Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
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This week
Behind on 1.5C
UN REPORT: A new UN report examining the progress countries have made to slash their emissions under the Paris Agreement, published last Tuesday, said that global pollution is set to fall just 2% below 2019 levels by 2030, Reuters reported. Under countries’ current “nationally determined contributions” (NDCs), “emissions can be expected to rise 9% above 2010 levels by the end of this decade”, Reuters noted. This falls short of what is needed to stay below 1.5C, it added.
‘BIG IF’: The Financial Times wrote that the expected emissions reduction is “slightly better” than the 11% by 2030 rise above 2010 levels laid out in last year’s assessment. Nevertheless, it quoted UN secretary-general António Guterres saying NDCs were “strikingly misaligned with the science”. The New York Times emphasised that even the relatively modest reductions in emissions outlined in the report will only happen “if every country does what it has promised to rein in global warming, and that’s a big if”.
WRI REPORT: The World Resources Institute’s “state of climate action 2023” report found that “countries are falling behind on almost every policy required to cut greenhouse gas emissions”. The Guardian reported that, of the 42 indicators assessed, electric vehicle sales is the only one that is progressing on track. To limit global warming to 1.5C coal must be phased out seven times faster than the current rate, it added.
US and China cooperate
JOINT STATEMENT: Many publications this week covered a new joint statement from China and the US, which saw the world’s two biggest emitters promise “to jointly tackle global warming by ramping up wind, solar and other renewable energy with the goal of displacing fossil fuels”, according to the New York Times. BBC News reported that, according to the statement, the two nations have agreed to “step up co-operation on methane”, but added “the document is silent on the use of coal and the future of fossil energy”. See Carbon Brief’s China Briefing for more details.
‘CAUTIOUS’ OPTIMISM: Politico said that “while much of the early reaction to the deal is cautiously positive, experts noted there were some notable goals and targets that were not in the agreement”. Carbon Brief’s Dr Simon Evans broke down the key points from the US-China joint climate statement on Twitter.
COP28 nears
POWER PLEDGES: More than 60 countries have backed a pledge to triple renewable energy sources by 2030 led by the US and the EU ahead of the COP28 climate summit in Dubai later this month, Bloomberg reported. The US is also spearheading a commitment to triple the amount of installed nuclear power capacity globally by 2050 at the summit, according to a second Bloomberg story.
LOSS AND DAMAGE: On Monday, the EU said it would make a “substantial” financial contribution to a new fund for “loss and damage” from climate change, Reuters said. The decision to establish the fund was made at COP27 and the details of how it will operate are due to be decided at COP28. Politico noted there is a growing gap between the EU and US on their approach to providing loss-and-damage funding.
EYES ON THE HOST: Time magazine this week published a sit down interview with the oil-and-gas chief who is president-designate of COP28, Sultan Al Jaber. He told the publication that the “phasedown” of fossil fuels was “inevitable”, but added that he believes the world is not ready to ditch oil and gas entirely, saying: “We need to get real. We cannot unplug the world from the current energy system before we build a new energy system.” It comes as Politico reported on how the United Arab Emirates has backtracked on planned restrictions on journalists at the summit after an investigation by the publication.
Around the world
- SOMALIA FLOODS: Somalia is currently experiencing its worst floods in a century as flash waters have killed at least 32 people, BBC News reported. A quarter of Somalia’s population is facing “crisis-level” hunger as a result of floods and drought, Reuters said.
- EU TARGETS METHANE: The EU has agreed a deal to curb methane emissions from the fossil fuel industry, reported the Guardian. The “first-of-its-kind law” applies to imports as well as domestic production.
- GRAVE DISRESPECT: In Climate Home News, two religious leaders claimed that the energy company Total is unearthing graves in order to build its East African Crude Oil Pipeline.
- CLIMATE REFUGEES: Libya’s deadly floods in September have created a new generation of climate refugees, Al Jazeera reported. Refugees sheltering in government schools describe their situation as “humiliating”.
- UK AID CUTS: The UK’s decision to cut foreign aid in 2020 could have left communities in Malawi more vulnerable to the impacts of Cyclone Freddy earlier this year, reported Climate Home News.
€60bn
The financial hole in Germany’s climate funds now that the nation’s plan to divert unused debt, unlocked during the Covid-19 pandemic, has been ruled unconstitutional by the country’s top court, according to Politico.
Latest climate research
- Restoring forests globally could capture an additional 226bn tonnes of carbon – an amount equivalent to one-third of all human-caused emissions since the beginning of the industrial era – according to new Nature research, which added this restoration “cannot be a substitute for emissions reductions”.
- Courts are playing “an increasingly influential” role in the global response to climate change and should be recognised as “Anthropocene institutions” within an “Earth system law paradigm”, a Global Policy paper suggested.
- Five species of small lowland herbivore declined by an average of 28% in the 20 months after Cyclone Idai in Mozambique in 2019, according to new research in Nature.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
Loss of labour due to heat stress wiped out the equivalent of 4% of Africa’s GDP in 2022, according to a new report from the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change covered by Carbon Brief. Meanwhile, Europe and North America only saw labour losses equivalent to 0.1% and 0.2% of their GDP, respectively, according to the findings. The chart shows effective income losses in 2022 due to heat stress in agriculture (blue) and other sectors (red), as a percentage of GDP, by continent.
Spotlight
Why do runners care about climate change?
This week, Carbon Brief speaks to Damian Hall, an ultramarathon runner who has broken records and represented GB, while also campaigning for action on climate change.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Carbon Brief: What came first for you: running or climate activism?
Damian Hall: The best answer is that running came first. But looking back, you can see some of the values that family passed on. My parents voted for the Green Party for many decades. All my sister wanted for her birthday was to protect a bit of the Amazon rainforest. I was in Tasmania a long time ago and felt politicised seeing the rainforests unprotected. So there were seeds of it before running.
But you always think someone else is going to sort it out. It was only after the Extinction Rebellion protests in London that I really woke up. So I’ve only been a productive activist since 2019.
CB: Do you think more runners compared to other athletes care about climate change and if so why?
DH: It’s hard to analyse how many runners care, although there are studies. I hadn’t thought running was part of the problem. I thought: “Running’s quite an innocent activity, isn’t it? You need a pair of shoes and off you go, how much harm can that be doing?” Then in 2018, fellow ultra runners Dan and Charlotte Lawson launched ReRun clothing to sound the alarm about waste in the industry, including all those free race t-shirts. Another friend, Jim Mann, started Trees Not Tees. Dan and I formed a WhatsApp group of runners vocal about the climate emergency and found that the runners who are out on the hills, out in nature – the trail, fell and ultra-distance runners – seemed more galvanised.
Ultimately, I was encouraged to write a book about it, which came out about a year ago – ‘We Can’t Run Away From This’. I looked into the sportswear industry which has lots of greenwashing. A topical example is Adidas – their new super shoe was meant to be single use, for one marathon and a little bit of warmup time. So wasteful. An event I covered in my book was the Paris Marathon – that had an equivalent footprint of [the lifetime CO2 emissions of] 34 people.
CB: Do you think running, particularly trail, is inherently linked to caring about the environment?
DH: Ultimately, some runners care more than others. I feel like trail, fell and ultra runners are maybe ahead of others.
A great example is Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc (UTMB), the biggest trail race there is. Chamonix Valley has the biggest glacier in France, Mur de Place, which is shrinking before our eyes. In the late 80s, you would get a cable car up, then after five steps, you’d be at the bottom of the glacier. Now when you get off that cable car, you have to go up 50 steps to get to the bottom of the same glacier. In that same valley you have UTMB, who now have a high carbon car manufacturing sponsor. You couldn’t encapsulate the dilemma of running any better than what’s happening in that valley. You’ve got both problems: what’s actually happening and the cause of it.
Watch, read, listen
FRONTLINE PALESTINE: In a Drilled podcast, Abeer Butmeh, coordinator of the Palestinian NGOs Network, spoke about battling for short- and long-term survival in the middle of a war and climate crisis.
SPOTIFY OFFSETS: An investigation by Follow the Money and the Guardian alleged that a Swiss climate consultancy generated carbon credits in a region “where the risk of state-enforced labour is probably the highest in the world” and sold them to Spotify and fossil fuel giant BP.
SCIENCE HATERS: The Climate Question podcast asked why climate scientists are facing a growing barrage of abuse.
Coming up
- 19 November: Argentina presidential election, final round
- 22 November: G20 leaders’ summit ministers meeting
- 23 November: International Energy Agency (IEA) launch for the “oil and gas industry in net-zero transitions” report
Pick of the jobs
- Carbon Brief, multimedia producer | Salary: £30,000 a year, dependent on experience. Location: UK/Europe time zone
- Knepp Wildland Foundation, Weald to waves project lead | Salary: £38,000-£40,000. Location: Horsham, UK
- EGU, press assistants (science writer and videographer/photographer) | Salary: €19.25 per hour. Location: Vienna, Austria
- The Lifescape Project, senior lawyer – climate and nature litigation | Salary: £40,000-£43,000. Location: Remote
- Compass and Clive Lewis MP, creative campaigner | Salary: £30,000-£32,000. Location: London, UK
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org
The post DeBriefed 17 November 2023: Countries fail 1.5C test; US and China agree on renewables; Why runners care about climate change appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Claver Gatete is Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa. Jason Veysey is Energy Modeling Program Director and Senior Scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute. Lisa Sachs is Director of the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment at Columbia University.
The case for global energy transition has rarely been clearer. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz earlier this year exposed the cost of unplanned, fossil-dependent systems, while the falling cost of renewables, the rising penetration of electric vehicles, and the growing value of demand flexibility have made the direction of travel obvious. The benefits of a clean, secure, integrated system are no longer in dispute. What remains unclear is how to build it.
Countries around the world have called for faster renewable energy deployment and alternative energy arrangements. A secure, affordable, resilient, decarbonised system requires specific investments in specific places in a specific sequence, optimised across sectors and borders. But very few governments have the analytical foundation to translate those imperatives into investment.
The two instruments that are supposed to determine investment priorities for decarbonisation – Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and country platforms – cannot answer the most basic question facing any country undertaking an energy transition: what should the energy system look like?
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New coal mine openings slow as East Asian demand plateaus
China and Australia drove global decline in new capacity additions in 2025, but planned production kept growing
To close this gap, every country needs a bankable, economy-wide optimisation model for its energy system. A model is not a plan, but it can help answer the critical question of what the future energy system should look like. It shows how optimal scenarios vary as assumptions and policies are adjusted, calculates investment requirements and sequencing, and quantifies how system costs are affected by assumptions, policies, and exogenous variables like trade policy and financing terms.
Tool for efficient investment
Optimisation is a simplified way of simulating an energy system, but it can be an extremely powerful tool for moving energy planning from reactive (how do we manage the disparate actions in the energy system?) to intentional (what energy system underpins our national objectives?). A model can show how optimal scenarios vary as assumptions and policies are adjusted, and how investment requirements are quantified and sequenced.
Optimisation models can treat the energy system and the sectors it serves as an integrated whole, optimising across sectors and projects in ways that can be mutually reinforcing. If considered independently, growth in industrial demand, transport electrification, and digital infrastructure can add stress to the energy system. But an optimised plan can arrange these and other changes in an efficient, synergistic way.
Two to tango: How governments can unlock private investment for national climate goals
New load can be added where low-cost power is available; industrial customers can ensure the viability of investments in energy supply; electric vehicle charging policy can smooth load curves and reduce costs for all consumers.
Additionally, optimisation modeling can also change the financeability of investments. Taken alone, each project faces uncertainty about the rest of the system, which raises the cost of capital and causes projects to stall or unwind after contracts are signed. A coherent, optimised plan makes visible the coordination that private capital would otherwise have to bet on: identified offtake, sequenced and committed transmission, contracted power supply, and so on.
What COP31 and COP32 should do
The upcoming COPs in Turkey and Ethiopia can shift the center of gravity of international climate cooperation from fragmented commitments to planning. Three moves are urgently needed.
First, optimised, economy-wide, long-term energy system planning must be the foundation on which any meaningful NDC, country platform, or finance commitment rests. NDCs are typically drafted by environment or single-line ministries, with limited cross-sectoral input from ministries of energy, finance, and planning. They contain targets, derived from sectoral strategies or national commitments, not from an analytically grounded picture of what the energy system should look like and what investments would make it work. Country platforms are generally a portfolio of investments assembled from existing project pipelines, rather than derived from a system-level analysis of what an optimised, decarbonised energy system would require.
Second, recognise regions as a key planning unit. Modern integrated energy systems are inherently regional. Renewable endowments are unevenly distributed; balancing variable supply across borders lowers aggregate cost, reduces redundant backup capacity, and unlocks economies of scale no individual nation can achieve. Many energy investments in Southeast Asia, East Africa, Southern Africa and Central Asia may only be financeable in a regional context. Assessing domestic infrastructure without regional optimisation perpetuates the perception that decarbonisation is more expensive than it is.
COP31 leaders unveil global targets, with spotlight on electrification
Third, finance the planning capacity. A coordinated commitment by multilateral development banks, bilateral donors, and philanthropic partners to help every region and its constituent countries develop and maintain their own modelling capability, with open-source tools and regional analytical hubs, would close the most consequential gap in the current architecture. The cost is small relative to current spending on country platforms, failed project preparation, and misallocated infrastructure investment.
This includes supporting regional institutions such as the ASEAN Centre for Energy, the African Energy Commission, regional power pools, and the Latin American and Caribbean Energy Organization to determine what optimised regional systems require. Country-by-country pledging, repeated at every COP, will not deliver what meaningfully integrated systems can.
The 2026 energy crisis made the cost of unplanned, fossil-dependent systems newly visible. That window of clarity will close. The international community should seize the moment to build the planning foundation that has been missing for thirty years, rather than commissioning another round of NDCs or pledges, striving for outcomes neither was designed to deliver.
The post Every country needs a model to help optimise its energy transition appeared first on Climate Home News.
Every country needs a model to help optimise its energy transition
The world is currently experiencing what is expected to become the strongest El Niño on record – dubbed a “super El Niño” by many.
El Niño is the warm phase of a recurring climate pattern in the tropical Pacific that releases heat from the ocean into the atmosphere.
This temporarily raises global temperatures and reshapes rainfall and extreme weather around the world – impacting the lives of billions of people.
The current El Niño event began in June and is expected to last into 2027.
El Niño is part of a wider climate pattern called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle.
The ENSO cycle also has a cool phase, known as La Niña, as well as a “neutral” phase. El Niño and La Niña events typically last between nine and 12 months, but can go on longer.
Below, Carbon Brief explains how the ENSO cycle works, its impacts on extreme weather and global temperatures and why this El Niño event is projected to be the most intense since records began.
The post Explainer: How the ‘super El Niño’ will reshape the world’s weather appeared first on Carbon Brief.
https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/el-nino-explainer/index.html
The second-largest reservoir in the US reached a record-low water height on Saturday – just days after the country’s largest reservoir broke its own record.
Both Lake Mead and Lake Powell are located on the Colorado River.
They provide water for populations across seven US states in the south-western US, with around 40 million people getting some or all of their municipal water from the Colorado River.
The river also provides water for around 5.5m acres (22,258 square kilometres) of farmland across Colorado, Arizona, California and the other states in the river basin.
Experts tell Carbon Brief that climate change, population growth and over-consumption are all contributing to the current record-low levels of the reservoirs.
Record lows
At full capacity, Lakes Mead and Powell can hold a combined 68 cubic kilometres of water – enough to supply all household consumption in the contiguous US for nearly 1.5 years. However, the water level in both reservoirs has been declining for decades.
The chart below shows the water level of Lake Mead, in metres above mean sea level. The reservoir, which began to fill in 1935 following the construction of the Hoover Dam, has a “full pool” maximum capacity of 347.60 metres. The water level in Lake Mead reached a record low of 317.11 metres on 7 August.
The following chart shows the water level of Lake Powell, in metres above mean sea level. Lake Powell’s full-pool level is 1,127.76 metres.
While the reservoir reached its maximum capacity several times in the 1980s, it has not done so since. On 15 August, the water level in Lake Powell was recorded at a new record-low of 1,072.87 metres.
Both reservoirs have continued to decline in the days since breaking their respective records. The downward trend will largely continue in both lakes until next spring, when the snowpack in the mountains of the Upper Colorado River Basin begins to melt, says Dr Jack Schmidt, a senior research scientist at Utah State University’s Center for Colorado River Studies. He tells Carbon Brief:
“The big dilemma of the moment is that we’re only in the middle of August, and we have no assurance of what the coming winter will be. The only thing we can be sure of is that we will be depleting overall total basin reservoir storage from now until, roughly, early April.”
Compounding factors
The record lows across the two reservoirs are the result of several compounding factors, experts tell Carbon Brief.
Since the turn of the 20th century, the amount of water flowing along the Upper Colorado River has declined by about 20%. Research suggests that half of this decline can be attributed to human-induced climate change.
Most of the river’s streamflow comes from the snowpack of the Upper Colorado River Basin, which stretches across five western US states but is primarily located in Colorado and Utah.
This region has been gripped by a historic “megadrought” for more than a quarter of a century. Nearly half of the megadrought’s intensity over 2000-18 is attributable to climate change, according to a 2020 study.
At the same time, the increasing population in the US south-west has put added pressure on the Colorado River’s water supply. The number of people obtaining some or all of their water from the Colorado system has grown by 15 million (around 60%) since 1992.
Schmidt tells Carbon Brief:
“There’s an ultimate cause of the present water crisis, and there’s a proximate cause. The ultimate cause is a warming climate, a warming planet and a pretty clear correlation between warming conditions and decreased runoff in the Colorado River Basin.
“The proximate cause is that in this messy democratic republic of ours, big policy decisions that match the variability of the climate occur painfully slowly – with intense political negotiations – and only incrementally.”
On 31 July, the US Bureau of Reclamation, which manages water resources in the western US, released an environmental impact statement on its proposed post-2026 strategy for managing Lakes Powell and Mead. The strategy itself has not been released yet.
Schmidt notes that the statement does appear to give the Bureau flexibility to “respond to crisis” by reducing the delivery of water to several states. However, he adds:
“They acknowledge it won’t work if we just stay critically dry, and of course every climate model for the 21st century, especially with a continually warming planet, says that that’s exactly what’s going to happen.”
The post Analysis: The two largest reservoirs in the US have hit record-low levels appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: The two largest reservoirs in the US have hit record-low levels
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