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An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
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This week
Atlantic and Amazon ‘tipping points’
CURRENT COLLAPSE?: New research found the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a large system of ocean currents that helps keep western Europe milder, “may already be on course to a tipping point”, the Press Association reported. The Associated Press said: “An abrupt shutdown of Atlantic Ocean currents that could put large parts of Europe in a deep freeze is looking a bit more likely and closer than before.”
QUESTION MARKS: The Daily Telegraph quoted Prof Jonathan Bamber, director of the Bristol Glaciology Centre, saying the new research was “entirely unrealistic for even the most extreme warming scenario over the next century”. But on the scientific blog RealClimate, ocean scientist Prof Stefan Rahmstorf noted that it was “observational data from the South Atlantic which suggest the AMOC is on tipping course” and that the model simulation was “just there to get a better understanding of which early warning signals work and why”.
AMAZON STRESS: Another study found that up to half of the Amazon is facing combined stress from rising heat, drought, deforestation and other factors that could push the rainforest towards a tipping point by 2050, Reuters reported. The research is the first to assess the cumulative impact of multiple threats, the New York Times reported. Carbon Brief also covered the findings.
‘Troika’ tout 1.5C target
COP30 COUNTDOWN: The United Arab Emirates, Azerbaijan and Brazil – hosts of the COP28, COP29 and COP30 climate summits – are teaming up to push for higher ambition towards the 1.5C limit, Al Jazeera reported. The “troika” wants countries to submit more ambitious pledges ahead of COP30 in Belem, Brazil next year, the outlet said.
MISSION 1.5C: Their efforts were mandated by the COP28 outcome, which launched an undefined “set of activities” known as “road map to mission 1.5C”. Meanwhile, Azerbaijan is on track to raise its gas output by 35% in a decade, Agence France-Presse reported.
MINISTERIAL MEETING: The International Energy Agency (IEA) held its 50th ministerial meeting this week, where leaders pledged in a communique to strengthen energy security and speed efforts towards 1.5C, Bloomberg reported. The IEA, which currently has 31 full members, also opened talks with India over joining the club, Press Trust of India reported.
Around the world
- INDONESIA ELECTS: Defence minister Prabowo Subianto, a “veteran…with a hardline military past”, will be the country’s next president, the Jakarta Post reported. He owns a coal business and “could increase deforestation and coal use”, said NPR.
- DRY JANUARY: A lack of rain in January caused Mexico’s “worst drought” for 12 years, Excélsior reported. Chile is clearing up after devastating forest fires, said El Mercurio, while Peru has issued warnings over heat stroke, El Comercio reported.
- MIGRATORY THREAT: One in five migratory species are under threat from human impacts including climate change, according to a UN report covered by BBC News.
- SAUDI TRANSITION ADMISSION: Oil giant Aramco dropped its expansion plans because of the energy transition, CNBC reported, quoting Saudi Arabia’s energy minister. The surprise move late last month had “spark[ed] questions” over the kingdom’s “concerns over the future of oil demand”, the outlet added.
- AFRICAN MYSTERY: New research casts doubt on earlier findings that Africa’s tropical ecosystems are releasing 6bn tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, Carbon Brief reported. Both sides agree on-the-ground data is needed to unravel the mystery.
- SHELL GAME: Demand for liquified natural gas (LNG) will “surge 50% by 2040” according to Shell, the Financial Times reported. The forecast, from the “world’s largest private LNG trader”, was “slightly lower” than last year, the paper said.
€881 billion
The record value of global carbon markets in 2023, according to a report from London Stock Exchange Group covered by BusinessGreen.
Latest climate research
- A new report from Climate Analytics translated the global goal of tripling renewable capacity by 2030 into regional targets and said only Asia was broadly on track.
- Research in Nature Energy explained how different types of lower-income coal, oil and gas producers can transition away from fossil fuels.
- Global warming “will lead to widespread increases in locust outbreaks”, found a study in Science Advances.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
Only a fifth of the population of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has access to electricity, with per-capita consumption below that of an average UK fridge, reported Carbon Brief in its latest country profile. Despite using hardly any fossil fuels, the country is one of the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitters, the profile explained, as a result of human-caused land use changes in its major forests and peatlands.
Spotlight
‘Underestimated’ global public support for climate action
This week, Carbon Brief interviews the authors of new research finding that “almost universal” global support for climate action is “systematically underestimated”.
Carbon Brief: Your survey of nearly 130,000 people in 125 countries found “almost universal” support (86%) for climate action. Were you surprised?
Prof Peter Andre, Prof Teodora Boneva, Prof Felix Chopra and Prof Armin Falk: We were indeed surprised to find that the percentage of the population approving of pro-climate social norms and demanding more political action from their national government is very high in almost all countries in our sample. We were probably misled by the same pessimism that we found to be so widespread across the globe. A broad majority of people across the globe is willing to pay a personal cost [to fight global warming]. However, in 110 out of 125 countries, the majority thinks that they are in the minority.
CB: Do you think this would hold for specific policies, such as a carbon tax?
PA, TB, FC and AF: One cannot simply equate support in the survey with support for specific policy proposals. [However], in a representative US sample, we do find that the general demand for more political action is strongly correlated with demand for specific climate policies, such as a carbon tax.
CB: There has been a resurgence of anti-climate rhetoric from politicians and the media in many countries. Do you think public opinion has shifted since your survey in 2021-22?
PA, TB, FC and AF: We do not detect any clear time trend within our samples from 2021 and 2022, but do not have data for the most recent months. If we were to speculate, we would not want to fall victim to the same pessimism one more time. Our best guess is that the support for climate action has increased rather than decreased in the last two years.
CB: You found stronger willingness to contribute among respondents in poorer, hotter and more vulnerable countries. Why do you think richer people are less willing to pay their way?
PA, TB, FC and AF: Two potential explanations come to mind. First, richer countries are still strongly dependent on fossil fuels. The mitigation costs could therefore be perceived as relatively high and the required lifestyle changes as too drastic. At the same time, richer countries may be more resilient: A country’s GDP per capita reflects its economic capacity to cope with climate change. The most direct and immediate consequences are likely to be concentrated in more vulnerable countries, which have fewer resources to mitigate the negative consequences of the climate crisis.
CB: You found people systematically underestimated the willingness of their peers to contribute to climate action. Why do you think that is – and how could it be changed?
PA, TB, FC and AF: The reasons for this perception gap are likely to be manifold. In the past, media and public discussions have given a lot of focus to the small number of climate change sceptics and have fallen prey to the efforts of special interest groups. Moreover, climate change is difficult to tackle. People might mistakenly infer that the slow progress in combating climate change is due to a widespread lack of personal commitment.
In our view, correcting this perception gap is more important than understanding its origin. Humans are (what behavioural scientists call) “conditional cooperators”. They contribute more to the public good if they believe that others contribute as well. For this reason, pessimism about others’ contributions is harmful. It can constitute a critical obstacle for climate action. We thus conclude in the paper that, “[r]ather than echoing the concerns of a vocal minority that opposes any form of climate action, we need to effectively communicate that the vast majority of people around the world are willing to act against climate change and expect their national government to act”. We hope that our study sparks a debate on this topic, and increases awareness about the large global support for climate action.
This interview was edited for length. A full transcript will be published on Carbon Brief’s website later today.
Watch, read, listen
‘UNINSURABLE WORLD’: A Financial Times “big read” looked at rising insurance premiums as extreme weather events become more frequent.
TRUMP WARNING: An election win for former US president Donald Trump would “spell disaster for climate action in Africa”, wrote Nathaniel Mong’are, adviser to the Kenyan cabinet secretary, in an article for SciDevNet.
WTF?: Popular Indian podcast WTF is? tackled climate change, interviewing researcher Prof Navroz Dubash, activist Sunita Narain and others.
Coming up
- 11-17 February: COP14 for migratory species, Samarkand, Uzbekistan
- 17-18 February: African Union summit, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
- 19 February to 1 March: Sixth UN Environment Assembly, Nairobi, Kenya
- 20 February: International Energy Agency (IEA) beyond COP28 event, Paris, France
- 21-23 February: Climate and Clean Air Conference, Nairobi, Kenya
Pick of the jobs
- Global Witness, investigator and senior investigator of climate disinformation | Salary: £44,837 and £52,494, respectively. Location: London (hybrid)
- California-China Climate Institute, University of California, Berkeley, climate policy fellow | Salary: $70,500-$86,900. Location: Berkeley, California
- Small World Consulting, sustainability consultants for carbon management and land use | Salary: £29,000-£40,000. Location: Lancaster, UK
- Common Wealth, principal or senior analyst for transatlantic energy | Salary: £43,500 for senior analyst or £50,500 for principal analyst. Location: London or US east coast
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org
The post DeBriefed 16 February 2024: Atlantic and Amazon ‘tipping points’; New ‘troika’ for 1.5C; Global support for climate action ‘underestimated’ appeared first on Carbon Brief.
The United Nations has said the world must cut greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 6% per year to limit global warming enough to be able to return to the 1.5C goal by 2100, as decades of insufficient climate action have now made an overshoot inevitable.
In a video message accompanying the UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP) 2026 Emissions Gap Report, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said the world could no longer avoid overshooting the 1.5C limit and that the consequences were already devastating. However, he said it was still possible to return average global temperatures to 1.5C above preindustrial times by the end of the century.
“Overshoot is not surrender,” he said, adding that the report, released on Wednesday, sets out what is needed to limit warming. That entails cutting global greenhouse gas emissions by 18% by 2030, 45% by 2035 and 69% by 2040, all compared with 2025 levels.
This implies average annual reduction rates of 5.7% for 2025-2035, higher than the pathways laid out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its last major scientific report, which required annual reduction rates of about 5%, UNEP said.
Paris Agreement committee names three countries snubbing it over NDCs
The more ambitious emissions reductions – which countries are still far off achieving – would put the world on the lowest-possible overshoot pathway, giving a 50% chance of limiting peak warming to 1.7–1.8C around mid-century before bringing global temperatures back to 1.5C or below by 2100, the report said. Reaching this scenario will also require carbon removal from the atmosphere, it added.
UNEP noted that if countries fully implement their current national climate plans (NDCs), they would only reduce emissions by 5-8% by 2030 and 11-15% by 2035, relative to 2025 levels.
UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen said the world must not give up on the Paris Agreement’s most ambitious warming limit, adding that every additional fraction of a degree and additional year of heating above 1.5C increases climate change impacts and risks, such as the deadly floods, heatwaves and wildfires that have plagued many nations this year.
“We must pull out all the stops to minimise peak warming and return to 1.5C by the end of the century. This is possible,” she said, adding that governments must urgently implement policies that deliver rapid and sustained emissions reductions.
Climate pledges fall short
New climate pledges since last year’s report have made a negligible difference to projected emissions and warming, UNEP said. Under current policies, the world is on course for 2.8C of warming this century, while full implementation of national climate pledges and continued similar efforts would limit warming to 2.6C, the report found.
UNEP said its projections had deteriorated, attributing this to the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement under President Donald Trump and revised estimates of historical emissions.
Even with the most optimistic pledge-based scenario – which assumes countries deliver both their current national climate commitments and additional net-zero targets – warming would now only be limited to 2.1C this century, the report found.
IPCC scientists vow to press on with climate reports despite political deadlock
Speaking to journalists ahead of the report’s launch, co-author Anne Ohlhoff said the US exit from the Paris accord meant that its previous national climate target was no longer included in UNEP’s global projections. The country has also dropped its net-zero emissions goal, she said, affecting the outlook because the US is the world’s second-largest emitter.
She warned that there is still a large gap between countries’ emissions commitments for 2035 and the reductions needed under the report’s lowest-possible 1.5C overshoot scenario.
Every five years of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions at current levels pushes peak warming up by around 0.1C, she said, adding that without urgent action, it could quickly become impossible to keep peak warming below 1.7–1.8C.
Describing the emissions gap as a “leadership gap”, UN chief Guterres warned that current national climate plans and policies “fall dangerously short” of what is needed to limit warming. He urged countries to adopt credible roadmaps for transitioning away from fossil fuels, accelerate clean energy deployment and electrification, invest in electricity grids and storage, cut methane emissions and halt deforestation.
Carbon removal needed, but risky
Alongside deep emissions cuts, removal of CO₂ from the atmosphere needs to be accelerated throughout the century, the report found. The world will need to remove and permanently store about 320 billion tonnes of CO₂ from the atmosphere to return global temperatures to around 1.5C by 2100.
The estimated carbon removal is equivalent to around eight years of global CO₂ emissions at 2024 levels. However, UNEP cautions that removing carbon at this scale remains uncertain because of technological and socio-economic challenges.
Keywan Riahi, a contributor to the report, said carbon could be removed through nature-based approaches, such as planting forests and improving wetland management, which help ecosystems absorb carbon emissions, as well as engineering solutions that capture emissions from energy production or remove carbon directly from the air.
However, he warned that both nature-based and technological approaches face risks and might not deliver carbon removal at the scale needed. This is because nature solutions such as planetary sinks are weakening because of climate change while techno-fixes remain uncertain, he added.
“All of those technologies come with risks,” Riahi told reporters, adding that what the world needs is to try “to keep the overshoot as low as possible, so that we do not need to rely on these technologies to take CO₂ out of the atmosphere later on”.
Renewable energy supports emissions cuts
Despite the expected overshoot of the 1.5C warming limit, the UNEP Emissions Gap Report underscored that the rapid growth of renewable energy and the impact of climate policies so far show that deeper emissions cuts remain possible.
It stated that since the adoption of the Paris Agreement in 2015, global renewable electricity capacity has grown three times faster than anticipated, while solar photovoltaic (PV) deployment has increased sevenfold compared with projections made a decade ago.
Maintaining the recent pace of renewable energy expansion, alongside stronger policies, could put the world on track to meet the global goal of tripling renewable energy capacity by 2030, the report said. It could also increase the share of wind and solar in electricity generation to levels consistent with the pathway that limits the overshoot of 1.5C to the lowest possible level, it added.
SE Asia speeds up plan for connected clean power grid after oil shock
Andersen said the explosion of renewable energy and slower-than-projected growth in coal energy supply showed that accelerating climate action is possible. However, she warned that progress remains insufficient, particularly in phasing down fossil fuels and halting forest loss.
“Nations must understand that the point of return begins now, not later,” she said, calling for “fast, deep and sustained emissions reductions”. She urged governments to strengthen their climate action at upcoming UN climate talks and accelerate efforts to keep the 1.5C pathway within reach.
Bill Hare, chief executive of Climate Analytics, said major fossil fuel-producing countries need to take greater responsibility for reducing their emissions, saying that big polluters such as the US and Saudi Arabia need “to stop playing politics and face the scientific reality”.
“Right now they are looking at the fire, denying it exists and pouring more petrol on it, while their own citizens increasingly face searing heat, wildfires and other impacts,” he said. “Governments [need] to get on with enacting policies that cut fossil fuel use as soon as possible.”
The post UN sets steep emission cuts to reverse 1.5C overshoot by end of century appeared first on Climate Home News.
UN sets steep emission cuts to reverse 1.5C overshoot by end of century
When the Turkish COP31 presidency presented its priorities to international business leaders for the first time in New York in September, among those invited to give the private sector’s first response was Ali Koç, scion of one of Türkiye’s wealthiest families.
On stage, the vice chair of the board of Koç Holding said the family company, which weeks earlier had been announced as one of the top sponsors for the UN climate summit, can be seen as “quite exemplary” for its climate record.
What Koç did not mention was that the group’s biggest money-making arm – Türkiye’s largest oil refiner Tüpraş – plans to keep running its refineries “at maximum potential”. Nor did he say that, in 2025, both parent company and subsidiary cut their 2030 climate targets to a level they had already nearly achieved, as Climate Home News’ analysis of company records reveals.
The decision to hand Koç Holding a prominent role at COP31 – the company is also the summit’s “Global Business Partner” – has reignited a long-running controversy over the platforming of fossil fuel interests at the annual UN climate conference.
It has also thrown into question how COP sponsors are chosen and screened. The hosting agreement between the Turkish government and the UN climate secretariat (UNFCCC) says that a partner company’s “climate integrity” should be taken into account.
COP31 electrification pledge leaves out clean power commitment
But how that test is applied is unclear and the process for picking sponsors remains largely opaque. The Turkish COP31 presidency has not published its selection criteria, nor the financial terms of any of its partnership agreements, including Koç’s. The UNFCCC declined to clarify how it advises on such deals.
Campaigners have long argued that accepting sponsorship from polluting companies is wrong because it gives them a global stage, visibility and access to policymakers at talks that are meant to move the world away from fossil fuels, and tarnishes the reputation of the COPs.
Koç’s energy division, which is dominated by oil refiner Tüpraş, accounted for three-quarters of the parent firm’s income in the first half of 2026.
“How was Koç Holding ever chosen as a COP31 sponsor? Any corporation that makes most of its money from oil refini