In his final letter published on the eve of COP30’s opening day on Monday, the summit’s Brazilian boss André Aranha Corrêa do Lago spelled out his top priority: ensure that the nearly 200 disparate country delegations gathering in Belèm “evolve into one cohesive team”.
But his hopes of channelling global togetherness look set to get a reality check. A familiar battle is brewing over the conference’s agenda for the coming two weeks, after negotiating groups tabled six proposals for additional topics to be discussed.
Emerging economies ask for talks on finance and trade
Two come from the Like-Minded Group of Developing Countries (LMDCs), which includes China, India and Saudi Arabia, with support from the Arab Group of predominantly oil-rich nations and cover well-trodden territory: finance and trade.
On finance, the bloc wants dedicated discussions on Article 9.1 of the Paris Agreement, which sets out an obligation for developed countries to provide financial help for developing nations’ efforts to cut emissions and adapt to a warming world.
Their demand that rich governments stump up cash is nothing new. But that has now been fuelled further by disappointment over the outcome of last year’s negotiations which produced the new UN climate finance goal of $300 billion a year by 2035. The LMDCs are now calling for a three-year “work programme” to discuss how the provision of money from developed nations under Article 9.1 is crucial to reach a broad range of goals in the Paris accord.
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Five big questions hanging over COP30
From insufficient emissions-cutting plans to a shortfall in adaptation finance, here’s our guide to the thorny issues facing the UN climate summit in Belém -
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The bloc also wants the summit to tackle “unilateral trade-restrictive measures”. That is code for mechanisms such as the EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM), which is essentially a carbon tax on imports aimed at creating a level-playing field between domestic and overseas producers.
But emerging economies – such as China and India – say those measures are protectionist, do not take different levels of development into account, and would harm their economies. They have been calling for the inclusion of this agenda item at the previous two COPs – but so far have not succeeded in their bid to separate the topic out from existing discussions.
Since taking on the presidency, Brazil has been trying to defuse a likely COP30 agenda fight over trade measures. But Do Lago’s proposal to create a new forum to discuss climate and trade outside of the UN climate regime was met with a lukewarm response.
Small islands push ‘survival’ agenda
Hot on the heels of UN chief Antonio Guterres conceding that a breach of the 1.5C warming limit is “inevitable”, the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) has put forward a proposal for discussions on how to react to that and raise emission-cutting ambition.
The group, predominantly composed of low-lying Pacific island nations, wants to create a dedicated space to agree “on concrete follow-up actions” to accelerate implementation of efforts before 2030. This also feeds into existing divisions over how COP30 should respond to a wide shortfall in ambition in countries’ updated national climate plans (NDCs) submitted this year.
“We are proposing this agenda item because the world’s current trajectory toward climate catastrophe is unacceptable – morally, scientifically, and legally,” said AOSIS Chair Ambassador Ilana Seid. “For small island nations, this is not about negotiation tactics – it’s about survival.”
The EU, for its part, wants dedicated discussions over a transparency mechanism of the Paris Agreement that requires countries to report a vast amount of national-level information, including inventories of greenhouse gas emissions and measures taken to act on promises made in their NDCs.
In its submission, the EU says it is “crucial” that good practices are shared and that barriers to boosting climate action are identified and urgently fixed.
Forests, mountains and health
Forest nations Honduras, Suriname and Papua New Guinea, meanwhile, are calling for discussions on the need for an “urgent” increase in financial support for global efforts “to reverse global deforestation and degradation by 2030” – one of the key agreements made at COP28 in Dubai two years ago.
Two additional proposals came in at the last minute on Sunday from Zimbabwe and Kyrgyzstan, respectively.
The Southeast African nation wants to create a new space for discussions on the impact of climate change on health. Its submission calls for a “structured dialogue” between negotiators and health experts that could come up with concrete actions to advance health considerations in adaptation interventions and meet the needs of the most vulnerable communities.
The Central Asian country wants better integration of mountain-related issues into the global climate agenda and, more specifically, the creation of an Annual Expert Dialogue on Mountains and Climate Change.
In an attempt to enable the smooth adoption of the conference agenda and prevent fireworks at the opening session, the COP30 presidency met with heads of government delegations on Sunday. The plenary will show whether those efforts to accommodate new agenda demands have been successful.
UN climate chief: Fight the climate crisis not each other
The head of the UN’s climate body kicked off the summit with a reminder to governments that “your job here is not to fight one another – your job is to fight this climate crisis, together”.
How far that advice is taken on board will be evident from day one, as a fight loomed over several new agenda items put forward by countries in the run-up to the conference
Simon Stiell told the assembled delegates he wasn’t “sugar-coating” the challenge ahead. “We have so much more work to do,” he said in his opening speech. “We must move much, much, faster on both reductions of emissions and strengthening resilience,” he added.
While the Paris Agreement, adopted 10 years ago, has started to bend the emissions curve downwards, it will not be enough to meet the lowest 1.5C warming limit in the accord, the UN has admitted in recent days based on new national climate plans (NDCs) submitted for the next 10 years.
“We can and must bring temperatures back down to 1.5C after any temporary overshoot,” Stiell said. For that to happen, countries need to make decisions in Belem to move forward on things they have already agreed, he emphasised.
For example, at COP28 in Dubai two years ago, governments pledged to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems. “Now’s the time to focus on how we do it fairly and orderly,” said Stiell. “Focusing on which deals to strike, to accelerate the tripling of renewables and doubling energy efficiency.”
Other agreed areas for action at COP30 that need “strong and clear outcomes” include a roadmap to raise climate finance to $1.3 trillion a year by 2035, a set of indicators to measure progress on the Global Goal of Adaptation, a technology implementation programme and just transition pathways for economies and societies, he added.
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Stiell did not mince his words about the ramifications if the talks do not spur greater climate action in the real world. He told delegates that squabbling while famines, extreme weather and conflicts ruin the lives of millions would never be forgotten or forgiven.
“We don’t need to wait for late NDCs to slowly trickle in, to spot the gap and design the innovations necessary to tackle it,” he said, emphasising that the solutions already exist. “Not one single nation among you can afford this, as climate disasters rip double-digits off GDP,” he warned.
While noting that the Paris Agreement “is working to deliver real progress”, Stiell ended by calling on the assembled negotiators to “strive valiantly for more”.
The post COP30 Bulletin Day 1: Agenda fight looms over opening day appeared first on Climate Home News.
American farmers are drowning in health insurance costs, while their German counterparts never worry about medical bills. The difference may help determine which country’s small farms are better prepared for a changing climate.
Samantha Kemnah looked out the foggy window of her home in New Berlin, New York, at the 150-acre dairy farm she and her husband, Chris, bought last year. This winter, an unprecedented cold front brought snowstorms and ice to the region.
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Climate Change
A Little-Used Maneuver Could Mean More Drilling and Mining in Southern Utah’s Redrock Country
Two Utah Congress members have introduced a resolution that could end protections for Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Conservation groups worry similar maneuvers on other federal lands will follow.
Lawmakers from Utah have commandeered an obscure law to unravel protections for the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, potentially delivering on a Trump administration goal of undoing protections for public conservation lands across the country.
A Little-Used Maneuver Could Mean More Drilling and Mining in Southern Utah’s Redrock Country
Drought and heatwaves occurring together – known as “compound” events – have “surged” across the world since the early 2000s, a new study shows.
Compound drought and heat events (CDHEs) can have devastating effects, creating the ideal conditions for intense wildfires, such as Australia’s “Black Summer” of 2019-20 where bushfires burned 24m hectares and killed 33 people.
The research, published in Science Advances, finds that the increase in CDHEs is predominantly being driven by events that start with a heatwave.
The global area affected by such “heatwave-led” compound events has more than doubled between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, the study says.
The rapid increase in these events over the last 23 years cannot be explained solely by global warming, the authors note.
Since the late 1990s, feedbacks between the land and the atmosphere have become stronger, making heatwaves more likely to trigger drought conditions, they explain.
One of the study authors tells Carbon Brief that societies must pay greater attention to compound events, which can “cause severe impacts on ecosystems, agriculture and society”.
Compound events
CDHEs are extreme weather events where drought and heatwave conditions occur simultaneously – or shortly after each other – in the same region.
These events are often triggered by large-scale weather patterns, such as “blocking” highs, which can produce “prolonged” hot and dry conditions, according to the study.
Prof Sang-Wook Yeh is one of the study authors and a professor at the Ewha Womans University in South Korea. He tells Carbon Brief:
“When heatwaves and droughts occur together, the two hazards reinforce each other through land-atmosphere interactions. This amplifies surface heating and soil moisture deficits, making compound events more intense and damaging than single hazards.”
CDHEs can begin with either a heatwave or a drought.
The sequence of these extremes is important, the study says, as they have different drivers and impacts.
For example, in a CDHE where the heatwave was the precursor, increased direct sunshine causes more moisture loss from soils and plants, leading to a drought.
Conversely, in an event where the drought was the precursor, the lack of soil moisture means that less of the sun’s energy goes into evaporation and more goes into warming the Earth’s surface. This produces favourable conditions for heatwaves.
The study shows that the majority of CDHEs globally start out as a drought.
In recent years, there has been increasing focus on these events due to the devastating impact they have on agriculture, ecosystems and public health.
In Russia in the summer of 2010, a compound drought-heatwave event – and the associated wildfires – caused the death of nearly 55,000 people, the study notes.
The record-breaking Pacific north-west “heat dome” in 2021 triggered extreme drought conditions that caused “significant declines” in wheat yields, as well as in barley, canola and fruit production in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada, says the study.
Increasing events
To assess how CDHEs are changing, the researchers use daily reanalysis data to identify droughts and heatwaves events. (Reanalysis data combines past observations with climate models to create a historical climate record.) Then, using an algorithm, they analyse how these events overlap in both time and space.
The study covers the period from 1980 to 2023 and the world’s land surface, excluding polar regions where CDHEs are rare.
The research finds that the area of land affected by CDHEs has “increased substantially” since the early 2000s.
Heatwave-led events have been the main contributor to this increase, the study says, with their spatial extent rising 110% between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, compared to a 59% increase for drought-led events.
The map below shows the global distribution of CDHEs over 1980-2023. The charts show the percentage of the land surface affected by a heatwave-led CDHE (red) or a drought-led CDHE (yellow) in a given year (left) and relative increase in each CDHE type (right).
The study finds that CDHEs have occurred most frequently in northern South America, the southern US, eastern Europe, central Africa and south Asia.
Threshold passed
The authors explain that the increase in heatwave-led CDHEs is related to rising global temperatures, but that this does not tell the whole story.
In the earlier 22-year period of 1980-2001, the study finds that the spatial extent of heatwave-led CDHEs rises by 1.6% per 1C of global temperature rise. For the more-recent period of 2022-23, this increases “nearly eightfold” to 13.1%.
The change suggests that the rapid increase in the heatwave-led CDHEs occurred after the global average temperature “surpasse[d] a certain temperature threshold”, the paper says.
This threshold is an absolute global average temperature of 14.3C, the authors estimate (based on an 11-year average), which the world passed around the year 2000.
Investigating the recent surge in heatwave-leading CDHEs further, the researchers find a “regime shift” in land-atmosphere dynamics “toward a persistently intensified state after the late 1990s”.
In other words, the way that drier soils drive higher surface temperatures, and vice versa, is becoming stronger, resulting in more heatwave-led compound events.
Daily data
The research has some advantages over other previous studies, Yeh says. For instance, the new work uses daily estimations of CDHEs, compared to monthly data used in past research. This is “important for capturing the detailed occurrence” of these events, says Yeh.
He adds that another advantage of their study is that it distinguishes the sequence of droughts and heatwaves, which allows them to “better understand the differences” in the characteristics of CDHEs.
Dr Meryem Tanarhte is a climate scientist at the University Hassan II in Morocco, and Dr Ruth Cerezo Mota is a climatologist and a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Both scientists, who were not involved in the study, agree that the daily estimations give a clearer picture of how CDHEs are changing.
Cerezo-Mota adds that another major contribution of the study is its global focus. She tells Carbon Brief that in some regions, such as Mexico and Africa, there is a lack of studies on CDHEs:
“Not because the events do not occur, but perhaps because [these regions] do not have all the data or the expertise to do so.”
However, she notes that the reanalysis data used by the study does have limitations with how it represents rainfall in some parts of the world.
Compound impacts
The study notes that if CDHEs continue to intensify – particularly events where heatwaves are the precursors – they could drive declining crop productivity, increased wildfire frequency and severe public health crises.
These impacts could be “much more rapid and severe as global warming continues”, Yeh tells Carbon Brief.
Tanarhte notes that these events can be forecasted up to 10 days ahead in many regions. Furthermore, she says, the strongest impacts can be prevented “through preparedness and adaptation”, including through “water management for agriculture, heatwave mitigation measures and wildfire mitigation”.
The study recommends reassessing current risk management strategies for these compound events. It also suggests incorporating the sequences of drought and heatwaves into compound event analysis frameworks “to enhance climate risk management”.
Cerezo-Mota says that it is clear that the world needs to be prepared for the increased occurrence of these events. She tells Carbon Brief:
“These [risk assessments and strategies] need to be carried out at the local level to understand the complexities of each region.”
The post Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes
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