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
Transitioning away?
BIG AUCTION: The US Biden administration raised $382m from the auction of drilling rights in the Gulf of Mexico – its largest oil-and-gas lease sale since 2015, according to Reuters. New auctions will not be open until 2025, but possibly under “tighter limits” and with “less territory up for grabs”, Bloomberg noted. It added that this came “just days” after the US pledged at COP28 to “transition away” from fossil fuels.
DISRUPTION: Oil prices surged 3% following attacks by Houthi rebels in Yemen on ships in the Red Sea, which prompted BP to pause all shipments, the Times explained. The attacks were part of an “escalating campaign against Israel” since the start of its war on Hamas, the newspaper said. Meanwhile, the Guardian reported that campaigners have launched two legal challenges against the North Sea Rosebank oil project – the UK’s largest untapped oilfield.
COAL DROP: The International Energy Agency (IEA) said that it expected global demand for coal to hit a record high this year, according to the Times. However, it predicted that coal demand will drop next year due to the expansion of renewables in China.
EU climate plans off-track
ROAD TO 2030: EU countries are off track to meet the bloc’s 2030 climate goals, Bloomberg reported, based on a European Commission assessment. It found that current national energy and climate plans would result in a 51% reduction in EU emissions by 2030, falling short of the existing 55% target.
CO2-FREE POWER: Seven European countries have committed to “eliminat[ing]” carbon dioxide-emitting power plants from their electricity systems by 2035”, according to Reuters. The newswire added that the countries account for nearly half of EU power production, mostly due to the inclusion of Germany and France.
Around the world
- CONGO ELECTS: Elections are underway in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), home to one of the world’s largest carbon sinks and minerals that are key for the clean-energy transition, according to Bloomberg. Presidential candidates disagree over plans to hand out oil-and-gas permits in the nation’s vast rainforest, it added.
- CLIMATE MIGRATION: More than 3 million Americans moved between 2000 and 2020 because of the rising risk of flooding due to climate change, according to a new study reported by CBS News.
- RECORD DENGUE: At least 4.2m cases of dengue have been reported across the Americas in 2023, breaking incidence records since 1980, the Spanish outlet Climática reported. The increase has been attributed to changes in the climate that make conditions more favourable for mosquitos that carry the disease, it added.
- AUSSIE EXTREMES: Firefighters tackled dozens of blazes across New South Wales in Australia, including a “giant out-of-control bushfire” in the Pilliga Forest, the Guardian reported. In the north of the country, “record rainfall and dangerous flash flooding” hit parts of Queensland, ABC News said.
- DEADLINE: Canada announced new rules to “effectively end sales” of new fossil fuel-powered passenger cars and trucks by 2035, according to a report in CBC News.
- NEW LEVY: The UK plans to introduce a “carbon border tax” by 2027 to try to protect British manufacturers in high-emitting sectors, such as steel and cement, and match similar efforts in the EU, the Financial Times explained.
$7tn
Annual public and private capital flows into activities that directly harm nature, in sectors including fossil fuels, agriculture and construction, according to the UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP) State of Finance for Nature 2023 report.
Latest climate research
- The 120m square kilometres that countries have pledged for “land-based” CO2 removal, such as tree planting, could “potentially conflict” with the Global Biodiversity Framework’s target to protect 30% of the world’s land and seas by 2030, according to a Frontiers in Climate paper.
- A study published in Climatic Change outlined how the “climate contrarian” US conservative thinktank the Heartland Institute has adapted its messaging over the course of a decade.
- A new study in Geophysical Research Letters identified an increase in large wildfires across much of the eastern US, including “some of the most populated regions” in the country.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.)
Captured
The most high-profile debate at COP28 concerned the language around fossil fuels in the final text, with parties ultimately settling on “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems”. This was widely regarded as weaker than calls to “phase out” or “phase down” fossil fuels. However, as climate negotiations-watcher Dr Jen Allan pointed out, data from the most recent UNEP Production Gap report “speaks volumes” about this debate. The chart above shows how some of the global-north and Latin American nations that publicly issued calls to cut fossil fuels have domestic plans to increase their production of coal, oil and gas by 2030. (Note that the UK has announced more support for oil-and-gas licences since these figures were compiled and some nations, such as Brazil, expressed support for a phase-out at COP28, but only if it was led by developed countries.)
Spotlight
How climate change could reduce the ‘value’ of nature
Carbon Brief unpacks a new study, which investigated how climate-induced biome shifts could exacerbate global inequalities.
Is it possible to put a price on nature?
The natural world underpins the fundamental needs of life, such as food, clean air, water and the materials to build shelter. And each of these components has a measurable impact on the global economy.
Analysis from the World Economic Forum suggests that “$44tn of economic value generation – more than half the world’s total GDP – is moderately or highly dependent on nature and its services”.
So what does climate change mean for the global economy?
A new study, published this week in Nature, assessed how “climate change-induced shifts in terrestrial vegetation cover” could impact the economy over the coming century. The authors found that, as the planet warms, many biomes such as grasslands and forests are shifting northward. They also highlight a “partial replacement of grasslands with forests” in many regions.
Using data from the World Bank, the authors analysed the contribution of grassland and forest biomes on different countries’ GDP. Their analysis covered products such as timber, as well as less-tangible benefits including “forest-related recreational services” and the “inherent value of protected areas”.
The paper suggested that by the end of the century, under the SSP2-6.0 scenario (which projects warming of around 3.8C by 2100), ecosystem shifts will reduce the financial benefits provided by nature by more than 9%. However, this change is not spread uniformly across the planet.
The authors found that as developing countries are “more reliant on natural capital” than their wealthier counterparts, they will be hit the hardest by the changing ecosystems. The bottom 50% of the countries, in terms of GDP per capita, will bear around 90% of the damages, the paper noted. Meanwhile, the top 10% only face 2% of the losses.
Dr Bernardo Bastien-Olvera – a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography – is the lead author of the study. He told Carbon Brief that some countries, including Australia, the US, Turkey, China, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, may see small benefits from shifting ecosystems. However, he added that these are “minimal”, amounting to only around 3% of the countries’ GDP.
“Our study challenges the common perception that forests are inherently more beneficial than grasslands,” said Bastien-Olvera. He told Carbon Brief that “each ecosystem type holds unique values, and the loss of one cannot be fully compensated by the introduction of another”.
Watch, read, listen
‘CARBON FOOTPRINT’: This week, NPR’s On Point podcast spoke to Prof Geoffrey Supran and climate journalist Amy Westervelt about the origins of the “carbon footprint” and Big Oil’s role in popularising a concept that “individualises the climate crisis”.
DECARBONISING DEVELOPMENT: With the dust finally settling on news from Dubai, Tim Sahay interviewed Navroz Dubash for Phenomenal World on COP28’s hits and misses and what the “developmentalist turn” of climate politics means for an unequal world.
TRANSITION TENSIONS: After reporting on farmers, miners, drivers and others in the EU and UK who shared “a burning sense they weren’t being heard” by policymakers, Politico’s Karl Mathiesen wrote that “the success of the green revolution will depend on… taking into consideration those who will bear its greatest costs”.
Coming up
- 8-9 January: Sustainability Forum Middle East (SFME) 2024, Manama, Bahrain
- 15-19 January: World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2024, Davos, Switzerland
- 18 January: US C3E Women in clean energy seminar series, virtual event
Pick of the jobs
- BBC Scotland News, senior journalist – producer, in the environment, science and weather team | Salary: unknown. Location: Scotland
- Carbon Tracker, events and communications officer | Salary: Up to £38,000. Location: London, UK, hybrid working
- Gaia Talent, senior environmental scientist | Salary: £60,000. Location: Cork, Dublin, Carlow, Ireland
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org
The post DeBriefed 21 December 2023: Major oil auction in US; EU missing targets; Climate change threatens nature’s ‘unique values’ 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 Daily Telegraph.
China’s climate plan
PEAK COAL?: China has set out its next “five-year plan” at the annual “two sessions” meeting of the National People’s Congress, including its climate strategy out to 2030, according to the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post. The plan called for China to cut its carbon emissions per unit of gross domestic product (GDP) by 17% from 2026 to 2030, which “may allow for continued increase in emissions given the rate of GDP growth”, reported Reuters. The newswire added that the plan also had targets to reach peak coal in the next five years and replace 30m tonnes per year of coal with renewables.
ACTIVE YET PRUDENT: Bloomberg described the new plan as “cautious”, stating that it “frustrat[es] hopes for tighter policy that would drive the nation to peak carbon emissions well before president Xi Jinping’s 2030 deadline”. Carbon Brief has just published an in-depth analysis of the plan. China Daily reported that the strategy “highlights measures to promote the climate targets of peaking carbon dioxide emissions before 2030”, which China said it would work towards “actively yet prudently”.
Around the world
- EU RULES: The European Commission has proposed new “made in Europe” rules to support domestic low-carbon industries, “against fierce competition from China”, reported Agence France-Presse. Carbon Brief examined what it means for climate efforts.
- RECORD HEAT: The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has said there is a 50-60% chance that the El Niño weather pattern could return this year, amplifying the effect of global warming and potentially driving temperatures to “record highs”, according to Euronews.
- FLAGSHIP FUND: The African Development Bank’s “flagship clean energy fund” plans to more than double its financing to $2.5bn for African renewables over the next two years, reported the Associated Press.
- NO WITHDRAWAL: Vanuatu has defied US efforts to force the Pacific-island nation to drop a UN draft resolution calling on the world to implement a landmark International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling on climate, according to the Guardian.
98
The number of nations that submitted their national reports on tackling nature loss to the UN on time – just half of the 196 countries that are part of the UN biodiversity treaty – according to analysis by