Andreas Sieber is the associate director of global policy and campaigns at 350.org. Stela Herschmann is Climate Policy Specialist at Observatório do Clima, a network of 130 Brazilian organisations.
Four work pillars. Sixteen possible negotiated outcomes. Three advisory “circles”. One “ethical stocktake”. Councils, roadmaps. There are so many shiny objects garnishing the agenda of COP30 that it’s easy to overlook one key absence: the preparations for the Belém climate change conference are simply not addressing the main cause of our current climate disruption.
Fossil fuels, the source of 75% of greenhouse gases, are nowhere to be seen in the negotiations. That must change if Brazil is really willing to make its mutirão – the term it is using to launch a global mobilisation – a turning point in the fight for a livable planet.
At COP28 in Dubai – hosted by a petrostate under the helm of an oil executive – the Global Stocktake (GST) delivered a breakthrough: a clear call to “transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems in an orderly, just and equitable manner”, with urgent action this decade. That this emerged despite, not because of, the host’s interests only underscores its significance.
The Global Stocktake may be dressed in the usual diplomatic language, but its message is unmistakable. It has set a new gold standard for climate action: putting the fossil fuel phaseout at the centre of the global response to the climate crisis.
A few weeks after the landmark Dubai decision, however, some countries started voicing what a top diplomat has called “buyer’s remorse”. At the G20 summit in Brazil last year, some countries led a rebellion against the GST, and managed to prevent the leaders’ declaration from doing as much as reaffirm the commitment from paragraph 28d.
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At COP29, in Baku, the bloody fight for finance, with rich countries’ intransigence denying many others the possibility of implementing the transition, meant that no progress was made on the crucial energy issue.
Some countries argue that the Global Stocktake is not a buffet where countries pick and choose what to implement; all of its provisions must be followed up, including those on finance, which are anathema to developed nations.
Furthermore, they say, the phaseout of fossil fuels outlined in Dubai must be delivered in each country’s climate plan, or NDC. The GST is but a guideline to better NDCs, and now it is up to each country to implement those guidelines as they see fit.
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Meanwhile, in the real world, a fossil frenzy is going on with no end in sight. Rich oil-producing nations such as Norway, Canada and Australia, are expanding their production like there’s no tomorrow (and at the current pace, there really won’t be).
Major developing economies like Brazil and the United Arab Emirates are using the Global North expansion as an excuse to “drill, baby, drill” themselves, each one betting on being the last seller of oil, all gambling with the future of humankind.
Not to say anything, of course, of the world’s top oil producer, the United States, which has become a rogue state under climate-change denier Donald Trump. To countries profiteering from the post-Ukraine invasion fossil orgy, that Saturday morning in 2023 when the gavel came down in Dubai is a hazy memory indeed.
Which brings us to COP30 and its host country.
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Brazil is the only major emitter so far to go beyond merely reaffirming the GST language in its NDC. There, it said it would “welcome the launching of international work for the definition of schedules for transitioning away from fossil fuels”.
That sentence captures one crucial thing about the Dubai energy decision that is lost to GST haters: it is not self-implementable. It needs timetables and a suitable definition of “orderly, just and equitable”. Who goes first, in which time horizons? What are the barriers? How to overcome them?
The world cannot simply commit to phasing out fossil fuels and expect every country to come up voluntarily with a plan on how to constrain its own fossil industries – especially considering the record profits of oil companies this decade. To be implemented, the Dubai text needs to be fleshed out. In short, it needs a COP decision.
What progress on energy at COP30 looks like
To be worthy of its historic billing, COP30 must deliver a formal outcome that accelerates the energy transition and implementation of the first Global Stocktake. There are calls to restrict the energy transition to the Action Agenda, where voluntary commitments are made (and as easily forgotten). This is not nearly enough.
Whether through a mandated process like the UAE Dialogue or a clear-eyed cover decision, COP30 must send a clear political signal and accelerate the energy transition and GST implementation. Here, the COP30 Presidency holds the pen – and the political responsibility – to secure a meaningful outcome on the energy transition that doesn’t tiptoe around hard choices.
What’s more, the COP30 leader-level moment must reinforce and accelerate commitments to triple renewable energy capacity, double energy efficiency, and transition unambiguously away from fossil fuels.
Brazil is well-positioned to lead a dialogue on protecting biodiverse areas from fossil fuel exploration and to initiate discussions on fossil fuel phaseout timelines, as indicated in its NDC. These deliberations should also lead to mandating the tracking of the transition away from fossil fuels and/or setting quantified goals for cutting fossil fuels, e.g. by a reduction goal in their share of the global energy mix by 2030.
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But Brazil can’t go it alone. Other countries also need to step up and put all their heart and diplomatic creativity to work. We are looking at you, Europe, whose leadership has been faltering.
In the case of the African Group of Negotiators, notably the fairly progressive position of the least developed countries (LDCs) has not always been represented by group negotiators on the topics of mitigation (emissions reductions) and fossil fuels.
There is a need to recreate the alliance that led to the successful Dubai outcome, while listening to the concerns of other countries that do not have the fiscal space to transition, in Africa in particular, or are concerned about meeting development needs, as in Asia.
In the coming weeks, two key moments for climate diplomacy shall test the will of the world to deal with the elephant in the room. This week, ministers and heads of delegation have gathered in Copenhagen to find political common ground for Belém. In June, technical UN negotiations for COP30 will take place in Bonn. At both meetings, fossil fuels need to be part of the conversation. We don’t have another 30 years to waste.
The post COP30 must heed the elephant in the room: fossil fuels appeared first on Climate Home News.
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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.
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