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
Hottest year on record
RISING TEMPERATURES: There is a greater than 99% chance that 2023 will be the hottest year on record, according to new Carbon Brief analysis. The analysis combined multiple temperature datasets to conclude it is “virtually certain” that this year will be the hottest for millennia. After a cooler start to the year, the past four months have seen truly exceptional global temperatures, surpassing prior monthly records by large margins, according to the analysis.
MYSTERY HEAT: Dr Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told the Washington Post that “it is indeed hard to give a good and informed answer to why this is happening – possibly for the first time”. Dr Zeke Hausfather, Carbon Brief’s climate science contributor who undertook the analysis, wrote in the New York Times that the ”acceleration” in warming “means that the effects of climate change we are already seeing – extreme heatwaves, wildfires, rainfall and sea level rise – will only grow more severe in the coming years”.
Fossil fuels under fire
ONE VOICE: The European Union has agreed to push for the “phase out” of all fossil fuels at the upcoming COP28 climate summit in Dubai in late November, Reuters reported. This could set up the bloc “to be one of the most ambitious negotiators” at the summit, according to the newswire.
FIGHTS FUELLED: Climate Home News reported that “negotiators from Africa and India have set out separate plans to push developed countries to do more to move away from fossil fuels” at the summit. Meanwhile, Axios reported that the host of the talks, UAE’s Sultan Al Jaber, has called for “a responsible phasedown of unabated fossil fuels”.
LOSS AND DAMAGE: Elsewhere, the Financial Times reported that countries are at odds over how to run the “loss and damage” fund agreed at the COP27 climate summit in Egypt last year, which was widely viewed as a historic step forward for climate justice. According to the FT, representatives from the negotiating bloc of G77 nations plus China, a large coalition of developing countries, were “considering abandoning” discussions underway in Aswan in Egypt amid a push from the US to allow the World Bank to be in charge of the fund.
Around the world
- BRAZIL DROUGHT: The Amazon river’s water level fell to its lowest in more than a century, leaving boats stranded and cutting off food and water supplies to remote villages, CNN reported.
- GREEN BELT: According to Xinhua, Chinese president Xi Jinping said the country will double down on green development “as one of the major steps to support the joint pursuit of high-quality belt and road cooperation”. (The belt and road initiative is China’s major infrastructure venture involving many developing nations across Asia and Africa.)
- UK HEAT: The UK’s National Infrastructure Commission has urged the government to phase out gas boilers and spend billions on rolling out heat pumps, the Daily Telegraph reported.
- CLIMATE STALEMATE: Russia’s opposition to holding the COP29 climate summit in an EU nation in eastern Europe next year has “left nations scrambling to find an alternative in time to organise the massive global event”, Reuters reported.
- OIL AND GAS DASH: The secretary general of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), Haitham Al Ghais, said Africa should be allowed to use its oil and gas to fight energy poverty, “a position often repeated by the fossil fuel industry to increase oil production on the continent”, Reuters reported.
£492bn
How much global investment in electricity grids is needed annually by 2030, if national climate targets and reliable power supplies are to be achieved, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) covered by the Guardian.
Latest climate research
- The world may have reached a “global irreversible solar tipping point”, where solar energy gradually comes to dominate global electricity markets – even without any further climate policies, a new paper in Nature Communication suggested.
- A new analysis in Climate Policy discussed ways to better integrate the perspectives of livestock keepers in Kenya, Ethiopia and Uganda in indicators for tracking climate adaptation, which tend to be limited to government documents only.
- Limiting global warming to 2C above pre-industrial levels would leave the Asia-Pacific, Europe and the US “highly exposed to “stranded assets”, especially coal plants”, a new paper in Nature Communication found.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
Toxic algae on UK’s largest lake
Lough Neagh – a lake in Northern Ireland that is larger than the country of Malta – has been plagued by blue-green algae that can negatively impact humans, plants and animals. The image above shows the blooms visible from Copernicus satellite imagery on 4 September. The green swirls of algae are particularly noticeable on the eastern side of the lake. Scientists told Carbon Brief that agricultural nutrient runoff and climate change are the main roots of the problem – and that there is no “silver-bullet” solution.
Spotlight
A young activist’s campaign to save Africa’s vanishing Lake Chad
This week, Carbon Brief speaks to young Nigerian climate activist Adenike Oladosu about her work to raise awareness about the rapid disappearance of Lake Chad.
The discussion of climate change is not a priority in many African countries, but it is driving some of the most striking upheavals across the continent. One example is the shrinking Lake Chad, which has been linked to conflict and migration in the Sahel. Once the world’s sixth-largest lake, it has shrunk by around 90% since the 1960s.
Adenike Oladosu learned about Lake Chad’s precarious state while researching herdsmen-farmers conflicts as a university student in Nigeria’s middle-belt region. She was surprised that an issue usually framed as an ethnic war was essentially a fight for depleting resources.
Inspired by the likes of Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, Oladosu decided to begin a Fridays for Future climate strike in Abuja, Nigeria’s political capital. She printed climate signs and stood alone at busy intersections; she also went to schools and churches. Soon, other young people joined her.
“The world needs to know about Lake Chad, because it doesn’t affect Nigeria alone, it affects the country around, including Niger, Chad and Cameroon,” Oladosu said. “My understanding is the fact that if you don’t know that a problem exists, you can’t solve it. Understanding that a problem exists is the first step towards solving the problem itself.”
On Twitter, Oladosu is relentless about campaigning for the restoration of Lake Chad. And she believes awareness about the issue is growing. In November 2022, on the campaign trail, Nigerian president Bola Tinubu promised to “recharge” the lake.
Earlier this year, as a fellow of the “planetary scholar and artists in residence” programme at the Justus Liebig University in Germany, Oladosu used remote-sensing technologies to observe and present the lake as a threatened space, raising more awareness about “the planetary dimensions of the crisis.”
For Oladosu, the shrinking of Lake Chad is also an issue of climate justice, which is connected to human rights. As of August 2023, more than six million people were living as displaced persons in the Chad basin, according to the UN. If Lake Chad was in Germany, she questioned, would it have shrunk by 90%?
Ahead of COP28, Oladosu joined the ONE campaign team in October to lobby for African priorities at the EU parliament in Brussels. For her, the restoration of Lake Chad should be one of the issues to take centre stage at the climate summit. She told Carbon Brief:
“If Lake Chad dries out it could become a battlefield for terrorists. If we want to achieve peace and security in the region, recharge Lake Chad in order to strengthen the livelihood in the region. This could be done through climate finance. Also, Lake Chad isn’t just an economic issue, it is a cultural site that unites. This is a decade of ecosystem restoration, Lake Chad should not be left behind.”
Watch, read, listen
CLIMATE WRECK: On the podcast Inherited, storyteller Mo Isu traced the repetitive cycle of loss and rebuilding in the rural Niger Delta region of Nigeria as the country weathers extreme seasonal flooding.
LOOKING BACK: Grist examined the historical link between environmental disasters and societal collapse.
GREENWASHING: The New Yorker reported on how a major carbon offsets firm sold millions of credits for carbon reductions that “weren’t real”.
Coming up
- 22 October: Argentina general election
- 23-27 October: Latin America and the Caribbean Climate Week 2023, Panama City, Panama
- 24 October: IEA’s World Energy Outlook 2023
Pick of the jobs
- Climate Home News, editor | Salary: £50,000-70,000. Location: Remote
- China Dialogue Trust, regional social media editor (Africa) | Salary: $580 per month. Location: Africa
- Diocese of Norwich, net-zero carbon officer | Salary: £35,000-£40,000. Location: Norwich, Norfolk
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org
The post DeBriefed 20 October 2023: Earth’s hottest year ‘for millennia’; Countries set out stall on fossil fuels; Saving shrinking Lake Chad appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Mae Buenaventura is the manager of the debt justice programme of the Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development, a regional alliance of peoples’ movements, community organizations, coalitions, NGOs and networks
A potentially historic shift in public debt governance is set to unfold in Washington DC this week as Global South governments take a collective stand to stop a “silent killer” of development financing.
The first-ever UN-hosted borrowers’ forum will officially be launched on April 15 on the sidelines of the 2026 Spring Meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Led by five convening countries – Zambia, Egypt, Nepal, the Maldives and Pakistan – the initiative is one of the key wins of last year’s 4th Financing for Development Conference (FFD4) in Sevilla, Spain.
The forum’s mandate is to establish a platform for borrower countries, supported by a UN secretariat, “to discuss technical issues, share information and experiences in addressing debt challenges, increase access to technical assistance and capacity-building in debt management, coordinate approaches and strengthen borrower countries’ voices in the global debt architecture”.
Instead of facing lenders alone, these countries will now use a UN-backed platform to share technical expertise and coordinate their approach to a global debt system that is fundamentally broken.
Debt grips climate-vulnerable nations
The human cost of the current debt architecture is staggering. According to the UN trade and development agency, UNCTAD, more than 40% of the global population – roughly 3.4 billion people – live in countries where the government is forced to spend more on debt payments than on the health, education and social protection of its citizens.
In so-called low-income countries, governments spend an average of 7.5% of their total budgets on debt service, with interest payments consuming up to 20% of total government revenue in these regions.
The Philippines is a case study in this financial stranglehold. It is part of a global majority forced to watch its public services crumble and infrastructure lag while its wealth is siphoned off to satisfy foreign lenders.
The policy of automatic appropriations – a legacy of the rule of late former President Ferdinand Marcos Sr. – mandates that debt servicing takes precedence over any other public expenditure, effectively placing the demands of lenders above the needs of the Filipino people. Even as it faces a $1.5 trillion regional financing gap to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, its hands remain tied by a legal framework that values credit ratings over human lives.
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Amid aid cuts, donor governments pledge less nature and climate funding to the Global Environment Facility (GEF), with the four-year package to be finalised in late May -
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As a “middle-income country” (MIC), the Philippines is stuck in a frustrating purgatory. It is often deemed “too wealthy” for the G20’s debt-relief framework, yet too poor to absorb global economic shocks. Last year, Finance Undersecretary Joven Balbosa hit the nail on the head when he called for support that goes “beyond the simplistic income categorization” that ignores a country’s actual vulnerabilities.
Without an inclusive and equitable global debt architecture, nations including the Philippines are left to navigate catastrophic climate risks and economic shocks with zero fiscal breathing space.
No respite during climate disasters
The regional evidence of this systemic failure is everywhere. Take Pakistan, which in 2022 was hit by catastrophic flooding that submerged a third of the country and caused billions in losses. Despite this climate-driven disaster, World Bank data shows that Pakistan made payments in 2023 of $11.8 billion for public and publicly guaranteed (PPG) external debt, while its PPG external debt reached $93 billion that same year, surpassing pre-pandemic debt of $87 billion (2020).
Sri Lanka followed IMF prescriptions throughout 16 lending programs since 1991, only to become the first Asian country this century to default. Its MIC status prevents application for debt relief and restructuring measures. Today, the Sri Lankan people bear the brunt of harsh conditionalities, including raising VAT from 8% to 15%, slashing food and fuel subsidies, and the erosion of hard-earned worker pensions.
Currently, the global rules of lending and borrowing are set by a “creditors’ club” composed of the IMF, the World Bank and the Global Sovereign Debt Roundtable it set up, and the Paris Club.
These institutions measure “debt sustainability” through a narrow lens of a country’s capacity to make timely repayments. They largely ignore internal economic inequalities, gender disparities and the existential threat of climate change.
Crises should trigger debt service cancellation
By organising the new borrowers’ forum, the Global South is signalling that the era of passive “standard-setting” by lenders is over.
The ultimate goal for global civil society and debt justice movements is the establishment of a UN Debt Convention; a democratic, binding and inclusive framework that governs both lenders and borrowers. This mechanism would ensure that debt restructuring and cancellation are sufficient to allow countries to fulfill their international human rights obligations and implement necessary climate actions.
Green Climate Fund picks locations for five developing country hubs
To be truly transformative, debt sustainability analyses must align with human rights and sustainable development needs. This means conducting impact assessments – both before and after loans are issued – to identify “illegitimate” debts that do not benefit the public.
Crucially, we need an automatic debt service cancellation mechanism that triggers during extreme climatic, environmental or health shocks. We also need a binding global debt registry to ensure that every loan is transparent and subject to public scrutiny.
Whether the borrowers’ forum becomes a true milestone depends on its courage to challenge the status quo. We can no longer allow debt to act as a “silent killer” of our future. It is time to demand a financial system that serves humanity, not just the balance sheets of the powerful.
The post Broken debt system must be fixed to confront future climate shocks appeared first on Climate Home News.
Broken debt system must be fixed to confront future climate shocks
Greenpeace and allies will be protesting outside Woodside’s Annual General Meeting to show the WA and federal governments strong community opposition to Woodside’s proposal to drill for gas at Scott Reef.
What: Protest outside Woodside Energy’s Annual General Meeting
When: 8am Thursday 23rd April 2026Where: Kagoshima Park (on the corner of Great Eastern Highway and Bolton Avenue)
What’s at stake
Scott Reef is a pristine ocean ecosystem off the north-west coast of Australia.
It is home to endangered and endemic species, including pygmy blue whales and the dusky sea snake, and a nesting ground for green sea turtles. Scott Reef is a place of extraordinary natural beauty, and a vital marine environment that supports a wide range of marine life.
What Woodside is proposing
Dirty fossil fuel corporation, Woodside Energy, is seeking approval to drill more than 50 gas wells underneath and around Scott Reef as part of its Browse project.
The gas would be extracted and transported to the Burrup Hub, the most polluting fossil fuel project in Australia. This proposal would industrialise the doorstep of Australia’s largest freestanding oceanic reef system – threatening the marine life that relies on it and the climate.
Why this can’t go ahead
The WA Environmental Protection Authority has already identified the risks of this project as “unacceptable”, issuing a preliminary rejection.
Serious concerns include:
- The risk of an oil spill
- Impacts on pygmy blue whales
- Damage to green sea turtle nesting grounds
These risks are severe, and potentially irreversible. But the decision hasn’t been made yet. The project is still being assessed.
The Federal Environment Minister is approaching a decision that will determine whether Scott Reef is protected – or vulnerable to decades of industrial gas destruction.
This is a defining moment.
Make opposition visible
Across Australia, people are speaking out to protect Scott Reef and oppose Woodside’s Browse project.
Showing that opposition is visible, coordinated and growing helps increase pressure on decision-makers ahead of this critical decision.
Join the protest
A protest outside Woodside’s AGM is a key public moment to demonstrate opposition and help protect Scott Reef.
Kagoshima Park (on the corner of Great Eastern Highway and Bolton Avenue)
8am, Thursday 23rd April 2026
Join the protest and help show how many people support protecting Scott Reef before the government makes its decision.
Join Greenpeace to save Scott Reef from Woodside’s dirty gas
As demand for whale meat declines at home, Norway exports it to Japan, markets it to tourists and sells it online as dog food.
Norway reopened its annual whale hunting season earlier this month, continuing a practice most countries abandoned decades ago.
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