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
EU 2040 target
AMBITION: Major EU economies – including Germany, France, the Netherlands and Spain – have called for the European Commission to set “an ambitious climate target for 2040”, in a letter obtained by Politico. While the memo does not mention a specific percentage reduction, Politico said “its rhetoric implies…that the countries would back a push to cut at least 90% of the EU’s emissions by 2040”. This is the minimum level recommended by EU science advisers.
TRILLION-EURO TARGET: The memo comes after the Financial Times reported on a draft document from Brussels detailing how the bloc can cut its emissions by 90% by 2040 and reach net-zero by 2050. The document says the EU must invest around €1.5tn a year from 2031 in order to meet its goals, according to the FT, adding that this would unlock savings of up to €2.8tn by lowering demand for fossil-fuel imports. Reuters also covered the draft, reporting that it says that EU fossil-fuel use could drop 80% on 1990 levels by 2040 under the proposals.
BREWING BACKLASH?: Meanwhile, a second Reuters story reported on the results of a cross-EU opinion poll suggesting that populist, right-wing parties could surge in the next set of European elections, which “could make passing ambitious climate change policies harder”. The Guardian also reported on how populist “anti-European” party gains in European elections “could shift the parliament’s balance sharply to the right and jeopardise key pillars of the EU’s agenda including climate action”.
IPCC roadmap
ISTANBUL MEETING: Countries gathered for a four-day meeting in Istanbul to decide on a future roadmap for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the climate science authority responsible for producing reports aimed at helping guide global action on climate change, Carbon Brief reported. At the meeting, governments decided against a new structure for the IPCC’s next “assessment cycle”, committing instead to the traditional set of three “working group” reports and just one “special” report (on cities) over the next five years.
‘NOT THRILLED’: Reacting to the decisions, one scientist told Carbon Brief that she is “not thrilled” by the decision to produce “a whole set of working group reports again”, given they will “not say that much new”. And another said that “waiting until 2028 for the three reports and 2029 for the synthesis is too late to have an impact on decision-making”. They added: “The world will be significantly different by then.”
Around the world
- LNG PERMIT ‘PAUSE’: President Joe Biden today announced a “temporary pause” on approving new export terminals for liquified natural gas (LNG), the Financial Times reported. It said the move was “a blow to a booming industry and…a win [for] climate campaigners”
- SCEPTIC APPOINTMENT: A UK Conservative peer who was previously criticised for claiming that rising temperatures are “likely to be beneficial” has been appointed to a parliamentary committee on climate change, the Guardian reported.
- AMAZON DROUGHT: Climate change was the main driver of the Amazon rainforest’s worst drought in at least half a century, according to a World Weather Attribution analysis.
- ZIM LITHIUM: China has invested more than $1.4bn in Zimbabwe, which holds one of the world’s largest lithium reserves, to secure supplies for electric vehicle manufacturing in the past two years, Climate Home News reported. It added there was a risk that local communities are “missing out” on benefits.
- COAL FIXATION: The Third Pole reported on how India’s push for new coal production could “cast doubt” on its climate targets.
2,195TWh
The amount of power that global nuclear is projected to generate by 2025 – an all-time high, according to an International Energy Agency report covered by the Financial Times.
Latest climate research
- The frequency and extent of concurrent drought and heat events in North America occurring this century is “likely unprecedented” since at least the 16th century, according to a Science Advances paper.
- Spiders may adjust the size of their webs in response to how warming temperatures could affect the size of their prey, new research in Nature Climate Change found.
- A “brief communication” in Nature Climate Change suggested that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could “hamper the ability to adequately describe conditions across the Arctic, thus biassing the view on Arctic change”.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
A new sector-by-sector analysis for Carbon Brief by the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air looked at economic growth driven by investments in clean energy in China in 2023. Clean energies – particularly the so-called “new three” industries: solar power, electric vehicles and batteries – injected 11.4tn yuan ($1.6tn) into China’s economy, accounting for 9% of China’s GDP in 2023. The analysis made use of official figures, industry data and analyst reports. This sector is a “key part not only of China’s energy and climate efforts, but also of its broader economic and industrial policy”.
Spotlight
Gender equality in climate negotiations
This week, Carbon Brief interviews the director of the Women’s Environment and Development Organization on why women are still a minority at UN climate summits.
Last week, the president of Azerbaijan was forced to rejig the organising committee for the COP29 climate summit, after receiving a large backlash for having previously picked an all-male panel.
Carbon Brief analysis shows that COPs have been male-dominated since their inception, with delegates at the most recent summit being 38% female and 62% male.
Carbon Brief spoke to Bridget Burns, executive director of the Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO). Burns has campaigned for more than a decade for the representation of women and the inclusion of gender equality in the climate negotiations outcomes.
Carbon Brief: Why is it important to have equal participation of men and women in the COP29 organising committee?
Bridget Burns: The reason why we need an equal percentage of men and women in the climate change negotiations is a matter of human rights. Representation goes well beyond just gender, [it includes] frontline communities, Indigenous peoples, who also really need to have a voice in decision-making.
The decisions will not necessarily be equitable and or effective [if] they’re not being designed by the entire population who have been impacted by [climate change].
[Women] are facing impacts differently, they have different access needs. But they also have potentially different solutions.
So even though [the COP29 hosts] have added 12 women [to the 28-strong organising committee], the fact that nobody in that room stepped back to say – “Oh! this is an all-male committee” – is deeply worrying.
Gender is just one of the challenges. It’s also a leadership committee that is full of fossil-fuel executives, which is not the type of leadership that we need in charge of the COP.
CB: What is needed to ensure that climate negotiations are really inclusive?
BB: Part of changing the nature of power, and the ways in which it showed up in our system for multiple years, [goes] beyond making room at the table. It’s to allow other folks to step up into leadership and to allow for their voices to be heard. That requires important conversations on ceding power.
There’s a lot of long-term systemic work that needs to happen. At a global level, we still need the decisions, mandates and benchmarks.
CB: Should we be talking about climate policies for women beyond their participation in climate summits?
BB: It’s hard to get gender equality discussed in the climate change negotiations. It’s even harder to take a feminist approach to climate justice. As the women and gender constituency, we always bring a feminist lens – and we’re calling for feminist climate justice.
If you are a country that is pushing for a strong gender action plan – but you are not backing that up with finance for developing countries, and you’re not backing that up with [emissions] reductions – then that’s not a feminist country.
Watch, read, listen
ELFSTEDENTOCHT: BBC Sport reported on how a much-loved skating race across frozen lakes and waterways in the Netherlands could be lost forever because of climate change.
AFRICAN DISCOURSE: In African Arguments, a group of African writers respond to a recent article focused on how “war in the Congo has kept the planet cooler” – noting that such a narrative “renders African people invisible”.
INDIGENOUS MENTAL HEALTH: A podcast by Climate Tracker explored the effects of climate change on Indigenous peoples from Jamaica and Guyana.
Coming up
- 28 January: Finland presidential election
- 29-30 January: G20 first environment and climate sustainability working group meeting, Vila do Conde, Brazil
- 30-31 January: UK Climate Change Committee COP28 key outcomes briefing report
Pick of the jobs
- UK Climate Change Committee, chief executive | Salary: Unknown. Location: UK
- Politico, energy technology reporter | Salary: Unknown. Location: Arlington, US
- Global Canopy, Claudia Comberti research assistant on Brazil and COP30 | Salary: £25,000. Location: Oxford
- The Chancery Lane Project, head of forestry, land and agriculture | Salary: £60,000-80,000. Location: Remote (must have right to work in the UK for at least two years)
The post DeBriefed 26 January 2024: EU eyes ‘ambitious’ 2040 target; IPCC decides on new climate reports; Gender inequality at COPs 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