We handpick and explain the most important stories at the intersection of climate, land, food and nature over the past fortnight.
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Key developments
COP16 resumes in Rome
CALI CARRIES ON: The UN biodiversity summit, COP16, resumed in Rome yesterday after the countries failed to reach agreement on several key issues in Cali, Colombia last year. The latest round of talks “will focus on securing financial resources and developing a robust system to track biodiversity commitments”, DownToEarth said. Devex noted that the Rome meeting “won’t have the same pomp and circumstance” as the Colombia talks. On the first day of the resumed talks, the Cali fund for sharing the benefits derived from genetic data – seen as one of the big “wins” from the Colombia talks – was launched.
DEFORESTATION IS UP: Last week, COP16 president (and former environment minister of Colombia) Susana Muhamad announced that deforestation in the country was 35% higher in 2024 than 2023. According to Climate Home News, the increase was “fuelled by an uptick in the Amazon region”, which Muhamad attributed primarily to “the involvement of organised crime more than rural communities”. Despite the uptick, the deforestation rate in 2024 was still the second lowest in the last 23 years, after last year’s record low.
NATURE PLANS LACKING: Meanwhile, a joint investigation by Carbon Brief and the Guardian found that of the 137 countries that had submitted updated biodiversity plans to the UN by 21 February, fewer than half were committing to protecting 30% of their land and sea by 2030. The so-called “30 by 30” target was a key goal of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, agreed at COP15 in Montreal. Responding to Carbon Brief and the Guardian, several countries said that they are still finalising their targets. Indonesia pointed out that the target is meant to be a global one, with no contributions specified for each country. Brian O’Donnell, director of Campaign for Nature, said: “This is troubling and action must be taken to put the world on track.”
Extreme weather driving up food prices
MAPPING DAMAGES: Carbon Brief published a new interactive map showing some of the impacts of extreme weather on global crops during 2023 and 2024. Using news reports in global media and other sources, the analysis identified 100 cases around the world where crops were damaged or destroyed by heat, drought, wildfires or other extreme events. According to the findings, Europe, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa were the regions most impacted by flooding, while Asia, Europe and Latin America were the most frequently hit by droughts.
HUGE IMPACT: Extreme weather is “expected to” drive up food prices throughout 2025, according to analysis covered by the Guardian. The research showed a “long-term trend towards more extreme weather events would continue to hit regional crop yields, causing price spikes”. Of the studied crops, coffee and cocoa had the highest price spikes last year due to surging rainfall and temperatures. Elsewhere, Mongabay covered a new report from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization pointing out that increasing droughts and floods, as well as rising temperatures in Latin America and the Caribbean, are leading to crop and livestock losses, interruption of supply chains and impoverishment among farmers. Those events are “highly frequent” in 74% of the countries in the region, the report said.
TOWARDS COP30: Warmer temperatures threaten wheat production in India, which has declined over the past three years, the New Indian Express reported. According to India’s Meteorological Department, north-western areas have seen temperatures fluctuate 2-6C above normal during that time. In Brazil, the inflation rate for food and beverage reached nearly 7.7% last year due to the impacts of climate change, according to COP30’s official webpage. The website quoted Guilherme Mello, secretary of economic policy at Brazil’s ministry of finance, who stressed the need to “adapt and create adequate instruments to guarantee food and water security”.
Spotlight
Biodiversity banking on a breakthrough
This week, Carbon Brief traces the history and future of the fight for a new biodiversity fund as COP16 restarts in Rome.
The fight for a new biodiversity fund – dominating the agenda at the resumed nature talks in Rome and led by “megadiverse” countries – is a fight that has come a long way in the last four years.
From a proposal in Nairobi to an overlooked objection that soured nature’s “Paris” moment in Montreal, the call for a COP-governed biodiversity fund that could match climate’s $100bn-promise failed to materialise at COP15.
Instead, the final nature deal for this decade – gavelled through in a hurry – gave the world an interim fund with a mandate to operate only until 2030. It gave rich countries a scaled-down, collective bottom line of paying $20bn per year by 2025 and $30bn per year by 2030 in biodiversity finance, against a $700bn-a-year nature funding “gap” that is widening every year.
With only $250m collected in the interim fund and developed countries accused of failing to pay their “fair share” by the start of COP16, Zimbabwe revived the fight for the fund on the very first day in Cali.
The decision “to establish a dedicated global financing instrument” eventually made it to a 3:30am draft issued by Colombia’s Susana Muhamad. That “L document” published well into overtime and an inability to gather a quorum put the brakes on COP16. It is now at the heart of what brings countries again to Rome.
To Muhamad, the “polarisation” around resource mobilisation has a lot to do with the “changing landscape of power in geopolitics”, the economic cost of conflict and the need to “substantially address” biodiversity loss and climate change.
The Rome session follows what has been described as a “betrayal” of climate finance talks at COP29 in Baku. It also comes as a re-elected Donald Trump dismantles US climate policy and many European countries cut their aid budgets.
Although the US is not a party to the UN Biodiversity Convention (CBD), Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and geopolitical trade wars have cast a cloud over global environmental cooperation and tempered hopes for more public funding for nature and climate.
At the opening of the resumed talks, UN secretary general Antonio Guterres warned in a statement that “[w]ith the world approaching dangerous tipping points, it is imperative that [countries] reach agreement here in Rome” on how biodiversity finance commitments will be honoured. He added:
“We share nature and we depend on nature. Multilateralism is our only hope.”
The Rome talks are already seeing countries bringing the same arguments to the table, even though $30bn is a 10th of the $300bn climate-finance goal.
In general, developed countries want to broaden and review the list of donor states contributing biodiversity finance to include other countries, such as China and Russia, as well as private sources, such as biodiversity credits. They also typically do not see the need for a new fund after 2030. In contrast, developing countries do not want to leave Rome without a new fund or to let countries escape their historical obligations to pay.
Muhamad, meanwhile, is hoping nations will agree on a roadmap somewhere in between and make progress towards reforming the complex, but shallow, pool of biodiversity finance.
After back-to-back regional consultations and bilateral meetings, her ambitious after-midnight draft has since been reformed into a “reflection note” attempting compromise. But, as she notes, “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed”, including a monitoring framework that countries say is contingent on a strong finance outcome.
As a delegate from Panama pointed out on the first day of the Rome talks:
“Biodiversity financing beyond 2030 must reflect the urgency of the biodiversity crisis and align with the commitments under the framework. This is a matter of survival for ecosystems, economy and humanity. We cannot repeat the failures of climate finance. [The Rome talks] must deliver more than words. It must deliver funding.”
News and views
US AG DEPARTMENT CHAOS: Organic farmers have sued the US agriculture department over its deletion of climate-related information from its website, the New York Times reported. The now-missing pages contained “datasets, interactive tools and funding information that farmers and researchers relied on for planning and adaptation projects”, the newspaper wrote. The department also implemented a funding freeze on climate- and conservation-related programmes, although some freezes on the latter have been lifted, according to Civil Eats. Meanwhile, the department is “scrambling to rehire several workers who were involved in the government’s response to the ongoing bird flu outbreak” and had been fired on Elon Musk’s recommendation, according to the Associated Press.
RIVER RESTRICTIONS: Norway’s parliament has approved a bill that would “open up protected rivers to hydropower plants”, the Guardian reported. Nearly 400 of the country’s waterways are currently protected from such development. The Guardian noted that “companies seeking to build hydropower dams would still face strict assessments before being granted a permit”. However, one member of the Norwegian parliament said the bill was “a historic attack on Norwegian nature”. The newspaper added that as a result of Norway’s network of hydropower dams, “the Norwegian electricity grid is among the cleanest on the planet”.
CONGO CORRIDOR: A plan to create the “world’s largest protected area” in the Democratic Republic of Congo does not have the approval of Indigenous peoples and local communities, Climate Home News reported. In January, DRC president Felix Tshisekedi announced the creation of a 2,600km-long “green corridor” in the Congo basin forest, which he said would “strengthen agricultural value chains and sustainable development”. However, the outlet noted that Indigenous and local groups have not been consulted about the project and “fear it could impinge on their land”. Groups that oppose the project, including Greenpeace Africa, fear it could “perpetuate neo-colonialism”.
ET TU, EU?: The European Commission plans to pare back the number of companies facing the EU’s sustainability reporting requirements and delay a key due diligence law that would require companies to address environmental and human-rights issues in their supply chains, according to a draft seen by Reuters. Politico published a set of five takeaways on the EU’s long-term “vision” for agriculture, which includes “stronger support for carbon farming [and] bioenergy production”. Environmental campaigners told the Guardian that the new farming strategy “ignores vital green proposals” including a just transition fund, a “necessary increase in environmental payments” and “the case for eating less meat”. Separately, Scandinavia’s largest dairy producer told the Financial Times that uncertainty about the EU’s rules “is deterring investment in food production and pushing up prices”.
TENSION OVER CORN: Mexico lifted its ban on genetically modified corn imports from the US, after a ruling made under the US, Mexico, Canada Agreement (USMCA), SciDevNet reported. In 2020, former Mexico’s former president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, had issued a decree to ban GM corn. After a recent ruling against such a ban, filed by a dispute settlement panel, current president Claudia Sheinbaum’s administration released a new decision on 5 February approving the use of GM corn for human consumption and calling off the plan to halt its use for animal feeding.
Watch, read, listen
PAYBACK TIME: The Straits Times’s Green Pulse podcast spoke to Dr Siva Thambisetty, who was closely involved in negotiations for the landmark Cali Fund that launched this week.
SEA TREASURES: A BBC Earth video showed the “top five whale scenes”, including everything from feeding techniques to the ongoing challenges they face.
BANANA BOOM: Mekong Eye explored how booming demand for bananas has driven large-scale soil depletion in Laos.
KEEPING CHAPARRAL ALIVE: NPR explained the importance of California’s native chaparral brush and how clearing it will not reduce the risk of wildfires.
New science
- Research published in Bird Study found that solar farms contained greater numbers and diversity of birds, as compared to arable farmland. Researchers studied six solar farms in the UK, finding that these benefits could be magnified by managing the farms with biodiversity in mind.
- UK peatland fires emitted around 800,000 tonnes of carbon between 2001 and 2021, according to a study published recently in Environmental Research Letters. By looking at climate projections, the researchers found that 2C of warming could increase peatland-fire emissions by more than 60%.
- A new study, published in Nature Food, finds that 1.2 billion people globally are dependent on imported nitrogen fertilisers for food production. The authors suggest that shifting towards smaller-scale ammonia production could increase both food security and agricultural sustainability.
In the diary
- 24-28 February: 62nd session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change | Hangzhou, China
- 25-27 February: Resumed session of COP16 | Rome
- 26 February: UK Climate Change Committee seventh carbon budget advice published | London
- 26-28 February: Finance in common summit | Cape Town, South Africa
- 3 March: World Wildlife Day
- 5-7 March: World Sustainable Development Summit 2025 | New Delhi
Cropped is researched and written by Dr Giuliana Viglione, Aruna Chandrasekhar, Daisy Dunne, Orla Dwyer and Yanine Quiroz. Please send tips and feedback to cropped@carbonbrief.org
The post Cropped 26 February 2025: COP16 biodiversity talks resume; Farmers sue Trump; Mapping extreme weather’s ag impacts 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”.