Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Floods and fires
PAKISTAN FLOODS: Torrential rain in northern Pakistan killed almost 400 people over five days, Agence-France Press reported. The rains have caused flooding and landslides that have “swept away entire villages, leaving many residents trapped in the rubble and scores missing”, it added. Bloomberg reported that the monsoon season has killed at least 1,860 people in India and Pakistan, “with flash floods, landslides and inundated cities exposing the region’s growing vulnerability to climate-related disasters”.
HEAVY RAIN IN CHINA: In China’s Inner Mongolia province, 13 people have been killed in floods caused by heavy rains, reported Reuters. It added that “heavy rainfall and severe floods that meteorologists link to climate change” are posing “major challenges”, including “economic losses running into billions”.
SPANISH WILDFIRES: Spain has continued to battle several major wildfires, even as temperatures across the country began to drop, reported the Associated Press. The fires have burned a total area twice the size of London this year, added the Daily Telegraph. The emissions from the wildfires have “surged to their highest levels in at least 23 years”, reported the Independent.
Around the world
- TRUMP REPORT ‘IRREGULARITIES’: A former head at the US Environmental Protection Agency has requested a correction to a recent misleading climate report from the Department of Energy, citing “legal and procedural irregularities”, reported Politico.
- SOARING SOLAR: Solar power generation in Britain has already surpassed the total for 2024, with more than 14 terawatt hours of electricity produced as of 16 August, the Financial Times reported.
- ‘CLASH OF VIEWS’: Incoming president of the COP30 climate summit, Brazilian diplomat André Corrêa do Lago, is preparing for a “clash of views” over how countries should respond to a review of their overdue climate plans, according to Climate Home News.
- TAX CREDITS: The US treasury department has issued guidance that “narrows which wind and solar energy projects” can receive the remaining tax credits set to be “largely eliminated” by the Republicans’ “big beautiful bill”, reported the Hill.
195%
The record increase in UK renewable energy capacity to gain planning permission in the second quarter of this year, when compared to the same period in 2024, reported the Financial Times.
Latest climate research
- The risk of rice production failure across Indian districts could increase by 26%, on average, due to climate change by 2055-84 | Environmental Research Letters
- Newborns across 33 African countries are more likely to die if their mothers are exposed to extreme heat during pregnancy | PNAS Nexus
- More than 13,800 square kilometres of giant panda habitat could “degrade” under a moderate-warming scenario | Global Change Biology
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
Clean-energy growth helped China’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions fall during the first half of the year, despite an increase in electricity demand, new analysis for Carbon Brief found. Emissions in the first half of the year fell by 1% year-on-year, extending a declining trend that started in March 2024, the analysis said. CO2 output fell in China’s power sector by 3%, with the growth in solar power alone matching the rise in electricity demand in the country. Emissions also fell in the building materials, steel and heating industries sectors, the analysis added.
Spotlight
How architecture can support climate-adaptive design
This week, Carbon Brief interviews Prof Alice Moncaster, professor of sustainable construction at the University of the West of England, about how architecture can adapt to the growing pressures of climate change.
Carbon Brief: What are the biggest challenges with designing climate-adaptive buildings?
Alice Moncaster: Climate change is already producing far more frequent and extreme heatwaves across most of the world, as well as more severe storms leading to flash flooding and failing roof and subsurface drainage systems, and long periods of drought, meaning water shortages and shrinking ground leading to cracking buildings.
There are two huge challenges for designing buildings that can physically withstand these extremes. The first is perhaps the easier, which is the design of new buildings. This is critical in developing nations where rapidly increasing and urbanising populations need a parallel expansion in their built environment.
The second is more complex and often seen as less exciting, but is essential to developed countries with a mature building stock and lower or no population growth – how to retrofit our existing buildings from all previous decades to withstand the new weather.
Really, there is a third, less talked about challenge. At the same time as designing and retrofitting for increasingly extreme climates, this major construction programme needs to add the very minimum to greenhouse gas emissions. We cannot just continue to throw money and materials at adaptation because, at the same time, we need to reduce our carbon emissions as much as possible in order to limit further climate change.
CB: There is a lot of focus on air conditioning (AC) currently, but how can the architectural design of a building also help to keep people cool in a warming climate?
AM: This is becoming a huge issue. AC not only uses energy, but adding portable AC units kicks heat out of the building, making the outside even hotter. Passive design strategies have existed for millennia in hotter countries.
These are focused on four approaches.
First, ventilation is increasingly an issue in countries where buildings are constructed to keep the warmth in and, therefore, are built to be airtight. A passive approach is to design in a stack or chimney effect, with an opening at the top of the building, often above a central atrium.
Second, the thermal inertia of a building has long been understood as essential for keeping buildings cool in hot summers. Rather than plasterboard, if wall or floor surfaces are exposed stone, brick or concrete, they will stay cool for many hours longer (as anyone who has been in an old church will know).
A method which combines ventilation with thermal inertia is a “jaali wall”, a perforated stone or brick screen used in some traditional Asian architecture.
Third, shading the outside of the building from the sun is essential. Many Mediterranean buildings include external shutters, which keep the sun off the windows.
The final approach is how the building is used. Bedroom spaces are often moved in hotter countries to cooler areas of the house or even outside.
CB: Do you think there is enough centering of climate-adaptive design within architectural practice currently?
AM: I believe that there is a huge amount of knowledge among our architects and building professionals about climate-adaptive – and climate-mitigating – design, but that it is very hard to make it actually happen.
I think it is partly due to the slow-to-change nature of the construction sector, across skills, materials and supply chains. But I increasingly think that underlying the sector are the powerful vested interests, which means that traditional materials still dominate.
Procurement practices also often do little to support innovation and the understanding of risk has not yet caught up with the very real risk of climate change.
Watch, read, listen
MASS EXTINCTION: A long read in the Guardian questioned whether climate change is leading towards “another Great Dying”.
A GOOD PLANET: On a New Scientist podcast, climate scientists Kate Marvel and Tim Lenton discussed how to fix climate change, quipping: “All of the other planets out there are just complete garbage. The Earth is the only good place.”
COOLED VS COOKED: A guest essay in the New York Times discussed the new American inequality – those who are “cooked” and those who are “cooled” – as extreme heat becomes increasingly common in the US.
Coming up
- 26-29 August: 6th Forum of Ministers and Environment Authorities of Asia Pacific, Fiji
- 24-28 August: World Water Week 2025, Stockholm, Sweden
- 27 August: UN Environment Programme sixth meeting of the open-ended ad hoc group on measurability and indicators, online
Pick of the jobs
- British Antarctic Survey, project manager – Rothera Renewable Energy | Salary: £56,509-£62,159. Location: Cambridge/Antarctica
- ClientEarth, UK environment lawyer | Salary: £56,991. Location: London
- The New York Times, deputy editor, climate desk | Salary: $150,000-$175,000. Location: Hybrid/New York
- Indigenous Climate Action, climate leadership coordinator | Salary: $55,000- $65,000. Location: Remote
- India Climate Collaborative, programme manager – heat | Salary: Unknown. Location: Mumbai/ Delhi/Bengaluru
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
The post DeBriefed 22 August 2025: Pakistan floods; China emissions drop; Climate-adaptive architecture appeared first on Carbon Brief.
DeBriefed 22 August 2025: Pakistan floods; China emissions drop; Climate-adaptive architecture
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