The “monsoon downpour” that triggered deadly landslides in Kerala’s Wayanad district last month was made 10% heavier by human-caused climate change, a new rapid attribution study says.
The landslides followed an “exceptional spell of monsoon rain” on 30 July. They have killed at least 230 people, with more than one hundred people still missing and rescue operations ongoing.
Analysis by the World Weather Attribution (WWA) service shows the rainfall that hit Wayanad on 30 July was the region’s third-heaviest period on record, surpassing even the extreme rainfall that led to flooding in Kerala in 2018.
The team of 24 researchers from India, Malaysia, US, Sweden, Netherlands and UK find that downpours of this intensity have already become 17% heavier in the last 45 years.
In a world where average global temperatures are 2C above pre-industrial levels, they estimate that extreme single-day bursts of rainfall in Kerala could become a further 4% heavier, potentially leading to even more catastrophic landslides.
The study also looks at other “mixed” factors that may have contributed to the high casualties and Wayanad’s “increased susceptibility” to landslides. These include a 62% loss of forest cover in the district and warnings that “failed to reach many people”.
Slippery slope
Wayanad is a mountainous district in northern Kerala in India’s Western Ghats – a chain of mountains older than the Himalaya that runs parallel to the country’s western coast.
With its high elevation and steep slopes – combined with a tendency to receive “prolonged” rainfall and widespread changes to its natural vegetation – Wayanad is highly landslide-prone. It is the most susceptible district to landslides in Kerala, which accounted for 59% of the country’s landslides over 2015-22.
From 22 June onwards, Wayanad saw “nearly continuous” monsoon rainfall, the WWA study says – with some areas recording over 1.8 metres of rain in just a month.
On 30 July, Wayanad witnessed what study author Dr Mariam Zachariah – a research associate at Imperial College’s London’s Grantham Institute for Climate Change – calls “an extreme burst” of more than 140mm of rain in a single day. This is equivalent to nearly a quarter of the rain London receives all year. This rain landed on loose, erodible soils already saturated by two months of monsoon rains.
The first landslide that began at an altitude of 1,550 metres struck the village of Mundakkai at midnight on 30 July, followed by three more landslides within three hours, hitting the villages of Chooralmala and Attamala.
Torrents of mud, water and rock buried several neighbourhoods, swept away victims and collapsed an arterial bridge, delaying rescue operations to the hardest-hit areas.
While state authorities say that the death toll at the time of writing is 231, media reports suggest that the actual number of lives lost to the landslides is greater than 400 – disproportionately impacting migrant workers working in farms, holiday resorts and tea plantations.
In a press briefing, study author Prof Arpita Mondal from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay said the “scale of the event was so huge that the debris registered a flow of several kilometres”, adding that “body parts have been recovered from downstream rivers as far as tens of kilometres from the location of the landslides”.
The event, she says, was “particularly devastating to two villages – Mundakkai and Chooralmala”, with one official telling News Minute that “I don’t think the Chooralmala ward will exist anymore”.
Monsoon downpour
To put Wayanad’s intense rainfall into its historical context and determine how unlikely it was, the authors analysed a timeseries of one-day maximum rainfall during the June-to-September monsoon season, focusing on northern Kerala.
They find that 140mm of rainfall hit northern Kerala on 30 July 2024, ranking as the third heaviest one-day rainfall event in a record stretching back to 1901.
The intensity of this rainfall surpassed even the “torrential” rainfall that hit large regions of Kerala in 2018, killing more than 40 people and earning the title of Kerala’s “worst floods in nearly a century”.
The map below shows total rainfall on 30 July 2024 in northern Kerala, based on data from the Indian Meteorological Department. Dark blue indicates a high total daily rainfall and yellow indicates a low total. The study region is shown in red on the map.
Total rainfall on 30 July 2024, based on data from the Indian Meteorological Department. Dark blue indicates a high total daily rainfall and yellow indicates a low total. The study region is shown in red. Source: WWA (2024)
The authors find that in today’s climate, this intense one-day rainfall is a one-in-50 year event.
Separately, using satellite observations, the authors find that heavy one-day rainfall events over northern Kerala have become about 17% more intense in the last 45 years, in which time the global climate has warmed by around 0.85C.
Attribution
Attribution is a fast-growing field of climate science that aims to identify the “fingerprint” of climate change on extreme-weather events, such as heatwaves and droughts.
In this study, the authors investigated the impact of climate change specifically on the heavy rainfall in northern Kerala on 30 July 2024.
To conduct attribution studies, scientists use climate models to compare the world as it is today to a “counterfactual” world, without the 1.3C of human-caused warming.
The authors find that climate change made the intense rainfall on 30 July around 10% more intense.
This “may not sound like very much, but really, when you are looking at this amount of rainfall, that is a lot of extra rain”, Dr Claire Barnes, a research associate at Imperial College’s London’s Grantham Institute for Climate Change, and author on the study, told the press briefing.
The authors note that Kerala is a mountainous region with “complex rainfall-climate dynamics” and explain that there is a high level of uncertainty in the model results.
However, Zachariah told the press briefing that the study findings are “consistent with Clausius Clapeyron relationship”, which states that the air can generally hold around 7% more moisture for every 1C of temperature rise.
The authors also investigate how rainfall intensity might change as the planet continues to warm. They find that if the planet were to warm to 2C above pre-industrial temperatures, rainfall intensity in northern Kerala is expected to become a further 4% more intense.
The study says that this increase in rainfall intensity is “likely to increase the potential number of landslides that could be triggered in the future”.
(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.)
Land-use change
The Western Ghats and their high-mountain tropical forest ecosystems are internationally recognised as a biodiversity hotspot and influence Indian monsoon weather patterns.
Wayanad is known for its dense forests and rich biodiversity, but it has also seen significant deforestation and land-use change.
While heavy rainfall was “a trigger” for the devastating landslides, human intervention “has played an important role, there’s no doubt about it”, says Madhavan Rajeevan, India’s former Earth sciences secretary who was not involved in the study. He tells Carbon Brief:
“In many interviews with local people, they say that [large-scale] construction work was going on in the worst-hit areas. And that construction [was done] by removing the local [Indigenous people] staying in the forest. But the landslide doesn’t differentiate between rich and poor. If there was no substantial human intervention in that area for the last four or five years, I’m very sure this landslide would not have happened.”
Between 1950 and 2018, Wayanad lost 62% of its forest cover while land under tea plantations grew by 1,800%, according to one study. The district’s high slopes are also host to coffee, pepper, tea and cardamom plantations, as well as being dotted by luxury resorts.
At the same time, a rise in construction and quarrying for building stones in recent years has “raise[d] concerns” among scientists about the impacts on the stability of hill slopes in the area.
On 31 July, the day after disaster struck, India’s climate ministry issued the sixth draft of a notification to classify parts of the Western Ghats as ecologically sensitive areas (ESAs), 14 years after experts had recommended curbs on development in the region.
Environmental lawyer Shibani Ghosh tells Carbon Brief that, to date, 72,000 square kilometres of the Western Ghats identified by these experts “do not even fall within the ambit of any proposed conservation scheme”.
While environmentalists still have “serious apprehensions” about the area that will be excluded from the Western Ghats ESA in the new draft, “had it been declared [even in its unsatisfactory form] by now, environmentally harmful activities would have been regulated, and perhaps the impact of these natural calamities would have been much less”, she adds.
Rajeevan, additionally, points to how the monsoon has changed in Kerala. He says:
“We know that seasonal rainfall is very high in the west coast, it rains continuously for many days and many hours, but the amount used to be very small: in millimetres per hour. But recent studies are suggesting that these shallow clouds are changing into deep convective clouds that drop very heavy rain in a very short spell, and that could be attributed to warming over the Arabian Sea.”
At the same time, forecasting is another issue that the study raises, drawing attention to the fact that warnings failed to reach many and impacts were not specifically spelt out.
In the aftermath of the landslides, whether meteorological authorities warned of heavy rains became the subject of parliamentary debate. But Rajeevan points out that accurate rain warnings alone are not enough:
“Red alerts and yellow alerts for the whole state or a few districts do not translate into a landslide warning. A district collector cannot translate them or take a decision. The Geological Survey of India issued a warning, but it was not alarming and a sophisticated, real-time landslide alert system needs a lot of money.
“The best solution is to identify and rehabilitate people living in landslide prone areas and to not trouble them by removing their forests.”
The post Climate change made ‘monsoon downpour’ behind Kerala landslides 10% more intense appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Climate change made ‘monsoon downpour’ behind Kerala landslides 10% more intense
Starting on Monday, about 10,000 government negotiators, scientists, journalists and campaigners will gather at a purpose-built venue in a national park in Mongolia’s capital Ulaanbaatar to discuss how to stop land turning into desert as the world warms.
Drought is currently sweeping much of the Northern hemisphere, leaving normally green urban parks looking like dry savannah, causing crops to fail, food prices to rise and billions to be shaved off economic output.
On Wednesday, Britain’s prime minister chaired an emergency meeting of the government’s Cobra committee. These are usually reserved for wars, terrorist attacks, riots and pandemics – but this one was on the extreme heat and drought the UK has been suffering since May.
With many countries facing far worse with fewer resources than the UK, the issues to be discussed at the UN’s COP17 summit in Mongolia – often overlooked – should be nearer the top of policy-makers minds.
But what is COP17? What will be decided and announced there over the next two weeks? How does it relate to climate change and how will it help restore the lands on which we all rely for our food, water and other essential resources? Climate Home News explains all below.
What is COP17?
It is the conference of parties (COP) to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). The parties are 196 governments, which includes all of the countries recognised by the UN.
The convention was conceived at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, at the same time as the other two larger “Rio trio” conventions on climate and biodiversity.
While the climate convention’s COP takes place every year, the UNCCD COP happens only once every two years. COP17 will be its seventeenth gathering.
What is desertification?
It is the process by which land degrades and becomes more like a desert, making it harder – and sometimes impossible – to grow crops or graze livestock there.
Climate change and other human activities – like excessive irrigation which depletes ground water – are making this process worse, causing poverty, hunger, health problems, forced migration and loss of species.
It’s a widespread problem. The UN estimates that half a billion people live within areas that have experienced desertification since the 1980s and that two-fifths of the world’s land is degraded.
What has it got to do with climate change?
The planet’s climate is heating up, mainly due to humans burning fossil fuels, and drying out its land. This kills plants and exposes the soil which can then be blown away by wind and washed away by water.
Without a top layer of soil, plants struggle to grow again and the land gets closer to being a desert. So combating desertification is a way of adapting to climate change.
It is also a way of lessening the pace of climate change, as land degradation releases carbon dioxide previously stored in healthy soils and plants.
What will be negotiated at COP17?
The main issue is what form a new initiative to tackle drought could take. The last COP saw Africa push hard for this to be a protocol – a kind of binding sub-treaty to the UNCCD.
But the US, Europe, Argentina and others argued that would take too long to set up, cost too much and take money away from what can be spent on the ground. They prefer a legally weaker alternative – a framework instead of a protocol.
Negotiations went late into the last night of talks in Riyadh, with the Saudis hosting informal consultations, but eventually governments had to agree to disagree and pick up talks again in Ulaanbaatar.
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Governments will also negotiate a new policy on protecting rangelands and pastoralists from degradation. Rangelands are areas where animals graze. They cover around half the Earth’s land and include almost everything other than forest, deserts, farms, glaciers and cities. Pastoralists are people who herd animals on these rangelands, often moving from place to place to find fresh pasture.
COP17 host country Mongolia has a lot of both – and pushed successfully for the UN to declare 2026 the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists. It is keen to agree a decision at COP17 bringing those issues more to the forefront of the UNCCD.
Negotiators will also debate the UNCCD’s post-2030 strategic framework, which they hope to adopt at COP18 in 2028. Campaign groups like the World Wildlife Fund want a stronger focus on biodiversity and nature-positive food systems.
What will happen when?
The COP will formally open with a ceremony on Monday August 17, followed by opening statements by governments and the adoption of the agenda.
Negotiations will begin, mostly behind closed doors for two weeks until the closing plenaries on Friday August 28.
While talks rumble on in the background, the second week will see senior government representatives including ministers get involved, with a “high-level segment” running from August 24-26.
They will discuss issues like drought resilience, finance and pastoralist communities. This is likely to be when any announcements – of new funding, for instance – are made.
On Monday August 24, there will also be an open dialogue between government officials and civil society members. Here, local practitioners are likely to share stories of how they are helping their communities reverse land degradation. UNCCD prides itself on being a bottom-up convention.
Unlike climate COPs, which often end a day or two over time, UNCCD COPs usually finish on the evening of their last day and – while they have gone late into the night – have never run into the next day.
What else should we watch out for?
At the last COP two years ago, host Saudi Arabia led the creation of an initiative called the Riyadh Global Drought Resilience Partnership to help 80 of the poorest nations deal with drought.
It received $12 billion in pledges, mainly from Gulf-based development finance institutions. Saudi Arabia is expected to report back on whether these pledges have been delivered and how the money will reach those in need now.
There are also hopes that governments will announce financial support for Mongolia’s Rangelands Flagship Initiative, which aims to mobilise investment in projects to fight land degradation.
Who will preside over COP17?
While the last five and the next two climate COPs have been or will be presided over by men, COP17 will be woman-led with Mongolia’s foreign minister, Battsetseg Batmunkh, as president.
This will also be the first COP for the UNCCD’s new executive director Yasmin Fouad. Before being appointed environment minister in her native Egypt, Fouad was a scientist and lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s special report on desertification. She played a key role at the COP27 climate summit in Egypt in 2022.
Although Saudi Arabia’s UNCCD COP presidency is ending, the Gulf power house will likely continue to be influential. It has supported the COP financially as part of the Riyadh-Ulaanbaatar action agenda and will be following up on initiatives announced two years ago.
While Saudi Arabia is often blamed for obstructing progress at climate talks, as a desert nation it is generally thought to have played a constructive role at UNCCD COPs.
What are the negotiating dynamics?
The UNCCD has six main negotiating groups: Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Northern Mediterranean, Central and Eastern Europe, and developed donor countries. Governments can also speak in their own capacities.
While divisions between the Global North and Global South do exist at UNCCD COPs, they are not as stark as at climate COPs. The Global South’s umbrella group – the G77 and China – usually only speaks on finance issues, on which developing countries tend to be united.
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Civil society groups are present but not as vocal or as confrontational as at climate COPs. There are generally no protests and campaigners tend to try to hold governments accountable more quietly. There are likely to be far fewer journalists than at climate COPs too.
What role will the US play?
While the US has left the UN’s climate convention, it remains in the UNCCD and is expected to bring a delegation of officials from its departments of agriculture and state. It is likely to resist any renewed push from Africa for a drought protocol.
The post Will the world’s drying lands get relief from COP17 in Mongolia? appeared first on Climate Home News.
Will the world’s drying lands get relief from COP17 in Mongolia?
Helen Phillips’ book, ‘Hum’, is set in a dystopian near future, in a city suffering the effects of climate breakdown and with dire air quality. Robots (the Hums) press advertising messages during conversations, meetings and even as they carry out medical procedures.
The Hums are vehicles for these ad messages, which are often for products like cosmetics, sweets or anything that might be relevant during interactions with humans. This advertising is poorly disguised, and merges with sentiments that lean towards concerns of well-being, convincing people how much better off they’ll be if they make a purchase.
While the novel is futuristic, the insidious way advertising permeates daily life is resonant of how adverts show up in our world today. And these ads are directly contributing to the worsening future climate Phillips describes in her book.
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Already by the summer of 2026, Europe had seen a 57% increase in wildfires in just four years with western Europe recording the hottest ever June and July on record. We’re facing droughts and floods, as well as predicted hikes in food costs or even chronic food shortages – and that’s before the expected additional effects of a strong El Niño later this year.
Frequent flying and bigger burgers
A portion of this climate breakdown is fuelled by over-consumption in richer countries, particularly of products that are high carbon – for which advertising can take some of the blame. Research shows that adverts drive citizens to consume about a third more goods and services in general, over and above what they might have purchased.
Yet despite a clear link between promoting high-carbon behaviours and climate breakdown, little advertising regulation exists in the UK. Take frequent flying for instance, one of the most carbon-intensive activities we can partake in.
EasyJet’s latest ad campaign is called “Drop Everything”. It encourages consumers to book cheap flights departing within the next 48 hours for presumably short or weekend getaways. Rather than promoting a specific destination, “Drop Everything” promotes a mindset that encourages indiscriminate consumption of flying. The ads were shown on billboards with clever creative slogans, as well as on digital media and through influencer campaigns.
Overall, flight numbers are increasing. The UK Civil Aviation Authority reported the highest number of UK passengers in the first quarter of 2026 (more than 61 million, breaking previous records for travel between January and March). It seems we’re still not joining the dots between flying and a worsening climate.
And how about meat consumption? Scientists advocate for less meat-eating, especially beef which has the highest carbon footprint of nearly all foods. Yet adverts from McDonald’s proliferate, helping make it one of the highest-volume sellers of fast-food chain beef burgers. In 2024, the outdoor advertising budget for McDonald’s UK rose to £86 million, an increase of 71% on previous years.
Small share for sustainability
While over half of UK ad professionals feel increasingly queasy about their profession and its effects on the climate crisis, the people running the show – the UK trade bodies – prefer to focus on the growth advertising brings.
In the first three months of 2026, they stated that UK advertising spend increased by 9.3%, reaching a total of £11.7 billion for that quarter, fuelling consumption and market growth.
But how many of those adverts actually promote low carbon goods and services? Kantar’s Sustainable Ads Tracker shows the percentage of ads featuring sustainability messaging in 2026 is around 4.3%. That’s woefully low, and much of this is made up of messaging that promotes recycling.
Additionally, the ad industry continues to happily produce adverts for the large oil and gas corporations that are fuelling climate breakdown. These adverts only narrowly pass the Advertising Standards Authorities’ advertising codes, allowing the continued greenwashing of the world’s most polluting brands.
There is essentially no leadership from the UK trade bodies, likely because they are directly funded by the brands and advertisers themselves. They are essentially ‘ad shushing’ – pushing for indiscriminate growth and directing attention to their sustainability awards, while confusingly denying that adverts drive higher consumption overall.
Let’s ‘un-shush’
Where does this leave us as we are subjected to hundreds, if not thousands, of persuasive advertising messages every day that support high-carbon lifestyles? Most ad professionals are unable to push back against this agenda at work, often due to the threat of job loss. The advertising trade bodies won’t take the lead as they work in service to big brands and advertisers.
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So, who can push for the changes we need? Members of the public.
Through pressuring our city officials and governments, we can force through restrictions, such as the watershed bans on unhealthy foods on TV before 9pm in the UK. Through supporting the efforts of organisations such as Ad Free Cities and others, we can help achieve bans on outdoor advertising for fossil fuels, aviation, meat and even single-use plastics in cities and regions such as Amsterdam, The Hague, Edinburgh, Florence, Uppsala and many more.
If we’re serious about climate change and stopping big global brands pushing their high-carbon products onto us, then advertising restrictions are one of the best ways to achieve this. If we don’t want a world like the one Phillips describes in her book, we need to make our voices heard above the advertising noise.
The post Pushing the climate crisis: How advertising fuels high-carbon lifestyles appeared first on Climate Home News.
Pushing the climate crisis: How advertising fuels high-carbon lifestyles
An upcoming UK government consultation on weakening targets for electric vehicles (EVs) could cost consumers as much as £3bn a year by 2030, according to Carbon Brief analysis.
It could require the UK to import an extra 17m barrels of oil in 2030, raising expected net imports by 8%, as well as adding 2.5% to national emissions that year, the analysis shows.
After years of fierce lobbying by parts of the car industry – and despite the significant savings on offer for EV drivers – media reports suggest that EV targets could be “watered down”.
Under current rules, battery EVs – BEVs, those which run only on electricity – must make up a rising share of new car sales in the UK.
This policy, known as the “zero-emission vehicles” (ZEV) mandate, was introduced by the previous Conservative government and sets a goal for 33% BEV sales in 2026, rising to 80% in 2030.
(Carmakers are able to use “flexibilities” to help meet their targets, which reduces the effective target under the ZEV mandate to an estimated 25% of sales in 2026.)
Now, the government under new Labour prime minister Andy Burnham is reported to be considering a cut in the BEV target for 2030 to just 50% of new car sales, alongside options for 60% or 70%.
Carbon Brief understands that a consultation on weakening the ZEV mandate is being reviewed by the prime minister’s office in Number 10, ahead of being formally released.
If the mandate is weakened to 50% by 2030 – and if carmakers make more use of “flexibilities” – there could be up to 3m fewer BEVs on UK roads by 2030, according to the NGO T&E.
Previous Carbon Brief analysis found that BEVs are around £1,100 cheaper to run per year than a petrol car, thanks to far lower fuel costs.
Overall, BEVs are more than £1,000 per year cheaper to own than either petrol cars or plug-in hybrids (PHEVs, which can run on petrol or electricity).
This is according to analysis of the “total cost of ownership” by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), including purchase price, fuel costs, insurance and proposed pay-per-mile charges.
In total, Carbon Brief analysis shows that UK drivers could be hit with an extra £3bn in annual ownership costs by 2030, if the ZEV mandate is weakened, as shown below.
A weaker ZEV mandate could “put billions of pounds of committed investments at risk”, reports BusinessGreen, including in the EV charging network and battery supply chains.
Industry group Energy UK says that the mandate is “working in the way it was designed to work” and that it is the “single biggest driver of emissions reductions” in government climate plans.
However, Carbon Brief analysis shows that a weaker ZEV mandate could result in an extra 7.4m tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions (MtCO2) in 2030. This would add the equivalent of 2.5% to national emissions in 2030, under the UK’s international climate goal for that year.
In addition, a weaker ZEV mandate could result in the UK needing to import an extra 17m barrels of oil in 2030, equivalent to 8% of projected net imports that year.
Energy UK says that shifting to EVs will help to reduce household energy bills “for everyone”. This is not only through direct cost-of-ownership savings for EV drivers, but also by spreading the costs of upgrading the electricity system across a wider user base.
Car industry group the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders claims that its members are spending “blilions…on discounts, finance incentives and marketing support” and that “natural” EV demand is below the level required to meet the current ZEV mandate. Its claims are disputed.
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The post Analysis: Weaker EV targets could cost UK consumers £3bn a year by 2030 appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: Weaker EV targets could cost UK consumers £3bn a year by 2030
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