Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Bonn talks wrap up
‘STEEP MOUNTAIN’: As climate negotiations in the German city of Bonn drew to a close on Thursday night, UN climate chief Simon Stiell said that nations had “a very steep mountain to climb” ahead of the COP29 summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, later this year, according to Agence France-Presse.
FINANCE DIVIDE: The talks were marked by “polarised views and sharp disagreements”, the Hindustan Times reported. The divide over climate finance was particularly notable, with countries failing to find common ground, despite the expectation they will come up with a new target “for helping poorer countries cut their emissions and protect their societies in a harsher, hotter world”, Reuters explained.
RAISING AMBITION: In its final daily dispatch from the talks in Bonn, Climate Home News covered an event that saw negotiators from the past, present and future COP presidencies – the UAE, Azerbaijan and Brazil – discuss their efforts to boost the ambition of other countries’ climate plans. All three said they will submit new strategies that are aligned with the Paris Agreement goal of 1.5C, but the article noted that none of them plan to stop producing fossil fuels. Carbon Brief has just published an in-depth article on the key takeaways from Bonn.
Europe goes to the polls
GREEN LOSSES: Losses by Green parties in the European parliamentary elections have “raised concerns” about EU climate policies, the Guardian reported. The Associated Press noted significant Green losses in Germany and France, amid a wider “electoral shift to the right”. Nevertheless, Reuters stated that the EU’s Green Deal package of laws would prove “hard to undo” – a point broadly echoed by experts speaking to Carbon Brief.
UK ELECTION: UK parties began launching their election manifestos. The incumbent Conservatives have drawn criticism for their “pragmatic” net-zero policies, according to the Press Association. By contrast, the Liberal Democrats have pledged to bring the UK’s net-zero goal forward to 2045, BusinessGreen reported. Labour, which polling suggests is likely to form the next government, confirmed its goal to bring forward a target to fully decarbonise the electricity grid from 2035 to 2030, according to Edie. Carbon Brief is tracking where all the parties stand on climate, energy and nature.
Around the world
- DROUGHT RIOTS: Riots have erupted over water shortages in the drought-stricken Algerian city of Tiaret, according to the Associated Press. It described the fossil-fuel-rich nation as being in “among the world’s worst-hit regions by climate change”.
- BAN REVERSAL: New Zealand’s right-wing government has announced it will reverse a ban on oil-and-gas exploration brought in by the previous government, Radio New Zealand reported.
- WET FIRES: A record area of Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands has burned in the first half of 2024, as weak rains have disrupted the usual seasonal flooding, BBC News reported.
- DIRTY MONEY: Sources have told Reuters that Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) members intend to launch a plan to end new private-sector financing for coal projects at the COP29 climate summit.
- REJECT YOUR ELDERS: The Swiss parliament has rejected a European Court of Human Rights ruling, which accused the nation of violating the rights of a group of “female climate elders” by enacting weak climate policies, according to the Guardian.
- TRADE WARS: The EU will impose additional levies on electric cars from China next month, taking tariffs to as high as 48%, Bloomberg said.
$1.1-1.3 trillion
The amount of climate finance developing countries at Bonn want developed countries to provide to them every year, according to Climate Home News.
Latest climate research
- The extreme rainfall that hit Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran in April and May this year was made twice as likely by El Niño, according to rapid analysis covered by Carbon Brief. The scientists were unable to determine the role of climate change.
- Nitrous oxide emissions from human activities rose by 40% over the past four decades, partly driven by growing global demand for meat and dairy, according to new research reported on by Carbon Brief.
- Exposure to high and low temperatures during pregnancy and the early years of a child’s life “may have lasting impacts” on brain development, according to new research in Nature Climate Change.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
New Carbon Brief analysis by Dr Zeke Hausfather examined when the world is likely to exceed the 1.5C and 2C limits set out in the Paris Agreement. The chart above shows observed global average temperature from 1850 to 2023 in black, along with a vast array of colours illustrating the wide range of possible futures derived from 37 different climate models. This approach suggests that the world will pass 1.5C around the year 2030, with a range of anywhere from 2028 up to 2036.
Spotlight
Fossil fuels, billionaires and weapons: are taxes the solution to climate finance?
Reporting from the UN climate talks in Bonn, Carbon Brief considers proposals to raise much-needed funds for climate action by taxing everything from fossil fuels to bombs.
Developing countries require trillions of dollars to achieve their climate goals and they want developed countries to foot a large chunk of this bill. But, by the most recent count, climate finance from those nations had reached just $116bn in 2022.
In the hunt for climate investment, one option gaining momentum is the idea of new taxes.
Tackling climate change by “making polluters pay” is not a new concept. However, as climate-finance negotiations have stalled at the UN climate talks in Bonn, some provocative ideas have made their way out of NGO reports and into the halls of power.
Tax the rich
Tucked away in the “global stocktake” text that emerged from the COP28 climate summit last year was a reference to “taxation” as an “innovative” source of climate finance.
G20 chair Brazil has taken up this idea, pushing a global “billionaire tax” that could raise around $250bn a year.
Germany and France are among those supporting this tax, arguing it could be a tool to raise climate finance.
COP28 also saw the launch of the International Tax Task Force – a group of countries exploring various levies on fossil fuels, transport and financial transactions.
Speaking to Carbon Brief in Bonn, one of the initiative’s leaders, Ali Mohamed, who is also the African Group chair, said “it’s important that we look at whatever is possible”, given the crises facing the world. He added:
“We hope just to bring together a group of countries that are willing to experiment.”
Some of these ideas are already being discussed at a high level. In particular, negotiators at the UN International Maritime Organisation are considering a shipping-emissions levy.
Oil and bombs
Ahead of Bonn, Bloomberg reported that Azerbaijan, the host of COP29, was considering a new climate fund filled by taxing oil, gas and coal production.
Fossil-fuel levies have already been employed in some countries and have been championed by UN secretary-general António Guterres. Nevertheless, Catherine Abreu, executive director of Destination Zero, told Carbon Brief it is “significant” to see such a fund proposed by the oil-producing COP president. But she added:
“So far, what we’ve heard about Azerbaijan’s proposal makes it sound more like an investment or profit-making scheme than a true climate fund.”
(This idea was further dampened in Bonn by a Politico interview with Yalchin Rafiyev, Azerbaijan’s lead negotiator, in which he suggested that their proposal would not only single out fossil fuel companies – and may consist of voluntary contributions.)
Meanwhile, the Arab Group – led by Saudi Arabia – submitted a proposal at Bonn calling for developed countries to provide $441bn in public spending a year.
Saudi negotiator Mohammad Ayoub went into more detail about how they could achieve this goal, suggesting “a tax on defence companies in developed countries”.
The proposal stood out, not least given Saudi Arabia’s status as the world’s second-largest arms importer. Climate Home News revealed that other taxes proposed by the Arab Group would target “luxury” items, such as fashion and technology.
Iskander Erzini Vernoit, director of the Imal Initiative for Climate and Development, told Carbon Brief the proposal was “a response to the constant refrain, which we hear from the US and others, that there supposedly is not sufficient public finance”.
Tax justice
This all comes against a wider backdrop of calls for “tax justice”. To this end, African nations in particular have been fighting for a new UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation.
“This could potentially lead to global tax measures that might target aviation or international financial transactions,” Teresa Anderson, global climate justice lead at ActionAid, told Carbon Brief.
Taxation is not generally regarded as a vote-winner. Yet, as wealthy countries face pressure to commit public money to climate action, Cat Pettengell, executive director of Climate Action Network UK, said “fair taxes and ending harmful subsidies are there for the taking”.
Watch, read, listen
‘COOKING AND COUGHING’: An on-the-ground report by the Associated Press examined how women are increasingly turning to burning firewood for food preparation in Kenya.
FIRE ERA: The Bloomberg Zero podcast explored how the 21st century could be “shaped by destructive fire weather”.
CLIMATE GRIEF: The Climate Pod spoke to climate justice writer Mary Annaïse Heglar about her new book, Troubled Waters, covering themes of climate racism and grief.
Coming up
- 13-15 June: G7 summit, Borgo Egnazia, Italy
- 17-20 June: 67th meeting of the Global Environment Fund (GEF) council, Washington DC
- 18-21 June: ICLEI (Local governments for sustainability) World Congress 2024, São Paulo, Brazil
- 19-21 June: G20 third climate and environment sustainability working group meeting, Manaus, Brazil
Pick of the jobs
- UN Climate Summit News, editor (part-time) | Salary: Unknown. Location: Remote
- Greenpeace International, senior scientist | Salary: £43,116-£49,944. Location: Exeter, UK
- WWF Malaysia, forestry manager | Salary: RM5,800-RM6,300. Location: Sabah, Malaysia
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
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The post DeBriefed 14 June 2024: Bonn climate talks; When Earth could breach 1.5C; How polluter taxes could raise climate funds 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