Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
UN climate focus
PACT FOR THE FUTURE: The UN general assembly meeting in New York signed off on a plan for countries to work together to tackle large global challenges, “with climate change one of the headline topics”, EuroNews reported. The agreement reaffirmed global pledges to transition away from fossil fuels, but did not raise global ambitions, the outlet noted.
ACTION OVER WORDS: Amid the summit, developing countries “pleaded” with richer nations to end the “lip service” and take more action on climate change, Reuters reported. Samoan environment minister Cedric Schuster told reporters that “we need all countries, but particularly the G20, to lead the way” on emissions cuts and climate finance, the outlet said.
AMAZON BLAZES: Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva mentioned Amazon fires in his UN general assembly opening speech, but “not the fact they’re adding to criticism of his administration’s own environmental stewardship”, the Associated Press said. The country’s portion of the Amazon rainforest recorded 38,000 fires last month – the highest in August since 2010, the newswire said.
Around the world
- ‘LIFE-THREATENING’: At least three people were killed and 1.3m left without power in “dangerous” Hurricane Helene, which made landfall over Florida on Thursday, CBS News reported. Sea surface temperatures have been “exceptionally warm” in the Gulf of Mexico – about 2C above normal for this time of years, BBC News said.
- COAL POWER: The Australian government cleared the way for three coal mines to extend their operations for a further 30-40 years in a move that has been criticised as “counter to action on climate change”, ABC News reported.
- BIG JOB: Former World Bank climate chief Rachel Kyte was appointed as the UK’s climate envoy – a position “axed” by former prime minister Rishi Sunak, according to the Guardian.
- GREENWASHING SPAT: French oil and gas company TotalEnergies is expected to appeal a South African advertising regulator ruling that it was “misleading” to “tout its commitment to ‘sustainable development’ in a campaign with the country’s national parks”, the Financial Times said.
- AI GOES NUCLEAR: Microsoft agreed to buy power from the Three Mile Island energy plant, “the site of the worst nuclear accident in US history”, which is set to reopen in 2028 “after improvements”, BBC News said. It added the deal is intended to bolster clean energy as “power-hungry data centres for artificial intelligence (AI) expand”.
£1.7bn
The extra funds the UK needs to spend on nature in the next two years to meet a flagship international target, according to Carbon Brief analysis, also covered by the Guardian.
Latest climate research
- Climate change doubled the likelihood of the heavy rainfall behind floods in central Europe earlier this month, a World Weather Attribution study found.
- Research in Atmospheric Science Letters explored the “new paradigms and challenges” for scientists researching extreme weather.
- The frequency of warm, dry and high fire-risk weather conditions have “surged” in parts of South America, including the Amazon region, in the past few decades, a study in Communications Earth and Environment found.
(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 UK’s last coal-fired power plant will close this month, ending a 142-year era of burning coal to generate electricity. It is the first major economy – and first G7 member – to phase out coal power. This chart shows the use of coal for electricity in the UK from 1880-2025, in millions of tonnes. Read Carbon Brief’s Q&A on how the country reached this milestone.
Spotlight
Rights for River Ouse
This week, Carbon Brief visits a river that could be the first in the UK to gain its own rights.
The River Ouse runs for 35 miles across east and west Sussex in England, winding through the town of Lewes and meeting the English Channel at Newhaven.
Since last year, the Ouse has been at the heart of community discussions in Lewes on what it means to give a river a voice – similar to a person – amid a growing global movement to grant legal rights to nature.
Lewes district council approved a motion on River Ouse rights in February 2023, agreeing to develop and consider a river rights charter in two years.
Ahead of the district council cabinet considering this charter next February, Carbon Brief visited the town to hear about the steps towards the Ouse gaining legal rights.
‘Eco-centric view’
Matthew Bird, a Lewes Green town councillor (pictured right) who put forward the 2023 motion, told Carbon Brief that the charter will be comparable to the universal declaration on river rights used in other parts of the world:
“It [will contain] things like the right to flow, the right to be free from pollution, the right to native biodiversity, the right to have a voice…The key thing for us is that it’s seeing things from an eco-centric point of view as much as you’re able to.”
The Ouse, as with many rivers, faces threats from climate change, pollution, biodiversity loss and invasive species such as Himalayan balsam – a fast-spreading plant with explosive seed pods.
Bird, who is also the director of the Love Our Ouse campaign, said that those involved in the motion aspired for a more holistic approach to tackling these issues. He told Carbon Brief:
“We’re just so focused on sewage [in the Ouse] that all those other really challenging issues were sort of drowned out. It felt like river rights, rights of nature could almost be a framework for looking at that.”
One focus of the movement is to grant the river the “right to restoration”.
Restoring and protecting rivers has proven to be an effective adaptation measure against increasing flood risk. Lewes was badly flooded in 2000 after the Ouse burst its banks following heavy rainfall. Hundreds of people were evacuated.
Rights for rivers
Local campaigns are ongoing in other parts of the UK to give rights to rivers such as the Cam, Don and Medway.
Further afield, a city in Brazil “legally recognised its waves as living beings” earlier this month. Ecuador was the first country in the world to include nature rights in its constitution in 2008.
Emma Montlake, the director of casework at the Environmental Law Foundation, who is also involved with Love Our Ouse, said that the charter, if approved, “will be a declaration by the local authority that they accept that the river has these rights”. She told Carbon Brief:
“The charter will also introduce a governance structure that can represent the river. Whether that’s an inter-species council or a citizens’ assembly.”
It will take longer to give legal rights to the river, however, “because there’s no national legislation to pin this on” in the UK, she added:
“It’s about giving nature a voice that it doesn’t currently have. We have lots of legislation, we have protections for habitats and species, we have different regulations for permitting, for pollution. But…our laws are not adequate to protect nature.”
Watch, read, listen
ICE JOB: Researchers spoke to the British Antarctic Survey’s podcast Beyond the Ice about their field work studying the “rapidly” changing Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica.
NOT-SO GREEN: DeSmog mapped the influence of Ireland’s “powerful farming lobby”, highlighting the “damage the [agricultural] sector is wreaking on Ireland’s climate targets”.
HEATING UP: The New York Times explored Nigeria’s “cooling crisis” amid scarce electricity and rising temperatures.
Coming up
- 29 September: Austria parliamentary elections
- 30 September-4 October: International Maritime Organization (IMO) marine environment protection committee meeting, London
- 1-2 October: 9th Forest Europe ministerial conference, Königswinter, Germany
Pick of the jobs
- African Climate Foundation, senior strategist for African Energy Futures Initiative | Salary: Unknown. Location: Remote
- Washington Post, accountability reporter, climate and environment | Salary: $97,400-$162,300. Location: Washington DC
- ClientEarth, lawyer, clean air, water and soil | Salary: €4,938 p\m in Brussels, €5,612 p\m in Berlin, €61,346 p\y in Madrid. Location: Berlin, Brussels or Madrid
- The Commonwealth, national climate finance adviser, Tuvalu | Salary: £50,727. Location: Tuvalu
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
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The post DeBriefed 27 September 2024: UN ‘pact for the future’; UK turns its back on coal power; River ‘rights’ 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 ar