Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Biden’s ‘climate legacy’
BIDEN OUT: US energy policy expert Jason Bordoff was among commentators reacting to the news that Joe Biden has withdrawn from the 2024 presidential race, telling Axios that he will “leave office with the strongest record on climate change of any president in US history”. The Associated Press reported that the Environmental Protection Agency announced $4.3bn in funding this week for decarbonisation efforts across 30 states. The timing of the grants will “ensure Biden’s environmental legacy will remain intact”, Inside Climate News said.
STILL OFF TRACK: Despite Biden’s efforts, the US remains off track for its Paris Agreement pledge of halving emissions from 2005 levels by 2030, according to a new report from US thinktank Rhodium Group, covered by the Financial Times. Rhodium’s analysis suggests the US would only reach 32-43% reductions by 2030, despite a record $71bn of clean energy investment in the first quarter of 2024. The Guardian covered how the US became the world’s biggest oil and gas producer, noting that no other country has ever produced as much of the fossil fuels.
KAMALA IN?: The New York Times is among publications examining the climate record of Kamala Harris, current vice-president and Biden’s most likely successor in the presidential race. “Harris has for years made the environment a top concern,” the newspaper said. The Guardian noted that, when Harris ran for the Democratic presidential primary in 2019, she promoted a “green agenda that was more ambitious than Biden’s, including calling for a carbon tax, a ban on fracking on public lands and a $10tn investment” to help combat climate change.
Global burning
NORTH AMERICA ON FIRE: Biden’s departure from the presidential race comes as US firefighters continue to battle wildfires in Utah and California amid blistering heat, the Guardian reported. NBC News noted that wildfires are also raging across Oregon and Washington, as well as across the border in Alberta, Canada. Fires forced 25,000 people to evacuate the tourist town of Jasper in Alberta, where flames have reached as high as 100 metres, the New York Times reported.
EUROPE ON FIRE: Parts of Europe are also battling blazes, with Greece facing its “most difficult wildfire season in two decades”, according to Bloomberg. There were 30 wildfires reported within a 24-hour period through last Sunday, it added. At least 20 wildfires were also reported in North Macedonia, with firefighters from neighbouring countries called in to help, according to Euronews.
Around the world
- FOSSIL CLIMATE FUNDS: Azerbaijan, host of the COP29 climate summit in November, is setting up a “Climate Finance Action Fund”, which will take money from fossil-fuel producing countries and companies in order to finance climate action in the global south, Reuters reported.
- ALTÉRRA-IA MOTIVE: Climate Home News reported on how money from a $30bn climate fund set up by COP28 host UAE, known as ALTÉRRA, has been used to help finance a gas pipeline project in the US.
- CLIMATE HYPOCRISY: A Guardian exclusive revealed how five wealthy countries are responsible for the majority of the new oil and gas licences handed out in 2024, with these projects due to emit 12bn tonnes of CO2 over their lifetimes. UN chief Antonio Guterres responded to the news by saying rich nations “are signing away our future”, reported Inside Climate News.
- WORST OIL SPILL: An oil tanker carrying 1.4m litres of oil capsized off the coast of the Philippines, with the country’s coast guard saying it “would be the worst oil spill in Philippine history if it were to leak”, reported the Inquirer.
- SA CLIMATE BILL: South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa signed a new climate change bill into law this week, reported the Citizen. The bill introduces a regulatory framework for climate mitigation and adaptation, something that had been lacking up to now.
- ETHIOPIA MUDSLIDES: At least 229 people have been killed in mudslides triggered by heavy rains in Ethiopia, Al Jazeera reported.
17.15C
The global temperature on Monday 22 July, which was likely the hottest day in human history, according to Carbon Brief’s latest “state of the climate” update.
Latest climate research
- A study in Nature Climate Change showed that only 8% and 53% of African nations’ nationally determined contributions (NDCs) and national adaptation plans (NAPs), respectively, provide sufficient baselines for tracking progress on climate adaptation.
- The current “science-based” climate targets that have been adopted by companies across the world suffer from three issues: “basic misrepresentation”; “narrow and arbitrary benchmarks”; and “unequal effort sharing in an unequal world”. This makes them in need of reform, argued a comment piece published in Nature Communications Nature and Environment.
- A Nature study found that as well as absorbing carbon dioxide, trees also absorb methane from the atmosphere through their bark, making them more effective in absorbing greenhouse gases than previously thought.
(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 Paris 2024 Olympics officially start today and these Games are likely to be the hottest ever, with the organisers attempting to mitigate impacts from the likely heatwaves. Carbon Brief analysis shows that the greenhouse gas emissions from these Games are expected to be less than half of those from London 2012. The Paris organisers have explicitly set a carbon budget of 1.75m tonnes of CO2 equivalent (which is half of the average of London 2012 and Rio 2016) and, according to their latest estimates, they are set to meet this target with total emissions coming in at 1.58m tonnes. Organisers said they had aimed to reduce emissions through use of temporary and low-carbon construction materials, as well as by encouraging sustainable travel. The Paris total is set to be even lower than the emissions from the Tokyo 2020 games held in 2021, when emissions were significantly reduced due to a ban on spectators amid the Covid-19 pandemic. The emissions figures exclude any carbon offsets and, for Rio 2016, do not include emissions from legacy construction.
Spotlight
Life in Louisiana’s ‘Cancer Alley’
This week, Carbon Brief interviews Dr Joy Banner, co-founder and co-director of the Descendants Project, about her work trying to uplift Black communities in the face of industrial pollution and increasing climate impacts.
Banner is based in a region along the Mississippi River in Louisiana known as “Cancer Alley”. It is so named due to the high prominence of cancer, which has been linked to local industrial air pollution from the area’s 150 industrial plants. These plants contributed 66% of Louisiana’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2020.
Levels of the carcinogen ethylene oxide, used in plastics production, were found to be 1,000 times higher than safe levels in the region. The health impacts disproportionately affect Black communities. This has been labelled by the UN as a form of “environmental racism”.
Banner’s organisation, the Descendants Project, aims to raise awareness of how Black communities in the region are “descended from the enslaved men, women and children who were forced to labour at plantations”, many of which were purchased by “large industrial petrochemical plants” fromin the 1970s onwards.
Carbon Brief: How would you say that your work relates to petrochemicals and climate change?
Joy Banner: To be honest, when we first started the Descendents Project…we didn’t see it as intersecting our work. But, pretty early on, Jo [co-founder and Joy’s sister] was invited to a conference in Texas, which is another location where there is a proliferation of petrochemical development. That work brought to mind the environmental issues that we are having in Louisiana. So, we are known as “Cancer Alley”, because of the health consequences of having so much industry right on top of us. Our cancer risk is 95% higher than the rest of the country. And the reason why we have so much production is plastics – and plastics is petrochemical[s] and so I guess I didn’t put two and two together [until then].
CB: The carbon emissions released in the production of plastics is having a global impact, but what are the kind of local impacts that you’re seeing in your community?
JB: I don’t know the statistics of how much [petrochemical production in] the Gulf Coast region is impacting climate overall, but it’s not insignificant at all. But, it’s just, for us, we are inundated with the smells. You can taste it, you can feel it, you can see it, you can hear it. It takes over your senses. And the other side of it is the impact that is happening to our climate and the way it’s impacting the strength of the hurricanes and the storm systems that are coming through…Our storms are getting worse. Those hurricanes are getting worse. And the impact of those storms are having more dire consequences.
CB: What are things that you’re trying to do [through the Descendants Project]?
JB: One of the strategies…[is] this dependence that we feel that we have on industries is false. It’s an illusion, it’s not actually a dependence because the plants are not doing s**t for us. Excuse my language, they really are not. Like they’re making billions of dollars. And why, if they’re so rich, then why are we in an impoverished community? Why do we have food deserts? Why are our school systems not better? And so, so our work is breaking that illusion, educating people and getting them to the point where they’re asking questions…We’re just strategising and highlighting the ways in which our communities are doing things for ourselves.
Watch, read, listen
BATTERY DEMANDS: A new report from the US thinktank RMI explored future demand for batteries and the critical raw minerals required to make them.
NOT SO RARE: The podcast BBC Rare Earth explored whether the rise in wildfires around the world is unstoppable and whether the solutions might be found through applying Indigenous fire management practices.
JAILED PROTEST: George Monbiot appeared on Guardian’s Science Weekly podcast to discuss the record-long jail terms for non-violent protest given to five Just Stop Oil activists for planning the blocking of a motorway in the UK.
Coming up
- 27 July-2 August: 61st session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Sofia, Bulgaria
- 28 July: Venezuelan presidential elections
- 29 July-2 August: International Seabed Authority Assembly, second part of the 29th session, Kingston, Jamaica
- 30 July-1 August: UN Environment Programme Dialogue on Actionable Steps for Inclusive Climate Resilience Monitoring and Reporting, online
Pick of the jobs
- International Energy Agency, China programme officer | Salary: €5,741 per month. Location: Paris
- Internews, environmental media consultant – Middle East North Africa | Salary: Unknown. Location: Remote (based in UK or Tunisia)
- Earth Journalism Network, virtual reporting fellowships to the UNCBD (COP16) and UNFCCC (COP29) | Salary: $100 communications stipend
- Reuters Institute, Oxford Climate Journalism Network Engagement Manager | Salary: £32,332-£38,205. Location: Oxford, UK
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
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The post DeBriefed 26 July 2024: Biden’s ‘climate legacy’; Global wildfires; Life in Louisiana’s ‘Cancer Alley’ 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