World leaders gathered in Paris this week to pledge to make 2024 the “pivotal year” for improving access to clean cooking.
At an International Energy Agency (IEA) summit attended on Tuesday by heads of state and ministers from 27 countries, a total of $2.2bn was pledged to boost uptake of clean cooking technologies.
The summit focused on improving access to clean cooking in sub-Saharan Africa, where nearly four out of five people still rely on open fires to prepare food.
Ensuring global access to clean cooking by 2030 could save 2.5 million people – mostly women and children – from premature deaths associated with breathing fire smoke, the IEA says. It could also save 1.5bn tonnes of CO2 equivalent (tCO2e), around the same as a year of global shipping and aviation emissions.
But while the case for achieving universal clean cooking is clear, questions remain over how finance should be leveraged and what kind of solutions should be pursued.
The conference featured speeches from a number of fossil-fuel executives, who argued that cookstoves using liquified petroleum gas (LPG) offer the quickest and “cleanest” solution for boosting cooking access.
This drew criticism from African commentators, who noted that fossil-fuel representatives actually outnumbered African women, who made up just 17% of the people at the summit.
The role that carbon offsets should play in helping to distribute clean cookstoves in Africa was also much touted by heads of state and industry representatives.
Academic research has found that the “carbon credits” issued by cookstove projects in the past have been “largely worthless”. But advocates told the conference that new guidelines could enable the development of “high integrity” credits for projects in Africa.
Carbon Brief attended the summit at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) headquarters in Paris and spoke to experts about what the new global pledge could mean for climate, energy, nature and gender goals.
- How could clean cooking aid climate, nature and gender goals?
- What are the solutions on offer for clean cooking in Africa?
- How will improved access to clean cooking be financed?
How could clean cooking aid climate, nature and gender goals?
Around 2.3 billion people – close to a third of the global population – lack access to clean cooking facilities, relying instead on wood, kerosene or coal as their primary cooking fuel.
The number of people without access to clean cooking is declining in Asia and Latin America. But in sub-Saharan Africa, continued population growth means the number of people without clean cooking access is still increasing.
Household air pollution, mostly from the inhalation of cooking smoke, is linked to around 3.7 million premature deaths each year, the IEA says. In Africa, women and children, who spend the most time at home, account for 60% of early deaths related to smoke inhalation and indoor air pollution.
Ensuring global access to clean cooking by 2030 is a key component of goal seven of the Sustainable Development Goals.
According to IEA projections, meeting this target could save 2.5 million people – mostly women and children – from premature deaths associated with breathing fire smoke.
In sub-Saharan Africa, many women and children are burdened with collecting firewood for hours each day in order to prepare a meal. The IEA projects that universal access to clean cooking could save the average household nearly 1.5 hours a day, which would likely, in turn, increase female participation in schooling and employment.
In addition to this, the IEA estimates that universal access to clean cooking – achieved in the way their scenario suggests – could save a total of 1.5bntCO2e from a combination of reduced combustion emissions and avoided deforestation for firewood.
At the summit in Paris on 14 May, heads of state and high-level private-industry figures repeatedly emphasised the clear benefits of improving clean cooking access in Africa – with many admitting they had neglected the issue for too long.
In his opening remarks to the summit, Akinwumi Adesina, a former Nigerian agricultural minister who is now president of the African Development Bank Group, spoke candidly of his experiences growing up in a low-income neighbourhood without access to clean cooking.
“I don’t wear glasses just because I went to university,” he told the summit, explaining that, as a child, he spent years standing over fire smoke, which likely damaged his vision.
He told the story of a female friend that died in a kerosene accident after fetching the fuel for use in cooking. Her family could not afford to buy a gas stove.
“How can we let these things happen?” he asked the conference.
Many speakers emphasised that, compared to other parts of the energy sector, such as heavy industry, improving access to clean cooking is “solvable”, as the technology needed is already available at a relatively low cost.
The IEA estimates that $4bn will need to be leveraged annually until 2030 in order to achieve universal clean cooking access. By comparison, total clean energy technology investment will need to reach $4tn per year by 2030 to meet net-zero, IEA says.
The clean cooking summit itself raised $2.2bn for clean cooking, the IEA said. IEA executive director Dr Fatih Birol promised that his agency would track where each penny was spent and reveal the results in a year.
Despite the new financial pledges and renewed focus, some lamented the lack of inclusion of African women at the conference.
Writing for African Arguments, the Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate noted that the number of fossil-fuel executives outnumbered African women, who made up just 17% of the people in attendance.
One male session chair even cracked a joke about the lack of women speaking at the summit, telling the audience that the IEA should be pleased that clean cooking will no longer be viewed as “just a women’s issue”.
Later on at the summit, Graça Machel, a former Tanzanian education minister and deputy chair of the Elders, a group of global leaders started by former South African president Nelson Mandela, appealed for African women to be directly involved in high-level decision making on clean cooking. She told the conference:
“We need to build the capacity of women themselves so they aren’t just recipients. African women – we want to be investors, entrepreneurs, managers and customers. Any policy has to have the face of women, taking into account the magnitude [of our presence]. In our countries, we are millions. Clean cooking is about African women.”
What are the solutions on offer for clean cooking in Africa?
More than 238 million people in sub-Saharan Africa live in informal housing, making the distribution of clean cooking technologies challenging.
Traditional “unclean” cooking involves a pot perched on top of a simple fire burning wood or waste products, or a kerosene dispenser.
According to the IEA, the main options for clean cooking include:
- Improved biomass stoves: An enclosed stove that burns solid fuel, but keeps heat from escaping and improves combustion, thereby reducing polluting smoke.
- E-cooking or electric stoves: Primarily hot plates, induction stovetops, rice cookers or electric pressure cookers that are plugged into an electricity source, which can come from renewable power.
- LPG stoves: A fossil-fuel burner that uses a mixture of propane and butane distributed in large pressurised cylinders.
- Biodigesters: A large vessel where organic matter (animal manure, agriculture residues or food waste) is decomposed into biogas. This biogas is then used in a burner-type stove.
- Ethanol: A simple burner that attaches to a small canister containing alcohol fuel made from crops, such as corn or sugar, that has been fermented and distilled.
- Gas stoves: A burner that uses fossil-fuel gas typically delivered to customers via distribution pipelines.
The IEA infographic below demonstrates how each of these methods work.
At the summit, fossil-fuel executives from companies such as TotalEnergies, Shell, Eni, Indian Oil and Equinor were keen to stress the role that LPG cookstoves should play in providing clean cooking access in Africa.
Patrick Pouyanné, chairman of the board and chief executive officer at TotalEnergies – one of the fossil fuel companies behind the controversial East African oil pipeline project – told the summit that his company will invest more than $400m in the development of LPG for cooking by 2030.
Eirik Wærness, senior vice president and chief economist at Equinor – a key funder of the controversial Rosebank oil field in UK waters – boasted that his company already supplies 10% of India’s LPG. He told the conference:
“We should not let the best – which is renewable energy – stand in the way of the good [LPG]. We will do all that we can to provide LPG – and also LNG [liquified natural gas] – as a viable, clean fuel.”
The IEA’s scenario for achieving universal clean cooking access sees a key role of LPG cookstoves. It notes that, in the last decade, 70% of people who gained “clean” cooking access globally did so through LPG.
In its scenario, LPG remains the “primary solution to deliver clean cooking access”, representing nearly half of new household access in 2030.
Below, an IEA graphic breaks down the numbers of households gaining access to different types of clean cooking in 2022 (left) and how its scenario expects households to gain access from 2023-2030.
At the sidelines of the summit, Carbon Brief spoke to Dr Donnee Alexander, chief science officer for the Clean Cooking Alliance, a UN-backed NGO which helped to coordinate the summit.
Asked about whether a focus on LPG cookstoves over renewable-energy methods could risk locking African nations into further fossil-fuel dependency, she responded:
“I think Africa should be able to transition however they so desire. Because they have no energy. For me to say, ‘you need to transition in a certain way’, when a woman is cooking over an open fire and dying prematurely because she’s experiencing smoke inhalation every day of her life, who am I to say that she should not be transitioning to a much cleaner option compared to the baseline?”
But several African commentators reject the idea that fossil fuels are the key solution to Africa’s clean cooking crisis.
In her commentary on the summit, Nakate says:
“Natural gas is not clean…burning LPG or methane at home emits nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide and benzene, all [of] which can potentially trigger respiratory complications, including childhood asthma…Instead of trying to make gas affordable, the summit should seek to unlock investments that establish and scale ambitious and people-centred energy programmes. This is the most reasonable way to deliver decentralised energy to communities on the continent.”
Her thoughts are echoed by Mohamed Adow, founder and director of the Power Shift Africa thinktank in Kenya.
In a statement, he said there is “no evidence” that gas is the solution to providing clean cooking access in Africa, adding:
“What we need is a woman-centred approach that puts their needs first, not those of a greedy private sector looking to make profits. Rather than subsidies for private companies, that money would be better used investing in high efficiency, low-cost electric cookers for Africans.”
While most of the speakers at the summit focused on LPG, there was some recognition that renewable energy could be a way forward for providing clean cooking.
Stanlake Samkange, assistant executive director at the World Food Programme, said that his organisation had traditionally focused on supplying cleaner fuel stoves, but that “2024 is a departure”. He added:
“We are not just focusing on fuel efficient stoves but clean cooking…We are looking at electronic stoves and e-cooking. In Madagascar, we are looking to link that to solar panels.”
How will improved access to clean cooking be financed?
The IEA estimates that $4bn will need to be leveraged annually until 2030 in order to achieve universal clean cooking access.
The clean cooking summit raised $2.2bn from public and private sources. This included new pledges from the EU, France, Denmark, the US, the UK and firms, including fossil-fuel companies.
It follows on from a high-level clean cooking event at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai, where the African Development Bank pledged to allocate a separate $2bn for clean cooking over the next decade.
At the Paris summit, Birol pledged that the IEA will closely monitor where the finance is spent and reveal the results in a year.
Throughout the conference, heads of state, ministers and company CEOs made it clear that they saw clean cookstove carbon-offset projects as key for leveraging finance and distributing new technologies in Africa.
Offsetting involves developed nations or companies paying for projects that distribute clean cookstoves, allowing them to then claim they have reduced their own emissions by paying to cut carbon in another country. (For a full breakdown, see Carbon Brief’s carbon offsets explainer.)
Stephanie Mbombo, presidential special envoy for the new climate economy for the Democratic Republic of the Congo, said that her president saw carbon offsets as the “key driver” for access to clean cooking, telling the summit:
“[With] carbon credits, we will save the world, but we will also save ourselves.”
The CEOs of clean cookstove carbon-offset companies were invited to speak alongside senior political figures and made bold claims about how they could play a pivotal role.
“With carbon credits, it’s solved, it’s done,” said Peter Scott, the CEO of the cookstove company BURN Manufacturing.
This sentiment was echoed in the declaration issued from the summit.
It said that participants “acknowledge the significant role that carbon credits and climate finance have already played in scaling clean cooking efforts, recognising the potential for further expansion of this support”.
But academic research has found that clean cookstove carbon-offset projects are “largely worthless” in emissions reductions terms.
A study in the journal Nature Sustainability found that nine in 10 of the 96m cookstove credits certified by leading carbon registries do not avoid the emissions they claim.
What is more, investigations by journalists, including at Climate Home News, have uncovered serious faults with clean cookstove projects, such as faulty stoves being distributed without communities being given access to repairs or replacements.
Gilles Dufrasne, policy lead at Carbon Market Watch, a watchdog of carbon offsets, told Carbon Brief that cookstove projects have “perhaps” been the least successful at achieving emissions reductions out of all types of carbon-offset projects. He added:
“This is a case of projects that very likely have significant positive impacts for sustainable development, and likely also positive climate impacts, but where the quantification of these impacts is extremely shaky. Most projects issue many more credits than they should, and that’s a problem if countries use it to meet their nationally determined contributions – as this [clean cooking summit declaration] suggests they could.”
Acknowledging the need for more “high integrity” cookstove credits, the conference saw the Clean Cooking Alliance launch new “principles for responsible carbon finance in clean cooking”.
Alexander told Carbon Brief the goal of the principles was to “address the challenges in the carbon market to ensure that we have both higher integrity but also higher demand”.
She said that the new principles could bring about tangible ways of improving the outcomes of cookstove carbon-offsets projects:
“We’re saying let’s measure reduction in fuel use [from distributing clean cookstoves], utilising standard methodologies. Or let’s have digital monitoring and verification so we know exactly when the stove is used. Things like that start to bring more integrity into the system.”
Dufrasne added to Carbon Brief that, with current projects offering little guarantee that promised emissions reductions will be achieved, there is a risk that the sale of more carbon credits to developed nations will lead to these countries reducing their emissions by less than if they had invested in alternative climate measures:
“Getting countries and companies to pledge finance to a fund, which then finances cookstove projects – with or without credits – is likely to be a better way.”
The post Clean cooking: What new global pledge means for climate, nature and gender goals appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Clean cooking: What new global pledge means for climate, nature and gender goals
Greenhouse Gases
DeBriefed 13 June 2025: Trump’s ‘biggest’ climate rollback; UK goes nuclear; How Carbon Brief visualises research
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Trump’s latest climate rollback
RULES REPEALED: The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has begun dismantling Biden-era regulations limiting pollution from power plants, including carbon dioxide emissions, reported the Financial Times. Announcing the repeal, climate-sceptic EPA administrator Lee Zeldin labelled efforts to fight climate change a “cult”, according to the New York Times. Politico said that these actions are the “most important EPA regulatory actions of Donald Trump’s second term to date”.
WEBSITE SHUTDOWN: The Guardian reported that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s Climate.gov website “will imminently no longer publish new content” after all production staff were fired. Former employees of the agency interviewed by the Guardian believe the cuts were “specifically aimed at restricting public-facing climate information”.
EVS TARGETED: The Los Angeles Times reported that Trump signed legislation on Thursday “seeking to rescind California’s ambitious auto emission standards, including a landmark rule that eventually would have barred sales of new gas-only cars in California by 2035”.
UK goes nuclear
NEW NUCLEAR: In her first spending review, UK chancellor Rachel Reeves announced £14.2bn for the Sizewell C new nuclear power plant in Suffolk, England – the first new state-backed nuclear power station for decades and the first ever under a Labour government, BBC News reported. The government also announced funding for three small nuclear reactors to be built by Rolls-Royce, said the Times. Carbon Brief has just published a chart showing the “rise, fall and rise” of UK nuclear.
MILIBAND REWARDED: The Times described energy secretary Ed Miliband as one of the “biggest winners” from the review. In spite of relentless negative reporting around him from right-leaning publications, his Department of Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) received the largest relative increase in capital spending. Carbon Brief’s summary has more on all the key climate and energy takeaways from the spending review.
Around the world
- UN OCEAN SUMMIT: In France, a “surge in support” brought the number of countries ratifying the High Seas Treaty to just 10 short of the 60 needed for the agreement to become international law, according to Sky News.
- CALLING TRUMP: Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said he would “call” Trump to “persuade him” to attend COP30, according to Agence France-Presse. Meanwhile, the Associated Press reported that the country’s environmental agency has fast tracked oil and highway projects that threaten the Amazon.
- GERMAN FOSSIL SURGE: Due to “low” wind levels, electricity generation from renewables in Germany fell by 17% in the first quarter of this year, while generation from fossil-fuel sources increased significantly, according to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
- BATTERY BOOST: The power ministry in India announced 54bn rupees ($631m) in funding to build 30 gigawatt-hours of new battery energy storage systems to “ensure round-the-clock renewable energy capacities”, reported Money Control.
-19.3C
The temperature that one-in-10 London winters could reach in a scenario where a key Atlantic ocean current system “collapses” and global warming continues under “intermediate” emissions, according to new research covered by Carbon Brief.
Latest climate research
- A study in Science Advances found that damage to coral reefs due to climate change will “outpace” reef expansion. It said “severe declines” will take place within 40-80 years, while “large-scale coral reef expansion requires centuries”.
- Climatic Change published research which identified “displacement and violence, caregiving burdens, early marriages of girls, human trafficking and food insecurity” as the main “mental health” stressors exacerbated by climate change for women in lower and middle-income countries.
- The weakening of a major ocean current system has partially offset the drying of the southern Amazon rainforest, research published in Environmental Research has found, demonstrating that climate tipping elements have the potential to moderate each other.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
Aerosols – tiny light‑scattering particles produced mainly by burning fossil fuels – absorb or reflect incoming sunlight and influence the formation and brightness of clouds. In this way they have historically “acted as an invisible brake on global warming”. New Carbon Brief analysis by Dr Zeke Hausfather illustrated the extent to which a reduction in aerosol emissions in recent decades, while bringing widespread public health benefits through avoided deaths, has “unmasked” the warming caused by CO2 and other greenhouse gases. The chart above shows the estimated cooling effect of aerosols from the start of the industrial era until 2020.
Spotlight
How Carbon Brief turns complex research into visuals
This week, Carbon Brief’s interactive developer Tom Pearson explains how and why his team creates visuals from research papers.
Carbon Brief’s journalists will often write stories based on new scientific research or policy reports.
These documents will usually contain charts or graphics highlighting something interesting about the story. Sometimes, Carbon Brief’s visuals team will choose to recreate these graphics.
There are many reasons why we choose to spend time and effort doing this, but most often it can be boiled down to some combination of the following things.
Maintaining editorial and visual consistency
We want to, where possible, maintain editorial and visual consistency while matching our graphical and editorial style guides.
In doing this, we are trying to ease our audience’s reading experience. We hope that, by presenting a chart in a way that is consistent with Carbon Brief’s house style, readers will be able to concentrate on the story or the explanation we are trying to communicate and not the way that a chart might have been put together.
Highlighting relevant information
We want to highlight the part of a chart that is most relevant to the story.
Graphics in research papers, especially if they have been designed for a print context, often strive to illustrate many different points with a single figure.
We tend to use charts to answer a single question or provide evidence for a single point.
Paring charts back to their core “message”, removing extraneous elements and framing the chart with a clear editorial title helps with this, as the example below shows.
Ensuring audience understanding
We want to ensure our audience understands the “message” of the chart.
Graphics published in specialist publications, such as scientific journals, might have different expectations regarding a reader’s familiarity with the subject matter and the time they might be expected to spend reading an article.
If we can redraw a chart so that it meets the expectations of a more general audience, we will.
Supporting multiple contexts
We want our graphics to make sense in different contexts.
While we publish our graphics primarily in articles on our website, the nature of the internet means that we cannot guarantee that this is how people will encounter them.
Charts are often shared on social media or copy-pasted into presentations. We want to support these practices by including as much context relevant to understanding within the chart image as possible.
Below illustrates how adding a title and key information can make a chart easier to understand without supporting information.
When we do not recreate charts
When will we not redraw a chart? Most of the time! We are a small team and recreating data graphics requires time, effort, accessible data and often specialist software.
But, despite these constraints, when the conditions are right, the process of redrawing maps and charts allows us to communicate more clearly with our readers, transforming complex research into accessible visual stories.
Watch, read, listen
SPENDING $1BN ON CLIMATE: New Scientist interviewed Greg de Temmerman, former nuclear physicist turned chief science officer at Quadrature Climate Foundation, about the practicalities and ethics of philanthropic climate-science funding.
GENDER HURDLES: Research director Tracy Kajumba has written for Climate Home News about the barriers that women still face in attending and participating in COPs.
OCEAN HEATWAVES: The New York Times presented a richly illustrated look at how marine heatwaves are spreading across the globe and how they affect life in the oceans.
Coming up
- 16-26 June: Bonn climate talks, Bonn, Germany
- 16 June: 79th meeting of the World Meteorological Organization executive council, Geneva, Switzerland
- 17 June: International Energy Agency (IEA) Oil 2025 report launch
Pick of the jobs
- Inside Climate News, California environmental reporter | Salary: Unknown. Location: Southern California
- Natural Resources Wales, lead marine and energy policy advisor | Salary: £45,367-£50,877. Location: Wales
- Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, senior manager, climate | Salary: £82,000. Location: London/hybrid
- Green Party,social media and digital content officer | Salary: £33,211. Location: London/remote
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
The post DeBriefed 13 June 2025: Trump’s ‘biggest’ climate rollback; UK goes nuclear; How Carbon Brief visualises research appeared first on Carbon Brief.
The UK’s chancellor Rachel Reeves gave the green light this week to the Sizewell C new nuclear plant in Suffolk, along with funding for “small modular reactors” (SMRs) and nuclear fusion.
In her spending review of government funding across the rest of this parliament, Reeves pledged £14.2bn for Sizewell C, £2.5bn for Rolls-Royce SMRs and £2.5bn for fusion research.
The UK was a pioneer in civilian nuclear power – opening the world’s first commercial reactor at Calder Hall in Cumbria in 1956 – which, ultimately, helped to squeeze out coal generation.
Over the decades that followed, the UK’s nuclear capacity climbed to a peak of 12.2 gigawatts (GW) in 1995, while electricity output from the fleet of reactors peaked in 1998.
The chart below shows the contribution of each of the UK’s nuclear plants to the country’s overall capacity, according to when they started and stopped operating.
The reactors are dotted around the UK’s coastline, where they can take advantage of cooling seawater, and many sites include multiple units coded with numbers or letters.
Since Sizewell B was completed in 1995, however, no new nuclear plants have been built – and, as the chart above shows, capacity has ebbed away as older reactors have gone out of service.
After a lengthy hiatus, the Hinkley C new nuclear plant in Somerset was signed off in 2016. It is now under construction and expected to start operating by 2030 at the earliest.
(Efforts to secure further new nuclear schemes at Moorside in Cumbria failed in 2017, while projects led by Hitachi at Wylfa on Anglesey and Oldbury in Gloucestershire collapsed in 2019.)
The additional schemes just given the go-ahead in Reeves’s spending review would – if successful – somewhat revive the UK’s nuclear capacity, after decades of decline.
However, with the closure of all but one of the UK’s existing reactors due by 2030, nuclear-power capacity would remain below its 1995 peak, unless further projects are built.
Moreover, with the UK’s electricity demand set to double over the next few decades, as transport, heat and industry are increasingly electrified, nuclear power is unlikely to match the 29% share of generation that it reached during the late 1990s.
There is an aspirational goal – set under former Conservative prime minister Boris Johnson – for nuclear to supply “up to” a quarter of the UK’s electricity in 2050, with “up to” 24GW of capacity.
Assuming Sizewell B continues to operate until 2055 and that Hinkley C, Sizewell C and at least three Rolls-Royce SMRs are all built, this would take UK capacity back up to 9.0GW.
Methodology
The chart is based on data from the World Nuclear Association, with known start dates for operating and retired reactors, as well as planned closure dates announced by operator EDF.
The timeline for new reactors to start operating – and assumed 60-year lifetime – is illustrative, based on published information from EDF, Rolls-Royce, the UK government and media reports.
The post Chart: The rise, fall and rise of UK nuclear power over eight decades appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Chart: The rise, fall and rise of UK nuclear power over eight decades
Recent years have seen a rapid succession of climate-related records broken.
To name just a few, the world has witnessed record warmth in the Atlantic, unprecedented glacier melt, all-time low Antarctic sea ice extent, the Amazon’s worst drought since observations began and UK temperatures soaring past 40C for the first time.
In a review article, published in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, my coauthors and I look at how the frequency of weather records is changing as the planet warms.
We find that the number of hot temperature records observed around the world since 1950 far exceed what would be expected in a million years in a world without human-caused climate change.
Specifically, we show that “all-time” daily hot records on land were more than four times higher in 2016-24 than they would have been in a world without climate change.
Meanwhile, daily maximum rainfall records were up 40% over the same time period and record cold events were twice as rare.
A key finding of our research is that it is the pace of global warming that controls the occurrence of records.
We show that, if the pace of warming were to slow down, the frequency of record-breaking hot events would start to decline – even if global temperatures continue to rise.
Counting records
By definition, records are supposed to be rare events, at least in a system that is not changing.
Statistics of record occurrence are remarkably simple. They are expected to become rarer the longer a measurement series gets.
The chance of observing a new record after 20 years of measurement is one in 20, or 5%. And after 100 years of observations, the chances of a new record drops to 1%.
For example, this is why it becomes increasingly difficult to break records in athletics as time goes by, unless training methods or sports equipment improve.
Record-breaking weather events – for example, the highest windspeed, most intense rainfall or hot and cold temperatures – also face these odds in a climate that is “stationary”.
However, today’s climate is not stationary, but warming at a very high pace. This has significant implications for the record count.
The plot below shows how the frequency of all-time hot records (dashed red line) and record cold events (dashed blue line) has changed since the 1960s. This is compared to the probability that would be expected under a stationary climate (black line).
(The plot uses ERA5, a reanalysis dataset, which combines observations and models from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF).)
It illustrates how the frequency of hot events declined more slowly than would be expected in a stationary climate since 1950, before increasing in the last 15 years. Meanwhile, the frequency of record cold events is declining more quickly than expected.
The record ratio
Tracking the ratio between the measured number of records and the one theoretically expected in a stationary climate – the “record ratio” – reveals the fingerprint of climate change.
Analysis of ERA5 data and Berkeley Earth surface temperature observations finds that the record ratio over the last decade for hot records over global land regions is more than four. For cold records, it is between 0.2 and 0.5, showing that record-breaking cold has declined
In other words, there were more than four times as many hot record events and less than half as many cold record events than would be expected without global warming.
In 2023 and 2024, the record ratio for hot events reached 5.5 and 6.2, respectively.
Record ratios tend to be higher over global oceans than on land. They are also higher for monthly or seasonal record temperatures than all-time daily records.
This is because natural variability in the climate tends to be smaller over oceans and for longer averaging periods, such as months and seasons.
Record counts directly relate to the relationship between rates of warming and natural fluctuations in the climate. This is sometimes referred to as the “signal-to-noise ratio”. (The “signal” being the long-term trend of climate change and “noise” referring to short-term fluctuations of natural variability.)
As a result, event types and regions with a higher signal-to-noise ratio tend to see a greater number of records.
Another way of illustrating the signal of climate change is by counting the total number of records in a measurement series.
In a stationary climate, there should be about five records in 100 years of temperature measurements, 7.5 in 1,000 years and less than 10 in 10,000 years.
However, our analysis of records in two measurement series shows how the number of record-breaking events has become significantly higher as the climate has changed.
For example, as the figure on the left below illustrates, a new annual record for average global temperature has been set 25 times over the past 175 years.
Meanwhile, the figure on the right shows how, in the Pacific north-west, a new five-day average heat record has been set 14 times within the last 75 years. The spike in temperature in 2021 reflects the brutal heatwave that killed hundreds of people and brought devastating wildfires that almost entirely destroyed the Canadian village of Lytton.
(In both figures, the warm records are marked by pink circles.)
According to fundamental laws of statistics, 14 new records would not be expected in more than a million years in a climate that is not warming.
It is worth noting that some climate variables, including ocean heat content, sea level rise and minimum glacier or ice sheet volumes, are changing so relentlessly that new record levels are currently set every year.
Record-shattering events
Record-shattering events are a subset of record-breaking events whose magnitude exceeds the previous event by a large margin.
In our research, we define this as more than one standard deviation, which is a measure of how spread out data is from the average.
(The exact value of standard deviation varies for different parts of the world. For example, when it comes to year-to-year average temperatures, one standard deviation is typically 2-3C in the Arctic, but less than 0.5C over the ocean).
These events of unprecedented intensity are often very impactful as they strongly exceed the conditions that society or ecosystems have experienced in the past.
The 2021 heatwave in the Pacific north-west, mentioned above, is a forbidding example.
Our research finds that the large number of record-shattering events in the past three decades is the consequence of a very high warming rate.
Using a simple timeseries model, we illustrate why the pace of warming is the key factor explaining the occurrence of record-shattering events.
In the left-hand figure, we assume a 150-year period of no warming followed by some linear warming at three different rates, which is a very simplistic approximation of historical and future warming pathways.
The right-hand figure illustrates what happens to the probability of record-shattering events in the Pacific north-west region under these three simplified pathways. It shows that the probability of record-shattering events at first rapidly increases and then stabilises. And the level at which the probability stabilises is greater the higher the rate of warming.
We therefore conclude that the high frequency of record-shattering hot extremes in recent years is controlled by the very high rate of warming caused by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.
This tight coupling of record counts to the rate or speed of warming implies that there will be early benefits of slowing down global warming.
In our research, we look at how the probability of hot and cold records changes under different emissions reduction scenarios. To do this, we analysed the occurrence of record hot and cold events in climate model projections in the CMIP6 archive.
The figure below shows how stabilising temperatures by achieving net-zero carbon emissions (SSP1-1.9 and SSP1-2.6) will lead to a rapid decline of records, even if temperatures remain higher than in the historical period.
(It is worth noting that, while the number of records will decline under this lower-emissions scenario, the number of heatwaves would remain higher than today.)
Under intermediate (SSP2-4.5), high (SSP3-7.0) and very high emission (SSP5-8.5) scenarios, the number of records would continue to increase to levels much higher than today.
Rainfall records
We would also expect rainfall records to become progressively rarer in a stationary climate.
However, we find that record-breaking heavy precipitation occurred about 40% more often in 2015-24 than would be expected in a stationary climate. Many record-shattering heavy rainfall extremes occurred in the mid-latitudes and led to flooding which had large impacts.
(Calculating the frequency of records is more challenging for rainfall than for temperature, given small-scale variations and uncertainties in rainfall observations.)
The greater number of record-breaking rainfall events is due to an increase in precipitation intensity over most land regions as the atmosphere warms, as well as larger variations of rainfall intensity on a day-to-day, season-to-season and year-to-year basis .
We also find that the margin by which previous rainfall records are broken tends to become larger and larger in time. This is due to the “non-symmetric” distribution of rainfall – where there are many days with little precipitation, less with heavy precipitation and very few with very extreme precipitation.
It is therefore not surprising to see record-shattering precipitation events exceeding previous records by 20-50% in intensity, even if overall precipitation intensity increases by roughly 7% per degree of warming.
Preparing for the future
Efforts to adapt to climate change are typically informed by the worst events observed in recent generations.
This means that society is often underprepared for record-shattering events – which by their very definition are of unprecedented intensity.
Qualitative and quantitative storyline methods can offer insight into the many record-breaking events to come into the future – and, thus, help society prepare for escalating climate impacts.
These methods combine information from historical and paleoarchives, long measurement series, targeted climate model experiments, statistical and machine learning methods and weather forecasting systems.
Ultimately, these methods can improve society’s preparedness to climate change, so that the next record-shattering extreme does not come as a surprise.
The post Guest post: How climate change is fuelling record-breaking extreme weather appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Guest post: How climate change is fuelling record-breaking extreme weather
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