Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
US targets Chinese clean tech
100% TARIFFS: US president Joe Biden on Tuesday announced tariffs on “$18bn” in Chinese clean technologies and critical minerals, Reuters reported. According to the newswire, tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles (EVs) will quadruple to 100% (plus a separate 2.5% tariff), while solar cell tariffs will double to 50%, lithium-ion EV battery tariffs will increase from 7.5% to 25% and tariffs on critical minerals rise from nothing to 25% this year.
SOLAR PANELS: On Friday, the Biden administration announced further tariffs on double-sided solar panel imports, which largely come from southeast Asia, the Financial Times reported. Economist Joe Brusuelas told CNN that the changes “foreshadow what is going to be a long, cold winter of economic conflict between the US and China”.
CALL AND RESPONSE: In the New York Times, economist Paul Krugman said the tariffs were all about “political economy”. He explained: “If those subsidies [under Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act] are seen as creating jobs in China instead, our last, best hope of avoiding climate catastrophe will be lost.” State-run newspaper China Daily quoted foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin saying that the US is “making double standards by justifying its own subsidies and exports, while accusing other countries’ subsidies and exports as ‘unfair’ and ‘overcapacity’”.
Afghanistan flooding
‘CATASTROPHIC’ FLOODING: Flash flooding hit Baghlan province in north Afghanistan last Friday, leaving more than 300 people dead and villages cut off, Fox Weather reported. The outlet said that the flooding washed away “vast landscapes” of communities and farms. It added that the World Health Organization described the floods as “catastrophic” and stated the country “lacks the necessary resources to manage a disaster of this magnitude”, including health facilities, especially as waterborne diseases emerge.
AID CALL: A survivor of the floods in a district of Baghlan told Xinhua that victims fled to the mountain in search of refuge and scores of them are still stranded in the hilltops. The newswire spoke to another survivor who said: “No one has assisted us, the women are living in the open ground, there is no tent and no one has provided assistance.
Around the world
- WEAKENING UK TARGETS?: Ministers are “considering” weakening the UK’s emissions targets by carrying over the “unused” portion of the last carbon budget to the next period, the Guardian reported. A decision is due this month.
- VATICAN CLIMATE SUMMIT: Experts and leaders from the Americas, Asia and Africa met at a Vatican summit on how to “effectively manage” climate change and boost climate resilience from 15-17 May, Vatican News reported. The summit is expected to deliver a “Planetary Climate Resilience protocol”, which will be submitted to the UN climate change body.
- AFRICAN CLEAN COOKING: Carbon Brief covered a summit held in Paris which saw leaders pledge $2.2bn to help to achieve universal clean cooking access by 2030, examining what this could mean for climate, energy, nature and gender goals.
- BRAZIL CLIMATE REFUGEES: Nearly 80,000 people remain in shelters in Rio Grande do Sul, following flooding in the Brazilian state, according to El País. The outlet noted that people are in a “dramatic and uncertain situation as rains persist and water rises again”.
- ‘HISTORIC’ TREATY: Le Monde reported that Australia and Tuvalu have agreed on a “historic” treaty to welcome climate refugees from Tuvalu, an island in the South Pacific threatened by rising sea levels. The treaty will come into force by the end of the year.
- ‘GREEN’ MINING: At a press briefing attended by Carbon Brief, Indigenous leaders called for an upcoming OECD forum on responsible mineral supply chains to consider their rights to consent on mining projects.
€48 billion
The amount spent each year by the EU on nature-harming activities, according to a new report covered by Carbon Brief.
Latest climate research
- New research published in Nature Communications found that chronic exposure of older adults to heat is projected to double in “all warming scenarios” by mid-century, with Asia and Africa being the most affected continents.
- Global investors and owners, mainly from Europe, were involved in 78% of wind and 96% of solar parks in Brazil from 2000 to 2021. These parks occupy 2,148 and 102 square km, respectively, and could “exacerbate land struggles,” according to a study in Nature Sustainability.
- A World Weather Attribution study found that the “deadly heatwaves” that hit Asia throughout April and May this year and brought temperatures above 40C, were more frequent and extreme due to 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
The administration of Indian prime minister Narendra Modi has boosted coal mining and coal power since 2014. Carbon Brief published an interactive piece analysing the impact on Indian communities and climate change, as well how this year’s general election could change things. The map above shows that India’s coal reserves are concentrated in seven south-central and eastern states, regions that have significant Indigenous populations. Indigenous peoples and local communities told Carbon Brief that they have been displaced and suffered environmental impacts as a result of coal mining projects.
Spotlight
Intense heatwave hits Mexico
This week, Carbon Brief speaks to experts about why recent heat in Mexico was so deadly.
Mexico recently experienced a heatwave from 3 to 13 May, leaving 14 dead and driving temperatures above 40C in several states, Forbes Mexico reported. The health services in the state of San Luis Potosí, in eastern and central Mexico, reported 10 deaths from heat stroke and other similar deaths in southern and northern states.
Milenio reported that the heatwave also killed birds, such as parrots and toucans, in San Luis Potosí. N+ news added that owls, parrots, stake birds and bats also died because of the heat, and other species, such as squirrels and turkeys, were also affected.
The heatwave is the second major deadly event in Mexico’s heat season, which began in March, Reuters reported.
Mexico is no exception. A recent report by the World Meteorological Organization stated that 2023 was the hottest year in Latin America and the Caribbean, with temperatures 1.39C above the 1961-1990 period.
There were 3,405 heatwave-associated deaths annually in the region between 1990 and 2019, according to a new study published in PLOS Medicine.
Deadly impacts
Dr Lucía Gabriela Rosales, director of public health at the Health Services of San Luis Potosí, told Carbon Brief that this second heatwave was very “atypical” and caused four confirmed deaths from heat stroke – mostly in adults over the age of 60 – as well as cases of dehydration and heat stroke.
Rosales pointed out that there was no specific alert for this heatwave, but there was a warning about the heat season from the Civil Protection authorities.
She added that the health sector has carried out some actions to deal with the high temperatures in the state, such as community campaigns and hydration points. She called on the population to take care of their health.
Dr José Antonio Ávalos, head of the Laboratory of Climate Variability, Remote Sensing and Assessment of Risks at the Autonomous University of San Luis Potosí, told Carbon Brief that May is the hottest month of the year in the state. Since 2023, the country as a whole has been experiencing levels of drought not seen since 1941, he added.
Ávalos pointed out that the authorities were aware of the municipalities most at risk from heatwaves, yet failed to effectively alert the population. He recommended the creation of a heatwave surveillance mechanism, the implementation of heat indices and increased investment in climate science.
The experts explained that heat stroke causes, among other things, body temperature above 42C, headache and tachycardia. Deaths from heat stroke are caused by an increase in the atmospheric temperature and humidity, which prevents the body’s sweat from evaporating, causing it to accumulate heat, they added.
Watch, read, listen
THREATENED PARKS: An Agence France-Presse video looked at how climate change is threatening many features of US national parks.
CHOCOLATE DILEMMA: A National Public Radio podcast explored how climate change is decreasing cocoa production worldwide and what solutions are available.
STELLAR CHANGE: The New York Times covered the challenges climate change poses to astronomers, who are considering “using their expertise” to address it.
Coming up
- 19 May: Dominican Republic presidential election
- 20 May: Fifth phase of India’s general election
- 21 May: International Energy Agency (IEA) ninth annual conference on energy efficiency, Nairobi, Kenya
- 21-24 May: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) forum on responsible mineral supply chains, Paris, France
- 22 May: Allied for Climate Transformation by 2025 (ACT2025) consortium high-level webinar on unlocking finance for climate-vulnerable nations at COP29 and beyond, virtual
Pick of the jobs
- Global Alliance for the Future of Food, climate and nature director | Salary: $125,000. Location: Global (remote)
- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, climate mitigation staff scientist (working group III) | Salary: $76,848-$130,642. Location: Washington DC (hybrid)
- The Washington Post, climate and environment photo assignment editor | Salary: Unknown. Location: Washington DC
- UK Antarctic Heritage Trust, filmmaker, Antarctica 2024-2025 | Salary: Travel and expenses plus a fee. Location: Cambridge, UK and Blaiklock, Antarctica
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
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The post DeBriefed 17 May 2024: Biden’s clean-energy tariff blitz; Modi’s coal plans examined; Deadly heat in Mexico 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 ‘