Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
COP crunch
FINAL CALL: COP29 has entered its final scheduled day in Baku. Yesterday’s six-hour “Qurultay” meeting witnessed “unanimous” disappointment over the state of draft texts, with developing countries unhappy about the lack of numbers on climate finance and almost all calling for clearer language on climate action. (Carbon Brief’s Simon Evans live-posted highlights from the event.) Around 3pm local time today, the COP29 presidency released a package of new texts, just hours before talks were due to close. At least one further iteration is expected.
FINANCE FIGHT: The new proposal for a global climate finance goal would involve developed countries “taking the lead” in channelling $250bn a year by 2035 to “help poorer nations” deal with climate change, Reuters reported. It added that the proposal has drawn criticism “from all sides”. Politico noted that it “falls far short of the trillion-plus figure that the poorer countries had sought”. For more on the draft finance deal, see Spotlight below.
STOCKTAKE STUTTERS: Last year’s “global stocktake” at COP28 included the landmark deal to “transition away from fossil fuels”. But the latest draft on the “mitigation work programme” excised all links back to this. Carrying things forward has been left to the “UAE dialogue”, which, in its latest draft, “reaffirms” last year’s language on fossil fuels, renewables and energy efficiency. It also has optional text adding further goals on energy storage and grids, as well as requesting an annual progress report for debate at subsequent COPs.
WILL IT END?: Seasoned COP watchers will know that the talks almost always run past their scheduled finish time. Carbon Brief’s analysis of previous finish times suggests that, if COP29 follows the upward trend, it will end at 3.25am on Sunday morning. Carbon Brief also polled a group of more than 200 delegates to ask when they think COP29 will end, with the mean time selected being 1:34am on Sunday. After talks finally draw to a close, Carbon Brief journalists will hold a free webinar to discuss the key outcomes. Sign up.
Around the COP
- ARGENTINA STAYS: Argentina confirmed it will not leave the Paris Agreement, squashing rumours ignited after right-wing populist leader Javier Milei decided to withdraw his country’s delegation from the talks last week, El Observador reported.
- INDONESIAN TRANSITION: Indonesia’s president Prabowo Subianto announced plans to retire all coal and other fossil-fuel power stations within 15 years, while also aiming to bring the nation’s net-zero target forward by a decade, said the Associated Press. It said experts “welcomed” the ambition, but are “sceptical” of its delivery.
- POWER PLAY: The UK launched a “global clean power alliance” at the G20, with Brazil, Australia, Canada and France among members, according to the Press Association. The leaders of the UK and Brazil wrote joint op-eds touting the pact in the Times and Folha de São Paulo.
- COP ‘STAND-OFF’: Australia and Turkey are currently in a “stand-off” over who will host COP31 in 2026, with neither party willing to give up their bid, Reuters said.
- ‘BIZARRE’ RESTRICTIONS: COP29 host Azerbaijan went to “bizarre” lengths to prepare Baku for the summit, Bloomberg reported. This included clearing public areas and roads by moving parliamentary elections, shutting schools and universities and ordering two-thirds of the city to work from home.
- LOBBYISTS: A Global Witness investigation found that at least 1,700 fossil-fuel executives registered to attend COP29, lower than the record in Dubai, but still larger than most party delegations. The Guardian reported that “hundreds” of industrial farming lobbyists have also been in attendance.
Zero
The number of new countries at COP29 joining a small alliance of nations that have pledged to phase out oil and gas.
Latest climate research
- Climate lawsuits and negative court decisions can reduce the value of publicly listed companies, a Nature Sustainability study suggested.
- Early 20th century global ocean surface temperatures were warmer than previously thought, a study in Nature has found, meaning the pace of heating from 1900 to the 1950s was slightly slower than assumed.
- A Nature Geoscience study found that the weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) – a major system of ocean currents responsible for transporting heat around the world – could be linked to influxes of freshwater into the subarctic Atlantic.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
China’s historical emissions within its borders have now caused more global warming than the 27 member states of the EU combined, according to new Carbon Brief analysis. However, China is still far behind the world’s largest historical emitter, the US, the analysis showed. It added that China is unlikely to ever overtake the US, based on current policies, committed plans and technology trends in both countries. Carbon Brief’s analysis is featured in a data-driven article in the New York Times.
Spotlight
Decoding the COP29 finance proposal
Carbon Brief unravels the latest hotly contested climate-finance text from COP29 and explains the main sticking points.
Nations have a deadline at COP29 to agree on a new goal for channelling money into cutting emissions and protecting people from climate change.
This target will replace an existing obligation for “developed” countries – including EU states, the US and Japan – to provide $100bn of climate finance a year to “developing” countries.
Money has always been one of the most controversial aspects of UN climate talks and COP29 has exposed deep rifts.
A draft text outlining the new goal published earlier today shows that, on the day the talks are meant to finish, these tensions are far from being resolved. Developing countries and climate NGOs described the proposal as “totally unacceptable” and a “joke”.
Parties will now digest this text and at least one new version will be produced by the Azerbaijani presidency as the talks drag into overtime.
Billions
The proposed goal has two parts. At its core is $250bn delivered each year to developing countries by 2035.
This is framed as the continuation of the $100bn annual goal, which is provided entirely by developed countries. Yet, in this text, developed countries only “take the lead”, leaving the goal open for others to contribute.
As with the $100bn, this goal would include public money, such as development aid, as well as private finance that is “mobilised” by public spending.
The target matches one floated to Politico by EU sources earlier in the week, which was greeted with derision by global-south leaders. Developing countries had demanded a similar core goal of $440-900bn, but made up entirely of public money and largely as grants.
Crucially, analysts have found that comparable amounts of climate finance could be provided in this timeframe, even if developed countries make no extra effort to contribute more in the coming years, beyond existing commitments.
Trillions
From the start of COP29, all developing countries have been united behind a call for $1.3tn in climate finance a year, provided by developed countries.
There is broad agreement among experts that developing countries need to invest trillions of dollars each year to fulfil their climate goals, with large chunks coming from developed countries.
The new text includes a “call” to raise $1.3tn in climate finance by 2035.
However, it does not line up with developing countries’ proposals and, instead, reflects developed countries’ long-standing vision of a broader goal based on global “investment”. It refers to the $1.3tn coming from “all public and private sources”.
On the other hand, some of the more contentious ideas put forward by developed countries, such as the US, are no longer in the text. For example, it does not reference “domestic spending” in counting towards the goal.
Contributors
One of the most disputed topics in climate-finance talks has been expanding the list of contributors beyond developed countries.
Many nations classed as “developing” in the UN climate system, such as China and Saudi Arabia, are relatively wealthy and major contributors to climate change. This, some argue, means they should be obliged to provide finance.
There is no longer a formal recognition of this in the new text. An attempt by some developed countries to add criteria for new contributors was deleted the previous day.
COP29 has seen some wrangling around this issue. Observers welcomed China referencing the billions of dollars in climate funds it already provides to the global south and the EU expressed its openness to recognising “voluntary” contributions from developing countries.
In the end, the draft text “invites” developing countries to contribute. It also references “voluntary” counting of contributions from multilateral development banks, to which emerging economies provide large sums of money.
The climate-finance text contains many more notable compromises, which are summarised in this thread. All eyes are now on what the final text, agreed by all parties at COP29, will say.
Watch, read, listen
‘TRUMP ATE MY HOMEWORK’: A comment piece by Avantika Goswami in Down to Earth picked apart the “narrative of a prejudged failed COP” in a crucial year for climate finance.
‘GRANTS, NOT LOANS’: The Green Pulse podcast by Singapore’s Straits Times explained what the COP29 finance goal means and why more “loans can’t help” vulnerable communities in developing countries.
ASIAN AGE: Historian and author Adam Tooze discussed climate, trade wars, geopolitics and the “polycrisis” in Asia in his State of Asia 2024 address.
Coming up
- 25-27 November: UN Forum on Business and Human Rights, Geneva, Switzerland
- 25 November-1 December: Fifth session of negotiations for an international plastics treaty (INC 5), Busan, South Korea
- 2-13 December: International Court of Justice hearings on the obligations of states in respect of climate change, The Hague, Netherlands
- 2-13 December: UN Desertification Conference COP16, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Pick of the jobs
- Small World, senior sustainability consultant | Salary: £49,811-£67,000. Location: Lancaster (hybrid)
- The Ocean Census, head of science | Salary: £78,000. Location: Oxford, UK
- M+ Museum, head of conservation and research | Salary: Unknown. Location: Hong Kong
- Associated Press, oceans and climate reporter | Salary: Unknown. Location: Los Angeles, US
- The Environmental Reporting Collective, managing editor | Salary: Unknown. Location: Southeast Asia
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
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The post COP29 DeBriefed 22 November 2024: Countries split on climate finance; Fossil-fuel transition ‘reaffirmed’; Latest texts analysed 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.”
