Canadians chose Mark Carney, a former central banker and UN climate envoy who leads the ruling Liberal Party, as their prime minister in Monday’s election, rejecting the anti-climate action Conservative Party of Pierre Poilievre.
The election result means that the climate policies of the world’s 12th-biggest emitter will be broadly unchanged, as the Liberals – under Justin Trudeau and now Carney – have governed the North American nation since 2015. At the time of publication, it was still unclear whether the centre-left party had won a majority of seats in Canada’s parliament.
Poilievre’s Conservative Party had promised to scrap climate polices like a carbon tax on industry and to boost oil and gas production and exports.
Meghan Fandrich, who survived a devastating wildfire driven by climate change in her village of Lytton, said there was “some comfort in knowing that Canada has rejected the Conservative leader – someone who voted against climate policies over 400 times, planned to accelerate fossil fuel production, and whose platform would have driven emissions higher, fuelling even more climate disasters”.
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A Carbon Brief analysis suggests that a Conservative victory would have led to a rise in Canada’s emissions, whereas a Liberal government would keep emissions falling – although not fast enough to meet its own climate targets.
Trump drives Carney comeback
Climate change did not play a major role in the election, particularly as Carney scrapped an unpopular carbon tax on consumers soon after taking over from Trudeau in March.
Polls had suggested that the Conservatives were on course for a huge victory until January, when Trudeau resigned and US President Donald Trump charged big tariffs on Canadian exports and threatened to annex the country, causing many voters to back Carney over Poilievre, who is more ideologically aligned with Trump.
Carney is an ex-banker with a long history of climate action. As governor of the Bank of England, he called on investors to take their money out of fossil fuel companies.
After leaving the bank, he promoted carbon offsets through the Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets and helped launch a coalition of financial institutions trying to reduce emissions called the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero.
Ana Toni, the Brazilian CEO of this year’s COP30 UN climate summit, said it was “very positive to have Mark Carney who has a deep knowledge of climate change and economics at the helm in Canada, and knows that the best path ahead is through the energy transition”.
After Trudeau announced in January that he would resign, Carney won the Liberal Party contest to take over from him as prime minister in March and has now won a general election, giving him a mandate to rule the country for up to four years.
Pick a lane on energy
Caroline Brouillette, head of Climate Action Network Canada, said Carney now had the chance to prove his climate credentials as Canada’s leader: “With the election over, Prime Minister Carney has the opportunity to practice what he has preached for years, and kickstart a green transformation that will build our country’s resilience for decades to come.”
But, she said, that means “picking a lane with regard to energy: no more flirting with fossil fuel expansion and new pipelines, which would come with staggering costs to our wallets and our planet”.
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Under pressure from Conservatives labelling him “Carbon Tax Carney”, the prime minister scrapped the controversial tax on consumers – which had been his party’s signature climate policy since 2019 – this March.
The tax, which a March poll showed two-thirds of Canadians wanted to get rid of, was paid by some drivers filling up their cars with gasoline or diesel and by people buying heating oil for their homes.
Carney said he would replace the tax with measures to retrofit homes for energy efficiency and install heat pumps, saying the changes “will make a difference to hard-pressed Canadians” and “ensure that we fight against climate change”.
Carbon tax on industry stays
But he did maintain the carbon price on big industries, which the Conservatives had promised to scrap. Analysis from the Canadian Climate Institute suggested that, while the consumer carbon price grabbed the headlines, the industrial price was expected to drive three times more emissions reductions by 2030.
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Carney’s election manifesto also promises to boost electric vehicle production and use, as well as infrastructure to transmit electricity across the country and carbon removal and storage technology.
The Conservative manifesto pledged to “unleash Canadian resources”, by scrapping the emissions cap on oil and gas production, enabling construction of gas export terminals on Canada’s west coast and approving oil exports from Arctic ports.
Canada this year holds the G7 presidency and will host a leaders summit for the group of big, wealthy countries in the oil-rich province of Alberta in June.
Harjeet Singh, director of the Satat Sampada Climate Foundation in India, said that, as the G7 chair, Carney “must summon the political courage to champion bold global climate action – starting at home by rejecting new oil and gas projects and urging other G7 nations to dramatically scale up public climate finance to support developing countries in deploying renewable energy and addressing escalating climate impacts”.
The post Canada votes to keep Carney as leader, over anti-climate Conservatives appeared first on Climate Home News.
Canada votes to keep Carney as leader, over anti-climate Conservatives
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.
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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.
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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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