Published

2 years ago

April 25, 2024

Alice Rush

Rachel Kyte is professor of practice in climate policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford.

With spring in full bloom, the world’s finance ministers, development and financial leaders, and philanthropists met for the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) Spring Meetings in Washington, DC last week.

In their midst, Brazil, the current president of the G20, insisted on a balanced focus between ending poverty and food insecurity and combating climate change. President Lula makes no secret of his desire for a new international financial architecture, designed for different challenges, in a different century with new emerging powers at the table.

2023 was the year leaders agreed the current architecture was no longer fit for purpose. 2024 needs to be the year the IMF, multilateral development banks (MDBs), and their shareholders rapidly implement reforms and begin the process for increasing capital.

In Washington, the presidents of the MDBs held their first-ever “summit” – a direct response to insistence by G20 leaders and expert groups that the system must work more effectively together as one, in addition to individual bank reforms.

Since G20 leaders last September called for a better, bolder and bigger MDB system, and the World Bank responded with its own roadmap of reform, changes are underway, especially in areas where the MDB managements have authority. Where progress is less clear is on issues requiring their shareholders to take the lead.

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Last week, coalitions of countries met with private finance, think tanks, philanthropy and civil society to discuss the key problems of debt, reversals on global development goals and lagging climate action. The policy proposals on what to do are manifold, and there is a deep well of goodwill to help with the current system’s obvious failures. But all eyes must be on governments.

In one gathering of finance ministers, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva boiled down the climate change to-do list to the two things only they can do: price carbon effectively and remove harmful subsidies in the fuel, food and fisheries sectors. So how do we move from rhetoric to action?

Geopolitical pressure and debt distress

We cannot ignore the worsening context. Wars in Ukraine and Israel-Gaza, and their costs, threaten progress. Famine and conflict are taking their toll in many other countries too. Climate impacts are severe and intensifying, with crippling extreme heat stretching across India and closing school systems from the Philippines to Sudan.

Many countries are suffering from debt distress and many more are channeling all available funds to service their debt at the expense of basic services, a serious impediment to investing in their much-needed climate resilience. Even more countries are suffering a crisis of liquidity.

Whether it’s debt, debt service, or liquidity, it’s a crisis. Yet, at the Spring Meetings, the crisis response still lacked urgency.

Protesters gather outside the IMF and World Bank’s 2024 Spring Meeting in Washington D.C., on April 19, 2024. (Photo: Andrew Thomas/Sipa USA)

Debt rescheduling was called out by the World Bank chief economist as inadequate. The details of how MDBs can use reflows of Special Drawing Rights as hybrid capital continues to be debated by the very same countries that urge climate action, and who themselves face fiscal pressure on their development and climate budgets.

While shareholders, creditors and the institutional leadership played pass the parcel, the finance ministers of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) – whose cumulative debt is around $40bn, and who have no tools to dig out of their growing indebtedness and climate crisis – were despairing. As the urgency of a lack of inclusion coupled with climate stress grows, is it time not to tweak the system but to break it in places?

For example, we could write off the debt of SIDS, while we begin new resource mobilization schemes from targeted forms of taxation to moral payments. If SIDS could face their short-term and existential challenges on a sounder footing, the international system could then expedite work on the problems of the next groups of vulnerable countries to mobilise investment in their resilience at scale.

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To underline the bind countries find themselves in, during the time that MDB reform has become mainstream and Mia Mottley of Barbados and other leaders from emerging market and developing economies have called for a system reset under the banner of the Bridgetown Initiative, net flows of finance away from emerging and developing economies have grown.

If we were grading reform mid-terms, we would be looking at Bs for management making in-roads on better and bolder, but an F for shareholders stuck on the bigger. How do they get straight As by the end of the year?

IMF and World Bank at a crossroads

First, we need radical collaboration among MDBs and between MDBs and development finance institutions, national development banks and private finance on the processes needed to get loans and guarantees disbursed faster. Some MDBs have moved to cooperate on procurement, and there are many suggestions on how to make country platforms work. But radical collaboration involves much deeper streamlining, due diligence, term sheets, analysis, talent, and pooled capital. 

Second, pressure must now be focused on the MDBs’ major shareholders: the G7, other OECD countries and the G20. While they work out how to mobilize more funds and endorse a US proposal for a framework for capital increases, there is room to de-fragment the many pockets of resources stuck in trust funds and facilities with too many strings attached to scale their impact.

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Thirdly, we must preserve the collaboration within the MDBs that, despite growing tension, means that the US, China, Europe and other large emerging economies are working together and can zero in on solutions to debt, growth of carbon markets, the evolution of the trade system, harmful subsidy removal, and shifting the development and climate finance systems to a world where all development is supporting adaptation and resilience.

Shareholders could start by strengthening the quality of governance and ensuring that the ambition leaders show when they meet at the G20 is echoed in the way MDB board members articulate interests. This would support management to act more boldly and thwart push-back against the reform agenda among senior officials.

In their 80th anniversary year, the IMF, the World Bank, and their owners and borrowers, are at a crossroads. The analysis of the last two years has confirmed they are necessary institutions. Yet, if they are to retain their relevance – and not face competition from new institutions and capital pools as frustration at the system’s inertia grows – reform must go deeper and faster to rise to the challenges of tomorrow, starting today.

The post Will blossom of reform bear fruit? Spring Meetings leave too much to do appeared first on Climate Home News.

Will blossom of reform bear fruit? Spring Meetings leave too much to do

Climate Change

On the Farm, the Hidden Climate Cost of America’s Broken Health Care System

Published

9 hours ago

March 7, 2026

Alice Rush

American farmers are drowning in health insurance costs, while their German counterparts never worry about medical bills. The difference may help determine which country’s small farms are better prepared for a changing climate.

By Jordan Gass-Pooré

Samantha Kemnah looked out the foggy window of her home in New Berlin, New York, at the 150-acre dairy farm she and her husband, Chris, bought last year. This winter, an unprecedented cold front brought snowstorms and ice to the region.

On the Farm, the Hidden Climate Cost of the Broken U.S. Health Care System

Climate Change

A Little-Used Maneuver Could Mean More Drilling and Mining in Southern Utah’s Redrock Country

Published

10 hours ago

March 6, 2026

Alice Rush

Two Utah Congress members have introduced a resolution that could end protections for Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Conservation groups worry similar maneuvers on other federal lands will follow.

By Georgina Gustin

Lawmakers from Utah have commandeered an obscure law to unravel protections for the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, potentially delivering on a Trump administration goal of undoing protections for public conservation lands across the country.

A Little-Used Maneuver Could Mean More Drilling and Mining in Southern Utah’s Redrock Country

Climate Change

Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes

Published

20 hours ago

March 6, 2026

Alice Rush

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.

Saint Basil's Cathedral, on Red Square, in Moscow, was affected by smog during the fires in Russia in the summer of 2010. — Saint Basil’s Cathedral, on Red Square, in Moscow, was affected by smog during the fires in Russia in the summer of 2010. Credit: ZUMA Press, Inc. / Alamy Stock Photo

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.

Charts showing spatial and temporal occurrences over study period — Spatial and temporal occurrence of compound drought and heatwave events over the study period from 1980 to 2023. The map (top) shows CDHEs around the world, with darker colours indicating higher frequency of occurrence. The chart in the bottom left shows how much land surface was affected by a compound event in a given year, where red accounts for heatwave-led events, and yellow, drought-led events. The chart in the bottom right shows the relative increase of each CDHE type in 2002-23 compared with 1980-2001. Source: Kim et al. (2026)

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: