A record El Niño climate phase will unleash unprecedented heat and extreme weather, and the UK food system is vulnerable, climate minister Katie White told New Scientist.

At the same time, she pushed back against “panic and fear” after environment minister Angela Eagle told Britons they should “store a bit of food that can keep you going for a while” in case of El Niño storms and flooding.

“Look, am I going out and buying loads of extra beans? I’ve always got a few cans of beans, but that’s mainly so I’m ready for when I’ve not had a chance to go to the shop,” said White. “So I’m not going out and doing that.”

The UK Met Office, the national weather service, has that the UK is likely to face an unusually warm, wet and stormy autumn and winter due to El Niño, which occurs every two to seven years. While late winter in the UK has often been cold and dry during El Niño, the current event is so strong that it could remain warm and rainy into spring.

If fields become too muddy, tractors may not be able to sow crops like winter wheat, as happened in the 2023-24 El Niño, or the plants could fail to sprout. Continued wet weather could undermine spring barley. Farmers could be forced to spend more on livestock feed and housing, raising meat and dairy prices as well.

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Closer to the tropics, crops like rice could fail due to heat, drought and weakened monsoons. A UK government last week warned that El Niño could increase UK prices for imported foods such as rice, cocoa and coffee. This comes after heatwaves and drought linked to global warming reduced crop yields in the northern hemisphere this summer, resulting in the worst-ever wheat, barley, rape and oat harvest in the UK.  

“We will have a wetter start to this winter… On the back of a very dry summer, that is difficult,” said White. “The food system is vulnerable.”

Large countries including China, Brazil and Germany have been building up stores of key foods like wheat, rice, corn and sugar. But the UK doesn’t keep substantial public food reserves.

White argued that the UK would be better off helping local farms and groceries to become more resilient to climate shocks. A task force she established that includes military experts and scientists will meet in October to scrutinise readiness for climate security threats, including to food.

“I don’t think we need to be in a position of grain stores, but I do think we do need to be looking at where the vulnerabilities are in the food system and how we support local production in the most sustainable way,” she said. “That’s going to be working with farmers and also on local supply chains.”

Farmers will probably have to plant more weather-resistant varieties or different crops entirely, according to at the University of Oxford. The UK also needs to reduce its reliance on imports for 40 per cent of its food. But “grain storage is definitely part of the answer” as well, she says.

El Niño flooding could also threaten housing and infrastructure, and these risks will continue as climate change makes most of the world warmer and wetter. The UK should not only build anti-flood engineering works such as the Thames Barrier, but also restore ecosystems like wetlands to absorb excess water, said White. Extreme heat, which killed at least 35,000 people in Europe this year, is likely to bake the continent again next summer.

The long-term solution is for the UK and other countries to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, she said, a goal that right-wing parties have been increasingly attacking in the UK, the European Union and the US.

Yet the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, which White is a part of, is reportedly set to the Jackdaw gas field off Scotland, and may consent to the Rosebank oil field as well. These would result in at least 275 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions over their lifetime, equivalent to about three-quarters of the UK’s current annual greenhouse gas emissions.

White said she couldn’t comment as the approvals are up to energy secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh, but noted that “oil and gas is part of our mix going forward”.

She argued that the growth of renewable energy, which now generates more than half of UK electricity, would reduce fossil fuel emissions over time, pointing out that the UK has almost as many public electric vehicle chargers as petrol pumps. Her department also just £30 million of funding for 1000 community-owned solar, hydro and wind projects.

This month, the UN the world will soon fail the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and will have to rely on CO2 removal – ranging from tree planting to carbon-sucking machines – to bring temperatures back down in the future. The UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency is funding £57 million of research into geoengineering techniques like spreading sun-blocking particles in the atmosphere.

White said the UK has no plans to deploy geoengineering and she is concentrating on reducing climate impacts in the near term.

“My focus as climate minister is… adaptation and resilience because I know that next summer is likely to be very, very hot,” she said. “But also for this winter, how do we accelerate electrification? Because that is the best way to bring people’s bills down.”

The ocean could be the next frontier for the world’s rapidly expanding solar energy industry. That’s the finding of a study showing a floating solar farm off the coast of Taiwan produces more electricity and more profit than a nearby solar farm on land.

Taiwan is roughly the same size as the Netherlands, but it is mostly mountainous and has 5 million more people, meaning open space is scarce. As a potential solution, built a 181-megawatt offshore floating photovoltaic (OFPV) project – sometimes called a “floatovoltaic” – on 1.8 square kilometres of water in the protected bay of an industrial park in western Taiwan in 2020-21.

The year before, the Taiwan Power Company had constructed a 100-megawatt land-based photovoltaic (LPV) project on 1.4 square kilometres near the bay, providing an ideal comparison once researchers excluded the additional 81 megawatts of capacity at the floating solar installation.

Pound-for-pound, the floating solar produces 12 per cent more electricity than the land-based solar, they found. Even though it has slightly higher operations and maintenance costs, it generates 11 per cent net profit, as opposed to 8 per cent for the land-based solar.

“Installing the PV system on the sea, on water, is more difficult than installing the PV system on the ground,” says team member Ching-Feng Chen at the National Taipei University of Technology. But “for the carbon reduction, emissions reduction, OFPV is much better than LPV”.

More than 1100 floating solar systems have been on lakes and reservoirs, mostly in China and other densely populated Asian countries.

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While the main attraction is that they don’t take land away from farming or development, they can also up to 20 per cent more electricity than land-based systems, although that number varies widely from site to site. The improved performance comes from the fact that solar panel efficiency declines as temperatures rise, and because conditions are typically 2-3°C cooler over water than over land. The stronger winds experienced over large bodies of water also contribute to this cooling effect.

“The principal enemy is the heat,” says Chen.

Floating solar on the ocean, where temperatures are even lower than on lakes and reservoirs, can more electricity still. But it’s also more challenging to build, and only a handful of projects have been deployed. The largest is in China, a 1-gigawatt system in shallow waters off the coast of Shandong province.

A framework of solar panels is attached to buoys and anchored to the ocean bottom. The floating solar in Taiwan rests directly on the seabed when the tide is out.

Installation costs in general are expected to be about 30 per cent higher on sea than on land because the systems have to resist humidity, rust, salt and waves, says Chen.

Salt and bird droppings also build up. Employees of the Taiwan project have to the panels from walkways and for driftwood and debris on jet skis. But the higher electricity output will more than compensate for these costs over a project’s lifetime.

Chen’s study did not consider the long-term wear and tear of waves and storms. That could become a bigger factor as offshore wind farms consider using floating solar to generate power when the wind isn’t blowing. Combined wind and solar covering 1 per cent of suitable ocean surface could provide almost 30 per cent of global electricity demand in 2050, a published last year found.

German and Dutch companies have been two solar projects about 12 kilometres off the coast of the Netherlands, one of which has waves of up to 10 metres since 2019. But last year, Shell and Eneco another floating solar system off the Netherlands’s coast – this one installed at the Hollandse Kust Noord offshore wind farm – after a defective electrical connector led to overheating.

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Another concern is that floating PV shadows the water column and reduces wind mixing, which can oxygen and light available for aquatic life like phytoplankton and seaweed.

“If you do it further offshore, then maybe the waves and weather conditions and so on will become more problematic, but the closer to the shore the less favourable for biodiversity,” says at HZ University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands.

Given that it impacts human activities less than land-based solar, however, “there’s definitely potential for this technology”, he says.

Because offshore PV is technically challenging, Chen thinks it will expand mainly in sunny islands that don’t have much offshore wind power, like Taiwan, Japan, Indonesia and Caribbean nations.

“Location is very important,” he says.

Leading oil and gas companies own less than 1.5 per cent of the world’s renewable power capacity – raising questions about how committed they are to the green energy transition, despite their public claims.

and at the Autonomous University of Barcelona looked at ownership records of more than 53,000 wind, solar, hydroelectric and geothermal projects worldwide, as tracked by Global Energy Monitor, a non-governmental organisation. They then cross-checked these to see what proportion of them were owned by the world’s 250 biggest oil and gas companies, which are collectively responsible for 88 per cent of global hydrocarbon output.

Many fossil fuel firms have pledged to invest in renewable energy sources as the world attempts to transition away from oil and gas, but the researchers found that the top firms own just 1.42 per cent of the total operating renewable capacity globally. More than half of that – some 54 per cent – was owned via acquisitions, rather than companies developing their own projects. By calculating the total energy output of the 250 firms, the pair found that renewable power accounts for just 0.13 per cent of the energy produced by these companies.

“The results were surprising, even for me,” says Llavero Pasquina. “I knew they were playing a very little role in the energy transition. I knew it was only for show. It was only for dressing their narrative. But I didn’t expect this low number.”

Llavero Pasquina and Bontempi are both part of a group called , which aims to produce research to “study and contribute to the global environmental justice movement”. Llavero Pasquina says his campaigning position strengthens his research. “You have the biggest interest in being as rigorous as possible, because you have to convince and you have to show what’s true.”

The fact that big energy firms, which have made their name and fortunes through oil and gas exploitation, aren’t massive players in renewables is unsurprising, says at Sciences Po in Paris. “At the end of the day, [the energy transition] has to be something disruptive, and it’s not going to be in the hands of those companies.”

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However, Bros does believe the big energy firms are unduly promoting their work on the energy transition. “They are portraying themselves [as] doing something, but I think if they were to do something, it would be more the carbon capture and sequestration,” he says, which involves capturing carbon as it is emitted, for instance when burning fossil fuels. “They are not doing much because I think it’s completely outside their domain of expertise.”

Offshore Energies UK, an industry body that represents the UK’s offshore energy industry, including oil, gas, wind, carbon capture and hydrogen, declined to comment directly on the study’s findings. However, it pointed to a previous statement from its chief executive, David Whitehouse. “Far from being in conflict, oil and gas, wind, and emerging low-carbon technologies are part of one integrated system. It is the skills of our people, the same people who built the North Sea that will deliver this transition,” .

A record surge of solar panels flowing from China to countries in Africa over the past year is a sign the continent is seeing a rapid build-out of renewable energy. That could help expand access to cheap, clean electricity and reduce reliance on imported fossil fuels.

“This isn’t a massive explosion yet in itself,” says at Ember, an energy think tank in the UK. “It’s the start of the takeoff.”

Jones and his colleagues analysed on Chinese solar panel exports since 2017. There is some solar panel manufacturing capacity in Africa – but as with most of the world, Chinese imports make up nearly all of the continent’s supply.

Between June 2024 and 2025, the researchers found exports to Africa surged 60 per cent compared to the previous year, amounting to just over 15 gigawatts of power capacity imported over that period.

Unlike an earlier surge in 2022 and 2023 that was driven mostly by imports to South Africa, this upward trend was spread across the continent – with 20 countries seeing import records and 25 countries importing more than 100 megawatts worth of panels. “It’s not being led by one or two countries,” says Jones. “To me, that’s the most incredible part of the story.”

South Africa was still the leader, importing about a quarter of the total. But other countries also imported a raft of panels: Nigeria was second with 1721 megawatts, followed by Algeria with 1199 megawatts, about a tenth of the total. Over the past two years, solar panel imports from China to countries in Africa – excluding South Africa –have more than tripled.

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Assuming all the panels imported over the past year were installed, the researchers estimate 16 countries imported enough to supply at least 5 per cent of current electricity generation; Sierra Leone could generate more than 60 per cent of its current electricity with the panels it imported alone. These solar imports could begin to offset far more expensive fossil fuel imports.

“Africa’s just energy transition is no longer a future aspiration. It is unfolding now,” says at Greenpeace Africa, an environmental advocacy group. “This transition has a huge potential of reshaping how we build resilience to the climate chaos and drive development.”

The surge comes partly from large solar installations under construction, but that isn’t the whole story. Jones says a lot of the imports appear to be going to small, distributed installations on rooftops or farms, as people seek cheaper, more reliable sources than national grids. A similar trend is playing out in Pakistan, which saw explosive growth in rooftop solar over the past few years driven by the falling cost of panels.

This is a hopeful trend, given about in Africa – nearly half of the continent’s population – lack access to reliable electricity. However, solar development on the continent still lags behind the rest of the world. African countries have struggled to attract investment in renewable energy, receiving just of the global total in recent decades, according to the International Energy Agency. Over the past year, Pakistan alone saw more solar panel imports than all of Africa, despite having one-sixth the population.

“The real challenge before us is to turn this momentum into lasting gains by aligning financing, policy and local industries to ensure clean energy is not only available, but also reliable, affordable and inclusive for all Africans,” says Wemanya.

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