High temperatures caused by climate change are driving an ongoing drought in the Middle East, according to a new rapid attribution analysis by the World Weather Attribution service.
Large parts of Iraq, Iran and Syria have been gripped by an intense drought for years. Low rainfall and high temperatures have caused crops to fail and driven water shortages across the region, pushing millions of people into food insecurity.
The study finds that, between July 2020 and June 2023, climate change made the drought more intense – mainly due to high temperatures that dried out the soil.
In a world without climate change, the dry period would not have even been severe enough to be called a drought, the study notes.
The authors find that climate change also made the event more likely.
In today’s climate, the drought in Iran was a one-in-five year event. However, without the influence of climate change, it would have been a one-in-80 year event.
Meanwhile, in the Tigris-Euphrates river basin that encompasses much of Iraq and Syria, climate change increased the likelihood of the drought from a one-in-250 to a one-in-10 year event.
The analysis shows that droughts of this intensity are “not rare anymore” due to climate change, one study author told a press briefing.
The study highlights that other factors, including conflict, water management and land degradation have also contributed to the severe impacts of the drought.
The Fertile Crescent
Tucked between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and the Mediterranean Sea, the Fertile Crescent – named for its rich soils – is often referred to as the “cradle of civilisation”. For thousands of years, this Middle Eastern region has been ideal for agriculture, allowing rural communities to cultivate crops and raise animals.
Today, the area is facing a severe multi-year drought driven by high temperatures and low rainfall. “In an already water-stressed region, agricultural practices consume 80%, on average, of freshwater resources,” Rana El Hajj, a senior technical adviser at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre and author on the study, told a press briefing.
As the drought has caused crops to fail, tens of millions of people across Iraq, Iran and Syria are facing the combined impacts of water shortages and food insecurity.
In Syria, where around 70% of the wheat crop relies on rainfall, agricultural production was 80% lower in 2022 than it was in 2020.
The resulting spike in food prices has driven millions of people into poverty and hunger. The World Food Programme estimates that 12.1 million Syrians – more than half the population – are facing hunger, while another 2.9 million people are at risk of becoming food insecure.
In Iraq, the 2020-21 rainfall season was the second driest in 40 years, leading to a 29% and 73% drop in water flow in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, respectively.
In April 2022, the Iraqi ministry of water resources warned that the country’s water reserves had halved since the previous year due to intense heat and low rainfall.
Almost 90% of Iraq’s rain-fed crops – mostly wheat and barley – failed in 2022. One Iraqi farmer called the water shortage a “catastrophic crisis“, explaining that “most of our agricultural lands have been transformed into barren scorching desert lands which lack basic living necessities”.
In Iran, only 180mm of rain fell across the country between September 2021 and September 2022 – a decline of about 24% compared to the long-term average. The drought has led to shortages of drinking water, crop failure and low hydropower output, and many Iranian farmers have been forced to travel to cities to find work.
The low rainfall came as intense heat baked the Middle East. Over the past few years, many regions have faced temperatures above 50C.
Multiyear drought
There are many ways to define drought. Hydrological drought focuses on the amount of rainfall a region receives, while pluvial droughts focus on surface and groundwater flows.
This study investigates agricultural drought, using a measure called the “standardised precipitation evapotranspiration index” (SPEI) – an index used to determine the onset, duration and magnitude of drought conditions in comparison with typical conditions.
Dr Ben Clarke – a researcher at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute and author on the study – told a press briefing that SPEI gives a measure of available water balance on the land surface.
The study investigates two regions – Iran, and the crescent around the Euphrates and Tigris rivers which encompasses large parts of Iraq and Syria.
The map below shows SPEI in these regions over the 36 months between July 2020 and June 2023. The study regions are outlined in grey, with the Tigris-Euphrates river basin on the left and Iran to the right. The areas of darker shading indicate a more severe drought.
Over both regions, 2020-23 was the second worst drought on record, the study finds.
Dr Elham Ghasemifar is a researcher in satellite climatology at Iran’s Tarbiat Modares University and was not involved in the study. He tells Carbon Brief that according to his research, the seasonality of agricultural drought is different across the three countries. Iraq and Iran see the most severe droughts in summer and spring, while Syria sees them in autumn, he says.
Attribution
Attribution is a fast-growing field of climate science that aims to identify the “fingerprint” of climate change on extreme-weather events. In this study, the authors investigate the impact of climate change on drought across Iran, Iraq and Syria.
To put the drought into its historical context and determine how unlikely it was, the authors analysed a timeseries of SPEI for each region. They also use climate models to compare the world as it is today to a “counterfactual” world without human-caused climate change.
The authors find that in today’s climate, which has already warmed by around 1.2C above pre-industrial temperatures due to human-caused climate change, the drought in Iran was a one-in-five year event. Without the influence of climate change, it would have been a one-in-80 year event, they find.
If the planet continues to heat, reaching a warming level of 2C above pre-industrial temperatures, Iran could expect a drought of this severity every other year, the authors add.
The graphic below illustrates these results, where a pink dot indicates the number of years in every 81 that an event like the 2020-23 drought over Iran would be seen at different warming levels.
The authors also performed the same analysis for the Tigris-Euphrates river basin in Syria and Iraq. They find that in a pre-industrial climate, today’s climate and a 2C climate, the drought would be expected once every 250, 10 and five years, respectively. These results are shown in the graphic below.
The study shows that droughts such as those recorded in Iran, Iraq and Syria over 2020-23 are “not rare anymore”, Prof Mohammad Rahimi – a professor of climatology at Iran’s Semnan University and author on the study – told a press briefing.
The authors also find that, in both regions, climate change made the drought more intense. Without the influence of climate change, neither event would have even been classified as a drought, the study suggests.
To look more closely at the causes of the drought, the authors also analyse temperature and rainfall trends separately. They find that the change in rainfall was “relatively extreme, but not necessarily affected by climate change”, while the temperatures recorded would have been “virtually impossible” with climate change, Clarke told the press briefing.
This indicates that the drought was caused by “naturally low precipitation coinciding with really, really high temperatures”, Clarke explained.
(These findings are yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal. However, the methods used in the analysis have been published in previous attribution studies.)
Water insecurity
High temperatures and low rainfall are not the only drivers of water insecurity across Iraq, Iran and Syria. Rajj told the press briefing that other human-caused factors, such as poor water management, land-use change, rapid urbanisation and conflict are also key.
In Syria, more than a decade of war has resulted in underdeveloped irrigation infrastructure, as well as a “devastated economy, damaged infrastructure and increasing poverty”, says the New York Times. Many farmers have also been forced from their lands by shelling, and the the Syrian currency has collapsed to a record low.
Water scarcity is also leading to tension between countries in the Middle East, with many regions building dams or overusing water at the expense of others.
For example, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers are Iraq’s primary sources of water, but both rivers originate in Turkey and flow through Syria first. As Turkey and Syria began developing hydropower projects on the two rivers in the 1970s, water flow to Iraq began to dwindle. Today, dams along the rivers have reduced inflow to Iraq by around 30-40%.
The post Climate change: Intensity of ongoing drought in Syria, Iraq and Iran ‘not rare anymore’ appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Climate change: Intensity of ongoing drought in Syria, Iraq and Iran ‘not rare anymore’
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China has said that hydrogen is a key “future industry”, important to both its energy transition and its industrial policy.
Hydrogen frequently goes through hype cycles, most recently driven by rising oil and gas prices due to the conflict in the Middle East.
Yet, even in China, the world’s largest producer and consumer of the fuel, hydrogen remains expensive and inefficient to produce.
This is especially the case for “green” hydrogen derived from renewables.
Moreover, there is limited supporting infrastructure and there is little incentive to use hydrogen over other energy sources.
As a result, uptake in China of hydrogen as an alternative fuel remains low.
Nevertheless, these challenges echo the early circumstances of another key clean-energy technology – electric vehicles (EVs).
In China, EVs benefited from a policy environment that included consistent signals of support, financial aid and the development of supporting infrastructure.
Many similar policies are now being deployed – and in some cases improved upon – to support the development of China’s hydrogen industry.
This article examines China’s approach to developing hydrogen and how its evolving industrial policy could make the fuel viable.
How is China using hydrogen and where does it come from?
Electrification and rising installations of solar and wind power have been the biggest drivers of China’s decarbonisation story so far. However, how China will address the more energy-intensive, hard-to-electrify segments of its economy remains an open question.
Hydrogen is seen by some in China as a potential solution for reducing emissions in a range of “hard-to-abate” industries, from steel and chemicals to aviation and shipping.
The country is the world’s foremost producer and consumer of hydrogen. It produced 36.5m tonnes of the gas in 2024, with maximum production capacity standing at 50m tonnes that year.
It also consumed nearly a third of the world’s hydrogen in 2024, as shown below.
Most of China’s production capacity is in regions with potential for high demand, such as Shandong, Inner Mongolia, Shaanxi, Ningxia, Shanxi and other provinces with significant heavy industry.
In 2024, the vast majority of China’s hydrogen – around 78% – was produced using fossil fuels, predominantly coal and gas, as shown in the figure below.
Another 21% was produced as an industrial by-product, while only 1% – just 320,000 tonnes – was derived from renewable-powered electrolysis of water.
One study found that, for every kilogram of hydrogen produced, 38.6kg of carbon dioxide (CO2) is emitted if the hydrogen is produced using coal-fired power. Hydrogen made through coal gasification results in 28.5kg of CO2 for every kilogram of hydrogen, while gas-based hydrogen creates 13kg of emissions.
By contrast, one kilogram of renewables-based hydrogen results in 0.5kg of CO2.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) calculates that hydrogen and hydrogen-based fuels could help China avoid close to 16bn tonnes of CO2 cumulatively by 2060 – but only if it comes from low-carbon sources.
The biggest reductions, it adds, would come from heavy industry, particularly chemicals and steel, with the maritime and shipping sectors also seeing some benefit.
Currently, around half of the hydrogen produced in China is used in synthetic ammonia and methanol production.
Ammonia is primarily used to manufacture fertiliser and is seen as a possible fuel technology for shipping. Methanol is used as a fuel for the transport industry, as well as for heating.
Another quarter of China’s current hydrogen usage is consumed by the oil refining and coal-to-chemical sectors. The remaining amount is used in other industries, including transport, heating and metallurgy.
What are the barriers to scaling up hydrogen?
Although China is the largest producer and consumer of hydrogen globally, the industry faces several barriers to becoming a viable clean-energy technology.
Agora Energiewende, a thinktank focused on the energy sector, says that, in order to make hydrogen a practical clean-energy solution, China would need to expand the scale and range of its application, as well as improving the conversion efficiency of production and use.
Both BloombergNEF and the IEA highlight the importance of China creating demand for hydrogen, such as through quotas for industrial usage.
Hydrogen “suffers from a relatively large efficiency loss during various conversion processes”, adds Agora. For example, it notes that only around 22% of the energy put into hydrogen fuel-cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) is converted into motion, compared to 73% for battery electric vehicles. Producing hydrogen with renewable energy is also less efficient than coal-to-hydrogen processes.
Cui Chuansheng, technical director at East China Engineering Science and Technology, tells state news agency Xinhua that the variability of wind and solar power often leads to low utilisation of electrolysers, resulting in “efficiency losses”.
Meanwhile, the cost of producing hydrogen – particularly green hydrogen – remains high.
One study placed the cost of hydrogen produced through alkaline water electrolysis (AWE), the most common method for producing green hydrogen in China, at $4-6 per kilogram, compared with $1.20-2.50/kg for steam methane reforming and $1.30-2 for coal gasification.
In some specific cases, such as blending hydrogen with gas, researchers find that hydrogen prices would need to fall to one-third of gas prices to incentivise uptake.
These constraints are all “interdependent”, Kevin Tu, managing director of Agora Energy China, tells Carbon Brief, with the need to ensure “bankable demand” while also reducing costs and developing infrastructure. He adds:
“Without credible offtake in the right sectors, costs will not fall; without lower costs and better logistics, downstream users will not commit.”
The IEA says that green hydrogen “could become cost-competitive by the end of this decade due to low technology costs and cost of capital”.
For now, however, the China Hydrogen Bulletin Substack reports that China’s four listed hydrogen equipment manufacturers all reported significant losses in 2025.
Meanwhile, a senior executive at a Chinese hydrogen company told economic news outlet Jiemian that he expected 40% of companies in the sector to have closed down by the end of 2026, with surviving companies only turning a profit in 2029 at the earliest.
The industry also lacks refueling and pipeline infrastructure. China’s development of a pipeline network for hydrogen remains in its early stages, with around 400km of pipelines currently in operation. By contrast, its long-distance gas network stands at 128,000km. Similarly, storage remains expensive and inefficient, creating a further obstacle to wider uptake.
How is China supporting hydrogen development?
China began considering the use of hydrogen as an energy source in earnest in the early 2000s, to address concerns around pollution and dependence on imported oil for the transport sector.
A clearer signal of its importance came in 2015, when the State Council included the technology in a 10-year national industrial strategy known as the “Made in China” initiative. This pitched hydrogen as a way to contribute to electrification of China’s road-transport system through the development of FCEVs.
Yuki Yu, founder of research firm Energy Iceberg, tells Carbon Brief that, from 2018-2021, hydrogen was treated as a “FCEV and manufacturing technology challenge”.
This has since evolved, she says, given that battery electric vehicles have emerged as the more popular technology.
Shen Xinyi, senior advisor at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), agrees, telling Carbon Brief that recent policy documents suggest the aim is now for hydrogen to be targeted at areas where direct electrification is harder, such as hydrogen-based chemicals, hydrogen metallurgy and some heavy-duty transport applications.
This is in line with the “hydrogen ladder”, an analysis of how likely different possibilities for applying hydrogen as a clean alternative are to become significant. The ladder sees significant future use of hydrogen in these hard-to-electrify areas as much more likely than for light vehicles.
Notable policy moves are being made in “three layers”, says Agora’s Tu, which are combining to improve the technology’s chances of scaling up. These are: the “legal and institutional” layer; “application-oriented” policies; and targeted measures to address “practical bottlenecks” at the local level.
One of the documents underpinning this pivot was the “medium- and long-term plan for the development of the hydrogen energy industry (2021-2035)”, issued in March 2022.
According to a report by the National Energy Administration (NEA), the plan is an attempt to develop an “industrial ecosystem” for hydrogen that features “diverse stakeholders, coordinated innovation and clustered development”.
The plan was the first government document to “lay out a long-term vision for China’s hydrogen economy”, unifying a previously disparate policy push into one document, according to the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, a UK-based thinktank.
Following on from the 2022 plan, the importance of hydrogen as a broad clean-energy solution has been emphasised in a number of policies. These include its classification being changed from a hazardous chemical to an energy carrier in China’s Energy Law, a 2024 action plan to “accelerate” the use of low-carbon hydrogen in industry and a new pilot scheme offering subsidies for projects that achieve specific targets.
The table below sets out the timeline and content of China’s hydrogen-related policies over the past 25 years.
| Policy | Year published | Key features |
|---|---|---|
| 10th five-year plan (2001–2005) | 2001 | Calls for “actively developing” low-emission vehicles, understood to include hydrogen vehicles |
| Made in China 2025 | 2015 | Pledges to “continue to support” development of fuel cell vehicles and “master core technologies” for low-carbon vehicles |
| Notice on implementation of demonstration projects for fuel cell vehicles | 2020 | Creates a dedicated subsidy programme for finding breakthroughs in FCEV core technologies and industrial applications |
| 14th five-year plan (2021-2025) | 2021 | Hydrogen listed as a future industry |
| Medium- and long-term plan for the development of the hydrogen energy industry (2021–2035) | 2022 | Aims to reach 100,000-200,000 tonnes of green hydrogen production [this target has been met]. Also aims to get 50,000 FCEVs on the road by 2025, leading to a “diversified” hydrogen industry by 2035 |
| Opinions on accelerating the comprehensive green transformation of economic and social development | 2024 | Promotes further development of hydrogen production, transport, storage and applications |
| Implementation plan for accelerating the application of clean and low-carbon hydrogen in the industrial sector | 2025 | Outlines tasks to promote use of low-carbon hydrogen to reduce emissions in heavy industries, such as steel and chemicals |
| Energy law | 2025 | Sees hydrogen included in national legislation for the first time, re-classifies it from a hazardous chemical to an energy carrier |
| 15th five-year plan (2026-2030) | 2026 | Again lists as a future industry, and calls for the development of green fuels derived from green hydrogen |
| Notice on the implementation of pilot projects for the comprehensive application of hydrogen energy | 2026 | Provides subsidies to projects to reduce hydrogen costs to 15-25 yuan/kilogram ($2.20-3.67/kg) and help develop a fleet of 100,000 FCEVs |
Key policies in the development of China’s hydrogen sector.
In addition, the NEA said in 2025 that local governments across China had issued more than 560 hydrogen-related energy policies by the end of 2024.
Tu notes that these local policies cover everything from permitting reforms and pipeline planning to exempting FCEVs from paying road toll.
Different provinces across China adopt distinct strategies for developing hydrogen industries, based on local conditions, says the US-based Center on Global Energy Policy, such as energy mix, availability of coal and industrial needs.
However, these local policies and targets are frequently more ambitious than the “conservative” national-level targets, it adds.
Could a new pilot programme boost hydrogen’s prospects?
A new pilot programme, announced in March 2026, aims to commercialise the country’s hydrogen industry by funding projects to reduce the cost of the fuel to 15-25 yuan/kilogram ($2.20-3.67/kg) by 2030, as well as other targets.
Unlike the 2020 subsidies, which focused on FCEVs, the new programme reaffirms China’s interest in a broader series of sectoral applications for hydrogen, including in clean heating, production of low-carbon iron and steel, and production of “green fuels” and other chemicals.
This new pilot is the “strongest financial instrument ever released for China’s green hydrogen application” in terms of creating a comprehensive hydrogen policy that covers a broad swathe of the economy, supporting it with financial backing and targeting application scenarios, Yu says.
However, she argues that strict grant caps – 240m yuan ($35m) per project and 1.6bn yuan ($235m) per selected region across only five regions – limited the overall funding scale available to the industry.
Energy Iceberg has calculated that only around 60-70 projects nationally could receive funding under the current rules, out of more than 670 active green hydrogen proposals in China.
Shen agrees that the pilot programme is significant and that it will expand the use of hydrogen in China’s climate strategy, particularly green hydrogen.
She notes a provision that “explicitly states that coal-based ammonia and methanol projects cannot be labelled as ‘green’ ammonia or methanol”, suggesting that policymakers are increasingly paying attention to the “integrity” of definitions for hydrogen and hydrogen-derived fuel.
The “real value” of the pilot scheme, says Tu, is that it focuses on developing “integrated city-cluster ecosystems linking supply, transport, infrastructure and end-use demand”, rather than only supporting individual projects.
This “should help identify viable business models, accelerate cost discovery and concentrate support on applications with stronger scale potential”, as well as boost investor confidence, adds Tu.
However, he continues that the broader effect it will have on boosting production of hydrogen will “depend on how quickly the selected clusters can translate the programme into real offtake and lower delivered hydrogen prices”.
How does this compare to China’s EV policy push?
The debate around the viability of hydrogen is reminiscent of critiques of EVs.
Until recently, EVs were seen as too expensive for consumers, inefficient and challenging to use without supporting infrastructure. As a result, many western automakers chose to temper their focus on EVs, while continuing to develop internal combustion engines.
However, China has managed to develop a competitive EV industry with products that top global sales.
Part of the playbook that spurred China’s success on EVs included consistent policy signalling in favour of the technology, including mentions in high-level documents and committing resources to building charging infrastructure.
“The defining features of China’s industrial-policy success are its persistence and adaptability,” says Kyle Chan, fellow at the Brookings Institution, adding that “long before the technology and economics of EVs and batteries were proven, China was making long-term investments and policy bets [in the sectors]”.
More tangible measures included direct and indirect subsidies and policy support in the shape of favourable loan rates and low-cost land. One estimate by US-based thinktank the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) pegs the amount of support allocated to the EV industry between 2009-2023 at $230.9bn.
This coupled with the success of private Chinese manufacturers in creating innovative, nimble companies that “forc[ed] policymakers to adapt”, as well as growing links between the automotive and information technology industries, according to a separate CSIS report.
But this progress on EVs also reportedly came with significant fraud. In 2016, one investigation found that 33 companies were involved in subsidy fraud totalling 9.2bn yuan ($1.3bn).
(It should also be noted that profitability in the industry lags far behind the average for downstream industrial sectors, according to the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post, which says that “only a handful” of nearly 50 EV makers have reported profits.)
Being the subject of an industrial policy push alone does not guarantee success, states CSIS. It says the strength of the EV industry “was neither inevitable nor the result of a single master plan” and that China’s aims to develop globally-competitive industries in areas such as commercial aviation remain unaccomplished.
China’s approach to hydrogen has been markedly different.
Instead of offering blanket subsidies, the fuel cell demonstration programme it established in 2020 focused on performance-based rewards.
To avoid the subsidy issues seen in the solar and EV industries, the ministry of finance deliberately chose this indirect funding model, says Yu.
However, Yu argues, the programme did not work as well as hoped, due to the funding ceiling and the siloed attempts made by different regional governments to develop hydrogen ecosystems .
But Chinese policy thinking is becoming more selective and pragmatic for hydrogen compared with EVs, says Shen. She says:
“Electrification remains the primary decarbonisation pathway [for road transport], while hydrogen is increasingly positioned for applications where direct electrification is more difficult.”
Tu echoes this, adding that China is “clearly moving toward a more supportive policy environment for hydrogen”.
But its approach is “unlikely to replicate the EV story one-for-one”, he adds.
China’s concerted hydrogen push is also unlikely to echo the EV story at a global level, according to the IEA.
In terms of green hydrogen, around 60% of global electrolyser manufacturing capacity is currently in China, prompting concerns from the EU about a repeat of China’s global dominance in the solar and EV sectors.
However, the IEA says, electrolysers made in China “might not supply other markets at scale in the short term”, due to difficulties transporting the bulky technology globally, expectations that costs will only fall gradually, uncertainty around global demand and questions over how well Chinese electrolysers perform against global alternatives.
China’s industrial focus on hydrogen is centred more on domestic use, Shen argues. “It is less about near-term export competitiveness and more about building domestic industrial ecosystems,” she says.
The post Q&A: Can China turn hydrogen into its next clean-energy industry? appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Q&A: Can China turn hydrogen into its next clean-energy industry?
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