We handpick and explain the most important stories at the intersection of climate, land, food and nature over the past fortnight.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s fortnightly Cropped email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
Key developments
Roadless rule
ROADLESS RULE NO MORE: The US agriculture department announced last week that it plans to “rescind a decades-old rule that protects 58.5m acres [236,741km2] of national forestland from road construction and timber harvesting”, the Los Angeles Times reported. The “Roadless Rule” has been in place since 2001 and “established lasting protection for specific wilderness areas within the national forests”, the outlet continued. US agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins called the rule “outdated”, while environmental groups “condemned the decision and vowed to take the administration to court”, according to the Washington Post.
PUBLIC LANDS PRESSURE: Amid Republican opposition, Utah senator Mike Lee pulled his “controversial proposal” to sell off public lands for housing developments from the “sprawling” domestic policy bill known as the “Big Beautiful Bill”, the Salt Lake Tribune reported. According to Politico, Lee blamed “misinformation” for the provision’s lack of support, even though, “in reality, he faced stiff opposition from western Republicans from states with large public land holdings”. On Tuesday, the Senate “narrowly approved” the bill, which now has to return to the House – where “many members have balked at the Senate’s changes to the measure” – for further approval, the Washington Post said.
BACK ONLINE: The Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) is back online following a “months-long shutdown” due to the Trump administration’s “slash[ing]” of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) budget, Devex reported. The publication called the site’s restoration a “welcome development for aid agencies around the world” and noted that FEWS NET is “widely regarded as the world’s most reliable early-warning system for food insecurity”. Updated data is “expected to be available by October 2025”, said a spokesperson for FEWS NET.
Bonn to Belém
FOOD-CLIMATE NEXUS: While “agenda fights”, finance and threats to multilateralism dominated the narrative at Bonn climate talks that concluded last week, food discussions were “potentially productive”, observers told Carbon Brief. The meeting featured the first of two workshops under the Sharm-el-Sheikh joint work on climate action, agriculture and food security – the only dedicated forum for agriculture in UN climate talks. Action Aid’s Teresa Anderson told Carbon Brief: “Agriculture negotiations are now reaping the bitter harvest from Baku. After initial resistance, negotiations resulted in more targeted and potentially useful guidance to at least help identify finance gaps in agriculture.”
SECOND CHANCES: A Down to Earth comment by Indian agricultural economist Smita Sirohi described the workshop as “a “second chance to reframe the debate” around agriculture and climate to ensure more focus on adaptation, not just mitigation. While countries shared their experiences with “systemic and holistic approaches” to integrating climate into national food plans, finance for these approaches was still a sticking point. Anderson added that many governments “[came] to the conclusion that agroecology is the most effective way to achieve multiple climate and development goals”. (For more, read Carbon Brief’s in-depth summary of the meeting.)
ENDS WITHOUT MEANS: Adaptation was at the forefront in Bonn. Before the start of the conference, countries “miraculously” narrowed down a list of “indicators” for the global goal on adaptation (GGA) from 9,000 to 490. Key divisions emerged between developed and developing countries on whether to include indicators on “means of implementation” (MOI) – shorthand for finance – as well as language around “transformational” adaptation. The final text invited experts to continue refining GGA indicators to a manageable 100, it included MOI indicators that developing countries viewed as a win.
FOREST FUND: More countries and private-sector groups supported Brazil’s Tropical Forest Forever Fund during London Climate Action Week, a statement said, but there is currently no funding estimate available ahead of its launch at COP30. Brazil is aiming for “$4-5bn per year for the investment in forests, 20% of that being destined for Indigenous [peoples] and local communities”, the country’s environment and climate minister, Marina Silva, told Carbon Brief at an event last week at the Brazilian embassy in London. Silva added: “It is not donation, it is not charity…We can have a fund that will be remunerating those who protect their forests – be they communities or private owners.” Elsewhere, Brazil and the UN held the first “global ethical stocktake” in London to hear from civil society before COP30.
Spotlight
How extreme weather is impacting India’s ‘food in 10 minutes’ delivery drivers
This week, Cropped’s Mumbai-based reporter Aruna Chandrasekhar spoke to a union leader fighting to hold delivery-app companies accountable for protecting millions of India’s food delivery workers from extreme weather.
Driven by increasing urbanisation, smartphone usage and home-based lifestyles further entrenched by the Covid-19 pandemic, food delivery platforms continue to boom in India.
On any given waterlogged day of the week, Mumbai residents can order iPhone chargers with their okra, or apples from New Zealand, even well after midnight.
But India’s 7.7m delivery workers are having to brave extreme heat and high water in India’s crowded cities – whether on electric mopeds, cycles or horseback – to bring India such items direct to the doorstep.
It begs the question: are food delivery platforms effectively outsourcing climate adaptation to informal gig workers with fewer social protections?
A Nature Cities study published in January found a “significant surge” in lunchtime orders on the hottest days of the year in China’s cities, “reveal[ing] the transfer of heat exposure” from consumers to delivery riders.
Similarly, a study published in Sage last week found that digital technologies are “reshaping food practices in urban India in ways that reinforce existing caste, class and gender hierarchies”.
As temperatures touched 44C this summer, the Telangana state gig and platform workers union (TGPWU) urged citizens to offer a “glass of water” to the thousands of delivery workers battling extreme heat to bring them their food.
According to the International Labour Organisation, delivery workers in India can work up to 82 hours a week, with apps increasingly racing to offer consumers delivery in under 10 minutes.
“Is 10-minute delivery even possible? Can we look at humans as humans and not as robots?” says Shaik Salauddin, TGPWU founder and general secretary of the Indian Federation of App-Based Transport Workers (IFAT), speaking to Carbon Brief. He continues:
“As unions, we can tell workers to rest, but who’s going to pay for their daily bread? But if the aggregators are telling workers to carry hot parcels of biriyani in 46C, bag between their shoulders, wearing a dark uniform: can you imagine the heat and mental stress? And then buildings with 10-15 floors don’t give them access to the lift, when they have less than 10 minutes to deliver.”
Salauddin, who worked as a taxi driver for 10 years, has been fighting for the impact of extreme weather on food delivery workers to be better recognised. Two weeks ago – well into the monsoon – India’s National Disaster Management issued guidelines to recognise delivery workers “as one of the most vulnerable” to heatwaves and to create separate sections for informal workers in city and state heat action plans.
This week, Salauddin is sending out extreme rain alerts on WhatsApp and Telegram. He tells Carbon Brief that he is “tired of the PR” and “superhero” praise heaped on riders risking their lives in record floods by the same delivery platforms that offer little accountability or transparency. He says:
“I tell workers there’s a red alert for extreme rain, open drains are overflowing, your EVs won’t make it, please don’t go out there. In 10 minutes, the apps say: ‘Please come online, we’ll pay you 30% extra as part of rain mode.’ Who do I fight with now?”
To Salauddin, climate change and “just transition” are “big words” that have to be linked to livelihoods and need a far-reaching vision: whether it is subsidies for marginalised castes to buy or retrofit EVs, more charging stations, or even just restrooms for exhausted workers. Governments must engage with unions every three months, he says, not just at the height of summer or monsoon. With the exception of a few states, India’s many gig workers are not formally recognised for social security benefits.
The biggest change, Salauddin says, must come from food delivery apps themselves. He concludes:
“Simply saying that ‘we’re a broker between companies and people, we take our commission and nothing else’ is not a good model. They need to take responsibility for livelihoods, for climate impacts and their emissions. In our nature of work, we should be looking at the future of work – and the future is already here.”
News and views
COUNTING CONTROVERSY: The European climate commissioner, Wopke Hoekstra, may allow EU member states to “count controversial carbon credits from developing countries towards their climate targets”, the Guardian reported. Hoekstra told the outlet that “developing countries were keen to gain EU financing through carbon credits” and that the “possibility of allowing this was ‘potentially very attractive’”. However, the Guardian noted, “green groups are furious” and insist that the EU must “meet its targets domestically”, without the use of overseas carbon offsets.
FUELLING FOOD: Around 40% of petrochemicals are used by food systems around the world, mostly through synthetic fertilisers and plastic packaging, according to a new report. The research, from the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food), noted that food production and processing accounts for at least 15% of global fossil-fuel use. Action on food systems is “missing” from global agreements to transition away from fossil fuels, the report said. IPES-Food expert, Prof Raj Patel, said in a statement: “Delinking food from fossil fuels has never been more critical to stabilise food prices and ensure people can access food.”
PLANT FUEL: Efforts are underway in Chad to switch to “green charcoal” – a fuel made from plant waste, such as sesame stalks or palm fronds – to prevent further “rampant deforestation”, Agence France-Presse reported. The central African country has lost more than 90% of its forest cover since the 1970s and is “steadily turning to desert”, the newswire said. “Green charcoal” is intended for household uses, such as cooking, as an alternative to cut-down trees. An initiative to produce this fuel, which allegedly emits less CO2 than ordinary charcoal when burned, is backed by the World Bank and the UN refugee agency, added AFP.
G&T DANGER: “Volatile” weather, made “more likely by climate breakdown”, may impact the flavour of juniper berries – the “key botanical” in gin – according to a new study covered by the Guardian. The research, published in the Journal of the Institute of Brewing, looked at berries from seven European countries taken across different harvests. “A wet harvest year can reduce the total volatile compounds in juniper by about 12% compared to a dry year. This has direct implications for the sensory characteristics that make gin taste like gin,” the lead study author Dr Matthew Pauley, an assistant professor at Heriot-Watt University, told the newspaper.
TREE TROUBLE: The UK missed its tree-planting targets by an area of forest equivalent to the size of the Isle of Wight over the past five years, according to Carbon Brief analysis. New figures showed that 15,700 hectares of trees were planted across the UK in the last year – roughly half of the annual 30,000 hectare target set by the previous government. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have repeatedly not met national targets since 2020, previous data showed. These missed goals amount to more than 36,000 hectares of unplanted forest.
ASIA IMPACTED: According to the World Meteorological Organisation’s State of Climate in Asia 2024 report released last week, Asia is warming twice as fast as the global average, reported the Times of India. Extreme summer heat and reduced winter snowfall “accelerated glacier mass loss” in 23 of 24 glaciers in the central Himalayas and Tian Shan, Down to Earth wrote, with drought in China affecting more than 4.8 million people. Per the report, marine heatwaves “gripped a record area of the ocean”. The north Bay of Bengal region recorded the “second fastest rate” of sea level rise globally after the South China Sea, wrote the New Indian Express.
Watch, read, listen
BLEACHING POINT: Kenyan marine ecologist Dr David Obura spoke to the Guardian about coral reefs that are “flickering out across the world”.
SHADOWY BROKER: The Financial Times looked at the life and death of Samuele Landi, an Italian “telecoms entrepreneur turned fraudster” and carbon-credits broker.
HORNBILL HOUR: The Some Like it Wild Podcast spoke to Dr Aparajita Datta about her research on the “secret life” of hornbills and valuing community knowledge in conservation research.
WOMEN’S WORK: For LitHub, Dr Sarah Boon wrote about “trailblaz[ing]” women scientists who carried out fieldwork in the 1900s.
New science
- A new study in Science Advances found that more than half of existing sea turtle hotspots “may disappear by 2050, with many new habitats in high shipping intensity areas” under a high-emissions scenario. “Alarmingly”, the authors added, only 23% of these hotspots are conserved under current marine protected areas.
- According to new research in Nature Climate Change, protecting “existing young secondary forests” can remove eight times more carbon per hectare than new tree plantations.
- A new study, published in Nature and covered by Carbon Brief, found that six staple crops will face “substantial” yield losses under future climate change – even when accounting for farmers’ adaptation efforts.
In the diary
- 7-25 July: Second part of the 30th annual session of the International Seabed Authority (ISA) | Kingston, Jamaica
- 7-11 July: Final meeting of the working group on access and benefit-sharing in the Plant Treaty | Lima, Peru
- 14-23 July: High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development 2025 (HLPF) | New York City
- 23-31 July: Ramsar Convention on Wetlands COP15 | Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe
Cropped is researched and written by Dr Giuliana Viglione, Aruna Chandrasekhar, Daisy Dunne, Orla Dwyer and Yanine Quiroz. Please send tips and feedback to cropped@carbonbrief.org
The post Cropped 2 July 2025: US public lands under attack; How India’s gig workers are suffering under climate change; Bonn to Belém appeared first on Carbon Brief.
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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