Welcome to Carbon Brief’s Cropped.
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.
Snapshot
At the UN general assembly in New York, climate change was one of the main agenda items, with the secretary general convening the first-ever “climate ambition” summit.
As part of a new week-long series, Carbon Brief examined the ins and outs of carbon-offsetting.
A landmark Brazil supreme court ruling on land rights was widely hailed as a “great victory for Indigenous peoples”.
Key developments
UN’s first-ever ‘climate ambition’ summit
‘DANGEROUS AND UNSTABLE’: As part of the UN general assembly in New York, secretary-general António Guterres convened the first-ever “climate ambition” summit, inviting 34 leaders to speak “in recognition of their strong action on climate change”, notably omitting the US, UK, China, India and COP28 hosts the United Arab Emirates, Reuters reported. At the summit, Guterres warned that society was moving “towards a dangerous and unstable world”, citing “distraught farmers watching crops carried away by floods” as one of the “horrendous effects” of unabated fossil-fuel use, according to Politico. Dennis Francis, a diplomat from Trinidad and Tobago, warned the summit of “potential catastrophe” due to sea level rise, adding that “fertile river deltas like the Mississippi, Mekong and Nile – the world’s breadbaskets – are sinking”, a UN News story said.
AMBITION AND ASSISTANCE: Brazil “brought the biggest news to the table” at the summit, Climate Home News wrote, announcing its plan to “undo former president Jair Bolsonaro’s cuts to its climate ambition and strengthen its targets further”. The country now plans to cut emissions by 48% by 2025 and 53% by 2030. Meanwhile, leaders from several island nations castigated rich countries at the general assembly, with Marshall Islands president David Kabua calling for “the establishment of an international financing facility to assist small island and low-lying atoll nations facing natural disasters”, according to a separate Reuters piece. Another event at the general assembly was the first-ever meeting of the Commonwealth environment and climate ministers. At the meeting, the ministers “noted the role of ecosystem-based approaches, ocean action, land restoration and food-systems transformations in climate resilience and sustainable development”, said a press release from the Commonwealth.
HIGH-SEAS SIGNATORIES: Also at the general assembly, 76 nations and the EU signed the high-seas treaty, “signalling interest in ratifying the agreement designed to protect marine biodiversity in international waters”, Mongabay said. The signing marks a “significant step” towards conserving the high seas, which make up around two-thirds of the world’s oceans, the outlet added. Each country must now ratify the treaty according to its own procedures; once 60 nations have done so, the treaty can finally come into force. The Pacific Islands News Association quoted Pacific Ocean commissioner Dr Filimon Manoni, who said that “to be truly paradigm-shifting, we must aim towards universal participation” in the treaty.
Carbon offsets series
NEW SERIES: Carbon Brief examined the topic of carbon-offsetting in a new week-long series of articles delving into the impact, history and controversies of offsets. As part of the series, Aruna Chandrasekhar wrote an in-depth Q&A on ‘biodiversity offsets’, which have been promoted as one of the key ways to support nature conservation and its goals. Biodiversity-offsetting “sits at the heart” of tensions between biodiversity-rich developing countries demanding more public finance and “debt forgiveness” to help them meet biodiversity targets and rich countries rolling out new “nature markets”. The piece discussed the history, concerns and use of these offsets.
ALL THINGS OFFSETS: In the main article of the series, Carbon Brief examined all aspects of carbon-offsetting. The outlet’s international team of journalists explained what offsets are, how they are used by businesses and nations and why they can be a problematic climate solution. It also explored whether the carbon-offsetting system, which one expert described as “deeply broken”, could ever be effectively reformed. This infographic further explained how offsets work by following the journey of a fictional carbon offset purchased on the voluntary market. Elsewhere, a recent report found that rainforest conservation offset projects are not suitable and a different approach should be used to safeguard critical ecosystems, according to the Guardian.
CLOSER LOOK: In a separate Carbon Brief piece, Daisy Dunne and Yanine Quiroz trawled through news stories and investigations into individual carbon-offset projects to create a detailed map showing the global scale of these initiatives. They found that 70% of the articles examined showed evidence of the projects causing harm to Indigenous peoples and local communities. Almost half of the reports found evidence of offset projects overstating their ability to reduce emissions. To round out the week of reporting, Carbon Brief is hosting a free webinar at 3pm UK time tomorrow, Thursday 28 September, where a group of expert panellists will discuss how carbon-offsetting could be reformed. Click here to register.
Brazil Indigenous victory
LAND RIGHTS: Brazil’s supreme court ruled against a “highly controversial time-frame proposal” that would have “stripped Indigenous rights” to land, according to Mongabay. Indigenous chief Arakuã Pataxó told the outlet: “Without a doubt this is a great victory for Indigenous peoples.” The “time-frame thesis”, if approved, would have prevented Indigenous claims to traditional lands that they had not physically occupied before 5 October 1988, when Brazil’s constitution was enacted. Brazil Reports said this would have “overlooked that during Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-85), many Indigenous peoples were persecuted and forced from their lands”, alongside the “obvious challenges” in obtaining proof of land occupation.
TENSIONS RUN ON: The ruling will “reshape the way the state approaches Indigenous land rights in Brazil”, according to the Guardian, setting a precedent that will have “widespread implications for all land-boundary disputes in Brazil”. However, the newspaper said that the ruling will not fully solve long-standing tensions around land conflicts. Indigenous leaders told the newspaper that they remain “anxious about attacks by non-Indigenous tenants”. Farmers said they are also worried about potential conflicts as “frictions emerge when Indigenous ranchers and farmers live in the same region”, the piece noted.
NEW DEAL: Elsewhere, the Cameroon government reached an agreement with the Indigenous Baka people to provide them with “more access to natural resources in the country’s protected forest areas”, Radio France Internationale reported. This expanded on a 2019 deal that gave Baka communities “unfettered access” to two national parks in the south-east of the country, the radio network said. The “original forest dwellers” will now have access to another national park and a wildlife reserve. The country’s minister of forestry and wildlife, Jules Doret Ndongo, said this is “another milestone moment in our efforts to promote the rights of Indigenous people and local communities in the preservation of biodiversity”.
News and views
AG EMERGENCY: Uruguay has extended its agricultural state of emergency until at least the end of the year. The declaration encompasses “livestock, dairy, horticulture, fruit, agriculture, beekeeping, poultry and forestry”, according to the South American news agency MercoPress. The initial declaration was signed on 25 October 2022 due to ongoing drought in much of the country. Uruguayan livestock minister Fernando Mattos said that the country is “on the way to normal rainfall, [but] there is still a long way to go to recover and reach the ideal point”. MercoPress added that the onset of El Niño “is likely to bring above-average rainfall”.
BURNED OUT: Canada’s record-breaking wildfire season – with more than 200 fires still burning across the country – have turned its “vast forests from carbon sink into super-emitter”, the Guardian wrote. The blazes have emitted around 2bn tonnes of CO2, or “triple the country’s annual carbon footprint”, the newspaper said. It added: “Decades of large wildfire and the mass die-off of trees from insects transformed the boreal from carbon sink to source.” Carbon Brief recently attended a US National Academies workshop on measuring greenhouse gas emissions from wildland fires, where experts noted that such emissions are “considered natural and, therefore, are not included in national greenhouse gas inventories”.
FRAUGHT FARM BILL: With the possibility of a US government shutdown looming, “it will be difficult or even impossible for Congress to enact a new farm bill”, Ag Insider wrote. The current bill expires on 30 September – the same day that the government is slated to shut down, although funding for many programmes follows a separate schedule. “There is little peril until dairy subsidies terminate on 31 December,” according to a separate Ag Insider article, which noted that December “is the new target” for the bill’s passage. The farm bill is projected to contain more than $1.5tn of spending, including on nutrition programmes, international aid, conservation work and crop subsidies.
SOMETHING IN THE WATER: The biggest freshwater lake in Ireland and Britain has hit a “crisis point” due to toxic blue-green algae, the Irish Times reported. This cyanobacteria – a type of bacteria that can photosynthesise – has made Lough Neagh “dangerous to anyone or anything that enters the water”, the newspaper added. The “underpinning drivers” of the issue, according to the Northern Ireland department of environment, include “excess nutrients from agricultural and wastewater systems” along with “climate change and the associated weather patterns, with the very warm June, followed by the wet July and August”. The Social Democratic and Labour party launched a motion to recall the devolved government in Northern Ireland, which has been at a standstill since last year, to discuss the “ecological crisis” on Lough Neagh, BBC News said.
COP28 GREENWASHING: DeSmog released a guide to the “greenwashing” terms that “the world’s largest food and farming companies will be using to sway debates” at COP28 in Dubai. Making the list are “regenerative agriculture”, which the outlet wrote “has ‘limited potential’ to mitigate climate change”; “sustainable intensification”, which is “the idea that industrial farming can continue to grow…but can do so while causing less damage”; and “nature-based solutions”, which DeSmog wrote is likely to be invoked during negotiations around the global carbon-credit market. In a separate piece, DeSmog examined the “Pathways to Dairy Net-Zero” group, a collaboration between the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and several other “international groups connected to the dairy industry” that focuses on climate change “solutions that can serve the industry”. DeSmog argued that its focus on improving “efficiency”, rather than reducing pollution, “has only enabled it to produce more milk – and with it, more emissions”.
KIWI FARMERS: “Rural voter anger” towards policies to tackle climate change and reduce emissions may bolster a “return of right-wing parties to power” during an upcoming general election in New Zealand, according to Reuters. Rural voters, who had a “flirtation” with the country’s Labour party in 2020, are looking to conservative candidates on 14 October to “unwind or delay” policies such as “planting pine forests on grazing land and taxing livestock methane burps”. Farmers have staged several protests in the past two years against these regulations, Reuters noted. Similar protests in the Netherlands saw a farmers’ party winning “sufficient support to shake up the country’s senate”, the newswire said, acquiring 16 of the 75 senate seats.
Watch, read, listen
SPROUTING: For Hawai’i Magazine, Kevin Allen wrote about the 150-year-old Lahaina Banyan Tree, which is acting as a “ray of hope” for locals devastated by last month’s Maui wildfires.
INCLUSIVE AG: In the Kathmandu Post, two researchers discussed the “multifaceted challenges” facing the agriculture sector in the mid-hills of Nepal, and how they can be addressed through gender-inclusive policies.
BIODIVERSITY CHATS: BBC Sounds podcast, the Life Scientific, spoke to Alexandre Antonelli, the director of science at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, about his “life spent in the wild”.
CHARRED: A piece by Max Graham in Grist looked at whether the production of biochar – described as a “focal point” in efforts to turn agriculture into a climate solution – can be scaled up.
New science
Earthworms contribute significantly to global food production
Nature Communications
New research found that earthworms contribute to around 6.5% of the world’s grain production. Researchers looked at maps of earthworm abundance, soil properties and crop yields alongside earthworm-yield responses to estimate the impact these invertebrates have on the global production of key crops. They found that impacts were “especially notable” in the global south – for example, earthworms contributed to 10% of overall grain production in sub-Saharan Africa. The scientists concluded that while the earthworm impact is important, they “suspect that other soil biota may be equally as important and that further study is needed”.
Intentional creation of carbon-rich dark earth soils in the Amazon
Science Advances
Ancient peoples in the Amazon used soil management practices to improve soil fertility and crop productivity, according to a new study. Researchers compared modern fertile soil called “dark earth” to that of ancient times, then used studies of present-day Indigenous practices to propose a model of how dark earth may have formed previously. They found that the “ancient and modern dark earth deposits have similar compositions and spatial distributions”, indicating that the former may have also been intentionally cultivated by Indigenous peoples of the time. The researchers wrote that the study “highlight[s] the value of Indigenous knowledge for sustainable rainforest management”.
Likely impacts of the 2022 heatwave on India’s wheat production
Environmental Research Letters
The spring 2022 heatwave in India reduced wheat production in some regions by up to 15% compared to a normal year, a new study found. The researchers built a statistical model using weather and wheat-production data from 1967-2018 across five Indian states that together produce around 90% of the country’s wheat. The results showed that the heatwave reduced wheat yields by 4.5% on a national scale. The likelihood and intensity of heatwaves are due to continue as a result of climate change, the researchers wrote, so “timely forecasts of their impacts on agriculture are critical”.
In the diary
- 29 September: UN International day of awareness on food loss and waste reduction
- 2-6 October: FAO 30th session of the Asia-Pacific Forestry Commission | Sydney
- 3-6 October: EUROPARC conference 2023 | Leeuwarden, Netherlands
- 3-6 October: UNEP Fifth forum of ministers and environment authorities of Asia Pacific | Colombo, Sri Lanka
- 4-5 October: FAO Rome water dialogues | Rome
- 9-13 October: UNEP Final intergovernmental consultations on nature-based solutions | Nairobi
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 27 September 2023: UN’s ‘climate ambition’ summit; Carbon offsets series; Brazil Indigenous victory appeared first on Carbon Brief.
The United Nations Secretary-General and foreign ministers from the UK, France and Spain have blamed the deadly wildfires engulfing Europe on climate change, using the disaster to renew calls for faster cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.
António Guterres told journalists on Friday that the “climate crisis is in overdrive”, adding that global heat seen so far is just a “warm up act” as a phenomenon known as El Niño intensifies “adding fuel to a planet already on fire”.
A new World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) report published on Friday predicts that the weather pattern will grow into a “strong event” between now and October, increasing the risk of higher than normal temperatures across much of the world and disrupted rainfalls.
“That risks shattering every seasonal record – and driving even more severe effects worldwide,” Guterres said.
El Niño builds on top of an already warming world, driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels. A WMO scientist, who did not want to be named, told journalists that all the heatwaves and other climate impacts seen so far this year are “before the effects of El Niño are really kicking in at a global scale”.
Fossil fuellling the fires
Fires have broken out across much of Europe but are threatening the most people in the south-west of France near Bordeaux and in Central Spain near Madrid. Nearly a quarter of a million people have been evacuated in France with hundreds of homes destroyed while in Spain 80,000 people have had to leave their homes and at least 13 died in one village.
A scientific study published on Friday by the World Weather Attribution group found that man-made climate change made deadly fires in France twice as likely and those in Spain twenty times more likely. Smaller fires in the UK were not analysed by the study.
UN Climate Change leader Simon Stiell blamed fossil fuels for the fires, as well as storms in Chile and heatwaves in North America and Japan in recent weeks. “The climate alarm is blaring”, he said on Wednesday.
Guterres criticised new fossil fuel production projects and fossil fuel subsidies for causing hardship across the world. Discussing his speech, a senior UN official – who did not want to be named – said the subsidies amounted to trillions of US dollars a year and criticised pension funds and institutional investors, including insurance companies, for continuing to invest in fossil fuel projects.
Asked why world leaders and the public are not prioritising climate action, Guterres said they are distracted by wars in Ukraine, the Middle East, Sudan and elsewhere and sometimes forget “other aspects that are a sometimes even more dangerous threat”.
Also the fossil fuel industry and “some countries” are campaigning to pretend that climate change does not exist, he said, adding that the UN should be more active in “naming the situations as they are and the responsibilties as they are and mobilising the public opinion”.
After meetings in Paris and Madrid earlier in the week, the UK’s new foreign minister Ed Miliband issued joint statements with his French and Spanish counterparts – Jean-Noël Barrot and José Manuel Albares Bueno – calling on the world to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels.
They promised to do more to reduce emissions and protect their people and encouraged other governments to do the same.
The UK-French statement called on governments to publish UN climate plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), which are aligned with the Paris Agreement’s goal to limit global average temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
According to Climate Action Tracker, only three countries – the UK, Nigeria and Norway – have submitted NDCs with 2035 emissions reduction targets which are compatible with 1.5C. Fifty-two countries – including Egypt, Vietnam and Argentina – have yet to submit an NDC at all.
Defending science
Beyond action on emissions, the ministers also intervened in an ongoing dispute over the timing of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC)’s next flagship assessment.
Miliband and Barrot’s statement said they “underline the importance” of scientific report feeding into governments’ next global stocktake of progress on climate action in two years’ time, calling it a “critical input” to that process.
The timing of this report has been a contentious issue in government negotiations at the IPCC and at June’s climate talks in Bonn. While a group of nations calling themselves the “friends of science” want the report before the stocktake, others like Saudi Arabia and India have argued that this would make the report of a worse quality and less inclusive of developing countries’ scientists.
Science ‘under attack’ from fossil fuel interests at UN climate talks
The UK-Spanish statement weighed in less explicitly on this issue but said that they “recall the importance of scientific evidence and acknowledge the work of the IPCC in this respect.”
The British and French ministers said they would seek to accelerate reductions of emissions in methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas, at COP31 in November. They encouraged governments “to work jointly to develop a marketplace for fossil fuels with near-zero methane intensity.”
Methane leaks from oil, gas and coal production are a major contributor to global warming. Over a 20-year period, methane traps around 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide.
The UK and Spanish statement emphasised the importance of supporting the Global South and underlined the need to mobilise sustainable financing “at scale with the challenge we face”. The previous UK government, in which Miliband was energy minister, cut climate finance to developing countries to pay for increases in military spending.
The UK government led by new Prime Minister Andy Burnham has yet to outline any major changes to climate finance in its two weeks in power but has announced it will convert some finance from grants to loans in order to free up money to subsidise bus travel in England.
More adaptation needed
Guterres said that “it is time to stop treating each disaster as an isolated tragedy and recognise the systemic risk that is unfolding before our eyes.” A recent study found that three-quarters of UK media reports about the British June heatwave did not mention climate change.
As well as reducing emissions, the UN Secretary-General called for measures to adapt vulnerable people to extreme heat. Specifically, he said that buildings should be built and retrofitted for extreme heat and that every city and country should have heat-health action plans and early warning systems. Over 250 cities have joined the UN’s ‘beat the heat’ initiative, he said.
The Portuguese diplomat called for governments and employers to do more to protect their workers from heat, criticising global fashion brands for not setting heat standards for the factories that supply them. “No one should have to risk their life to earn a living,” he said.
The post UN chief warns climate crisis “in overdrive” as El Niño threatens to fuel the fire appeared first on Climate Home News.
UN chief warns climate crisis “in overdrive” as El Niño threatens to fuel the fire
Climate Change
‘Ride the wave of momentum’: Australia announces once-in-a-decade Marine Parks Network review
In response to the federal government announcing its once-in-a-decade review of Australia’s Marine Parks Network, the following lines can be attributed to Elle Lawless, Senior Campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific:
“Greenpeace Australia Pacific welcomes today’s announcement that the Albanese Government will review Australia’s Commonwealth Marine Parks Network. This is a rare, once-in-a-decade opportunity to strengthen our marine parks and ban industrial fishing in Australia’s marine protected areas.
“Australians would be appalled to know that more than half of Australia’s Marine Parks Network currently allows for extractive industries, like longlining, bottom trawling and oil and gas mining. These so-called ‘protected’ areas were designed to safeguard our beloved ocean wildlife and underwater ecosystems – that is what Australians expect. Damaging industrial industries should not be given a free pass to trawl, fish, drill or extract from our marine parks.”
“With the first Ocean COP just around the corner, and off the back of Australia’s move to ratify the Global Ocean Treaty earlier this year, the Australian government has a unique opportunity to ride the wave of this momentum and solidify itself as a true global ocean leader.
“Greenpeace Australia Pacific is calling for industrial activities to be banned from our protected waters and for at least 30% of Australia’s ocean to be protected as ocean sanctuaries. This review presents a rare opportunity to create more ocean sanctuaries, true blue havens where ocean life can recover, thrive and repopulate the surrounding waters.”
—ENDS—
‘Ride the wave of momentum’: Australia announces once-in-a-decade Marine Parks Network review
In recent days, prominent climate sceptics and rightwing commentators have shared charts on social media incorrectly implying that Europe is having its “quietest” year for wildfires in 2026.
These include Dr Matthew Wielicki, a former University of Alabama geochemist and self-described “professor in exile”, who was recently appointed by the Trump administration to lead the US Global Change Research Program.
However, these charts paint a misleading picture as they are skewed by encompassing the entirety of Russia in the data – including the vast plains of Siberia.
These charts also use data that include fires that are deliberately lit to manage cropland, which is a declining practice across much of Europe.
In this factcheck, Carbon Brief shows that the area burned by wildfires across the European Union in 2026 is second only to 2022 for this time of year.
The latest data from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) also shows that France has set a new modern record for area burned and Spain’s wildfire season is among the worst on record.
The fires have displaced more than a third of a million people across south-western Europe, while an impending heatwave has also raised fears of the fires worsening in the coming days.
‘Quietest year’
On 27 July, as wildfires raged across multiple European countries, former Conservative peer and climate-sceptic commentator Matt Ridley posted on Twitter that “2026 is the quietest year for wildfires in Europe by some distance”.
Ridley, who sits on the academic advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a UK-based climate-sceptic lobby group that refuses to reveal the sources of its funding, was responding to an article by Daily Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley.
Stanley’s column, headlined: “Climate change is real – and the right needs to get serious about it”, warned:
“This is no longer a matter of speculation: the wildfires of Europe, pitiless and persistent, are the way we live now.”
Ridley included a chart from Our World In Data, showing the cumulative area burned by wildfires by week for Europe. The chart puts 2026 as having the smallest area for this time of year in a dataset going back to 2012.
Ridley’s post was widely shared by prominent rightwing figures – including Richard Tice, deputy leader of the hard-right, climate-sceptic Reform UK party, former Conservative cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg and multiple commentators.
Separately, Wielicki also shared a chart on Twitter to imply that wildfires in Europe are declining. Wielicki has previously claimed that the “science is not settled on climate change”.
The charts posted by Ridley and Wielicki both use data from the Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS). The GWIS category for “Europe” encompasses all the countries on the continent and includes the whole of Russia.
As a result, Russia accounts for about 74% of the area included in the GWIS definition of “Europe”.
Wildfires in Russia typically account for 80-90% of the burned area in the GWIS Europe dataset. In 2026, fires in Russia are substantially below average. Therefore, including Russia in this comparison creates the false impression that wildfire activity across Europe is unusually low.
Dr Calum Cunningham, a research fellow at the University of Tasmania’s Fire Centre, says that such claims are “highly misleading”, noting that “they rely on aggregating fire activity across an enormous and climatically diverse region”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“A relatively quiet season in Russia can easily mask an exceptionally active season in France or Spain. If the analysis is focused on the regions actually experiencing the current fires, the picture is very different.
“The reality is that western Europe has experienced an extraordinary sequence of climate conditions this year.”
In contrast, the EFFIS provides a subset of wildfire data specifically for the area covered by the 27 nations of the EU, which, therefore, excludes Russia.
Another difference between the two datasets is that GWIS monitors all fires – including those on agricultural land that are intentionally set alight. The burned area as measured by GWIS contains significant cropland area.
By contrast, EFFIS uses land-cover data and other information to filter specifically for forest fires.
Looking at the EU-only data from EFFIS reveals that Europe is far from having its “quietest” year. The bloc’s burned area, as of 29 July, is almost 435,000 hectares (ha) – second only to 2022 for this time of year.
Notably, Wielicki has actually continued to post charts based on GWIS data, even after acknowledging that “includ[ing] all of Russia, including vast areas of Siberia…isn’t a good proxy for Europe”.
French fires
Even looking at EU-wide data misses the scale of this year’s wildfires for some individual countries.
The chart below shows the surge in burned area in France since mid-July.
For much of the first half of the year, the country was having a wildfire season that was only slightly above average in terms of total burned area. However, a notable uptick began in the first week of July.
The third week of the month saw France break its previous cumulative annual record by more than 19,000ha. That gap has widened as the fires continue to burn; as of 29 July, the cumulative burned area in France during 2026 was nearly 24,700ha above the previous record.
The fires in France follow a record-breaking June heatwave that “dried out vegetation across the region, allowing fires to spread quickly”, wrote the New York Times.
On 27 July, French president Emmanuel Macron called a “crisis cabinet meeting” in order to address the fires “ravaging several areas of south-west France”, said France 24.
More than 220,000 people have been evacuated due to the Gironde fire, west of Bordeaux, in “what may be France’s largest peacetime evacuation”, reported the Associated Press.
In the Conversation, Cunningham and two other University of Tasmania researchers write that evacuation orders “protec[t] human lives, but makes it more likely houses and other structures will burn if there’s no one to defend them”. They add:
“There is little doubt climate change has made France and Spain’s wildfires worse. They represent yet another reason to redouble our efforts to tackle climate change and stabilise our climate.”
Central Spain scorched
While Spain’s fire season has not broken records in the same way that France’s has, it is on track to be among the worst since EFFIS began reporting data in 2006.
The chart below shows the rapid increase in burned area in Spain since 8 July. The latest data from EFFIS reveal that, as of 29 July, Spain has almost matched its previous record at this point in the year. It is also nearly five times the average area burned for this time of year.
In Spain, the wildfires have been concentrated in the central part of the country, near Madrid.
BBC News reported that the fires outside the capital have burned “an area more than twice as large as the city itself”.
Nearly 90,000 people were forced from their homes in central Spain by the fires, said the Associated Press.
Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s prime minister, called the fires a “painful expression” of climate change.
Meanwhile, the UK, French and Spanish governments have issued joint statements this week in response to the fires. The UK/Spain statement begins:
“This summer’s wildfires demonstrated that climate change was now a national security emergency facing Europe and threatening our way of life.”
Related
The post Factcheck: No, Europe is not having its ‘quietest’ year for wildfires appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Factcheck: No, Europe is not having its ‘quietest’ year for wildfires
-
Climate Change12 months ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
-
Greenhouse Gases12 months ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
-
Greenhouse Gases2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
-
Climate Change2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
-
Climate Change2 years ago
Bill Discounting Climate Change in Florida’s Energy Policy Awaits DeSantis’ Approval
-
Renewable Energy9 months agoSending Progressive Philanthropist George Soros to Prison?
-
Carbon Footprint2 years agoUS SEC’s Climate Disclosure Rules Spur Renewed Interest in Carbon Credits
-
Greenhouse Gases1 year ago
嘉宾来稿：探究火山喷发如何影响气候预测