Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Deadly flooding
VALENCIA FLOODS: Spain is facing its worst flooding “in generations”, with more than 158 people killed in its third-largest city, Valencia, BBC News reported. On Thursday, more than 1,200 emergency staff worked to rescue people “as rains continued to threaten parts of the country”, the broadcaster said. An editorial in Spanish newspaper El País described the event as “a painful reminder that Spain is on one of the front lines of the climate crisis”.
CLIMATE ATTRIBUTION: The Associated Press reported that, according to a “rapid but partial” attribution study by World Weather Attribution, climate change “made Spain’s rainfall about 12% heavier and doubled the likelihood of a storm as intense as this week’s deluge of Valencia”. The Financial Times reported that sea surface temperatures “far above normal levels” in the Mediterranean helped to fuel the storm.
NEW DANGER: Meanwhile, Tropical Storm Trami has triggered devastating floods and landslides in the Philippines, CNN reported. The outlet quoted president Ferdinand Marcos, who said: “This is climate change. This is all new, so we have to come up with new solutions.” Authorities have reported at least 150 deaths due to the storm and a subsequent typhoon that has struck the region, according to the Philippine Star. Meanwhile, Taiwan also faced its largest typhoon in decades, the Guardian reported.
UK climate plans
CLEAN ENERGY BOOST: The first budget of the new UK Labour government contained plans to “beef up” investment in its “clean energy mission”, BusinessGreen reported. The website pointed to new fiscal rules to boost public spending on “green infrastructure”, plus investment in carbon capture and storage (CCS), green hydrogen and electric car supply chains.
GREEN BUDGET?: The Guardian said “reactions were mixed” on how “green” the budget was. The newspaper noted that, despite higher taxes on air passengers, the government was criticised for maintaining a “freeze” on fuel duty for petrol and diesel and loosening a cap on the price of bus tickets. Carbon Brief has published a rundown of the budget’s key climate and energy announcements.
NEW GOAL: Meanwhile, the UK government’s climate adviser the Climate Change Committee (CCC) has recommended that the nation should make an international pledge to cut its emissions to 81% below 1990 levels by 2035, according to the Press Association. The advice aligns with the UK’s existing domestic target, the Financial Times added. Carbon Brief covered the CCC’s advice, which will influence the target the UK is expected to present at the upcoming COP29 climate summit.
Around the world
- BAD RECORD: Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere reached “record” levels in 2023, with carbon dioxide (CO2) at a concentration last seen a few million years ago, according to new World Meteorological Organization figures covered by BBC News.
- NO DEAL: The EU has imposed tariffs on Chinese-made electric vehicles after China failed to secure a deal to halt their passage, according to the South China Morning Post. In response, Reuters reported that China has told carmakers to halt big investments in European countries that support the tariffs, including France and Italy.
- RISING SEAS: At a meeting in Samoa, Commonwealth nations agreed on an “ocean declaration”, which recognised existing maritime boundaries in nations that lose land to sea-level rise, according to the Associated Press.
- FAKE COP: “Apparently fake” social media accounts are being used to boost Azerbaijan’s hosting of COP29, according to a Global Witness investigation reported by the Guardian. The accounts have been drowning out online criticism of the nation’s poor record on human rights, it added.
8.3%
The proportion by which EU greenhouse gas emissions fell in the past year – the sharpest drop since the pandemic, but “still not on track” for its climate targets, reported EuroNews.
Latest climate research
- A new study in the journal npj Climate and Atmospheric Science suggested that more than half of the 60,000 deaths caused by Europe’s summer heatwave of 2022 can be attributed to global warming.
- A global area of forest bigger than Mexico has the potential for natural forest restoration, which could store more than 23bn tonnes of carbon over the course of three decades, according to new research published in Nature.
- Only one in seven news articles published in the English-language press in India about a 2022 heatwave mentioned the links to climate change, new research in Environmental Communication found. The figure was even lower for articles written in Hindi, Telugu and Marathi, it added.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
Additions of new solar and wind generating capacity in China continue to break last year’s records, according to new analysis for Carbon Brief by Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. The growth in China’s solar-power output this year alone is on track to equal the total power generation of Australia or Vietnam in 2023, based on growth rates during the first nine months of the year. The wider analysis by Myllyvirta found that China’s emissions remained flat in the third quarter of the year, leaving open the possibility that its emissions could drop in 2024.
Spotlight
Coming to consensus in Cali?
This week, Carbon Brief reports on the ground in Cali, Colombia, as the COP16 biodiversity talks inch towards their finale.
Tensions are running high and energy is running low as COP16 nears its end, with plenary sessions dragging on long into the nights.
Connectivity issues have plagued the two weeks of the summit, with WiFi signals shaky at best. Translation services have also proven cumbersome in both negotiating rooms and the press centre. Countries with small delegations have complained of being forced to prioritise certain negotiation tracks, while being shut out of others due to a lack of capacity.
Rather than coming towards consensus in the summit’s final days, observers tell Carbon Brief, countries are seemingly entrenching their positions even further.
In a statement shared with Carbon Brief, Oscar Soria, an activist with the Common Initiative and a veteran COP-goer, said:
“What we are seeing at this COP is an unprecedented high level of distrust between developing and developed countries.”
With the talks scheduled to end on Friday, Carbon Brief analysis shows that there are still nearly 700 brackets denoting areas of disagreement remaining in the decision texts. (Biodiversity COPs tend to run over their scheduled finish time.)
Below are four of the key issues negotiators are tasked with addressing – and how progress has been made on each.
Finance
Negotiations around finance at COP16 fall under two tracks: mobilising funds; and the financial mechanism for disbursing them.
Developing countries are unsatisfied with a decision at COP15 to create a Global Biodiversity Framework Fund – hosted at the Global Environment Facility in the US – and would rather see a fund that is governed by the COP itself, while developed countries want to maintain the status quo.
On resource mobilisation, money has been slow to trickle in, with additional pledges made at the summit towards the new fund totalling just $163m.
Carbon Brief understands that it is looking increasingly likely that parties will agree to revisit the issue during intersessional meetings next year.
Digital sequence information
The use of genetic resources, known as digital sequence information (DSI), is one of the key issues at COP16 – and is tied in closely to the fights around finance.
Biodiverse countries, many of whom are in the global south, want mandatory payments from companies that profit from genetic code sourced within their borders (for example, genes that are used in drug development).
Countries with strong pharmaceutical and other industries are pushing for voluntary payments only. As of Thursday evening, both options remained on the table.
Indigenous rights
Another key topic at COP16 is how to recognise the contributions of Indigenous people, who play an outsized role in protecting biodiversity globally.
In Cali, countries have agreed to adopt a programme of work to implement Article 8(j) of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which deals with respecting and preserving Indigenous knowledge.
However, Indigenous representatives are also calling for negotiators to agree to a new subsidiary body on Article 8(j), with “a mandate to provide advice” to the CBD.
Monitoring framework
In 2022, countries agreed to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, a landmark deal often described as the “Paris Agreement for nature”.
In Cali, negotiators have been tasked with coming up with a set of metrics that can be used to monitor countries’ implementation of the framework.
Discussions so far have been slow, but productive, observers told Carbon Brief.
The framework consists of sets of both mandatory and optional indicators, along with an annex containing technical details.
The general sense is that the monitoring framework that is being negotiated is not perfect, but the need to come to a decision – so countries can monitor their progress ahead of a “stocktake” at the next COP – means parties should agree to the framework here, with a promise to revisit and revise it going forward.
(Carbon Brief will publish a full summary of the COP16 talks after countries reach a deal.)
Watch, read, listen
‘DISTURBING’ PROGRESS: In Cali, the Guardian’s Patrick Greenfield reported on “alarm” raised by experts at a “disturbing” lack of progress at COP16.
AFRICAN ADAPTATION: For African Arguments, two policy experts called for the COP29 climate summit to adopt a clear adaptation goal amid growing climate impacts in Africa.
STOCKTAKE: For BBC Radio 4, environmental journalist Roger Harrabin examined whether the US election of 2000 was “the year we lost climate”.
Coming up
- 4-8 November: 12th session of the World Urban Forum, Cairo, Egypt
- 5 November: US presidential election
- 5 November: UN Environment Programme event on national adaptation plans, online
- 7 November: UN Environment Programme Adaptation Gap Report 2024 launch
Pick of the jobs
- New York Times, climate writer and climate multimedia editor | Salary: $111,050-$125,000 and $111,712-$140,000. Location: New York
- Nature Reviews Earth and Environment, locum associate or senior editor | Salary: $74,000-$91,000. Location: London or New York
- Mayor of London, senior policy and programme officer – climate change mitigation | Salary: £51,029. Location: London
- Norwegian Church Aid and DanChurchAid Joint Country Programme Zambia, senior programme officer, climate and environment stewardship | Salary: Unknown. Location: Lusaka, Zambia
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
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The post DeBriefed 1 November 2024: Spain’s deadly floods; UK budget ‘mixed’ on climate; Countries inch towards a deal at COP16 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
Greenhouse Gases
DeBriefed 6 March 2026: Iran energy crisis | China climate plan | Bristol’s ‘pioneering’ wind turbine
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Energy crisis
ENERGY SPIKE: US-Israeli attacks on Iran and subsequent counterattacks across the Middle East have sent energy prices “soaring”, according to Reuters. The newswire reported that the region “accounts for just under a third of global oil production and almost a fifth of gas”. The Guardian noted that shipping traffic through the strait of Hormuz, which normally ferries 20% of the world’s oil, “all but ground to a halt”. The Financial Times reported that attacks by Iran on Middle East energy facilities – notably in Qatar – triggered the “biggest rise in gas prices since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine”.
‘RISK’ AND ‘BENEFITS’: Bloomberg reported on increases in diesel prices in Europe and the US, speculating that rising fuel costs could be “a risk for president Donald Trump”. US gas producers are “poised to benefit from the big disruption in global supply”, according to CNBC. Indian government sources told the Economic Times that Russia is prepared to “fulfil India’s energy demands”. China Daily quoted experts who said “China’s energy security re