Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
COP16 kicks off
HOLA CALI: The largest ever UN biodiversity summit, COP16, is officially underway in Cali, Colombia. At the talks, countries will grapple with how to put the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework – often described as the “Paris Agreement for nature” – into action, alongside debates on finance for developing countries and how to best share the benefits from genetic information.
TRACKING NEGOTIATIONS: Carbon Brief has produced an interactive grid of where each party stands on the key negotiating issues and a live tracker of the texts under negotiation. On Tuesday, Carbon Brief’s team of five journalists on the ground in Cali held an online webinar on the key issues up for discussion at the summit. A recording is available.
Around the world
- CLIMATE PLANS: The UK must decide “how far and how fast” to cut emissions amid preparations to release a new national climate pledge at the COP29 climate summit in November, the Guardian reported. Carbon Brief understands that the US, Brazil and UAE are planning to do the same, three months before the deadline.
- LOBBYING: An “influential” group of 30 oil and gas producers drafted “detailed plans” for “dismantling” key US climate rules after the upcoming presidential election, the Washington Post reported. Members of the group were “aggressively pursued for campaign cash by Donald Trump”, the newspaper noted.
- CUBA CHAOS: At least six people were killed as Hurricane Oscar brought heavy rainfall to Cuba, according to the New York Times.
- ENERGY BOOST: South-east Asia must accelerate clean-energy investments to $190bn by 2035 – around five times current levels – to meet climate goals, according to a new International Energy Agency (IEA) report covered by Reuters.
3,071
The number of “square brackets” remaining in negotiating documents at COP16, as of Thursday night, according to Carbon Brief’s COP16 text tracker. (Square brackets denote areas of disagreement in UN texts. They must all be resolved before countries can reach consensus.)
Latest climate research
- The extreme floods that hit Sudan in August were made nearly 20% more intense by human-driven climate change, according to a new World Weather Attribution analysis.
- Research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that a 1% increase in deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon was associated with a 6.3% jump in malaria cases the following month.
- Over the past 30 years, polar bears have been increasingly exposed to a range of pathogens, due in part to the loss of sea ice habitat and rapid warming in the Arctic, a new PLOS One study said.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
Greenhouse gas emissions remain far off track to meet global climate goals, according to the UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP) 2024 emissions gap report covered by Carbon Brief. The chart above, based on a figure from the report, shows how emissions will change by 2035 under current policy and under current national climate plans, known as “nationally determined contributions” (NDCs). The chart compares this with the emissions reductions needed by 2035 to put the world on track with a scenario where global temperatures are kept to 1.5C (red) or 2C (pale red).
Spotlight
Where countries stand on reversing nature loss
This week, Carbon Brief reports on how countries plan to get back on track after the majority of them missed a deadline to release new nature pledges ahead of COP16.
In a cold and snowy Montreal in the depths of December 2022, countries agreed to the landmark Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), often referred to as the “Paris Agreement for nature”.
The GBF is a list of four goals and 23 targets that collectively aim to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030 and to put Earth “in harmony with nature” by 2050.
At the Montreal talks, countries pledged to release new national plans to lay out how they plan to implement the goals and targets within their borders.
These plans are known as national biodiversity strategies and action plans, or “NBSAPs”.
Under the GBF and its underlying documents, countries agreed to submit new NBSAPs by the COP16 biodiversity summit, which is currently taking place in Cali, Colombia.
Carbon Brief analysis shows that just 30 countries and the EU met the deadline to submit an updated NBSAP ahead of COP16.
Since then, a further five countries have published new NBSAPs, including COP16 host Colombia.
That leaves 162 parties that are yet to submit updated NBSAPs.
Countries that were unable to meet the deadline to submit NBSAPs ahead of COP16 were requested to instead submit national targets. These submissions simply list biodiversity targets that countries will aim for – without an accompanying plan for how they will be achieved.
As of 25 October, 113 parties had submitted national targets.
Next steps
One of the major tasks for negotiators in Cali will be to decide how to move forward after the majority of countries failed to produce new NBSAPs ahead of the talks.
On Thursday, a draft decision submitted for review by COP16 president and Colombian environment minister Susana Muhamad laid out the next steps for countries when it comes to NBSAPs.
The text still contains some brackets, meaning countries will need to negotiate the finer details before it can be officially adopted.
The draft “urges” countries that have not yet done so to release new NBSAPs “as soon as possible”. (In UN language terms, “urges” is stronger than “invites” or “encourages”, but not as strong as “requests” or “instructs”.)
Eyebrows may be raised at the failure to include a specific timeframe for when laggard countries should submit new NBSAPs.
One NGO observer told Carbon Brief that they had hoped to see the language say “as soon as possible, but no later than the end of 2025”, adding:
“Generally having a clear deadline is good to keep countries to account. ‘As soon as possible’ is commonly understood as ‘really really soon’ and we can only hope that parties see it that way too.”
The text also “requests” the Global Environment Facility (GEF), a major multilateral environmental fund, “provide[s] timely support to all eligible parties, aligned with national circumstances and needs, upon request, to enable them to” release new NBSAPs.
It comes after developing countries said that a lack of timely funding from the GEF had prevented them from being able to produce new biodiversity plans on time.
Watch, read, listen
‘BLENDED’ FINANCE: Writing in Le Monde ahead of COP29, Mette Frederiksen and Mia Mottley, the prime ministers of Denmark and Barbados, respectively, argued in favour of scaling up state-backed “blended” finance instruments to channel private investment for climate action.
COP16 OUTSIDER: Vox examined why the US is the only country in the world, other than the Vatican, to refuse to join the UN biodiversity convention.
PANTANAL JAGUARS: A podcast by the Brazilian Report covered how extreme fires in Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands are affecting jaguars, “the biome’s most emblematic species”.
Coming up
- 21-26 October: World Bank and IMF annual meetings, Washington DC
- 21 October-1 November: UN Biodiversity Conference COP16, Cali, Colombia
- 25-28 October: International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Species Survival Commission Leaders’ Meeting 2024, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Pick of the jobs
- California Governor’s Office of Land Use and Climate Innovation, senior climate research specialist | Salary: $6,963-$8,650 per month. Location: Sacramento, California
- Australian Government Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, ember vacancy on the Great Artesian Basin Stakeholder Advisory Committee | Salary: Unknown. Location: Remote, Australia
- Caribbean Community Climate Change Center, project development specialist | Salary: Unknown. Location: Belize
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
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The post DeBriefed 25 October 2024: COP16 kicks off; ‘Quantum leap’ needed for 1.5C; Where countries stand on reversing nature loss appeared first on Carbon Brief.
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 Reuters. The newswire added that the plan also had targets to reach peak coal in the next five years and replace 30m tonnes per year of coal with renewables.
ACTIVE YET PRUDENT: Bloomberg described the new plan as “cautious”, stating that it “frustrat[es] hopes for tighter policy that would drive the nation to peak carbon emissions well before president Xi Jinping’s 2030 deadline”. Carbon Brief has just published an in-depth analysis of the plan. China Daily reported that the strategy “highlights measures to promote the climate targets of peaking carbon dioxide emissions before 2030”, which China said it would work towards “actively yet prudently”.
Around the world
- EU RULES: The European Commission has proposed new “made in Europe” rules to support domestic low-carbon industries, “against fierce competition from China”, reported Agence France-Presse.