Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Asian extreme weather
SWELTERING: An intense heatwave is sweeping across south and eastern Asia. The Dhaka Tribune said temperatures in Bangladesh have surpassed 40C in many regions and the Daily Star reported that the country recorded at least 23 days “heatwave days” in April. Agence France-Presse reported that Thailand’s capital, Bangkok, reached 40.1C on Wednesday. The Bangkok Post added that temperatures could reach 43C in northern Thailand next week. (See Carbon Brief’s recent on-the-ground reporting on the impacts of climate change on human migration in Thailand.) Schools across the Philippines, Bangladesh and India have been forced to close due to the heat, according to BBC News.
ELECTION HEAT: In India, the heatwave coincides with the country’s six-week general election, in which nearly one billion people are eligible to vote, the New York Times reported. India’s election authorities have set up a taskforce “to review the impact of heatwave[s]” on the election after a significant decrease in voter turnout, the Indian Express said. India’s Economic Times added that temperatures in the country will peak on 27-28 April.
FLOODING: More than 110,000 people have been evacuated from China’s Guangdong province after record-breaking rainfall caused widespread flooding, state news agency Xinhua reported. China Daily said that southern China has experienced more than double the typical rainfall for April. The flooding has caused economic losses exceeding 140m yuan ($19.8m), according to the People’s Daily Online. Meanwhile, the Financial Times reported that the World Meteorological Organization has published a report warning that climate change “is causing major repercussions across Asia”.
Legal action
HISTORIC ENQUIRY: The Inter-American Court on Human Rights in Barbados is hearing the first part of a “historic” inquiry this week, the Guardian said. The New Humanitarian reported that Colombia and Chile are “asking the hearing to define states’ legal responsibility to combat climate change and prevent it from violating people’s human rights”. It added that the court will hear from Julian Medina, a Colombian fisherman, among others.
HEALTH FAILURE: A group of South Koreans is suing their government for failing to protect 200 people, including young environmental activists and children, by not tackling climate change, Reuters reported. “The proceeding is Asia’s first such climate-related litigation,” the newswire added. Meanwhile, BBC News reported that an Iraqi man is taking legal action against BP, alleging that his late-son’s leukaemia was caused by the oil company’s flaring practices.
SUSPENDED: Meanwhile in the UK, Dr Sarah Benn, a retired GP in Birmingham, has had her medical licence suspended for five months following her involvement with Just Stop Oil protests and risks being stuck off permanently, the Guardian reported. According to the Times, the 57-year-old was previously jailed for 31 days after taking part in three climate protests at an oil terminal in Kingsbury in 2022. There has been backlash to the ruling, which the British Medical Association called “very concerning”, the paper added.
Around the world
- EARTH DAY: US president Joe Biden marked “Earth Day” on Monday by announcing $7bn of investment into solar energy projects, the New York Times reported.
- CONTROVERSIAL TREATY: EU lawmakers have voted “overwhelmingly” for the bloc to leave the international energy charter treaty, according to the Financial Times. The paper called the ruling a “victory for climate advocates”, adding that many think the treaty protects fossil fuels.
- UNHELPFUL SLOGAN: Chris Stark, the outgoing chief executive of the UK’s Climate Change Committee, told the Guardian that “net-zero” has become an “unhelpful” slogan, which is often “associated with the campaigns against it”.
- MEXICAN DROUGHT: Nearly 80% of Mexico’s territory is now under drought conditions, Excélsior reported. EuroNews added that drought, combined with a surge in water demand to grow crops such as avocados, is causing rivers and lakes to dry up in the “once green and lush” state of Michoacan.
- DEADLY FLOODS: Countries across east Africa have been “lashed by relentless downpours in recent weeks”, Al Jazeera reported. The outlet warned that “deadly floods” are sweeping through Kenya’s capital Nairobi.
- CLIMATE RISK: The World Bank is advising South Africa’s national treasury on climate risk strategies, such as taking out climate insurance or setting up contingency funds, following floods which have caused billions of dollars of damage in recent years, reported Bloomberg.
2.4 billion
The number of workers globally expected to face “excessive heat conditions” at some point during their careers, according to an International Labor Organization report covered in the Associated Press.
Latest climate research
- A study in Nature Climate Change found that meteorological definitions for extreme weather events do not fully capture the negative impacts experienced by women in informal settlements.
- The area of land in east Africa affected by combined heatwaves and wildfires could increase by 940% by the end of the century, according to new research in Earth System Dynamics.
- New analysis by the World Weather Attribution service found that the heavy rainfall that hit Oman and the United Arab Emirates recently was 10-40% heavier than it would have been in an El Niño year without climate change.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
The past 10 months have all set new all-time monthly global temperature records, with April 2024 on track to extend this streak to 11, wrote Dr Zeke Hausfather in his latest quarterly “state of the climate” report for Carbon Brief. The graph shows monthly temperatures over 1940-2024, plotted with respect to a 1850-1900 baseline. Based on the year so far and the current El Niño forecast, Carbon Brief estimates that global temperatures in 2024 are likely to average out at around 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
Spotlight
Climate science in the courtroom
Last week, a group of 2,000 Swiss women won a landmark case in the European Court of Human Rights. The women, mostly in their 70s, said that their age and gender made them particularly vulnerable to heatwaves linked to climate change. The court ruled that Switzerland’s efforts to meet its emissions targets had been “woefully inadequate”.
At the annual European Geosciences Union (EGU) general assembly in Vienna, Carbon Brief interviews Prof Wim Thiery – a scientist who was involved in multiple conference sessions on climate change and litigation. This interview was edited for length.
Carbon Brief: What types of climate science are used in litigation?
Prof Wim Thiery: Just like how there’s a range of different subfields in climate science, we have a range of different climate cases. For example, there’s attribution science which supports reparation cases. We are seeing carbon budget research and fair-share emission pathways research supporting cases on climate policies. And we’re also seeing future climate impact projections supporting cases that are started by young people around the world.
CB: What science was used in the recent European case?
WT: Impact attribution research played a key role. Recent studies by [Oxford University researcher] Dr Rupert Stewart-Smith and [Swiss epidemiologist] Dr Anna Vicedo-Cabrera, for example, showed that all women in Switzerland are disproportionately at risk of heat-related mortality in Switzerland. So, these are recent scientific publications that were directly mentioned in court and that played an influence on the final court ruling.
CB: Do you think the methods used in attribution science are changing to better support litigation?
WT: We are seeing an evolution in attribution science, whereby we move from the traditional science of long-term trends in climate variables, to the operational ability to – in almost real time – establish the link of climate change with the occurrence of individual extreme events. And we’re seeing a new evolution whereby communities are increasingly looking at impact-relevant variables. Think about inundated areas, lake levels, heatwave mortalities. These are the new target variables of attribution science. This is a new frontier and we are seeing that those studies are directly usable in court cases.
CB: Do you ever worry about your research, or that of your colleagues, becoming ‘too political’?
WT: We are used to, in climate science, working with policymakers and with society. Our research is of direct societal relevance and this is just a new example. For me, this is just another example of working with stakeholders – lawyers are a new group of stakeholders for our community.
There is a very direct and tangible impact when you see that an attribution study or a particular scientific publication is used in a court case and has a direct effect on its evolution. It’s very tangible, the outcomes, and I think that’s something which motivates climate scientists in engaging in this community.
Watch, read, listen
FAKE MEAT: Climate YouTuber Simon Clark has published a video asking: “How green is fake meat, really?” To answer the question, he compared the carbon and land footprints of beef, chicken, pork and mutton with those of major meat substitutes.
GROWING GULLIES: A multimedia-rich BBC News article explained how soil erosion is causing vast gullies and chasms to open up around Latin America and Africa, destroying tens of thousands of homes.
GREENWASHING ADS: The Financial Times and Reuters have taken down “advertorials” paid for by oil giant Saudi Aramco, following allegations of greenwashing and disinformation, DeSmog reported.
Coming up
- 28-30 April: G7 ministers’ meeting on climate, energy and environment, Piemonte, Italy
- 29 April: Parliamentary election, Togo
- 30 April: UN General Assembly thematic event on “the El Niño Phenomenon”, New York, US
- 4 May: Local elections, UK
Pick of the jobs
- Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, head of Asia campaigns and advocacy | Salary: $60,000-80,000. Location: Fully remote (Asia)
- UK Met Office, land observations manager | Salary: £41,725. Location: Exeter, Edinburgh or Watnall
- International Institute for Environment and Development, urban climate resilience lead and principal researcher | Salary: £64,814-80,654. Location: Hybrid within or outside the UK, with occasional travel to the UK offices.
- Climate Analytics, deputy head of climate policy and senior climate science data analyst | Salary: €54,348-84,495 and €64,348-70,944, respectively. Location: Berlin
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
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The post DeBriefed 26 April 2024: Extremes grip Asia; Human rights inquiry; Using climate science in court appeared first on Carbon Brief.
DeBriefed 26 April 2024: Extremes grip Asia; Human rights inquiry; Using climate science in court
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 impor