The “dangerous humid heat” that engulfed western Africa in mid-February was made 10 times more likely by human-caused climate change, a new rapid attribution study finds.
Throughout February, western Africa was hit by unusually intense heat. Temperatures exceeded 40C in some regions, prompting the Ghanaian and Nigerian meteorological services to issue heat warnings.
The World Weather Attribution (WWA) service have analysed the region’s “heat index” – a measure that incorporates both temperature and humidity, to reflect the physiological impacts of the extreme conditions.
While the average air temperatures in west Africa reached 36C over 11-15 February, the heat index for the same period was about 50C, according to the study.
The study authors find that climate change made the heatwave 10 times more likely and 4C hotter. They warn that if global warming reaches 2C above pre-industrial temperatures, “similar events will occur about once every two years and will become a further 1.2-3.4C hotter”.
There was “very limited” data available on the impacts of this heatwave across west Africa, the study notes. However, the authors told a press briefing that heat is a “silent killer” and that lack of reported impacts does not mean the heatwave was not dangerous.
The report says that “to reduce heat-related morbidity and mortality in southern west Africa, there is an urgent need for improved monitoring and research on the impacts and risks associated with heat waves”.
Early heatwave
Countries across west Africa have been sweltering under unseasonably hot temperatures for weeks.
Wasiu Adeniyi Ibrahim is a meteorologist from the Nigerian Meteorological Agency and a co-author on the study. He told a press briefing that in west Africa, the most severe hot and humid weather of the year is usually recorded during March and April.
However, by February this year, the region was already reporting record-breaking temperatures. This intense heat was driven by an “anomalous high-pressure system over the Sahara region” which “carried hot air towards the coast”, Ibrahim explained.
On 7 February, the Ghanaian capital city of Accra recorded its hottest day in history when temperatures reached 38C.
The finals of the Africa Cup of Nations football tournament were played in Ivory Coast on 11 February. This year, for the first time, the Confederation of African Football included two-minute cooling breaks at the 30th and 75th minutes, with provisions for additional breaks under extreme heat.
The Nigerian Meteorological Agency issued a warning on 13 February after air temperatures hit 41C in the north of the country, stating that the heat could cause conditions including fainting, heat rash, “weakness of the body” and respiratory issues. The agency advised people to stay hydrated, seek shade and stay indoors as much as possible between midday and 4pm.
“Experts warn that the extreme temperatures, amid the epileptic power supply, could trigger diseases, threaten livestock, and lead to death,” the Nigerian newspaper Punch said, reporting on the heat warning.
The WWA adds that, across Nigeria, “doctors reported an increase in patients presenting for heat-related illness” and “people complained of poor sleep due to hot nights”.
The Ghanaian Meteorological Agency released an “urgent public service announcement” on 20 February, advising precautionary measures such as staying hydrated and avoiding direct sun exposure.
As the month progressed, hundreds of regional and national temperature records across the region were broken, including hottest February nights in Ghana, Benin and Togo.
‘Dangerous humid heat’
Extreme heat is particularly dangerous when combined with high humidity. When it is hot, the human body produces sweat to cool itself down. However, as humidity increases, sweating becomes less effective.
To assess the severity of the hot and humid conditions, the study authors analysed the “heat index”. This measure “combines temperature and humidity to reflect how it feels to the human body”, Dr Izidine Pinto – a researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and co-author on the study – explained to a press briefing.
The study says:
“While the average air temperature in west Africa was above 36C, the heat index for the same period was about 50C, reflecting how a combination of humidity and high temperatures caused dangerous conditions.”
The authors focus on a region of southern west Africa where the heat was the most extreme, including Nigeria, Benin, Togo, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and small parts of Guinea and Cameroon.
The maps below show the five-day heat index over this region averaged over 11-15 February (left), where purple indicates hotter temperatures, and the difference compared to the 1991-2020 average (right), where red indicates hotter temperatures. The blue boxes in both maps indicate the study region.
Pinto told the press briefing that as there was no meteorological station data available for many of the countries in the study region, the researchers had to “wait for the gridded datasets to be updated and validated for the region” before conducting their analysis. This delayed the release of the study findings, he said.
To put the heatwave into its historical context and determine how unlikely it was, the authors analyse a timeseries of annual maximum five-day heat index over the study region, shown below. Higher bars with darker colours indicate a higher heat index.
The authors find that in today’s climate, this heatwave was a one-in-10 year event.
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. To conduct attribution studies, scientists use models to compare the world as it is today to a “counterfactual” world without human-caused climate change.
They can also use these models to assess how much more intense or frequent the event would be in an even warmer world.
In this study, the authors investigate the impact of climate change on the maximum five-day heat index in southern west Africa.
They find that global warming made the west African heatwave 4C hotter. They add that if global warming reaches 2C above pre-industrial temperatures, similar events could become a further 1.3-3.4C hotter.
The authors also calculate that climate change made the heatwave 10 times more likely to occur, adding that similar events could occur every other year in a 2C world.
The graphic below illustrates these results. a pink dot indicates the number of years in every 100 that an event like the February heatwave over southern West Africa would be seen at different warming levels.
The square on the left shows a world without climate change, in which such a heatwave would happen less than once every 100 years. The middle square shows that in today’s climate, the heatwave is a one-in-10 year event. And the square on the right shows that in a 2C world, a heatwave of this severity could be expected every other year.
(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.)
Under-reported
West Africa was not the only region to experience record-breaking heat in February 2024.
February 2024 was the world’s hottest February on record, and countries across southern Africa – including Botswana, Namibia, Mozambique, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe – saw temperatures of 4-5C above the February average.
Africa’s record-breaking heat continued into March.
In Johannesburg, South Africa’s largest city, many residents faced several weeks without water. “Authorities in Johannesburg, South Africa’s commercial hub, have blamed the ongoing heatwave for the lack of water in some parts of the city for several weeks,” Daily News reported on 13 March.
On 18 March, the health and education ministries of South Sudan closed its schools, after weather services projected an extreme two-week heatwave with temperatures of up to 45C. Parents were advised to keep all children indoors, and ministries warned that any school found open during the warning period would have its registration withdrawn.
BBC News added:
“Muslims, who make up around 6.2% of the country’s population, have been hit especially hard as many are observing Ramadan – a month of fasting. They are therefore not permitted to drink water or any other liquids to stay hydrated during the day.”
Between March 18-19, at least five countries in Africa, including South Africa and South Sudan, reported record-breaking temperatures.
However, the WWA study says that while the heatwave “potentially affected millions”, there is “very limited” data available about its impacts. As such, it says that very few heat-related impacts were reported by the media and government organisations.
“This, of course, does not mean there are no impacts”, said Maja Vahlberg from the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, who is a co-author on the study.
In fact, Vahlberg told a press briefing that early-season heatwaves are generally “more impactful than heat waves in the hot season” because “the human body has to very rapidly adjust to extreme temperatures”.
Heatwaves are a “silent killer”, Pinto told the press briefing, warning that “you only see the impacts later”.
The lack of reporting on the impacts of the heatwave “reflects the need to improve awareness of dangerous heat and detection of heat impacts”, the study says.
The post Climate change made west Africa’s ‘dangerous humid heatwave’ 10 times more likely appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Climate change made west Africa’s ‘dangerous humid heatwave’ 10 times more likely
It’s been less than 20 years since baby food in plastic pouches first appeared on supermarket shelves. Since then, these convenient and popular “squeeze-and-suck” products have become the dominant packaging for baby food, transforming the way that millions of babies are fed around the world. But emerging evidence raises concerns that big food brands are feeding our children plastic pollution with unknown consequences, by selling baby food in flexible plastic packaging.
Testing commissioned by Greenpeace International in 2025 found plastic particles in the baby food products of two global consumer goods companies – Danone and Nestlé. The study suggests a link between the type of plastic the pouches are lined with – polyethylene – and some of the microplastics found. Tests also suggest a range of plastic-associated chemicals in the packaging and food of both products.
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Governments around the world are now negotiating a Global Plastics Treaty – an agreement that could solve the planetary crisis brought by runaway plastic production. Let’s end the age of plastic – sign the petition for a strong Global Plastics Treaty now.
Climate Change
U.N. General Assembly Embraces Court Opinion That Says Nations Have a Legal Obligation to Take Climate Action
The U.S. was among eight countries that voted against endorsing the nonbinding ruling that said all nations must take steps to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
The United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday voted overwhelmingly in favor of a climate justice resolution championed by the small Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu. The resolution welcomes the historic advisory opinion on climate change issued by the International Court of Justice in July 2025 and calls upon U.N. member states to act upon the court’s unanimous guidance, which clarified that addressing the climate crisis is not optional but rather is a legal duty under multiple sources of international law.
The number of new coal-fired power plants built around the world hit a “10-year high” in 2025, even as the global coal fleet generated less electricity, amid a “widening disconnect” in the sector.
That is according to the latest annual report from Global Energy Monitor (GEM), which finds that the world added nearly 100 gigawatts (GW) of new coal-power capacity in 2025, the equivalent of roughly 100 large coal plants.
It adds that 95% of the new coal plants were built in India and China.
Yet GEM says that the amount of electricity generated with coal fell by 0.6% in 2025 – with sharp drops in both China and India – as the fuel was displaced by record wind and solar output, among other factors.
The report notes that there have been previous dips in output from coal power and there could still be ups – as well as downs – in the near term.
For example, nearly 70% of the coal-fired units scheduled to retire globally in 2025 did not do so, due to postponements triggered by the 2022 energy crisis and policy shifts in the US.
However, GEM says that the underlying dynamics for coal power have now fundamentally shifted, as the cost of renewables has fallen and low usage hits coal profitability.
China and India dominate growth
In 2025, coal-capacity growth hit a 10-year high, with 97 gigawatts (GW) of new power plants being added, according to GEM.
(Capacity refers to the potential maximum power output, as measured in GW, whereas generation refers to power actually generated by the assets over a period of time, measured in gigawatt hours, GWh.)
This is the highest level since 2015 when 107GW began operating, as shown in the chart below. This makes 2025 the second-highest level of additions on record.
The majority of this growth came from China and India, which added 78GW and 10GW, respectively, against 9GW from all other countries.
Yet GEM points out that, even as coal capacity in China grew by 6%, the output from coal-fired power plants actually fell 1.2%. This means that each power plant would have been running less often, eroding its profitability. Similarly, capacity in India grew by 3.8%, while generation fell by 2.9%.
China and India had accounted for 87% of new coal-power capacity that came into operation in the first half of 2025. The shift up to 95% in the year as a whole highlights how increasingly just those two countries dominate the sector, GEM says.
Christine Shearer, project manager of GEM’s global coal plant tracker, said in a statement:
“In 2025, the world built more coal and used it less. Development has grown more concentrated, too – 95% of coal plant construction is now in China and India, and even they are building solar and wind fast enough to displace it.”
Both China and India saw solar and wind meet most or all of the growth in electricity demand last year.
Analysis for Carbon Brief last year showed that, in the first six months of 2025 alone, a record 212GW of solar was added in China, helping to make it the nation’s single-largest source of clean-power generation, for example.
However, the country continues to propose new coal plants. In 2025, a record 162GW of capacity was newly proposed for development or reactivated, according to GEM. This brought the overall capacity under development in the country to more than 500GW.
China’s 15th “five-year plan”, covering 2026-2030, had pledged to “promote the peaking” of coal use, while a more recent pair of policies introduced stricter controls on local governments’ coal use.
For its part, in India some 28GW of new coal capacity was newly proposed or reactivated last year, bringing the total under development to 107.3GW and under-construction capacity to 23.5GW.
The Indian government is planning to complete 85GW of new coal capacity in the next seven years, even as clean-energy expansion reaches levels that could cover all of the growth in electricity demand.
Outside of China and India, GEM says that just 32 countries have new coal plants under construction or under development, down from 38 in 2024.
Countries that have dropped plans for new coal in 2025 include South Korea, Brazil and Honduras, it says. GEM notes that the latter two mean that Latin America is now free from any new coal-power proposals.
This means that both electricity generation from coal and the construction of new coal-fired power plants are increasingly concentrated in just a few countries, as the chart below shows.
Indonesia’s coal fleet grew by 7% in 2025 to 61GW, with a quarter of the new capacity tied to nickel and aluminium processing, according to GEM.
Turkey – which is gearing up to host the COP31 international climate summit in November – has just one coal-plant proposal remaining, down from 70 in 2015.
The amount of new coal capacity that started to operate in south-east Asia fell for the third year in a row in 2025, according to GEM.
Countries in south Asia that rely on imported energy are increasingly looking to other technologies to protect themselves from fossil-fuel shocks, such as Pakistan, which is rapidly deploying solar, states the GEM report.
In Africa, plans for new coal capacity are concentrated in Zimbabwe and Zambia, the report shows, with the two countries accounting for two-thirds of planned development in the region.
‘Persistence of policies’
While new coal plants are still being built and even more are under development, GEM notes that the global electricity system is undergoing rapid changes.
Crucially, the growth of cheap renewable energy means that new coal plants do not automatically translate into higher electricity generation from coal.
Without rising output from coal power, building new plants simply results in the coal fleet running less often, further eroding its economics relative to wind and solar power.
Indeed, GEM notes that electricity generation from coal fell globally in 2025. Moreover, a recent report by thinktank Ember found that renewable energy overtook coal in 2025 to become the world’s largest source of electricity.
GEM notes that coal generation may fluctuate in the near term, in particular due to potential increases in demand driven by higher gas prices.
It adds that gas price shocks, such as the one triggered by the Iran war, can cause temporary reversals in the longer-term shift away from coal.
According to Carbon Brief analysis, at least eight countries announced plans to either increase their coal use or review plans to transition away from coal in the first month of the Iran war. However, a much-discussed “return to coal” is expected to be limited.
GEM’s report highlights that global fossil-fuel shocks can have an impact on the phase out of coal capacity over several years.
In the EU, for example, 69% of planned retirements did not take place in 2025, due to postponements that began in the 2022-23 energy crisis triggered by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, according to the report. Countries across the bloc chose to retain their coal capacity amid gas supply disruptions and concerns about energy security.
Yet coal-fired power generation in the bloc is now more than 40% below 2022 levels. Again, this highlights that coal capacity does not necessarily translate into electricity generation from coal, with its associated CO2 emissions.
Overall, GEM notes that “repeated exposure to fossil-fuel price volatility is as likely to accelerate the shift toward clean energy as it is to delay it”.
GEM’s Shearer says in a statement:
“The central challenge heading into 2026 is not the availability of alternatives, but the persistence of policies that treat coal as necessary even as power systems move increasingly beyond it.”
In the US, 59% of planned retirements in 2025 did not happen, according to GEM. This was due to government intervention to keep ageing coal plants online.
Five coal-power plants have been told to remain online through federal “emergency” orders, for example, even as the coal fleet continues to face declining competitiveness.
Keeping these plants online has cost hundreds of millions of dollars and helped drive an annual increase in the average US household electricity prices of 7%, according to GEM.
Despite such measures, Trump has overseen a larger fall in coal-fired power capacity than any other US president, according to Carbon Brief analysis.
Meanwhile, according to new figures from the US Energy Information Administration, solar and wind both set new records for energy production in 2025.
Despite challenges with policy and wider fossil-fuel impacts, the underlying dynamic has shifted, says GEM, as “clean energy becomes more competitive and widely deployed” around the world.
It adds that this raises the prospect of “a more sustained decoupling between coal-capacity growth and generation, particularly if clean-energy deployment continues at current rates”.
The post New coal plants hit ‘10-year’ global high in 2025 – but power output still fell appeared first on Carbon Brief.
New coal plants hit ‘10-year’ global high in 2025 – but power output still fell
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