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Key developments
First ministerial China-UK ‘climate dialogue’
UK-CHINA CATCH UP: On 16 June, Huang Runqiu, head of China’s Ministry of Economy and Environment (MEE), met Ed Miliband, the UK’s secretary of state for energy and climate change, as well as Rachel Kyte, UK’s special representative for climate, in London, reported Chinese media outlet Jiemian News. The meeting was the first of a “new annual UK-China climate dialogue” announced during Miliband’s trip to China in March. The meeting has not been widely reported by major Chinese state media or English-language outlets. A short report from the MEE said the ministers discussed multilateral climate governance and “next steps” for climate cooperation. The MEE also said they had agreed to cooperate in areas such as adaptation, carbon markets, climate “investment and [private] financing” (气候投融资) and methane emissions controls.
‘NEW CLIMATE AGREEMENT’: While there was no public announcement on the event from the UK side, a government spokesperson told Carbon Brief via email: “There is no route to energy security for today’s generation without our clean energy mission, and there is no climate security and no route to keeping future generations safe without engaging global climate action. It is negligent not to engage with China on their important role in reducing global emissions.” The government email said that at the meeting, the UK had “secured a new climate agreement with China”, explaining that the two ministers “signed a new climate memorandum of understanding [MoU], setting out where both countries can work together to reduce global emissions, such as climate change mitigation and emissions reduction targets”.
‘FRANK CONVERSATIONS’: According to the UK government email, Miliband had “frank conversations” with his counterpart. It added that the new MoU offered a “forum to encourage greater action from China”, including “more ambitious targets”. It also “allows the UK and China to collaborate on…measuring and controlling methane emissions…[and] climate finance”. The inclusion of methane in the MoU “suggests the UK is looking to work with China in areas that the US previously did”, according to an individual who participated in the talks.
CHINA-EU: A few days earlier on 13 June, Huang had attended the 10th China-EU ministerial dialogue in Belgium, meeting Jessika Roswall, EU commissioner for environment, water resilience and a competitive circular economy, reported China Environment News. Huang said facing “multiple challenges in environmental and climate governance”, there is a “greater need” to strengthen cooperation between EU and China, added the outlet. The Chinese state news agency Xinhua published two articles praising the EU and China’s “green-energy” partnership as well as “green cooperation”. Meanwhile, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen “accused Beijing of deliberately creating a near-monopoly” in the global rare-earth supply at the G7 summit in Canada on 16 June, adding that “no single country” should control 80-90% of the “raw materials and downstream products like magnets”, reported the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post.
China’s oil demand to ‘peak in 2027’
PEAK IN 2027: Following the ongoing debate on whether China’s oil demand has already peaked, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said that it would “top out in 2027” – two years earlier than previously forecasted – “reinforcing the outlook for a global peak and prolonged supply surplus this decade”, reported Bloomberg. Japanese media outlet Nikkei Asia said “slowing demand” in China, which had accounted for 60% of oil demand growth in the world in the past decade, marked what the IEA called a “fundamental transformation” of the global energy market. However, according to Reuters, the IEA “stuck to its prediction that global [oil] demand will peak by 2029”, despite China’s more rapid transition. The news agency added that the IEA’s view “sharply contrasts with that of producer group OPEC, which says [global oil] consumption will keep growing for much longer”. In its coverage of the IEA report, the Times said China’s early peak was due to the “unexpectedly ‘breakneck’ switch to electric vehicle[s] (EVs)”. The sale of EVs surpassed more than one million in May, up 24% from a year ago, reported Reuters. China’s “trade-in” subsidies that boosted sales of EVs, however, were suspended in some cities as “funds run short and officials scrutinise the prevalence of zero-mileage used cars”, according to Bloomberg.
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ENERGY TRENDS: China’s demand for imported liquified natural gas (LNG) is expected to fall by 6-11% this year, said Reuters. This “unusual downturn” would be the first fall in three years due to “weak industrial demand and strong domestic and piped gas supply”, added the newswire. Separately, China’s thermal power output – mostly coal – grew 1.2% from a year earlier in May – the first rise since November – reported Bloomberg, attributing the rise to heatwave-induced demand and weak hydro output. Covering heavy rain that also caused floods (see below), Bloomberg reported that the “filling up” of rivers and reservoirs in central and southern China that “feed the country’s mighty dams” posed a “threat to the coal market that competes with hydropower in electricity generation”. Meanwhile, the Chinese government said that China’s overall energy intensity decreased by a cumulative 11.6% over 2021-24, reported state broadcaster CCTV. The outlet added: “This is equivalent to saving 1.4bn tonnes of standard coal and reducing carbon dioxide emissions by about 3bn tonnes.”
‘Worst flood’ and record-breaking rain
FLOODS AND HEATWAVES: The government issued its most severe “red” flood alerts for the first time this year after heavy rains in central and southern China, reported Reuters. State broadcaster CCTV said that floods “exceeding the warning level” occurred in 27 rivers across the country. Huaiji, a county in southern Guangdong province, was “hit with [the] worst flood in a century”, said state broadcaster China Global Television Network (CGTN). Record-breaking rain also fell in Hunan province in central China, affecting more than 400,000 people, reported Xinhua. About 400 ninth-grade students and 30 teachers were evacuated in Guangxi, in the south, the day before the senior high school entrance examination, said Xinhua. Meanwhile, ahead of the arrival of the first typhoon of the year, named Wutip, more than 16,000 people were transferred to safer places from “construction sites, low-lying flood-prone areas and regions at risk of flash floods” in Hainan province in south China, said Xinhua. At the same time, parts of China were hit by a “brutal heatwave”, with Xinjiang province in the northwest experiencing temperatures of up to 46.8C, according to the Guardian.
FLOOD RELIEF: About 60m yuan ($8m) were issued “to bolster flood relief efforts in Guangdong Province”, said Xinhua. In addition, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), “urgently” allocated 100m yuan ($14m) to support “disaster relief work” in Guizhou, with an additional 100m yuan to Guangdong and Hunan, according to China News.
China ‘will cap’ carbon market emissions by 2030
WIDER COVERAGE: China is planning to expand the coverage of its national emissions trading scheme (ETS) to “ALL industry sectors and aviation by 2027”, according to a LinkedIn post by Yan Qin, principal analyst at consultancy firm Clearblue Markets, citing a new “high-level policy (Opinions)” document dated 24 May. The document – not seen by Carbon Brief – has been named publicly and, while its contents have not been put into the public domain, they have been “confirmed…by analysts with access to the draft”, reported Table.Briefings. In his own LinkedIn post, Lauri Myllyvirta, co-founder of the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) said it was not yet clear if the expansion would only cover “main emitting sectors” – likely including the chemicals industry at a minimum, said Myllyvirta – or all industry and aviation, as Qin suggested.
CARBON CAP: According to Qin’s post, the plan would also “introduce absolute [emissions] allowance caps for sectors with stabilised emissions, starting in 2027, and [an] absolute cap for the ETS by 2030”. To date, the ETS has only covered the power sector and has lacked an absolute cap on emissions. New sectoral caps would be conditional, according to Table.Briefings, which described this flexibility as an “escape hatch”. In his post, Myllyvirta said: “The introduction of a national [ETS] cap by 2030 is in line with expectations – that’s when China’s emissions are supposed to have peaked, at the latest, and when the focus shifts from reducing carbon intensity to absolute emission cuts, in the current policy roadmap.” He added that while past slippage on ETS implementation gave “reason to be skeptical about any new timelines”, the document did “imply to me that there is a push from the top to make the ETS…relevant in China’s decarbonisation effort”.
1,084,450,000
The capacity of China’s solar-power installations – some 1.08 terawatts (TW), up 57% year-on-year – as of May 2025, according to China’s National Energy Administration (NEA) and reported by PV magazine. China added 198 gigawatts (GW) of new solar capacity in the first five months of the year, reported the Guardian, including 93GW in May alone.
Spotlight
China and the world’s climate cooperation in dilemma
A group of prominent experts of climate policy from academia, thinktanks and civil society shared their thoughts about China and climate change at the 2025 Bath Conference on China & Global Sustainability Transition earlier this week, organised by the SGAIN project at the University of Bath.
A wide range of topics – including the potential for China to show climate leadership – were discussed under the Chatham House rule. Carbon Brief outlines some of the key messages from the conference.
In an on-the-record opening keynote, Erik Solheim, former minister of climate and the environment of Norway and former executive director of the UN environment programme, said that, while European leaders currently appear to have “no time for long-term environmental problems”, China’s president Xi Jinping has been speaking a “lot more about the environment”.
Xi’s attitude was illustrated by his “two mountains” theory, said Solheim. He added that this theory – showing that “going green is not just for the environment, going green is also good for the economy” – was the “primary driver” of China’s “green transition”.
In a second on-the-record keynote, Kate Logan, director of the China climate hub and climate diplomacy at the Asia Society, said that other than the “new three” – solar panels, EVs and batteries – being a new engine of China’s economic growth, its exports of clean-energy technology have also surpassed that of “traditional energy”.
China has made major overseas climate-related investments, said Max Schmidt, a researcher from the Perspectives Climate Group, who agreed to be named despite the Chatham House rule.
Other speakers said that China’s overseas investments – both from the state and private capital – have largely shifted from infrastructure to renewable energy projects, while largely phasing out money going towards foreign coal plants.
Asked by Carbon Brief about ongoing Chinese investments in overseas coal-fired power, despite its pledge to end such activity, another speaker said that this commitment had been “by [and] large…diplomatic”. They added: “As we understood, it does not apply to what has already been in the pipeline.”
China’s role in the new international climate-finance goal agreed at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan last year. One speaker said:
“Strategically, we promote cooperation…[and] multilateralism…[But] if [the developed countries] say China needs to provide public [climate] funds, fill[ing] the gap left by the US, these prominent [Chinese climate] negotiators will definitely say no.”
Another speaker said that talks on climate finance between the UK and China have not been “very productive”.
The person said China urged developed countries, including the UK, to increase their climate finance, while the UK urged China to “count their south-south climate support towards the [international] climate finance goal”.
“Neither side wants to budge, so there has been little progress and it is unclear how the gap left by the US will be filled,” added the person.
In answering Carbon Brief’s question on how to move things forward, one speaker said:
“Stop trying to set any formal obligations for China…Instead, set an open-ended opportunity…Keep China happy and you will see…a lot of donations…That’s my understanding of dealing with the government for so many years.”
Addressing recent security concerns over China’s clean-energy exports, a speaker suggested that in an ideal world, the UK would have a “list” of products that it “welcomes” from China.
However, complex clean-energy products containing many components, such as EVs, present “huge grey areas”, which are “in the middle” and are likely to have to be decided on a “case-by-case basis” due to the uncertainty involved, added the speaker.
In the US, meanwhile, “climate conversations” were being “disrupted” by another factor – the supply of critical minerals amid geopolitical concerns – according to a different speaker, who said this was intensified by China “leapfrogg[ing]” in the EV industry.
Another speaker said that critical minerals were being “politicalised”, in part because of the different ways they are used in each country.
The speaker said that critical minerals had a wide range of uses. For the US they were mainly used in semiconductors, petrochemicals and defence, whereas China also used them in EVs and wind turbines, they explained.
Speaking to Carbon Brief on the sidelines of the event, Dr Yixian Sun, who leads the SGAIN project, said that the rest of the world could take “useful lessons” from China’s efforts towards sustainable development. He added:
“To keep the 1.5C goal alive, stronger international cooperation is urgently needed – to help China deepen its own transition and [to] develop inclusive partnerships with the rest of the world.”
Watch, read, listen
EMISSIONS PEAKED?: Bloomberg’s “Zero” podcast interviewed CREA’s Myllyvirta, about whether China’s emissions have “finally peaked”, citing his analysis for Carbon Brief.
‘GREEN DEVELOPMENT’: Prof Bai Quan, from the Academy of Macroeconomic Research (AMR) under China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), who Carbon Brief interviewed last year, published an article about “green development” at state-run media outlet Economic Daily.
INDUSTRY MITIGATION: Prof He Kebin, dean of the Institute for Carbon Neutrality at Tsinghua University, gave a talk about “industrial decarbonisation”, reported China Energy Net.
‘NATIONAL LOW-CARBON DAY’: A short video promoting combating climate change for China’s “national low-carbon day” (25 June) was produced and published by the MEE.
New science
Persistent emissions of ozone-depleting carbon tetrachloride from China during 2011–2021
Nature Geoscience
China was responsible for half of the world’s emissions of the ozone-depleting greenhouse gas carbon tetrachloride over 2011-20, according to new research. The paper used both long-term atmospheric observations from a network of sites from across China and a “top-down approach” to estimate the country’s carbon tetrachloride emissions. The authors noted that “substantial” carbon tetrachloride emissions are permitted for feedstock use in China, but still found thousands of tonnes of “unexplained” carbon tetrachloride emissions from the country per year.
Agricultural and Forest Meteorology
The extreme heatwave and drought in North China in 2022-23 caused more than 80,000 hectares of forest canopy dieback, a new study found. The researchers used remote sensing forest monitoring algorithms and drone-captured images to identify forest canopy dieback during this period. The most severe dieback occurred in May 2023, they found. Areas with high forest cover were hardest hit in the early stages of the extreme weather, which suggests that “afforestation efforts may have inadvertently increased forest vulnerability”, the study authors wrote. They added that this extreme weather event was “highly severe, widespread, and prolonged, causing historically low anomalies in regional greenness and productivity”.
China Briefing is compiled by Wanyuan Song and Anika Patel. It is edited by Wanyuan Song and Dr Simon Evans. Please send tips and feedback to china@carbonbrief.org
The post China Briefing 26 June 2025: First UK-China climate dialogue; China-climate conference summary; Oil peak ‘in 2027’ 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.”
