Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
This week
EU 2040 aims
ROAD TO 2040: The European Commission has called for a 90% cut in EU emissions by 2040, Carbon Brief reported. The recommendation is designed to bridge the gap between the bloc’s existing short- and long-term emission-cutting goals. EU politicians and institutions will grapple over the details of the proposal before it is put into law.
RENEWABLE RIVALRY: The EU also finalised its “green tech bill”, which is intended to help the bloc “withstand mounting competition from the US and China”, according to Politico. The Net-Zero Industry Act aims to “manufacture 40% of the bloc’s clean-tech needs within the EU”, Bloomberg said. The plan was developed in “direct response to the US Inflation Reduction Act”, the outlet added.
TO THE STREETS: Meanwhile, amid ongoing farmer protests across Europe, Carbon Brief analysed whether their concerns were related to climate issues. In response to the protests, the European Commission “removed” a reference to non-CO2 agricultural emissions falling by 30%, which had been in a draft of its 2040 plan, Al Jazeera said. The commission also shelved plans to halve pesticide use by the end of this decade, the Guardian reported.
Chile and California extremes
CHILE FIRES: More than 131 people died after forest fires broke out in Valparaiso, Chile earlier this month, the country’s La Tercera newspaper said. Almost 15,000 homes were damaged and hundreds of people remain missing, BBC News said. The event was Chile’s “worst tragedy” since an earthquake killed hundreds in 2010, El País said.
INTENSE RAIN: In the US, southern California experienced “record-breaking rainfall” in recent days, leading to flooding and mudslides, NBC News reported. The New York Times looked at the extreme weather in both Chile and California, noting that the “far apart” disasters show the impact of “two powerful forces: Climate change…and the natural weather phenomenon known as El Niño”.
1.5C ‘breach’
12-MONTH BREACH: New data suggested that global warming exceeded 1.5C across an entire 12-month period “for the first time” from February 2023 to January 2024, according to BBC News. The article noted that this year-long “breach” of 1.5C, as recorded by the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, does not break the Paris Agreement 1.5C limit – as that refers to warming over longer time scales – but it “does bring the world closer to doing so”. (See Carbon Brief’s 2017 guest post on how to interpret the 1.5C limit for more.)
AUSSIE HEAT: In Australia, long-term temperature records show that the country’s climate has warmed by 1.5C since 1910, the Guardian said. The figures were released in the Bureau of Meteorology’s annual climate statement, which noted that 2023 was the country’s joint-eighth warmest year on record. Dr Andrew King, a climate scientist at the University of Melbourne, told the newspaper that “we know Australia is already warming above the global average”.
1.5C SCIENCE: Separately, a study based on a new climate “proxy” dataset claimed that the planet has already exceeded 1.5C of warming, Carbon Brief reported, but a number of scientists challenged this conclusion. The researchers used sea sponge data to create a record of ocean temperatures since 1700, which suggested that global warming is “0.5C higher” than current estimates. This “does not mean that impacts of climate change will occur earlier than expected”, said Prof Richard Betts, a Met Office climate scientist, who was not involved in the study.
Around the world
- AMAZON DRILLING: Activists in Ecuador have warned that the country’s newly elected president could be trying to “wriggle out” of a landmark referendum decision to stop oil drilling in a part of the Amazon, according to Climate Home News.
- AT THE COALFACE: The “vast majority” of the world’s new coal power plants were developed in China last year, Bloomberg reported. This is despite the country’s record action on clean energy.
- LNG PAUSE: A top US energy department official defended president Joe Biden’s pause on approving liquified natural gas (LNG) exports at a senate hearing on the decision, Reuters reported. (Read Carbon Brief’s Q&A on how the pause could impact global emissions.)
- OIL PROTESTERS: A group of 11 Ugandan climate activists face up to a year in jail after protesting against a $5bn oil pipeline project, the Guardian said.
- SCIENTIST ‘VICTORY’: US climate scientist Prof Michael Mann won a long-standing defamation lawsuit against two right-wing bloggers who made derogatory comments about him and his work, the New York Times reported. Mann described it as a “victory for science [and] scientists”.
$2.4 trillion
The amount of funds needed each year by 2030 to keep global climate goals “within reach”, according to Simon Stiell, the UN climate chief, Reuters reported.
Latest climate research
- Research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences called for a sixth category to be added to a hurricane wind scale to communicate that climate change has intensified tropical storm winds.
- Methane emissions have a smaller impact on the ability of mangroves to sequester carbon than previously thought, a study in Nature Climate Change found.
- A study in Nature Sustainability assessed the climate, energy, air quality and health impacts of focusing on more compact urban development in China by 2050. Researchers found that this policy would have “considerable environmental and economic benefits”.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
Many UK newspaper frontpages on Friday morning reported that Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has announced that he is scrapping his flagship policy to invest £28bn a year in climate action, if elected to power. It comes after months of uncertainty over the pledge. Writing in the Guardian, Starmer, along with shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves, blamed “damage” caused by the Conservatives “crashing the economy” for the policy change. The move sparked a wave of newspaper editorials, with the Guardian describing it as “wrong, wrong, wrong” and the Daily Mail calling Starmer “Sir Flip flop”. To add context to the £28bn figure, Carbon Brief’s deputy editor Dr Simon Evans noted on Twitter that the UK spent £265bn on energy in 2022. This included more than £100bn on imported oil and gas.
Spotlight
Northern Ireland’s climate ‘catch-up’
This week, Carbon Brief explores how a new government in Northern Ireland might approach tackling climate change.
A new power-sharing government was set up in Northern Ireland last weekend, after the region was effectively run by civil servants for the past two years.
In a “historic” move, Michelle O’Neill was appointed as Northern Ireland’s first nationalist (pro-Irish unification) first minister, BBC News reported.
Andrew Muir is the new minister for agriculture, environment and rural affairs. The interim chair of the UK’s Climate Change Committee (CCC), Piers Forster, said the CCC “look[s] forward to working with [Muir] on delivery of NI’s ambitious climate targets”.
Although Northern Ireland has a Climate Change Act, including a net-zero target, it has a lot of climate policy to “catch up on” after two years of stagnation, Dr Viviane Gravey, a senior politics lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast, told Carbon Brief. She said:
“We don’t have our climate plan that was supposed to be published in 2023, we don’t have our environmental strategy that was supposed to be published in July. We don’t even have our statement on environmental principles.”
These were not able to be put in place “because ministers were not there and civil servants could not just produce policies that have such a big impact”, she added.
Without these “central pillars”, Gravey said that Northern Ireland is “really not in a position right now to actually deliver on any of [its] targets – because we don’t even know what the targets really are”.
She added that Muir seemed to be a “very different minister” who “made very clear in a statement that he is really interested in his whole portfolio”.
In this statement, the minister said he intended to put in place plans that “benefit our climate and environment, while supporting our economically and socially significant agriculture, food and fisheries sectors alongside our important rural communities”.
The former environment minister, Edwin Poots, who is now the speaker of the Northern Ireland assembly, got into hot water after downplaying climate change in 2020.
Future action
Campaigners and experts recently described Northern Ireland as the “dirty corner of Europe” that may suffer “grave environmental damage because of governance failures”, the Guardian reported.
Gravey said there is a “glimmer of hope” that the new minister will tackle climate and environmental issues, but “whether he is going to manage to actually deliver on that, who knows”.
Without action on climate change in Northern Ireland, there is a risk that the region could “hold the UK back” when it comes to meeting its target of net-zero emissions by 2050, she added.
But the return of power-sharing means there is at least “some chance of getting something done”, she said, adding:
“The last time we had a government from 2020 [until 2022] was a moment of hope and, finally, we had action on climate change in Northern Ireland. And now the question is: Will we be able to get that energy back?”
Watch, read, listen
EV METALS: Climate Home News reported on how Indonesia’s rapidly growing nickel sector is “infringing the rights of Indigenous peoples”.
SHIFT KEY: A new podcast on key climate news and the shift away from fossil fuels was launched by Heatmap News executive editor, Robinson Meyer, and energy systems expert Jesse Jenkins.
SOLAR POWER: Capital & Main, a US news nonprofit, investigated the possibilities and tradeoffs of Hawaii’s renewable energy “revolution”.
Coming up
- 13-14 February: International Energy Agency 50th ministerial meeting, Paris, France
- 14 February: Indonesian general election
- 19-23 February: Review of the true-up period reports for the second commitment period to the Kyoto Protocol, Bonn, Germany
Pick of the jobs
- Carbon Brief, team coordinator | Salary: £30,000. Location: UK preferable (hybrid)
- The Revelator, associate editor | Salary: $65,000-$75,000. Location: Portland, Tucson, Oakland or Los Angeles, US (or remote)
- Coral Reef Alliance, climate adaptation and resilience fellowship | Salary: Unknown. Location: Manado, Indonesia
- Kew Gardens, research leader fungal taxonomy | Salary: £43,123. Location: London (hybrid)
- Nature Energy, chief editor | Salary: Unknown. Location: London, Berlin or Heidelberg (hybrid)
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org
The post DeBriefed 9 February 2024: EU told to cut emissions 90% by 2040; Labour’s £28bn in context; Can Northern Ireland ‘catch up’ on climate? appeared first on Carbon Brief.
American farmers are drowning in health insurance costs, while their German counterparts never worry about medical bills. The difference may help determine which country’s small farms are better prepared for a changing climate.
Samantha Kemnah looked out the foggy window of her home in New Berlin, New York, at the 150-acre dairy farm she and her husband, Chris, bought last year. This winter, an unprecedented cold front brought snowstorms and ice to the region.
On the Farm, the Hidden Climate Cost of the Broken U.S. Health Care System
Climate Change
A Little-Used Maneuver Could Mean More Drilling and Mining in Southern Utah’s Redrock Country
Two Utah Congress members have introduced a resolution that could end protections for Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Conservation groups worry similar maneuvers on other federal lands will follow.
Lawmakers from Utah have commandeered an obscure law to unravel protections for the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, potentially delivering on a Trump administration goal of undoing protections for public conservation lands across the country.
A Little-Used Maneuver Could Mean More Drilling and Mining in Southern Utah’s Redrock Country
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.
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