Published

2 years ago

November 17, 2023

Alice Rush

Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.

This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.

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.

DeBriefed 17 November 2023: Countries fail 1.5C test; US and China agree on renewables; Why runners care about climate change

Climate Change

Corpus Christi Cuts Timeline to Disaster as Abbott Issues Emergency Orders

Published

20 hours ago

March 19, 2026

Alice Rush

The governor’s office said the city’s two main reservoirs could dry up by May, much sooner than previous timelines. But authorities still offer no plan for curtailment of water use.

By Dylan Baddour

City officials in Corpus Christi on Tuesday released modeling that showed emergency cuts to water demand could be required as soon as May as reservoir levels continue to decline.

Corpus Christi Cuts Timeline to Disaster as Abbott Issues Emergency Orders

Climate Change

Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems

Published

21 hours ago

March 19, 2026

Alice Rush

Lena Luig is the head of the International Agricultural Policy Division at the Heinrich Böll Foundation, a member of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food. Anna Lappé is the Executive Director of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food.

As toxic clouds loom over Tehran and Beirut from the US and Israel’s bombardment of oil depots and civilian infrastructure in the region’s ongoing war, the world is once again witnessing the not-so-subtle connections between conflict, hunger, food insecurity and the vulnerability of global food systems dependent on fossil fuels, dominated by a few powerful countries and corporations.

The conflict in Iran is having a huge impact on the world’s fertilizer supply. The Strait of Hormuz is a critical trade route in the region for nearly half of the global supply of urea, the main synthetic fertilizer derived from natural gas through the conversion of ammonia.

With the Strait impacted by Iran’s blockades, prices of urea have shot up by 35% since the war started, just as planting season starts in many parts of the world, putting millions of farmers and consumers at risk of increasing production costs and food price spikes, resulting in food insecurity, particularly for low-income households. The World Food Programme has projected that an extra 45 million people would be pushed into acute hunger because of rises in food, oil and shipping costs, if the war continues until June.

Pesticides and synthetic fertilizer leave system fragile

On the face of it, this looks like a supply chain issue, but at the core of this crisis lies a truth about many of our food systems around the world: the instability and injustice in the very design of systems so reliant on these fossil fuel inputs for our food.

At the Global Alliance, a strategic alliance of philanthropic foundations working to transform food systems, we have been documenting the fossil fuel-food nexus, raising alarm about the fragility of a system propped up by fossil fuels, with 15% of annual fossil fuel use going into food systems, in part because of high-cost, fossil fuel-based inputs like pesticides and synthetic fertilizer. The Heinrich Böll Foundation has also been flagging this threat consistently, most recently in the Pesticide Atlas and Soil Atlas compendia.

We’ve seen this before: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 sparked global disruptions in fertilizer supply and food price volatility. As the conflict worsened, fertilizer prices spiked – as much from input companies capitalizing on the crisis for speculation as from real cost increases from production and transport – triggering a food price crisis around the world.

Mar 16, 2026

News

‘Completely delusional’: UN climate chief warns against fossil fuel push after Iran crisis

As Gulf disruptions send oil and gas prices soaring, Simon Stiell urges leaders to double down on renewables and fight fossil fuel dependency

Read more
Mar 4, 2026

Energy

Gulf oil and gas crisis sparks calls for renewables investment

Energy analysts and some politicians say the Iran war’s effect on oil and gas prices shows renewables are the path to energy security

Read more

Since then, fertilizer industry profit margins have continued to soar. In 2022, the largest nine fertilizer producers increased their profit margins by more than 35% compared to the year before—when fertilizer prices were already high. As Lena Bassermann and Dr. Gideon Tups underscore in the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s Soil Atlas, the global dependencies of nitrogen fertilizer impacted economies around the world, especially state budgets in already indebted and import-dependent economies, as well as farmers across Africa.

Learning lessons from the war in Ukraine, many countries invested heavily in renewable energy and/or increased domestic oil production as a way to decrease dependency on foreign fossil fuels. But few took the same approach to reimagining domestic food systems and their food sovereignty.

Agroecology as an alternative

There is another way. Governments can adopt policy frameworks to encourage reductions in synthetic fertilizer and pesticide use, especially in regions that currently massively overuse nitrogen fertilizer. At the African Union fertilizer and Soil Health Summit in 2024, African leaders at least agreed that organic fertilizers should be subsidized as well, not only mineral fertilizers, but we can go farther in actively promoting agricultural pathways that reduce fossil fuel dependency.

In 2024, the Global Alliance organized dozens of philanthropies to call for a tenfold increase in investments to help farmers transition from fossil fuel dependency towards agroecological approaches that prioritize livelihoods, health, climate, and biodiversity.

In our research, we detail the huge opportunity to repurpose harmful subsidies currently supporting inputs like synthetic fertilizer and pesticides towards locally-sourced bio-inputs and biofertilizer production. We know this works: There are powerful stories of hope and change from those who have made this transition, despite only receiving a fraction of the financing that industrial agriculture receives, with evidence of benefits from stable incomes and livelihoods to better health and climate outcomes.

New summit in Colombia seeks to revive stalled UN talks on fossil fuel transition

Inspiring examples abound: G-BIACK in Kenya is training farmers how to produce their own high-quality compost; start-ups like the Evola Company in Cambodia are producing both nutrient-rich organic fertilizer and protein-rich animal feed with black soldier fly farming; Sabon Sake in Ghana is enriching sugarcane bagasse – usually organic waste – with microbial agents and earthworms to turn it into a rich vermicompost.

These efforts, grounded in ecosystems and tapping nature for soil fertility and to manage pest pressures, are just some of the countless examples around the world, tapping the skill and knowledge of millions of farmers. On a national and global policy level, the Agroecology Coalition, with 480+ members, including governments, civil society organizations, academic institutions, and philanthropic foundations, is supporting a transition toward agroecology, working with natural systems to produce abundant food, boost biodiversity, and foster community well-being.

Fertilizer industry spins “clean” products

We must also inoculate ourselves from the fertilizer industry’s public relations spin, which includes promoting the promise that their products can be produced without heavy reliance on fossil fuels. Despite experts debunking the viability of what the industry has dubbed “green hydrogen” or “green or clean ammonia”, the sector still promotes this narrative, arguing that these are produced with resource-intensive renewable energy or Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), a costly and unreliable technology for reducing emissions.

As we mourn this conflict’s senseless destruction and death, including hundreds of children, we also recognize that peace cannot mean a return to business-as-usual. We need to upend the systems that allow the richest and most powerful to have dominion over so much.

This includes fighting for a food system that is based on genuine sovereignty and justice, free from dependency on fossil fuels, one that honors natural systems and puts power into the hands of communities and food producers themselves.

The post Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems appeared first on Climate Home News.

Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems

Climate Change

Are There Climate Fingerprints in Tornado Activity?

Published

21 hours ago

March 19, 2026

Alice Rush

Parts of the Southern and Northeastern U.S. faced tornado threats this week. Scientists are trying to parse out the climate links in changing tornado activity.

By Kiley Price

It’s been a weird few weeks for weather across the United States.