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El Niño drags India's rainfall 15% below average, raising risk of driest monsoon in 17 years
India's meteorological department has reported that an intensifying El Niño is putting India at risk of its driest monsoon season in 17 years, after cumulative rainfall from June to September came in 15% below the long-term average. That could weigh on agricultural output and further stoke food inflation, which climbed to 5.95% in August. The report said that if dry conditions persist, this year's monsoon will be the weakest since 2009, when rainfall was 18% below normal, potentially affecting both the current harvest and the next planting cycle. Food costs rose for a seventh straight month in August. The meteorological office had forecast in May that rainfall this season would be 10% below normal. Christian Werner, managing director of the consultancy Global Weather Climate Analytics in Australia, said weather conditions could favor cyclone formation in the Bay of Bengal in the final week of September, which may help bring critically needed rain to eastern and northeastern India and ease drought conditions there. Adequate monsoon rainfall is crucial for the hundreds of millions of Indian farmers who rely on seasonal rains to grow their crops, with India among the world's largest producers of rice, sugar and cotton.
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Terradot and Google Launch Largest Enhanced Rock Weathering Project in Southern Brazil
Terradot and Google announced a megaton-scale climate project in Southern Brazil that pairs methane avoidance in rice farming with permanent carbon dioxide removal, marking Google's largest carbon removal purchase to date. Google will purchase 1M tonnes of near-term methane impact by 2030 and 1M tonnes of carbon removal impact by 2040, delivering 1M tonnes of impact by 2030. The project is the largest enhanced rock weathering project ever undertaken and the first of any kind to combine near-term methane elimination with durable carbon removal at this scale. Terradot will help rice farmers across more than 200,000 hectares starting in Rio Grande do Sul adopt Alternate Wetting and Drying, an irrigation practice that periodically drains flooded paddies to cut water use and sharply reduce methane, while spreading naturally sourced crushed volcanic rock on farmland to generate durable carbon removal. Terradot CEO James Kanoff said the project eliminates the trade-off between moving fast on near-term warming and removing carbon permanently, and Google Head of Carbon Removal Randy Spock said the agreement is built to be a template rather than a one-off. As part of the project, Google is providing an R&D grant to Terradot and to Stanford Doerr School's Soil & Environmental Biogeochemistry Lab to strengthen the scientific foundation of AWD as a methane mitigation strategy.
Cabinet approves 15-billion-baht national disaster insurance scheme covering 30 million households
Today's cabinet meeting (Sept 15) was chaired by Deputy Prime Minister and Transport Minister Phiphat Ratchakitprakarn on behalf of Prime Minister and Interior Minister Anutin Charnvirakul, who is on a trip to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The Interior Ministry is seeking approval for a total budget framework of 15 billion baht to buy natural disaster insurance under the national disaster insurance programme, and is proposing three types of policy covering floods, windstorms and earthquakes, for 30 million households, with a one-year coverage period from 1 October 2026 to 1 October 2027, to ease the burden of risk on the state, which spends tens of billions of baht a year on relief for disaster victims. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives is seeking approval for a project to improve the irrigation system in the lower Chao Phraya basin and the lower eastern side, with a budget of about 95 billion baht, using loans from the Asian Development Bank, or ADB, together with the national budget. The Transport Ministry, for its part, is proposing to cancel the item for construction of the ministry's new headquarters building, which was tied to the budgets for 2026 to 2028, effectively delaying the construction plan. Attention is also on proposals to appoint and transfer senior officials at several ministries to fill positions left vacant by retirements on 30 September this year.
