Dayu Water-Saving 2026 Interim Report: Design Qualifications Deliver Dividends, Cash Flow Is the Core Test

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.

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.

Mitti Labs has announced a five-year carbon credit agreement with Google to scale climate-smart agriculture across 100,000 hectares of smallholder rice farms in India, delivering one million high-integrity credits to Google by 2030 in what the company calls the largest rice methane offtake to date. The partnership will transition over 70,000 farmers to water and methane-savings irrigation practices, aiming to eliminate 3M tons of near-term warming impact, measured as GWP20 and equivalent to 1M tons of GWP100 impact, while conserving billions of gallons of water across critical regional basins. Rice paddies continuously flooded under traditional practices account for more than 10% of global methane emissions, and Mitti Labs says its model cuts up to 50% of methane emissions from rice fields and reduces irrigation volumes by close to 40% while maintaining rice yields. The partnership is projected to deliver billions of liters of water savings across India, equivalent to Bengaluru's annual supply for three years, and Mitti Labs will use Google's support to expand its NASA-supported GeoAI platform, which fuses satellite radar data with field-collected ground truth at the resolution of individual smallholder plots. Kate Brandt, Chief Sustainability Officer at Google, said the company is committed to finding solutions that neutralize warming across both the near and long term, while Mitti Labs co-founder Xavier Laguarta called the partnership a powerful accelerator of its mission to reduce emissions, save water, and strengthen the livelihoods of the 150 million smallholder farmers who grow rice.

The European Union's weather information agency, the Copernicus Climate Change Service, announced on the 10th that the global average temperature this August reached 16.96 degrees, the highest ever recorded for the month of August. This ties with July 2023 as the highest ever recorded across all months. The global average temperature in August was 1.65 degrees above the pre-industrial average, and it was the first time since last November that the monthly temperature rise exceeded 1.5 degrees. In Western Europe, the average temperature from June to August surpassed the record heat of 2003, making it the hottest summer on record, with severe droughts occurring in France, the United Kingdom and elsewhere, and the flow of major rivers such as the Rhine and the Danube falling to unusually low levels. The average temperature across Europe this summer was the third highest on record. The average sea surface temperature in August for ocean areas excluding the regions around the North and South Poles reached 21.07 degrees, setting a new record high for that month, and the El Niño phenomenon is strengthening near the equator in the Pacific, with the possibility that it could become one of the strongest on record.

In the summer of 2025, Japan's average temperature was 2.36°C above the normal, marking the highest since records began in 1898, and the third consecutive year of record highs. This extreme heat has damaged crops and livestock, leading to reduced supplies and higher prices for eggs, rice, and vegetables. For example, in Ibaraki Prefecture, egg production rates have dropped by 10-20%, and the ratio of top-grade Koshihikari rice from Niigata Prefecture has fallen to just a few percent. According to Teikoku Databank, the average price of a curry rice meal has hit a record high of 365 yen, with an index of 142.6 compared to the 20-year average. If temperatures continue to rise, a plate of curry rice could cost around 500 yen by the 2040s, prompting consumers to consider new rice varieties and adjust storage methods.