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China Briefing handpicks and explains the most important climate and energy stories from China over the past fortnight. Subscribe for free here.
Key developments
Hottest month in history
RECORD HEAT: July 2024 was China’s “hottest month in observed modern history” (since records began in 1961), in a record coinciding with the world experiencing its hottest day on 22 July, Reuters reported. Every province across the country saw average temperatures for July rise year-on-year, with Guizhou, Yunnan, Hunan, Jiangxi and Zhejiang ranking highest, it said, adding that the record were unusual because “the El Nino climate pattern…ended in April, but temperatures have not abated”. State broadcaster CCTV said on 4 August that several provinces had experienced temperatures between 40-43.9C, warning residents to “reduce” time spent outdoors. Reuters also said that rising temperatures “sharply pushed up demand for power to cool homes and offices” and “stoked fears of damage to rice crops”, adding that the city of Hangzhou “banned all non-essential outdoor lighting and light shows this week to conserve energy”.
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RECORD FLOODS: According to the state-supporting Global Times, China has “experienced 25 numbered flood events” this year, the highest number since records began in 1998. The newspaper said that, according to Ma Jun, director of the Beijing-based Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, “[due to] global climate change, extreme weather events are increasing, which increases the difficulty of forecasting [rainfall and floods]”. Another CCTV report cited the China Meteorological Administration saying that the country experienced two typhoons and recorded “13.3% higher than average” rainfall in July. Typhoon Gaemi killed 30 people and left 35 missing in Zixing, Hunan province, Reuters said. State news agency Xinhua stated that the typhoon also caused “damage” in the coastal provinces of Fujian and Liaoning, affecting 766,900 and 60,000 residents, respectively. Xinhua reported the Chinese government called for “proactive” flood control and for “disaster relief funds [to] be allocated promptly”. The state-sponsored outlet China News said the Ministry of Water Resources issued 649m yuan ($90m) to support “flood relief” in 14 affected provinces.
New renewable energy targets and ‘green electricity’ trading policy
NEW RENEWABLE TARGETS: Regulators published provincial targets for 2024-25 under China’s renewable portfolio standards (RPS) on 2 August, reported China Power. The targets, for the renewable share of electricity supply, increased by more than 3 percentage points year-on-year in most provinces, according to analysis published by financial outlet Yicai, “compared with a 1 to 2 points jump in previous years”.
NEW ALUMINIUM TARGETS: In order to help meet the targets, regulators also issued renewable-energy goals for the aluminium industry in each province for the first time, China Power said. Reuters reported that Shandong, China’s biggest aluminium producer, is “set a target for renewables to account for 21% of the energy used to produce the metal”. The targets in Inner Mongolia and Yunnan province, which are also major aluminium producers, are set at 29% and 70%, respectively, added the newswire. China Power said that the “green electricity consumption” in the aluminium industry will be “calculated based on ‘green electricity certificates’ (GECs)” – a scheme that allows electricity generated by non-fossil fuels to be traded between producers and buyers. (See Carbon Brief’s China Briefing of 24 August 2023 for background on China’s GECs.)
‘GREEN ELECTRICITY’ TRADING: While announcing this year’s targets, the government also issued new rules for trading “green electricity” for the “medium to long term”, BJX News reported. The document says the trade via GECs should not be subject to price limits or set prices and, instead, work as a market-based system, unless “clearly stipulated by the state”. Trading should take place “mainly within provinces” with strong wind and solar resources, and can “gradually expand to other qualified renewable energy sources” when “conditions are ripe”, added the outlet.
CARBON MARKET INCLUSION: Despite an announcement in 2023 that GECs may be included in the carbon market in the future, China Power Enterprise Management magazine said that, currently, the GECs “have almost no impact on the national carbon market”, because GECs “is limited to low indirect emissions from electricity”. If energy-intensive industries are included in the carbon market, GECs can cover around 19% of carbon emissions in China, added the magazine.
No mention of reform in new power system plan
UPGRADING THE SYSTEM: BJX News reported that China has issued a plan to upgrade its power system to “promote the construction of a new type of power system” between now and 2027. The outlet said the new system should be “safe, stable, cost-effective, flexible” and support the addition of more “clean and low-carbon” resources. A “key effect” of the plan, according to the National Energy Administration, is to improve the transmission of renewable energy from the remote desert bases to cities “at a large scale”, added the outlet.
‘NEW-GENERATION’ OF COAL: Another BJX News article stated that the plan also proposes to “carry out experimental demonstrations of new-generation coal power” and explore a development path for coal “that is compatible with the development of a ‘new type’ power system”. Economic news outlet Jiemian also noted that the call to guarantee stable power supply “ranked at the top of the nine special actions outlined by the action plan”. (A new report by Ember, covered by Carbon Brief, stated that increasing investments in low-carbon energy by state-owned enterprises is pushing coal into “decline”.)
REFORM OMITTED: Reuters quoted Xuewan Chen, energy transition analyst at LSEG, saying the plan “focuses on building a more flexible power grid to better manage the [energy] transition”, but that the document did not mention “power market reform and the creation of a competitive power market to more effectively allocate resources”.
Solar industry woes continue
‘UPHEAVAL’: China’s domestic solar industry is in “upheaval” with wholesale prices falling by another 25% so far this year, after falling by almost half in 2023, the New York Times reported. It quoted Frank Haugwitz, a solar industry consultant, saying efforts by the Chinese government to rein in the industry’s expansion have been “too small to reduce China’s overcapacity”. Bloomberg said that an increasing number of Chinese solar manufacturers “are falling into restructuring or bankruptcy”, adding that “while bigger players like Longi have so far survived billions of yuan in losses by imposing production halts and layoffs, smaller companies have fewer ways to plug financial gaps”.
‘SEVERE OVERCAPACITY’: In a meeting of China’s Politburo at the end of July, state-run newspaper China Daily said, president Xi Jinping called for “strengthening industry self-regulation and preventing ‘involutional’ vicious competition”, adding that China should “strengthen the market mechanisms” to help with “inefficient production capacity”. The outlet did not report that any particular sectors were named during the meeting. Several days earlier, Bloomberg stated that Wang Bohua, head of the China Photovoltaic Industry Association, had called for “struggling solar manufacturers [to be pushed] to exit the market as soon as possible to reduce severe overcapacity”.
SOLAR SURGE: Elsewhere, BJX News reported that China added 134 gigawatts (GW) of new renewable capacity in the first six months of 2024, according to the National Energy Administration (NEA) – an increase of 24% year-on-year. It added that solar made up 102GW of the total. (Total US solar capacity stood at 139GW at the end of 2023.)
51.1%
The share of sales of “new energy vehicles” (NEVs) – which includes both battery electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids – in China in July, according to the China Passenger Car Association. The trade body added that NEV performance beat manufacturers’ expectations, which it attributed to a trade-in policy encouraging consumers to replace old cars.
Spotlight
China moves towards ‘dual-control of carbon’ with new work plan
China has released a plan that will set an absolute limit on its carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions for the first time, shifting to “dual control” of total CO2 emissions and carbon intensity instead of total energy use and energy intensity.
The document, outlining a timeline for China to construct this new system for carbon “dual-control”, will be a key element of the country’s strategy to meet its climate goals.
In this issue, Carbon Brief assesses the document’s implications for China’s future emissions targets.
Switching to dual-control of carbon
In 2016, Beijing established a set of targets for energy intensity – its energy consumption per unit of GDP – and total energy consumption, in a system known as the “dual-control of energy”.
Since 2021, the central government has called for replacing the “dual-control of energy” with “dual-control of carbon”, which would be comprised of targets for both carbon intensity and total carbon emissions. China has only ever set targets for CO2 intensity, not for total CO2 emissions.
This shift began taking shape on 2 August when the State Council, China’s top administrative body, released a “work plan” outlining the first concrete design of the new system.
The National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China’s primary economic planning body, told reporters at a press conference that the plan “establishes a clear direction” for developing renewable energy and “focusing on control of fossil-fuel energy consumption”.
Anticipating a 2030 peak?
According to the new plan, China aims to establish a “completed” statistics and accounting system for CO2 emissions by 2025. Components of this system include carbon footprint standards, a national database of greenhouse gas emission factors and other measurement and monitoring capabilities.
Between 2026 and 2030 – the period of the 15th five-year plan – China will replace current targets under “dual-control” of energy with a policy on “dual-control” of carbon that places “[carbon] intensity control as the main focus and control of the total amount [of carbon] as a supplement”.
This means that, under the new system, carbon intensity targets will remain binding and the cap on China’s total CO2 emissions will initially be a non-binding “supplement”.
In subsequent five-year plan periods, China will set a binding cap for total CO2 emissions, which will become the “key target” once China’s carbon peak is reached, with carbon intensity as a secondary target.
“The timeline here indicates policymakers still only aim to peak emissions by 2030, despite the clear likelihood that emissions will…peak much sooner,” Yao Zhe, global policy analyst for Greenpeace East Asia, said in a statement, adding that this shows China is still “underpromising”.
Li Shuo, director of the Asia Society Policy Institute’s China climate hub, told Carbon Brief that the ambiguity is intentional to allow policymakers “to further clarify when and how they want to make that switch [to an absolute cap]” after a peak is confirmed.
He added that policymakers’ “intrinsic inability” to predict the exact peaking timeline is the reason for setting two targets under the [new] dual-control system, as, once it happens, China “can just switch to the other [metric]”.
‘Rolling up its sleeves’
The shift from focusing on “dual-control of energy” to “dual-control of carbon” is a “change from process control to results-oriented management that will compel industries to adopt green technologies”, according to Qi Qin, China analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.
China is falling short of its existing carbon intensity target, she said, making it important to “accelerate” its energy transition and clean energy buildout – priorities that are emphasised in the work plan.
Local governments are tasked with developing more specific targets, taking “local conditions” into account. Actions are also outlined for central government departments, industry associations and enterprises.
The central government subsequently released a related action plan to issue 70 national standards in areas including carbon footprints, CO2 emissions reduction, energy efficiency and carbon capture, utilisation and storage.
When formulating targets, the document urges policymakers to consider “economic development, energy security [and] normal production”, pointing to existing anxieties around maintaining stable access to power, which the country currently mostly relies on fossil fuels to provide.
Li told Carbon Brief:
“This is the Chinese government rolling up its sleeves and trying to make quite an important switch…Folks have been advocating for China to really reduce its emissions in absolute terms for almost two decades. This is the mechanics of how this will happen – them actually making this switch and trying to make sure this is done in the right way by, for example, disaggregating [targets] to the local level, getting the private sector involved and trying to build up the carbon accounting system from the bottom up.”
Implications for China’s NDC targets
As well as meeting domestic policy needs, the NDRC said, a dual-carbon control system is “conducive” to setting the country’s new international climate pledge (nationally determined contribution, NDC), and supports the image of China as “a responsible large country that is actively responding to global climate change”.
Yao said Greenpeace expects that China’s next NDC will include a carbon emission reduction goal for 2035.
Li told Carbon Brief that China’s international pledge will then drive domestic targets, due to “how the timeline works”. He added: “The NDC [target] for 2035 has to be communicated in 2025, [looking] 10 years into the future…The job of the five-year plans for the next two five-year periods [will then be] to align with that international pledge.”
Watch, read, listen
DRIVING FORCE: A report released today by Ember found that global wind capacity will double by 2030, with the majority of additions being installed in China.
SUPPORTING INNOVATION: Huang Kunming, governor of Guangdong province, wrote in the People’s Daily about the need to boost innovation to meet China’s development needs, including to “accelerate the green transformation of development”.
SUPPLY CHAINS: A Boston University Global Development Policy Center study found commercial ties between China and Latin American and Caribbean countries have broadened from solely minerals and agriculture to include the automotive, energy and transport sectors.
TACKLING METHANE: The California-China Climate Institute hosted a webinar on the state of agricultural methane emissions and bilateral cooperation between the US and China, building on a recently released report.
Captured
CO2 emissions in China fell by 1% in the second quarter of 2024, the first quarterly fall since the country re-opened from “zero-Covid” lockdowns, new analysis for Carbon Brief found. The reduction was driven by the surge in clean energy additions, which is pushing fossil fuel power into reverse – although the shift is being somewhat diluted by rapid energy demand growth in the coal-to-chemicals sector.
New science
The dominant warming season shifted from winter to spring in the arid region of Northwest China
npj Climate and Atmospheric Science
A new paper investigated the “seasonal asymmetry” in warming in the arid region of northwest China – which has experienced “significantly higher” warming than the global average, according to the paper. The authors used station and reanalysis data to investigate seasonal temperature changes in the region. They found that “the dominant season of temperature increase shifted from winter to spring”. The paper added that the main reason for warming in spring was a decrease in cloud cover, while a strengthening Siberian High was mainly responsible for driving winter cooling.
Carbon emissions from urban takeaway delivery in China
npj Urban Sustainability
Transport-related emissions from food deliveries in Chinese cities “surged” from 0.31m tonnes of CO2 equivalent (MtCO2e) in 2014 to 2.74MtCO2e in 2021, a new study found. The authors analysed the rise in emissions from food deliveries and explored possible policies to mitigate these emissions in the future. They estimated that by 2035, transport-related emissions from food deliveries will rise to 5.94MtCO2e. However, if motorcycles were replaced with electric bikes and traffic routes were optimised, “it is possible to mitigate such GHG emissions by 4.39-10.97MtCO2e between 2023 and 2035,” they said.
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 8 August: Record extreme weather; First quarterly CO2 fall since Covid; ‘Dual control’ of carbon emissions appeared first on Carbon Brief.
N.C. Gov. Josh Stein wants state lawmakers to rethink tax breaks for data centers. The industry’s opacity makes it difficult to evaluate costs and benefits.
Tax breaks for data centers in North Carolina keep as much as $57 million each year into from state and local government coffers, state figures show, an amount that could balloon to billions of dollars if all the proposed projects are built.
The Global Environment Facility (GEF), a multilateral fund that provides climate and nature finance to developing countries, has raised $3.9 billion from donor governments in its last pledging session ahead of a key fundraising deadline at the end of May.
The amount, which is meant to cover the fund’s activities for the next four years (July 2026-June 2030), falls significantly short of the previous four-year cycle for which the GEF managed to raise $5.3bn from governments. Since then, military and other political priorities have squeezed rich nations’ budgets for climate and development aid.
The facility said in a statement that it expects more pledges ahead of the final replenishment package, which is set for approval at the next GEF Council meeting from May 31 to June 3.
Claude Gascon, interim CEO of the GEF, said that “donor countries have risen to the challenge and made bold commitments towards a more positive future for the planet”. He added that the pledges send a message that “the world is not giving up on nature even in a time of competing priorities”.
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UK imports of “green” jet fuel linked to Amazon deforestation
A Texas refinery shipping sustainable aviation fuel to Europe has sourced beef tallow with links to a meatpacking firm fined over illegal cattle purchases -
Italy pushes coal exit back after gas prices rise
Analysts say the move sends a negative signal, but its impact will be limited given coal’s marginal role in Italy’s energy mix
Donors under pressure
But Brian O’Donnell, director of the environmental non-profit Campaign for Nature, said the announcement shows “an alarming trend” of donor governments cutting public finance for climate and nature.
“Wealthy nations pledged to increase international nature finance, and yet we are seeing cuts and lower contributions. Investing in nature prevents extinctions and supports livelihoods, security, health, food, clean water and climate,” he said. “Failing to safeguard nature now will result in much larger costs later.”
At COP29 in Baku, developed countries pledged to mobilise $300bn a year in public climate finance by 2035, while at UN biodiversity talks they have also pledged to raise $30bn per year by 2030. Yet several wealthy governments have announced cuts to green finance to increase defense spending, among them most recently the UK.
As for the US, despite Trump’s cuts to international climate finance, Congress approved a $150 million increase in its contribution to the GEF after what was described as the organisation’s “refocus on non-climate priorities like biodiversity, plastics and ocean ecosystems, per US Treasury guidance”.
The facility will only reveal how much each country has pledged when its assembly of 186 member countries meets in early June. The last period’s largest donors were Germany ($575 million), Japan ($451 million), and the US ($425 million).
The GEF has also gone through a change in leadership halfway through its fundraising cycle. Last December, the GEF Council asked former CEO Carlos Manuel Rodriguez to step down effective immediately and appointed Gascon as interim CEO.
Santa Marta conference: fossil fuel transition in an unstable world
New guidelines
As part of the upcoming funding cycle, the GEF has approved a set of guidelines for spending the $3.9bn raised so far, which include allocating 35% of resources for least developed countries and small island states, as well as 20% of the money going to Indigenous people and communities.
Its programs will help countries shift five key systems – nature, food, urban, energy and health – from models that drive degradation to alternatives that protect the planet and support human well-being by integrating the value of nature into production and consumption systems.
The new priorities also include a target to allocate 25% of the GEF’s budget for mobilising private funds through blended finance. This aligns with efforts by wealthy countries to increase contributions from the private sector to international climate finance.
Niels Annen, Germany’s State Secretary for Economic Cooperation and Development, said in a statement that the country’s priorities are “very well reflected” in the GEF’s new spending guidelines, including on “innovative finance for nature and people, better cooperation with the private sector, and stable resources for the most vulnerable countries”.
Aliou Mustafa, of the GEF Indigenous Peoples Advisory Group (IPAG), also welcomed the announcement, adding that “the GEF is strengthening trust and meaningful partnerships with Indigenous Peoples and local communities” by placing them at the “centre of decision-making”.
The post GEF raises $3.9bn ahead of funding deadline, $1bn below previous budget appeared first on Climate Home News.
GEF raises $3.9bn ahead of funding deadline, $1bn below previous budget
Tropical cyclones that rapidly intensify when passing over marine heatwaves can become “supercharged”, increasing the likelihood of high economic losses, a new study finds.
Such storms also have higher rates of rainfall and higher maximum windspeeds, according to the research.
The study, published in Science Advances, looks at the economic damages caused by nearly 800 tropical cyclones that occurred around the world between 1981 and 2023.
It finds that rapidly intensifying tropical cyclones that pass near abnormally warm parts of the ocean produce nearly double – 93% – the economic damages as storms that do not, even when levels of coastal development are taken into account.
One researcher, who was not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that the new analysis is a “step forward in understanding how we can better refine our predictions of what might happen in the future” in an increasingly warm world.
As marine heatwaves are projected to become more frequent under future climate change, the authors say that the interactions between storms and these heatwaves “should be given greater consideration in future strategies for climate adaptation and climate preparedness”.
‘Rapid intensification’
Tropical cyclones are rapidly rotating storm systems that form over warm ocean waters, characterised by low pressure at their cores and sustained winds that can reach more than 120 kilometres per hour.
The term “tropical cyclones” encompasses hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons, which are named as such depending on which ocean basin they occur in.
When they make landfall, these storms can cause major damage. They accounted for six of the top 10 disasters between 1900 and 2024 in terms of economic loss, according to the insurance company Aon’s 2025 climate catastrophe insight report.
These economic losses are largely caused by high wind speeds, large amounts of rainfall and damaging storm surges.
Storms can become particularly dangerous through a process called “rapid intensification”.
Rapid intensification is when a storm strengthens considerably in a short period of time. It is defined as an increase in sustained wind speed of at least 30 knots (around 55 kilometres per hour) in a 24-hour period.
There are several factors that can lead to rapid intensification, including warm ocean temperatures, high humidity and low vertical “wind shear” – meaning that the wind speeds higher up in the atmosphere are very similar to the wind speeds near the surface.
Rapid intensification has become more common since the 1980s and is projected to become even more frequent in the future with continued warming. (Although there is uncertainty as to how climate change will impact the frequency of tropical cyclones, the increase in strength and intensification is more clear.)
Marine heatwaves are another type of extreme event that are becoming more frequent due to recent warming. Like their atmospheric counterparts, marine heatwaves are periods of abnormally high ocean temperatures.
Previous research has shown that these marine heatwaves can contribute to a cyclone undergoing rapid intensification. This is because the warm ocean water acts as a “fuel” for a storm, says Dr Hamed Moftakhari, an associate professor of civil engineering at the University of Alabama who was one of the authors of the new study. He explains:
“The entire strength of the tropical cyclone [depends on] how hot the [ocean] surface is. Marine heatwave means we have an abundance of hot water that is like a gas [petrol] station. As you move over that, it’s going to supercharge you.”
However, the authors say, there is no global assessment of how rapid intensification and marine heatwaves interact – or how they contribute to economic damages.
Using the International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship (IBTrACS) – a database of tropical cyclone paths and intensities – the researchers identify 1,600 storms that made landfall during the 1981-2023 period, out of a total of 3,464 events.
Of these 1,600 storms, they were able to match 789 individual, land-falling cyclones with economic loss data from the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) and other official sources.
Then, using the IBTrACS storm data and ocean-temperature data from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, the researchers classify each cyclone by whether or not it underwent rapid intensification and if it passed near a recent marine heatwave event before making landfall.
The researchers find that there is a “modest” rise in the number of marine heatwave-influenced tropical cyclones globally since 1981, but with significant regional variations. In particular, they say, there are “clear” upward trends in the north Atlantic Ocean, the north Indian Ocean and the northern hemisphere basin of the eastern Pacific Ocean.
‘Storm characteristics’
The researchers find substantial differences in the characteristics of tropical cyclones that experience rapid intensification and those that do not, as well as between rapidly intensifying storms that occur with marine heatwaves and those that occur without them.
For example, tropical cyclones that do not experience rapid intensification have, on average, maximum wind speeds of around 40 knots (74km/hr), whereas storms that rapidly intensify have an average maximum wind speed of nearly 80 knots (148km/hr).
Of the rapidly intensifying storms, those that are influenced by marine heatwaves maintain higher wind speeds during the days leading up to landfall.
Although the wind speeds are very similar between the two groups once the storms make landfall, the pre-landfall difference still has an impact on a storm’s destructiveness, says Dr Soheil Radfar, a hurricane-hazard modeller at Princeton University. Radfar, who is the lead author of the new study, tells Carbon Brief:
“Hurricane damage starts days before the landfall…Four or five days before a hurricane making landfall, we expect to have high wind speeds and, because of that high wind speed, we expect to have storm surges that impact coastal communities.”
They also find that rapidly intensifying storms have higher peak rainfall than non-rapidly intensifying storms, with marine heatwave-influenced, rapidly intensifying storms exhibiting the highest average rainfall at landfall.
The charts below show the mean sustained wind speed in knots (top) and the mean rainfall in millimetres per hour (bottom) for the tropical cyclones analysed in the study in the five days leading up to and two days following a storm making landfall.
The four lines show storms that: rapidly intensified with the influence of marine heatwaves (red); those that rapidly intensified without marine heatwaves (purple); those that experienced marine heatwaves, but did not rapidly intensify (orange); and those that neither rapidly intensified nor experienced a marine heatwave (blue).
Dr Daneeja Mawren, an ocean and climate consultant at the Mauritius-based Mascarene Environmental Consulting who was not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that the new study “helps clarify how marine heatwaves amplify storm characteristics”, such as stronger winds and heavier rainfall. She notes that this “has not been done on a global scale before”.
However, Mawren adds that other factors not considered in the analysis can “make a huge difference” in the rapid intensification of tropical cyclones, including subsurface marine heatwaves and eddies – circular, spinning ocean currents that can trap warm water.
Dr Jonathan Lin, an atmospheric scientist at Cornell University who was also not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that, while the intensification found by the study “makes physical sense”, it is inherently limited by the relatively small number of storms that occur. He adds:
“There’s not that many storms, to tease out the physical mechanisms and observational data. So being able to reproduce this kind of work in a physical model would be really important.”
Economic costs
Storm intensity is not the only factor that determines how destructive a given cyclone can be – the economic damages also depend strongly on the population density and the amount of infrastructure development where a storm hits. The study explains:
“A high storm surge in a sparsely populated area may cause less economic damage than a smaller surge in a densely populated, economically important region.”
To account for the differences in development, the researchers use a type of data called “built-up volume”, from the Global Human Settlement Layer. Built-up volume is a quantity derived from satellite data and other high-resolution imagery that combines measurements of building area and average building height in a given area. This can be used as a proxy for the level of development, the authors explain.
By comparing different cyclones that impacted areas with similar built-up volumes, the researchers can analyse how rapid intensification and marine heatwaves contribute to the overall economic damages of a storm.
They find that, even when controlling for levels of coastal development, storms that pass through a marine heatwave during their rapid intensification cause 93% higher economic damages than storms that do not.
They identify 71 marine heatwave-influenced storms that cause more than $1bn (inflation-adjusted across the dataset) in damages, compared to 45 storms that cause those levels of damage without the influence of marine heatwaves.
This quantification of the cyclones’ economic impact is one of the study’s most “important contributions”, says Mawren.
The authors also note that the continued development in coastal regions may increase the likelihood of tropical cyclone damages over time.
Towards forecasting
The study notes that the increased damages caused by marine heatwave-influenced tropical cyclones, along with the projected increases in marine heatwaves, means such storms “should be given greater consideration” in planning for future climate change.
For Radfar and Moftakhari, the new study emphasises the importance of understanding the interactions between extreme events, such as tropical cyclones and marine heatwaves.
Moftakhari notes that extreme events in the future are expected to become both more intense and more complex. This becomes a problem for climate resilience because “we basically design in the future based on what we’ve observed in the past”, he says. This may lead to underestimating potential hazards, he adds.
Mawren agrees, telling Carbon Brief that, in order to “fully capture the intensification potential”, future forecasts and risk assessments must account for marine heatwaves and other ocean phenomena, such as subsurface heat.
Lin adds that the actions needed to reduce storm damages “take on the order of decades to do right”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“All these [planning] decisions have to come by understanding the future uncertainty and so this research is a step forward in understanding how we can better refine our predictions of what might happen in the future.”
The post Marine heatwaves ‘nearly double’ the economic damage caused by tropical cyclones appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Marine heatwaves ‘nearly double’ the economic damage caused by tropical cyclones
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