Half of global greenhouse gas emissions are now covered by a 2035 climate pledge following a key UN summit this week, Carbon Brief analysis finds.
China stole the show at the UN climate summit held in New York on 24 September, announcing a pledge to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 7-10% below peak levels by 2035.
However, other major emitters also came forward with new climate-pledge announcements at the event, including the world’s fourth biggest emitter, Russia, and Turkey.
Following the summit, around one-third (63) of countries have now announced or submitted their 2035 climate pledges, known as “nationally determined contributions” (NDCs).
The NDCs are a formal five-yearly requirement under the “ratchet mechanism” of the Paris Agreement, the landmark deal to keep temperatures well-below 2C, with aspirations to keep to 1.5C, by the end of this century.
Nations were meant to have submitted these pledges by 10 February of this year, but around 95% of countries missed this deadline.
UN climate chief Simon Stiell then asked laggard countries to make 2035 pledges by the end of September, so they can be included in a report synthesising countries’ climate progress.
At the summit, many nations shared that they were still working on their NDCs and that they would aim to submit them to the UN before or during COP30 in November.
Halfway there
The map below shows countries that submitted their 2035 pledges by the 10 February deadline (dark blue), after the deadline (blue) and that have now announced their pledge, but not yet submitted it formally to the UN registry (pale blue).
The EU has not yet agreed on a 2035 climate pledge. At the UN climate summit, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen announced a “statement of intent” to cut emissions somewhere in the range of 66.3-72.5% below 1990 levels by 2035.
She added that the EU would aim to make its formal NDC submission to the UN before COP30 in November.
The world’s second-largest emitter, the US, submitted its 2035 pledge in 2024 under former president Joe Biden.
However, current president Donald Trump has since signed an order to withdraw the country from the Paris Agreement. Therefore, it is now assumed that the US pledge is now void.
More than 100 nations spoke at the UN climate summit, which was held on the margins of the annual UN general assembly in New York.
Some media outlets mistakenly reported that all of these countries “announced” new pledges at the summit.
However, many of the countries speaking at the summit had already submitted their 2035 pledges, or used their slots to promise to do so at a future date.
Carbon Brief reviewed the six hours of footage from the UN climate summit to get a clear picture of which countries announced new 2035 pledges during the event.
Countries that made new NDC target announcements during the event included China, Russia, Turkey, Palau, Tuvalu, Kyrgyzstan, Peru, São Tomé and Príncipe, Fiji, Bangladesh and Eritrea. (Tuvalu has since submitted its NDC to the UN.)
These countries together represent 36% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to Carbon Brief analysis. (It is worth noting that China alone accounts for 29% of emissions.)
Some 53 countries have already submitted their 2035 climate pledges to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). These nations account for 14% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Therefore, countries that have either announced or submitted their 2035 climate pledges now represent half of global emissions, according to Carbon Brief analysis. (The 50% figure excludes the US and the EU for the reasons outlined above.)
Missing emitters
Despite the new announcements, two-thirds of nations have still not submitted their 2035 climate pledges, according to Carbon Brief analysis.
This includes major emitters, such as India, Indonesia and Mexico.
According to the Hindu, India plans to submit its 2035 climate pledge at the beginning of COP30 on 10 November.
Both Mexico and Indonesia spoke at the UN climate summit. Mexico said it was “still consulting industries” about its proposed target, while Indonesia made no mention of when it might submit its NDC.
Many other nations appearing at the summit made promises to submit their 2035 climate pledges by COP30.
This might mean that many nations miss the end of September deadline set by UN climate chief Simon Stiell to be included in an upcoming NDC synthesis report.
The post Analysis: Half of global emissions covered by 2035 climate pledges after UN summit in New York appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: Half of global emissions covered by 2035 climate pledges after UN summit in New York
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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
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