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
UK’s ‘slowing’ climate ambition
MIXED SIGNALS: The Climate Change Committee (CCC) has warned the perception of the UK’s climate ambition has “suffered from mixed messages” following “new fossil-fuel developments and the prime minister’s speech to soften some net-zero policies”, reported the Press Association. In a report on progress made at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai last year, the advisory body said “decisions to approve a new coal mine and licence new oil and gas production” have contributed to “a perception of slowing UK climate ambition by members of the international community”, the outlet noted.
‘GROSSLY IRRESPONSIBLE’: It comes as the UK this week allocated another 24 licences to major oil companies for the right to drill for fossil fuels in the North Sea, the Guardian reported. According to the North Sea Transition Authority, oil and gas could be produced within the decade under the licences, the outlet noted. The move “angered MPs and environmental campaigners”, who called the move “grossly irresponsible”, it added.
IMF WARNING: Meanwhile, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, has “warned UK chancellor Jeremy Hunt against cutting taxes, arguing the country needs to curb public borrowing and prioritise spending in areas such as health, education and tackling climate change”, reported the Financial Times.
Around the world
- ENVOY IN EMPLOY: US president Joe Biden has appointed his clean energy adviser John Podesta to succeed John Kerry as the nation’s top climate diplomat, reported the Financial Times. Podesta will take on the role in addition to his current White House job overseeing $370bn in spending on clean energy under the Inflation Reduction Act, noted the New York Times.
- SOLAR SUCCESS: China’s installed wind and solar capacity is set to overtake coal for the first time this year, according to Reuters. Bloomberg reported that China installed more solar panels in 2023 than any other nation has built in total.
- ITALY-AFRICA SUMMIT: At a summit of African leaders in Rome, Italy unveiled a plan to use its climate fund to transform into “an energy hub” that creates “a bridge between Europe and Africa”, reported Climate Home News. Observers warned that the plan presents “enormous ambiguities” that leave the door open to fossil-fuel investment.
- TRACTOR TUMULT: Farmers protesting across Europe have “won their first concession”, reported the Guardian, with the EU announcing a delay in rules for setting aside land for nature. Carbon Brief’s Cropped newsletter has more on how far-right political groups are aiming to capitalise on the outrage.
- PAKISTAN ELECTION: Ahead of Pakistan’s general election on 8 February, two major political parties have “prominently highlighted the importance of dealing with climate change-related issues in their manifestos”, reported the Press Trust of India.
- FIGHTING FIRES: More than a hundred firefighters battled a forest fire in the Los Alerces national park in northern Patagonia, reported BBC News. La Nación noted that an “unusual heatwave” has brought temperatures of up to 40C to the region.
2.47 million square kilometres
The “missing” area of Antarctic sea ice in July 2023, relative to the long-term average, according to a Carbon Brief guest post. This is larger than the area of Algeria, the 10th largest country in the world.
Latest climate research
- Melting of a glacier in Switzerland over just two years has left it “irrevocably lost” as a record of past air pollution from ice cores, a Nature Geoscience study reported.
- Economic recovery spending in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic “missed many opportunities to advance climate adaptation and resilience” (A&R), according to a Nature Sustainability study. Analysis of around 8,000 government policies across 88 countries found that just 10-11% had “direct A&R benefits”.
- A study in Earth’s Future warns that extreme heat and thawing permafrost will pose “severe threats” to global rail and road infrastructure as the climate warms.
(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 US is already the world’s largest exporter of liquified natural gas (LNG) and has more additional capacity “proposed” (dark blue on the chart) than any other nation, according to a new Q&A by Carbon Brief. The article unpacked the implications of the surprise move, made late last week by US president Joe Biden, for a “temporary pause” on the expansion of LNG export terminals.
Spotlight
Surging methane from the world’s wetlands
This week, to mark UN World Wetlands Day, Carbon Brief speaks to a scientist helping uncover how methane emissions from wetlands are rising in a changing climate.
In 2020 and 2021, the rate at which methane levels in the atmosphere increased hit record highs.
The rise between 2019 and 2020 was “roughly a doubling” of the annual growth rate, Dr Benjamin Poulter, a research scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, explained to Carbon Brief. This was “unexpected and caught the scientific community by surprise”.
In December 2022, a Nature study by Poulter and colleagues found that “wetlands appear to have played a key role, explaining around 50% of the jump from 2019 to 2020”, he said. Further work – currently undergoing peer-review – has suggested that the world’s wetlands were the main driver behind the growth between 2020 and 2021 as well.
Wetlands are areas of land that are either permanently or seasonally inundated with water. They are found across the world, but predominantly in lush landscapes in the tropics and frozen “permafrost” expanses in the higher latitudes of the northern hemisphere.
The near-constant saturation means that decomposing organic matter in the soil releases methane instead of CO2. This methane can diffuse from the water into the atmosphere, be emitted through grass-like plants or abruptly as bubbles. Research has also shown that trees can transport methane from the soil to the atmosphere – or potentially even produce it within their stems.
La Niña’s influence
There appears to be two main reasons why wetlands produced more methane over 2020-22, Poulter explained – a combination of a La Niña event “causing wetlands to expand in the tropics” and climate change “causing warming in all parts of the world, and especially in the high latitudes”.
La Niña is the cold-water counterpart to the natural El Niño climate phenomenon. They are known collectively as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). In general, an El Niño event “causes wetland methane emissions to decrease in tropical regions due to drying”, said Poulter, while La Niña causes emissions “to increase as wetlands expand”. There are regional variations that complicate things a little, he added.
In the high latitudes, “ENSO has less of an impact”, explained Poulter, but rapid warming in this region “is likely driving increasing trends in wetland methane emissions” – as well as “changing the seasonal onset of wetland methane production as the permafrost thaws earlier, deeper and freezes later in the year”.
Methane feedback
The overall increase in wetland methane emissions in recent years is “expected from wetland model projections”, noted Poulter. He published a study last year that indicated the rise may be part of an extended climate-wetland methane “feedback” where global warming drives greater wetland methane emissions, which – in turn – drives further warming.
For 2023 and 2024, the methane growth rate is likely to be influenced by “the El Niño phase of ENSO and the record-breaking global air temperatures”, Poulter said. Last year, for example, “droughts in Central America and Amazonia disrupted shipping and livelihoods, and likely led to decreased tropical wetland methane emissions”.
The US Global Monitoring Laboratory is due to release its final atmospheric concentration data for 2023 in April. This will help confirm understanding of wetland methane emissions, Poulter said, and “whether the El Niño-induced drought impacts on tropical wetlands caused the atmospheric growth rate of methane to decrease” last year.
Watch, read, listen
OVERSTATE: In this interactive, a group of Bloomberg journalists investigated how “dozens” of UK wind farms have routinely overestimated how much power they can produce.
BIG OIL: DeSmog uncovered evidence that fossil-fuel companies funded climate research as far back as 1954, further suggesting their long-standing knowledge of global warming.
‘IMPORTANT QUESTIONS’: In a Nature news feature, journalist Gayathri Vaidyanathan looked at the “agonising choices” over how the UN loss-and-damage fund will be allocated.
Coming up
- 6 February: European Commission to table its proposed climate target for 2040, Strasbourg, France
- 7 February: Azerbaijan presidential election
- 8 February: Pakistan general election
- 11 February: Finland presidential election (second round)
Pick of the jobs
- Save the Children US, advisor (climate) | Salary: $68,850-94,050. Location: Washington DC
- Knight Science Journalism Program, fellowship for advancing science journalism in Africa and the Middle East | Salary: $40,000 stipend and $5,000 for housing. Location: US-based fellowship eligible to journalists from Africa and the Middle East
- Met Office, scientist and senior scientist – vegetation-climate interactions | Salary: £32,100-34,925 and £38,838-42,434, respectively. Location: Exeter, UK
- Wateraid, regional WASH and climate change specialist | Salary: Unknown. Location: Pretoria, South Africa (or any city where WaterAid has presence in the region)
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org
The post DeBriefed 2 February: UK’s ‘slowing’ climate ambition; New top US climate diplomat; Surging methane from wetlands 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 remains fundamentally unshaken”, thanks to “emergency stockpiles and a wide array of import channels”.
‘ESSENTIAL’ RENEWABLES: Energy analysts said governments should cut their fossil-fuel reliance by investing in renewables, “rather than just seeking non-Gulf oil and gas suppliers”, reported Climate Home News. This message was echoed by UK business secretary Peter Kyle, who said “doubling down on renewables” was “essential” amid “regional instability”, according to the