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.
Key developments
The road to COP28
PROGRESS ON PLEDGES: Climate Home News examined the progress towards the climate pledges made at COP26 in Glasgow two years ago. Nearly 50 additional countries have signed a pledge to reduce their methane emissions by 30% by 2030, bringing the total to 150 countries. However, these countries only constitute half of global methane emissions and “under current trajectories, total human-made methane emissions could rise by up to 13%” over 2020-30. Another major pledge in Glasgow was the forest pledge to halt and reverse deforestation by 2030, signed by more than 140 countries. Countries “remain off track to reach the goal of the Glasgow pledge”, Climate Home News wrote. In 2022, tree loss was 21% higher than the required level to achieve zero deforestation in seven years, according to an assessment carried out by several non-governmental organisations.
DECARBONISING FOOD: Ahead of COP28, the Global Alliance for the Future of Food and Dalberg Advisors, a global consultancy focused on sustainability, published two reports looking at the links between food systems and fossil fuels. The Alliance called on stakeholders from the food and energy industries to collaborate to break the bond between the food sector and fossil fuels and transform the food sector to a more sustainable one that is in line with the Paris Agreement. One of the reports laid out the relationships between food and energy systems and provided recommendations to decarbonise the food sector. For example, it said, food producers could start reducing their use of fossil-fuel-based agrochemicals and move to agroecological and regenerative systems.
FOOD FOCUS: A group of more than 80 organisations and individuals, including Unilever, WWF and Columbia Climate School, issued a joint open letter addressed to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change to demand that food systems be at the centre of negotiations at COP28, reported the UK trade publication Food Manufacture. The organisations pointed out that joint action is required to solve climate change, biodiversity loss and food insecurity. The signatories also asked that National Adaptation Plans and Nationally Determined Contributions include food systems. The letter argued that doing so will encourage countries to create national policies to reduce food waste and move to more sustainable and healthy diets.
Hidden costs of food systems
HIDDEN FIGURES: The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) found that the “hidden costs” of food systems amount to “at least” $10tn per year, or nearly 10% of total global GDP. The latest edition of its annual State of Food and Agriculture report focused on “true-cost accounting” – tallying up the environmental, health and social costs and benefits of the world’s food systems. According to the FAO, unsustainable food systems are contributing to “climate change, natural resource degradation and the unaffordability of healthy diets”. Based on an assessment of more than 150 countries’ food systems, the report found “that low-income countries bear the highest burden of the hidden costs of agrifood systems relative to national income” – up to one-quarter of their GDP, as compared to just 12% for middle-income countries and less than 8% for high-income countries.
ENVIRONMENTAL UNDERESTIMATE: Of the total sum, more than 70% of the hidden costs are “driven by unhealthy diets”, leading to “non-communicable diseases and causing labour productivity losses”, the FAO wrote in a press release, adding that the costs of these health impacts primarily affected higher-income countries. About 20% of the costs are environmental: greenhouse gas emissions, nitrogen emissions, land-use change and water use. The press release noted that the scale of environmental costs “is probably underestimated due to data limitations”. FAO director-general Qu Dongyu said: “The future of our agrifood systems hinges on our willingness to appreciate all food producers, big or small, to acknowledge these true costs and understand how we all contribute to them and what actions we need to take.” Governments should factor in these true costs “to transform agrifood systems”, the FAO added. Next year’s report will also focus on true-cost accounting, the FAO said.
INTERCONNECTED COSTS: Dr David Laborde, head of agrifood economics at the FAO, told Wired: “With this report, we can put a price tag on these problems [facing our agrifood systems].” Wired wrote that “hidden costs can be interconnected”, using the example of cacao – where farmers in low-income countries “are often paid a pittance for their crops”, while over-consumption of chocolate in higher-income countries can lead to negative health outcomes there. Jack Bobo, the director of the Food Systems Institute at the University of Nottingham, told Wired that the cross-border calculations required for true-cost accounting “can get fiendishly complicated”. Bobo said: “If you export your environmental footprint to the most biodiverse countries on the planet, you may not have a more sustainable system…There’s not one perfect system.”
DRC controversy
OIL AND GAS BLOCKS: A company chosen by the Democratic Republic of the Congo for a “technically complex project” to extract gas from Lake Kivu, a large lake located on the DRC-Rwanda border, did not meet the financial criteria in its proposal, an investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) and Reuters found. Alfajiri Energy, a Canadian start-up, was selected last month to extract methane from Lake Kivu – described as a “killer lake” due to its risk of a toxic, deadly eruption. The DRC’s decision to auction off land for oil and gas exploration, announced last year, has been “plagued with apparent preferential treatment and backroom deals”, TBIJ said.
BIDDING WARS: A 2022 report seen by Reuters and TBIJ said that Alfajiri Energy “lacked vital information, such as a work plan or feasibility study” and scored lowest out of three companies applying for the contract. The same experts involved in this report later made a “remarkable U-turn” in a second report, which “reposition[ed] Alfajiri as the highest-scoring bidder”, TBIJ said. Reuters noted: “The auction, which took place last year, was the first of its kind to be conducted in [the DRC] under a law from 2015 that was designed to promote transparency in the oil and gas sector.”
RESPONSE: Reuters said that the DRC’s hydrocarbons minister, Didier Budimbu, denied any problems with the tender process, adding in a text message: “The process was very transparent and it will remain so. I will make sure of it.” He told TBIJ that he maintains transparent relations with all potential investors in the tendering process, reassuring them that the DRC is “now the destination for those who want to seize the opportunity to do business”. Reuters said the DRC president’s office declined to comment. Alfajiri’s founder and chief executive, Christian Hamuli, called the process “rigorous, transparent and credible”, Reuters said. Hamuli told TBIJ that Alfajiri has “highly qualified and experienced professionals with integrity” who are capable of developing the Lake Kivu project in a secure manner.
THREE BASINS: Elsewhere in Central Africa, tropical forest countries from across three continents agreed to work together to finance and protect their ecosystems, but failed to firm up a unified alliance at a summit in the Republic of the Congo late last month. Carbon Brief reported the key outcomes of the Three Basins Summit, which were described as ”underwhelming” by one observer. The final declaration, agreed between countries located in the tropical forest basins of the Amazon, the Congo and the Borneo-Mekong, “fails to commit to any concrete actions for the protection and restoration of nature”, according to a statement by Greenpeace. But an observer told Carbon Brief it might “inform policies and strategies at COP28”.
News and views
NO OLIVE BRANCH: Some 40,000 olive trees and hundreds of square kilometres of land have been burned in southern Lebanon in “fires caused by Israeli shelling” since last month, Reuters reported. More than 130 fires have been recorded by the agricultural ministry. The olive harvest has not happened yet, meaning that farmers are losing this year’s harvest in addition to the trees themselves. More than 110,000 farmers and growers in Lebanon rely on olive trees for their income, Reuters added. Lebanon’s agricultural minister, Abbas Hajj Hassan, told the newswire: “People are connected to olives spiritually. Our ancestors planted them, and we are losing them today.”
AGREEMENT ON ICE: An international meeting in Tasmania “failed to agree on new conservation areas” for the fragile Antarctic marine environment, the Guardian wrote. The meeting, comprising 26 national governments and the EU, “hear[d] evidence the southern continent is facing a range of crises”, but the Russian delegation “opposed proposals to boost environmental protection”, the newspaper explained. Further debate on the three proposed protected areas has been pushed to next year as a result. The executive director of the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition, Claire Christian, said: “It feels like we are taking one step forward and two steps back on Antarctic marine protection.”
KENYA OFFSETS: Kenya has signed a deal with Blue Carbon, a UAE-based company, that would “concede ‘millions of hectares’ of its territory for the production of carbon credits”, the Middle East Eye reported. This follows a “slew” of similar deals with Liberia, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe, the news site said. Elsewhere, the Guardian reported on allegations of sexual harassment at a leading carbon-offsetting project in southern Kenya, which is used by companies such as Netflix and Shell. A report from two NGOs alleged “extensive sexual abuse, harassment and exploitation between 2011 and 2023” by senior male employees of Wildlife Works, a California-based firm operating the Kasigau Corridor conservation project. In a statement, Wildlife Works’ president, Mike Korchinsky, said the company suspended three people after it became aware of the allegations in August.
BLOW TO FARMERS: Extreme weather events, such as floods, heavy rainfall and hailstorms, have made Italy fall to second place in worldwide wine production, wrote Fortune, with France now in first place. Overall, European wine production fell 5.5% compared with the average production from the last five years, according to the European farming lobby Copa-Cogeca. Meanwhile, in the UK, farmers have warned that potato and cereal crops might be affected by the recent floods caused by Storm Babet in October, reported the Guardian. The newspaper added that farmers’ crops were rotting due to the floods, driving the National Farmers’ Union to call on the government to implement a water strategy to prevent damages.
LATIN AMERICAN DROUGHT: The state of Pará, in northern Brazil, suffered an “unusually fierce dry season” caused by the combination of large-scale cattle farming, climate change and weather events such as El Niño, the Guardian reported. The publication wrote that palm trees “have started to shrivel up and turn brown”, rivers and aquifers are drying, the odour of smoke permeates the air and land-grabbers “are taking advantage of the tinder-dry conditions”. In the state of the Amazonas, also in Brazil, more than 3,000 forest fires were registered over 1-23 October, which has increased the number of respiratory problems, reported Mongabay. At the same time, it is expected that a “severe drought” will reduce daily ship crossings of the Panama Canal and increase shipping costs, according to MercoPress.
DUBIOUS DECLARATION: A new Unearthed investigation found that large EU agribusiness groups are using a “pro-meat manifesto” to lobby senior EU politicians. The “Dublin Declaration” – signed by more than 1,000 scientists and used by trade groups to oppose green policies – was “written, released and promoted by agribusiness consultants”, freedom of information requests revealed. Prof Erik Mathijs told Unearthed the declaration “is actually fairly uncontroversial” in asking that the “social, historical and cultural value” of animal food products be recognised. New York University’s Dr Matthew Hayek told the outlet the declaration was a “hugely misleading endeavour” that “fosters confusion and doubt when there should be none”. The declaration’s organising committee denied that their ties to private organisations was affecting their scientific objectivity.
Watch, read, listen
BANKING ON SEEDS: Indigenous peoples in Brazil are preserving the country’s biodiversity through a seed bank, Amanda Magnani wrote for Latin America News Dispatch.
‘DAUNTING TASK’: Marine geographer Dr Dawn Wright told NPR’s Short Wave about her experience exploring the seafloor and its importance for human life.
ENERGY VS ENVIRONMENT: In Cambodia, renewable energy projects are sparking debate over their impacts on local biodiversity, Anton Delgado said in the Japan Times.
INSECT REVOLUTION: A podcast from Table addressed the opportunities for expanding insect consumption in Europe and its potential to reduce land and water use.
New science
Adaptation of sea turtles to climate warming: Will phenological responses be sufficient to counteract changes in reproductive output?
Global Change Biology
According to a new study, changes in nesting behaviours will not be sufficient to offset the impacts of changing temperatures on sea turtles at a majority of nesting sites. Researchers modelled sea turtle hatching using both historical and projected air and sea temperatures under a moderate warming scenario, then assessed how nesting earlier or later in the year would improve hatching success and influence the sex ratio of the hatchlings. They found that although some turtles could maintain their current nesting temperatures, success rates and sex ratios by shifting their nesting timing, for half of the sites, no such shift would be able to maintain current temperatures. They conclude: “Turtles may need to use other adaptive responses and/or there is the need to enhance sea turtle resilience to climate warming.”
Climate change exacerbates nutrient disparities from seafood
Nature Climate Change
The availability of nutrients, such as iron and zinc, is expected to decline in seafood by around 30% by the end of the century in low-income countries under 4C of warming, a new study found. The researchers combined fisheries databases and predictive models to analyse nutrients from fisheries and aquaculture in the past and to project future paths under climate change. They found that climate change, for example, has driven changes in species distributions and productivity and modified catch composition, changing the nutrients people consume. The researchers highlighted the importance of seafood for physical and mental development and suggested securing “effective mitigation to support nutritional security of vulnerable nations and global health equity”.
Integrating climate adaptation and transboundary management: Guidelines for designing climate-smart marine protected areas
One Earth
New research found that future climate change, including marine heatwaves, could diminish ecological connectivity – the ability of organisms to move freely – in marine protected areas (MPAs) by 50% and hinder the recovery of vulnerable species to those changes. The researchers mapped and analysed areas of the coastal Pacific Ocean near California that met proposed MPA guidelines, then quantified the connectivity of fish and invertebrate larvae. The authors provided 21 guidelines for designing marine reserve networks, including incorporating connectivity, allowing time for recovery and adapting to climate change. They concluded that expanding marine protected areas coverage – particularly critical areas for connectivity and climate refugia – is crucial to enhancing the climate resilience of the ocean.
In the diary
- 9-10 November: CBD International dialogue with Indigenous peoples and local communities on the implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and its Gender Plan of Action | Geneva, Switzerland
- 13-17 November: UNCCD 21st session of the committee for the review of the implementation of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification | Samarkand, Uzbekistan
- 13-17 November: 59th session of the of the International Tropical Timber Council | Pattaya, Thailand
- 13-17 November: UNFCCC Asia-Pacific Climate Week | Jahor, Malaysia
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 8 November 2023: ‘Hidden costs’ of food; Gas auction controversy; Looking towards COP28 appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Cropped 8 November 2023: ‘Hidden costs’ of food; Gas auction controversy; Looking towards COP28
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