Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Trump vs world
TILTING AT ‘WINDMILLS’: At the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Donald Trump was quoted by Reuters as saying – falsely – that China makes almost all of the world’s “windmills”, but he had not “been able to find any windfarms in China”, calling China’s buyers “stupid”. The newswire added that China “defended its wind power development” at Davos, with spokesperson Guo Jiakun saying the country’s efforts to tackle climate change and promote renewable energy in the world are “obvious to all”.
SPEECH FACTCHECKED: The Guardian factchecked Trump’s speech, noting China has more wind capacity than any other country, with 40% of global wind generation in 2024 in China. See Carbon Brief’s chart on this topic, posted on BlueSky by Dr Simon Evans.
GREENLAND GRAB: Trump “abruptly stepped back” from threats to seize Greenland with the use of force or leveraging tariffs, downplaying the dispute as a “small ask” for a “piece of ice”, reported Reuters. The Washington Post noted that, while Trump calls climate change “a hoax”, Greenland’s described value is partly due to Arctic environmental shifts opening up new sea routes. French president Macron slammed the White House’s “new colonial approach”, emphasising that climate and energy security remain European “top priorities”, according to BusinessGreen.
Around the world
- EU MILESTONE: For the first time, wind and solar generated more electricity than fossil fuels in the EU last year, reported Reuters. Wind and solar generated 30% of the EU’s electricity in 2025, just above 29% from plants running on coal, gas and oil, according to data from the thinktank Ember covered by the newswire.
- WARM HOMES: The UK government announced a £15bn plan for rolling out low-carbon technology in homes, such as rooftop solar and heat pumps. Carbon Brief’s newly published analysis has all the details.
- BIG THAW: Braving weather delays that nearly “derail[ed] their mission”, scientists finally set up camp on Antarctica’s thawing Thwaites glacier, reported the New York Times. Over the next few weeks, they will deploy equipment to understand “how this gargantuan glacier is being corroded” by warming ocean waters.
- EVS WELCOME: Germany re-introduced electric vehicle subsidies, open to all manufacturers, including those in China, reported the Financial Times. Tesla and Volvo could be the first to benefit from Canada’s “move to slash import tariffs on made-in-China” EVs, said Bloomberg.
- SOUTHERN AFRICA FLOODS: The death toll from floods in Mozambique went up to 112, reported the African Press Agency on Thursday. Officials cited the “scale of rainfall” – 250mm in 24 hours – as a key driver, it added. Frontline quoted South African president Cyril Ramaphosa, who linked the crisis to climate change.
$307bn
The amount of drought-related damages worldwide per year – intensified by land degradation, groundwater depletion and climate change – according to a new UN “water bankruptcy” report.
Latest climate research
- A researcher examined whether the “ultra rich” could and should pay for climate finance | Climatic Change
- Global deforestation-driven surface warming increased by the “size of Spain” between 1988 and 2016 | One Earth
- Increasing per-capita meat consumption by just one kilogram a year is “linked” to a nearly 2% increase in embedded deforestation elsewhere | Environmental Research Letters
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
For the first time since monitoring began 15 years ago, there were more UK newspaper editorials published in 2025 opposing climate action than those supporting it, Carbon Brief analysis found. The chart shows the number of editorials arguing for more (blue) and less (red) climate action between 2011-2025. Editorials that took a “balanced” view are not represented in the chart. All 98 editorials opposing climate action were in right-leaning outlets, while nearly all 46 in support were in left-leaning and centrist publications. The trend reveals the scale of the net-zero backlash in the UK’s right-leaning press, highlighting the rapid shift away from a political consensus.
Spotlight
Do the oceans hold hope for international law?
This week, Carbon Brief unpacks what a landmark oceans treaty “entering into force” means and, at a time of backtracking and breach, speaks to experts on the future of international law.
As the world tries to digest the US retreat from international environmental law, historic new protections for the ocean were quietly passed without the US on Saturday.
With little fanfare besides a video message from UN chief Antonio Guterres, a binding UN treaty to protect biodiversity in two-thirds of the Earth’s oceans “entered into force”.
What does the treaty mean and do?
The High Seas Treaty – formally known as the “biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction”, or “BBNJ” agreement – obliges countries to act in the “common heritage of humankind”, setting aside self-interest to protect biodiversity in international waters. (See Carbon Brief’s in-depth explainer on what the treaty means for climate change).
Agreed in 2023, it requires states to undertake rigorous impact assessments to rein in pollution and share benefits from marine genetic resources with coastal communities and countries. States can also propose marine protected areas to help the ocean – and life within it – become more resilient to “stressors”, such as climate change and ocean acidification.
“It’s a beacon of hope in a very dark place,” Dr Siva Thambisetty, an intellectual property expert at the London School of Economics and an adviser to developing countries at UN environmental negotiations, told Carbon Brief.
Who has signed the agreement?
Buoyed by a wave of commitments at last year’s UN Oceans conference in France, the High Seas treaty has been signed by 145 states, with 84 nations ratifying it into domestic law.
“The speed at which [BBNJ] went from treaty adoption to entering into force is remarkable for an agreement of its scope and impact,” said Nichola Clark, from the NGO Pew Trusts, when ratification crossed the 60-country threshold for it to enter into force last September.
For a legally binding treaty, two years to enter into force is quick. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol – which the US rejected in 2001 – took eight years.
While many operative parts of the BBNJ underline respect for “national sovereignty”, experts say it applies to an area outside national borders, giving territorial states a reason to get on board, even if it has implications for the rest of the oceans.
What is US involvement with the treaty?
The US is not a party to the BBNJ’s parent Law of the Sea, or a member of the International Seabed Authority (ISA) overseeing deep-sea mining.
This has meant that it cannot bid for permits to scour the ocean floor for critical minerals. China and Russia still lead the world in the number of deep-sea exploration contracts. (See Carbon Brief’s explainer on deep-sea mining).
In April 2025, the Biden administration issued an executive order to “unleash America’s offshore critical minerals and resources”, drawing a warning from the ISA.
This Tuesday, the Trump administration published a new rule to “fast-track deep-sea mining” outside its territorial waters without “environmental oversight”, reported Agence France-Presse.
Prof Lavanya Rajamani, an expert in international environmental law at the University of Oxford, told Carbon Brief that, while dealing with US unilateralism and “self-interest” is not new to the environmental movement, the way “in which they’re pursuing that self-interest – this time on their own, without any legal justification” has changed. She continued:
“We have to see this not as a remaking of international law, but as a flagrant breach of international law.”
While this is a “testing moment”, Rajamani believes that other states contending with a “powerful, idiosyncratic and unpredictable actor” are not “giving up on decades of multilateralism…they just asking how they might address this moment without fundamentally destabilising” the international legal order.
What next for the treaty?
Last Friday, China announced its bid to host the BBNJ treaty’s secretariat in Xiamen – “a coastal hub that sits on the Taiwan Strait”, reported the South China Morning Post.
China and Brussels currently vie as the strongest contenders for the seat of global ocean governance, given that Chile made its hosting offer days before the country elected a far-right president.
To Thambisetty, preparatory BBNJ meetings in March can serve as an important “pocket of sanity” in a turbulent world. She concluded:
“The rest of us have to find a way to navigate the international order. We have to work towards better times.”
Watch, read, listen
OWN GOAL: For Backchannel, Zimbabwean climate campaigner Trust Chikodzo called for Total Energies to end its “image laundering” at the Africa Cup of Nations.
MATERIAL WORLD: In a book review for the Baffler, Thea Riofrancos followed the “unexpected genealogy” of the “energy transition” outlined in Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s More and More and More: An All-Consuming History.
REALTY BITES: Inside Climate News profiled Californian climate policy expert Neil Matouka, who built a plugin to display climate risk data that real-estate site Zillow removed from home listings.
Coming up
- 26 January: International day of clean energy
- 27 January: India-EU summit, New Delhi
- 31 January: Submit inputs on food systems and climate change for a report by the UN special rapporteur on climate change
- 1 February: Costa Rica elections
Pick of the jobs
- British Antarctic Survey, boating officer | Salary: £31,183. Location: UK and Antarctica
- National Centre for Climate Research at the Danish Meteorological Institute, climate science leader | Salary: NA. Location: Copenhagen, with possible travel to Skrydstrup, Karup and Nuuk
- Mongabay, journalism fellows | Stipend: $500 per month for 6 months. Location: Remote
- Climate Change Committee, carbon budgets analyst | Salary: £47,007-£51,642. Location: London
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
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The post DeBriefed 23 January 2026: Trump’s Davos tirade; EU wind and solar milestone; High seas hope appeared first on Carbon Brief.
DeBriefed 23 January 2026: Trump’s Davos tirade; EU wind and solar milestone; High seas hope
Drought and heatwaves occurring together – known as “compound” events – have “surged” across the world since the early 2000s, a new study shows.
Compound drought and heat events (CDHEs) can have devastating effects, creating the ideal conditions for intense wildfires, such as Australia’s “Black Summer” of 2019-20 where bushfires burned 24m hectares and killed 33 people.
The research, published in Science Advances, finds that the increase in CDHEs is predominantly being driven by events that start with a heatwave.
The global area affected by such “heatwave-led” compound events has more than doubled between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, the study says.
The rapid increase in these events over the last 23 years cannot be explained solely by global warming, the authors note.
Since the late 1990s, feedbacks between the land and the atmosphere have become stronger, making heatwaves more likely to trigger drought conditions, they explain.
One of the study authors tells Carbon Brief that societies must pay greater attention to compound events, which can “cause severe impacts on ecosystems, agriculture and society”.
Compound events
CDHEs are extreme weather events where drought and heatwave conditions occur simultaneously – or shortly after each other – in the same region.
These events are often triggered by large-scale weather patterns, such as “blocking” highs, which can produce “prolonged” hot and dry conditions, according to the study.
Prof Sang-Wook Yeh is one of the study authors and a professor at the Ewha Womans University in South Korea. He tells Carbon Brief:
“When heatwaves and droughts occur together, the two hazards reinforce each other through land-atmosphere interactions. This amplifies surface heating and soil moisture deficits, making compound events more intense and damaging than single hazards.”
CDHEs can begin with either a heatwave or a drought.
The sequence of these extremes is important, the study says, as they have different drivers and impacts.
For example, in a CDHE where the heatwave was the precursor, increased direct sunshine causes more moisture loss from soils and plants, leading to a drought.
Conversely, in an event where the drought was the precursor, the lack of soil moisture means that less of the sun’s energy goes into evaporation and more goes into warming the Earth’s surface. This produces favourable conditions for heatwaves.
The study shows that the majority of CDHEs globally start out as a drought.
In recent years, there has been increasing focus on these events due to the devastating impact they have on agriculture, ecosystems and public health.
In Russia in the summer of 2010, a compound drought-heatwave event – and the associated wildfires – caused the death of nearly 55,000 people, the study notes.
The record-breaking Pacific north-west “heat dome” in 2021 triggered extreme drought conditions that caused “significant declines” in wheat yields, as well as in barley, canola and fruit production in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada, says the study.
Increasing events
To assess how CDHEs are changing, the researchers use daily reanalysis data to identify droughts and heatwaves events. (Reanalysis data combines past observations with climate models to create a historical climate record.) Then, using an algorithm, they analyse how these events overlap in both time and space.
The study covers the period from 1980 to 2023 and the world’s land surface, excluding polar regions where CDHEs are rare.
The research finds that the area of land affected by CDHEs has “increased substantially” since the early 2000s.
Heatwave-led events have been the main contributor to this increase, the study says, with their spatial extent rising 110% between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, compared to a 59% increase for drought-led events.
The map below shows the global distribution of CDHEs over 1980-2023. The charts show the percentage of the land surface affected by a heatwave-led CDHE (red) or a drought-led CDHE (yellow) in a given year (left) and relative increase in each CDHE type (right).
The study finds that CDHEs have occurred most frequently in northern South America, the southern US, eastern Europe, central Africa and south Asia.
Threshold passed
The authors explain that the increase in heatwave-led CDHEs is related to rising global temperatures, but that this does not tell the whole story.
In the earlier 22-year period of 1980-2001, the study finds that the spatial extent of heatwave-led CDHEs rises by 1.6% per 1C of global temperature rise. For the more-recent period of 2022-23, this increases “nearly eightfold” to 13.1%.
The change suggests that the rapid increase in the heatwave-led CDHEs occurred after the global average temperature “surpasse[d] a certain temperature threshold”, the paper says.
This threshold is an absolute global average temperature of 14.3C, the authors estimate (based on an 11-year average), which the world passed around the year 2000.
Investigating the recent surge in heatwave-leading CDHEs further, the researchers find a “regime shift” in land-atmosphere dynamics “toward a persistently intensified state after the late 1990s”.
In other words, the way that drier soils drive higher surface temperatures, and vice versa, is becoming stronger, resulting in more heatwave-led compound events.
Daily data
The research has some advantages over other previous studies, Yeh says. For instance, the new work uses daily estimations of CDHEs, compared to monthly data used in past research. This is “important for capturing the detailed occurrence” of these events, says Yeh.
He adds that another advantage of their study is that it distinguishes the sequence of droughts and heatwaves, which allows them to “better understand the differences” in the characteristics of CDHEs.
Dr Meryem Tanarhte is a climate scientist at the University Hassan II in Morocco, and Dr Ruth Cerezo Mota is a climatologist and a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Both scientists, who were not involved in the study, agree that the daily estimations give a clearer picture of how CDHEs are changing.
Cerezo-Mota adds that another major contribution of the study is its global focus. She tells Carbon Brief that in some regions, such as Mexico and Africa, there is a lack of studies on CDHEs:
“Not because the events do not occur, but perhaps because [these regions] do not have all the data or the expertise to do so.”
However, she notes that the reanalysis data used by the study does have limitations with how it represents rainfall in some parts of the world.
Compound impacts
The study notes that if CDHEs continue to intensify – particularly events where heatwaves are the precursors – they could drive declining crop productivity, increased wildfire frequency and severe public health crises.
These impacts could be “much more rapid and severe as global warming continues”, Yeh tells Carbon Brief.
Tanarhte notes that these events can be forecasted up to 10 days ahead in many regions. Furthermore, she says, the strongest impacts can be prevented “through preparedness and adaptation”, including through “water management for agriculture, heatwave mitigation measures and wildfire mitigation”.
The study recommends reassessing current risk management strategies for these compound events. It also suggests incorporating the sequences of drought and heatwaves into compound event analysis frameworks “to enhance climate risk management”.
Cerezo-Mota says that it is clear that the world needs to be prepared for the increased occurrence of these events. She tells Carbon Brief:
“These [risk assessments and strategies] need to be carried out at the local level to understand the complexities of each region.”
The post Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes
Greenhouse Gases
DeBriefed 6 March 2026: Iran energy crisis | China climate plan | Bristol’s ‘pioneering’ wind turbine
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Energy crisis
ENERGY SPIKE: US-Israeli attacks on Iran and subsequent counterattacks across the Middle East have sent energy prices “soaring”, according to Reuters. The newswire reported that the region “accounts for just under a third of global oil production and almost a fifth of gas”. The Guardian noted that shipping traffic through the strait of Hormuz, which normally ferries 20% of the world’s oil, “all but ground to a halt”. The Financial Times reported that attacks by Iran on Middle East energy facilities – notably in Qatar – triggered the “biggest rise in gas prices since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine”.
‘RISK’ AND ‘BENEFITS’: Bloomberg reported on increases in diesel prices in Europe and the US, speculating that rising fuel costs could be “a risk for president Donald Trump”. US gas producers are “poised to benefit from the big disruption in global supply”, according to CNBC. Indian government sources told the Economic Times that Russia is prepared to “fulfil India’s energy demands”. China Daily quoted experts who said “China’s energy security remains fundamentally unshaken”, thanks to “emergency stockpiles and a wide array of import channels”.
‘ESSENTIAL’ RENEWABLES: Energy analysts said governments should cut their fossil-fuel reliance by investing in renewables, “rather than just seeking non-Gulf oil and gas suppliers”, reported Climate Home News. This message was echoed by UK business secretary Peter Kyle, who said “doubling down on renewables” was “essential” amid “regional instability”, according to the Daily Telegraph.
China’s climate plan
PEAK COAL?: China has set out its next “five-year plan” at the annual “two sessions” meeting of the National People’s Congress, including its climate strategy out to 2030, according to the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post. The plan called for China to cut its carbon emissions per unit of gross domestic product (GDP) by 17% from 2026 to 2030, which “may allow for continued increase in emissions given the rate of GDP growth”, reported