Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Elections in India and Mexico
CLIMATE PRESIDENTA: Following weeks of deadly heat in the country, Mexico elected former climate scientist Claudia Sheinbaum as its first female president after a “landslide victory in Sunday’s election”, Axios reported. Sheinbaum was co-author of the industry chapter for the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that jointly won the Nobel peace prize, noted a profile by Mexican newspaper El Universal.
‘GREEN PROMISES’: However, Mexican climate scientists and political analysts questioned “whether she will deliver on her green promises”, Climate Home News reported. Boston Globe columnist Marcela García also doubted Sheinbaum’s “progressive credentials”, while Bloomberg columnist Juan Pablo Spinetto noted her support of the populist politics and pro-oil policies of her “mentor”, outgoing president Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
NO MODI MAJORITY: In India’s elections, meanwhile, prime minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) suffered the “unexpected blow” of losing its parliamentary majority, the Guardian reported. Modi will continue for a third term, but “[his government] will face major challenges fueled by climate change”, the New York Times said.
HEAT STRESS: At least 85 people died of heat stress in northern India last week, the Hindustan Times reported. Six weeks of voting “amid unusually high temperatures…may have depressed turnout” in the election, NBC News reported, but: “[n]either the BJP nor the opposition said much about climate change during the campaign”.
Around the world
- MONEY TALKS: UN climate chief Simon Stiell opened intersessional talks in Bonn, Germany, by calling for “serious progress” on a new finance target, Climate Home News reported. Carbon Brief analysis revealed record UK climate finance spending.
- BROKEN RECORD: May 2024 was the world’s 12th consecutive warmest month on record, Agencia EFE reported, citing the Copernicus Climate Change Service.
- WINDFALL TAX: UN secretary general António Guterres has backed a windfall tax on fossil-fuel firms, which he called the “godfathers of climate chaos”, the Associated Press reported. BBC News said he also called for a fossil-fuel advertising ban.
- GERMAN GAP: An expert council on climate issues said Germany is likely to miss its 2030 targets, Der Spiegel reported, adding that this contradicted ministers. At least six people have died in floods in southern Germany, said Tagesschau.
- OFFSETS PLEASE: A group of 10 West African nations are supporting carbon credit use, Reuters reported. In a letter to the Science-Based Targets initiative they called for offsets to be included in corporate net-zero guidance, the newswire said.
- EU ELECTIONS: European Parliament elections are underway, with exit polls from the Netherlands showing a Labour-Green alliance narrowly beating Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders’ party, said Politico.
36.8 billion
Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and cement in 2023, a record, according to a new Carbon Brief guest post on the world’s key climate indicators.
5
Years before the carbon budget for a 50% chance of staying below 1.5C is used up, according to the study described by the guest post, which updates IPCC figures.
1.43
Global warming in 2023, in degrees C above pre-industrial levels, also a record.
100%
Share of warming in the decade 2014-2023 caused by humans, according to the guest post.
Latest climate research
- Research in Nature Sustainability looked at how to incorporate environmental concerns when planning for more hydropower in Africa.
- Catastrophic recent floods in Brazil were made twice as likely by climate change, according to a rapid attribution study by World Weather Attribution.
- A study published in Environmental Research Letters and covered by Carbon Brief showed better refrigeration could cut almost 2bn tonnes of greenhouse gases a year.
(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 world will invest $2tn in clean energy this year, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA). This is roughly double the amount being put towards fossil fuels, the agency said. Carbon Brief analysis of the figures showed North America is the top spender on fossil fuels, while China is putting 3.7 times more money into clean energy than it is investing in fossil fuels. The world is still off track for the goal of tripling renewables by 2030, said another new IEA report covered by the Guardian.
Spotlight
Rapid climate action ‘makes energy cheaper, not more costly’
This week, Carbon Brief looks at the costs and benefits of cutting emissions to net-zero in order to tackle climate change, factchecking claims made during the UK election campaign.
Ahead of the 4 July election, UK politicians are talking about climate action in very different ways. As ever, a key battleground is the costs and benefits of cutting emissions.
The climate-sceptic Reform party has mislead by omission, highlighting a large and scary-sounding figure for the cost of net-zero, without mentioning the cost of the alternative.
Its manifesto says the cost of net-zero is “estimated by the National Grid and others at some £2tn or more” – but leaves out the part about this being cheaper than not meeting the target.
Conservative prime minister Rishi Sunak has portrayed net-zero as a reluctant sacrifice. In this week’s leaders’ debate on ITV, he said: “Of course we are going to tackle climate change and get to net-zero…[But I am] not going to impose thousands of pounds of costs [on voters].”
This, too, is only a partial accounting, focusing on the investments needed to decarbonise.
In contrast, opposition Labour leader Keir Starmer said less on the investment required, but touted the economic opportunity and potential to lower bills. He told the leaders’ debate: “[The transition] is a huge opportunity. If we go to renewables that means cheaper bills.”
A much-discussed report by consultancy Aurora appeared to offer more support to Sunak than to Starmer, noting higher investment needs to decarbonise electricity more quickly.
Yet Aurora later tweeted further details from its modelling, showing that a faster transition to net-zero power would result in lower bills – despite larger investment costs.
The costs and benefits of net-zero
At a global level, reaching net-zero by 2050 would “make energy cheaper, not more costly”, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA).
It compared global energy costs on the world’s current path – heading for 2.4C of warming – with the accelerated action needed to reach net-zero by 2050 and stay below 1.5C.
It totted up investment needs, financing costs, the cost of fuel – including fossil fuel “rents”, such as oil company profits – as well as subsidies and distributional impacts.
Strikingly, the IEA concluded that accelerating climate action to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 would make the global energy system “more affordable and fairer”.
According to the report, this is because higher investment costs would be more than offset by lower fuel bills, greater efficiency and reduced fossil fuel rents. It concluded:
“Energy transitions could lead to major reductions in household energy bills and accelerate progress towards universal energy access. But managing upfront costs for poorer and rural households – as well as ongoing costs – remains a key public policy challenge.”
If those challenges can be overcome, in other words, then it would be cheaper to avoid dangerous climate change than to continue on our current path.
As well as being cheaper on its own terms, this would also limit the negative economic impacts of warming. As Green MP Caroline Lucas tweeted during the leaders’ debate, what is the cost of not decarbonising?
Watch, read, listen
IPCC CHAIR: In an interview with African Arguments, IPCC chair Prof Jim Skea talked about developing country representation, model reliance on CO2 removal and more.
SECRET SPHERE: Amid doubts over European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen’s climate commitment if she wins a second term, Politico’s Karl Mathiesen recounted her “secret climate crusade” to get her Green Deal “past sceptical colleagues”.
GAZA HEATWAVE: Climate Home News reported on the unequal effects of a recent heatwave on communities in Gaza and nearby Tel Aviv.
Coming up
- 13 June: Close of the Bonn UN climate change conference, Germany
- 9 June: Conclusion of European Parliament elections
- 13-15 June: G7 summit, Borgo Egnazia, Italy
Pick of the jobs
- Climate Analytics, senior climate policy analyst | Salary: Unknown. Location: Berlin
- UK Climate Change Committee, analyst – just transition | Salary: £35,985-38,562. Location: London
- Oil Change International, senior strategist – global policy | Salary: $75,000-85,000. Location: Flexible
- The Royal Society, policy adviser – climate change | Salary: £42,000. 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 7 June 2024: Sheinbaum and Modi elected; Hottest May; Factchecking net-zero costs appeared first on Carbon Brief.
DeBriefed 7 June 2024: Sheinbaum and Modi elected; Hottest May; Factchecking net-zero costs
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 wid