabass and seabream in UK supermarkets to devastating overfishing and social harms in Senegal!

www.desmog.com/2025/05/22/r...
With✍️ @hazelhealy.bsky.social on @desmog.bsky.social

Revealed: Meat Industry Behind Attacks on Flagship Climate-Friendly Diet Report In January 2019, world-renowned food and nutrition experts published a groundbreaking study. The culmination of two years’ work by 37 authors, the EAT-Lancet report set out to answer the question: how...

and full writeup in @desmog.bsky.social here --

www.desmog.com/2025/04/10/m...

PR campaign may have fuelled food study backlash, leaked document shows Eat-Lancet report recommended shift to more plant-based, climate-friendly diet but was extensively attacked online

Meat industry PR campaign may have fuelled backlash against EAT-Lancet planetary diet, leaked document shows

must-read from @clarecarlile.bsky.social 👇

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

the role of fossil capital in the rise of the far right in the US - and its consequences - are difficult to keep track of given the sheer pace of change. still, we should.

The Flawed Ideology That Unites Grass-Fed Beef Fans and Anti-Vaxxers From RFK Jr. to Hollywood A-listers and Democratic senators, people across the political spectrum are jumping onto the slippery slope of nature-based solutionism.

If the 2010s were marked by techno-solutionism, then the 2020s might be the decade of "natural solutionism". Both are flawed, disdain the regulatory state, and in both "expertise is treated as suspect, corrupt, or altogether illegitimate, with anecdotes and mantras replacing verifiable data"

Supermarkets Accused of Major Methane 'Blindspot’ Leading supermarkets are failing to address the methane pollution in their supply chains, a new report has found, putting their own climate pledges at risk. The study from environmental non-profits Ch...

🔴 New: Supermarkets accused of major methane ‘blindspot’

- Report argues supermarkets will not meet climate pledges until “dismal lack of action” on supply chain emissions is addressed

www.desmog.com/2025/03/18/s...

Supermarkets Accused of Major Methane 'Blindspot’ Leading supermarkets are failing to address the methane pollution in their supply chains, a new report has found, putting their own climate pledges at risk. The study from environmental non-profits Ch...

🔴 New: Supermarkets accused of major methane ‘blindspot’

- Report argues supermarkets will not meet climate pledges until “dismal lack of action” on supply chain emissions is addressed

www.desmog.com/2025/03/18/s...

ICYMI, over the weekend I published a new story looking at the close ties between the pharmaceutical and livestock industries, and how one of the larger pharma companies has ridiculed plant-based meat and worked to muddy the debate over livestock's carbon footprint.

Brazilian beef and leather companies fall short in tackling deforestation, a study finds The next United Nations climate conference will be held in Belem, the capital of an Amazon region where widespread deforestation has turned the surrounding rainforest from a vital carbon sink into a s...

Brazilian beef and leather companies fall short in tackling deforestation, a study finds apnews.com/article/braz...

‘Ultimate hypocrisy’: UK exported 8,500 tonnes of banned pesticides last year

Our new investigation found:

- Last year, the UK exported 8,500 tonnes of pesticides considered so hazardous they are banned here

- Including: enough bee-killing neonicotinoid thiamethoxam to spray an area larger than England

- Syngenta was responsible for 98% of these banned pesticide exports

Industry-Backed Emissions Metric Could ‘Completely Derail’ Climate Action, Campaigners Warn Governments have been cautioned against adopting a new methane metric that is “incompatible” with climate science and “penalises” low-income countries. A statement issued by more than 60 civil society...

NEW: An industry-backed emissions metric could ‘completely derail’ climate action if adopted by governments, campaigners warn

It comes the New Zealand government considers whether to adopt new climate goals based on the GWP* measure

My latest for @desmog.bsky.social

www.desmog.com/2024/12/06/i...

Industry-backed Emissions Metric Could ‘Completely Derail’ Climate Action, Campaigners Warn Governments have been cautioned against adopting a new methane metric that is “incompatible” with climate science and “penalises” low-income countries. A statement issued by more than 60 civil society...

🟡 NEW 🟡

Industry-backed Emissions Metric Could ‘Completely Derail’ Climate Action, Campaigners Warn

📝 @rachelsherrington.bsky.social