From Berlin and Paris, to Brussels and Bucharest, European farmers have driven their tractors to the streets in protest over recent weeks.
According to reports, these agricultural protesters from across the European Union have a series of concerns, including competition from cheaper imports, rising costs of energy and fertiliser, and environmental rules.
Farmers’ groups in countries including Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Lithuania, Poland and Romania have all been protesting over the past couple of months.
The UK’s Sunday Telegraph has tried to frame the protests as a “net-zero revolt” with several other media outlets saying the farmers have been rallying against climate or “green” rules.
Carbon Brief has analysed the key demands from farmer groups in seven countries to determine how they are related to greenhouse gas emissions, climate change, biodiversity or conservation.
The findings show that many of the issues farmers are raising are directly and indirectly related to these issues. But some are not related at all. Several are based on policy measures that have not yet taken effect, such as the EU’s nature restoration law and a South American trade agreement.
Why farmers are protesting
The issues EU farmers are raising centre around “falling sale prices, rising costs, heavy regulation, powerful and domineering retailers, debt, climate change and cheap foreign imports”, the Guardian reported.
Carbon Brief has gathered a range of specific concerns based on media reports and farmer union statements across seven EU countries.
Each one is classified around whether the concern is related to climate change and/or greenhouse gas emissions (green), biodiversity and/or conservation (yellow), or not related to either set of issues (red).
Note, this table is not exhaustive.
These issues relate to climate change and biodiversity in different ways.
In some countries, protesters are calling for more action on climate adaptation, particularly in Greece where farmers are asking for measures to prevent farmland being damaged by flooding and other extreme weather.
In other cases, farmers are calling for fuel subsidies to continue and for fertiliser and pesticide restrictions to be reconsidered.
The EU’s “farm to fork” strategy – the bloc’s broad sustainable food initiative – focuses on cutting both pesticides and fertilisers in the years ahead to optimise their use and reduce harm (read Carbon Brief’s Q&A on fertilisers and climate change).
Last November, politicians voted against the EU’s proposed pesticide regulation which aimed to halve the use and risk of chemical pesticides by the end of this decade. This “buried the bill for good”, the Associated Press noted. Any new proposal “would need to start from scratch” after the European parliament elections in June.
The EU said these rules would have “translate[d] our commitment to halt biodiversity loss in Europe into action”, highlighting the health risks and water quality issues associated with pesticide use.
European legislators are working to finalise a number of other climate and biodiversity rules this year ahead of the June elections.
How the protests have developed
In December, the German government announced plans to reduce subsidies and spending in an effort to fill a €17bn gap in the country’s 2024 budget.
The measures included cutting some agricultural subsidies and tax breaks, leading to an outburst of farmer protests (as covered in Carbon Brief’s Cropped newsletter).
In the weeks since then, other farmer groups across the EU have been taking to the streets with their own concerns.
Germany
The German government eased its budget cut plans in January by “giving up a proposal to scrap a car tax exemption for farming vehicles” and phasing-out agricultural diesel subsidies instead of outright removing them, the Associated Press reported.
German farmers continued to protest, calling for the subsidies to remain fully in place. The Financial Times said the subsidy issues were the “immediate trigger” for the protests, but German farmer Frank Schmidt told the outlet that he and others were already “at the end of our tether”.
The protests “tapped into wider discontent with Germany’s government”, the Associated Press said, with farmers raising similar concerns around requirements and cheap imported food.
Around 30,000 protestors and thousands of tractors brought Berlin’s city centre “to a standstill” in mid-January as the demonstrations continued, the Guardian said.
France
The protests in France also began partly over plans to reduce agricultural fuel subsidies, which the government rolled back at the end of January (but not before farmers in Dijon sprayed manure on a local government building).
Protests escalated last week as hundreds of tractors blocked off major roads into the country’s capital in what was called the “siege of Paris” by many media outlets, including BBC News.
President Emmanuel Macron was “scrambling to end an escalating political and social crisis”, the Times said. (Read last week’s edition of Carbon Brief’s Cropped newsletter for more details on the French protests.)
On 1 February, the country’s main farmer unions called for an end to the protests after “securing promises of government assistance” on issues around finance and regulations, according to Al Jazeera.
These included a government decision to suspend efforts to halve the use of pesticides by the end of this decade, the Daily Telegraph reported, which environmentalists described as a “major step backwards”. The newspaper said:
“Studies indicate the population of farmland birds has fallen by 30% in France over the past 30 years, with pesticides blamed as the primary cause for their demise.”
Belgium
Belgian farmers blocked roads in and out of Brussels last week, the Brussels Times reported, before the city was taken over by a wider protest on 1 February. Hundreds of “angry farmers” gathered outside the European parliament building, starting fires and throwing eggs in protest against “taxes, rising costs and cheap imports”, Sky News said.
EU farmers “won their first concession from Brussels” last week, the Guardian reported, after the commission proposed to delay rules for farmers to “set aside land to encourage biodiversity and soil health”.
This will offer “additional flexibility to farmers at a time when they are dealing with multiple challenges”, commission president Ursula von der Leyen said in a statement.
Farmers in Belgium and France are also concerned about competition from trade deals between the EU and other countries.
This includes the EU-Mercosur trade deal, which intends to boost trade between the EU and Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. Many EU farmers believe that it will lead to unfair competition.
Most negotiations were finalised for the deal in 2019, but the final talks were paused “due to the positions of [former] Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro on deforestation”, Euractiv reported. (An edition of Carbon Brief’s Cropped newsletter covered this in more detail last year.)
Since Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took over office last year, the deal has gotten closer to completion despite continued opposition from countries including France and Ireland.
Talks are ongoing and the EU “continues to fulfil its objective of achieving an agreement that respects our sustainability goals and respects our sensitivities, particularly in agriculture”, a European commission spokesperson told Reuters last week.
Greece
At the ongoing protests in Greece, farmers raised concerns about accessing more reimbursement for lost crops due to “natural disasters and disease”, eKathimerini reported. Greece was badly impacted by wildfires last summer.
The government has said it will help farmers with energy costs and promised a “one-year extension of a tax rebate for agricultural diesel”, Reuters reported.
Romania
Romanian farmers and truck drivers cited a number of different concerns, many of which related to climate change or biodiversity in different ways.
A major issue for Romanian farmers and other eastern European countries is controlling Ukrainian grain imports. Farmers in countries surrounding Ukraine have been arguing for months that they “can’t compete” with the price of these imports.
Some in Romania also took issue with “disruptions caused by Ukrainian grain imports”, Politico said, noting that “Russia's blockade of Ukraine's Black Sea ports has made Romania a key transit hub for Ukrainian grain.”
In response to the protests, the Romanian government announced extra farmer funding and fuel subsidies on 26 January, according to Radio Romania International.
Last week, the European Commission proposed extending its free trade deal with Ukraine until June 2025, but with a new measure to prevent too many Ukrainian agricultural products being sold in EU states, Euronews reported.
Other EU countries
Farmer protests remain ongoing in Lithuania and Poland over similar concerns, many of which are outlined in the above interactive table.
In Ireland, protests began on 1 February in “solidarity” with other farmers, RTÉ reported. The president of the Irish Farmers Association, Francie Gorman, said there is “mounting frustration about the impact of EU policy”.
Elsewhere, France24 reported that more than 300 vehicles gathered in protest near Milan, Italy last week. Meanwhile, a small group of farmers protested in Portugal on 1 February, Reuters reported.
Farmers in Spain are preparing to take to the streets later this month. Similar plans are underway in Slovakia, where separate protests are ongoing against plans to close the country’s special prosecutor’s office.
Far right taking note
This year will see major elections across the globe.
EU citizens will elect new members of the European parliament in June and recent polling has suggested that there could be a “sharp turn to the right” in the results, Deutsche Welle reported.
As these protests continue, Politico said that right-wing parties in several European countries – such as France, Italy, the Netherlands and Germany – are “piggybacking on farmers’ noisy outrage”.
Dr Gilles Ivaldi, a politics researcher at Sciences Po who has examined the far right in Europe, says that right-wing groups may use the farmer protests to “boost their electoral support”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“What we see, particularly in France, is that the far right is seeking to capitalise on public discontent with the impact of the green transition, not only among farmers but also in social groups affected most by the economic cost of environmental policies.”
He says that in France’s case, the far right is “clearly trying to instrumentalise” the farmer protests to “mobilise against the government and the EU”. Sky News reported that the protests “are being seized upon by various groups”, including Marine Le Pen’s right-wing Rassemblement National party.
But Ivaldi notes that the far right’s EU election focus will mostly remain on topics such as immigration, the economy, the future of the EU and the bloc’s Green Deal. The “main factors” behind a potential right-wing surge will not come from agriculture alone. He adds:
“Far-right parties are currently capitalising on the economic crisis and rise in prices, on the immigration issue, particularly growing concerns about the massive influx of refugees in Germany and, more broadly, the many anxieties caused by the war in Ukraine and geopolitical instability.”
The post Analysis: How do the EU farmer protests relate to climate change? appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: How do the EU farmer protests relate to climate change?
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.”