Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
UK considers cuts
EMISSIONS ADVICE: New recommendations from the UK’s climate advisers, the Climate Change Committee, said the nation should reduce its emissions to 87% below 1990 levels by 2040. This would keep the country on track for reaching net-zero by 2050 and take £1,400 off household bills by the same year, according to the advice. Read Carbon Brief’s in-depth summary of the findings, which show that the estimated cost of reaching net-zero is now 73% lower than thought just five years earlier.
‘Y BOTHER’: Despite not being a major focus of the new analysis, much of the UK media coverage zoned in on how achieving the emissions cut might affect people’s lives. The Guardian reported that the average person might need to skip “two kebabs’ worth of meat a week”, while a frontpage Daily Telegraph story raged at the idea that frequent fliers may need to pay a higher rate of tax, which was not a recommendation. It comes shortly after a satirical Private Eye piece by correspondent Y Bother reported that “getting net-zero done might be a massive faff”, asking: “Shall we just not do it?”
UK AID CUT: Elsewhere, prime minister Keir Starmer announced plans to cut the UK aid budget from 0.5% to 0.3% of national income and spend more on defence, the Guardian reported, just as officials entered international finance negotiations in Rome (more on this below). The newspaper said it understood the UK’s £11.6bn climate finance would be “ringfenced” from cuts, but Climate Home News reported that climate groups were “dismayed” by the move.
Around the world
- BIG VOTE: The centre-right Christian Democrats party won Germany’s federal election, with far-right Alternative for Germany in second place, Al Jazeera reported. Clean Energy Wire said the future government would still be committed to climate neutrality by 2045 but is likely to have a “reduced focus on climate policies”.
- REGULATORY REVERSAL: The US Environmental Protection Agency is aiming to reverse the “endangerment finding”, a key legal ruling that required the agency to regulate CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Washington Post.
- SETBACK: Energy company BP announced it will slash investment in renewables, while boosting oil and gas spending by 20%, the Associated Press reported.
- UKRAINE-US PACT: Ukraine made an agreement with the US to jointly explore its mineral resources – including oil and gas, according to a frontpage story in the Financial Times.
45%
The proportion by which Tesla’s electric vehicle sales have fallen in Europe since Elon Musk’s “political meddling”, reported Bloomberg.
Latest climate research
- A new Nature study suggested that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) – a system of ocean currents that moves water, heat and nutrients around the Atlantic Ocean and the globe – is unlikely to collapse this century. The research has promoted discussion around what AMOC “collapse” means.
- Climate change could lead to the creation of new carbon sinks in some ice-free areas of Antarctica, according to a study in Communications Earth and Environment.
- Peatland fires in the UK released 800,000 tonnes of carbon from 2000-21, a study in Environmental Research Letters found, accounting for 90% of the country’s total fire emissions.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
In December 2022, nearly all countries agreed to a flagship global target to protect 30% of Earth by the end of the decade. But a new investigation of hundreds of country plans submitted to the UN by Carbon Brief and the Guardian found that more than half of nations are not willing to commit to protecting 30% of their own land and seas. It comes as nations met in Rome this week to try to find agreement on outstanding biodiversity issues (more on this below). The chart above shows the various pledges made by countries when it comes to protecting a proportion of their land for nature, illustrating how less than half have committed to the key 30% figure.
Spotlight
COP16 talks reach finance deal
This week, Carbon Brief reports from COP16 nature talks in Rome, where countries landed a landmark finance deal in the early hours of Friday morning.
Last year saw a run of fraught and fractious environmental talks play out around the world.
Talks on reversing biodiversity loss, plastic pollution and desertification all ended in failure, while a UN climate summit in Azerbaijan produced a finance deal that was bitterly disappointing for many developing countries.
However, in the early hours of Friday morning at the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) headquarters in Rome, countries delivered what they described as a signal of hope for multilateralism in uncertain times.
Against a backdrop of foreign aid freezes and cutbacks in the US and Europe, nations agreed to a “permanent arrangement” to pay to help developing countries conserve biodiversity and a strategy to “mobilise” at least $200bn per year by 2030.
Striking a deal
The decision came after finance dominated discussions during the three-day resumed session of COP16 in Rome. Countries agreed to meet again in the Italian capital after failing to reach consensus at COP16 in Colombia in October 2024.
Different versions of the financing texts were negotiated throughout the week. Most countries agreed on the need to find a solution, but key disagreements still fractured the path to a deal until the summit’s final plenary.
In the end, two proposals – one from the COP16 presidency and another from Brazil on behalf of the BRICs – were merged to enable countries to find consensus on finance.
A UK official told Carbon Brief that Brazil’s leading role in the negotiations is a “very positive sign” of its commitment to working with countries ahead of hosting the COP30 climate summit in November.
Biodiversity in the balance
Colombian politician and COP16 president Susana Muhamad received a lengthy standing ovation for her role in guiding parties to consensus in the early hours of Friday morning in Rome.
But, amid celebrations, some speakers noted that nations are still far off track for meeting the targets of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). The GBF is a landmark deal, first made in 2022, aiming to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030.
Some three-quarters of nations have still not submitted their UN biodiversity plans for how they will achieve the targets of the GBF – four months after the deadline.
And a recent investigation by Carbon Brief and the Guardian revealed that more than half of nations that have submitted UN biodiversity plans do not commit to the GBF’s flagship target of protecting 30% of land and seas for nature by 2030.
Carbon Brief’s in-depth summary of all of the key outcomes from the COP16 talks in Rome has just been published.
Watch, read, listen
CLIMATE DATA: A short video report by ABC News explained how the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration uses automated techniques to record climate data.
‘FIRE AND FURY’: An editorial in Nature urged the global science community to resist Donald Trump’s “assault on science and international institutions”.
UNLOCK LOVELOCK: A BBC Sounds podcast told the life of James Lovelock, the co-author of the Gaia scientific theory and a former advisor to Shell who in 1966 warned the company about the risks of fossil fuels.
Coming up
- 3-4 March: First G20 agriculture working group meeting | South Africa
- 3-14 March: International Seabed Authority 30th session, legal and technical commission meeting | Kingston, Jamaica
- 4-6 March: Regional workshop on Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) | Mombasa, Kenya
Pick of the jobs
- Associated Press, climate social video producer | Salary: $52,046-$82,934. Location: New York
- Imperial College London, deputy director of Undaunted | Salary: £68,005-£77,703. Location: London (hybrid)
- Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, senior economist, climate policy | Salary: Unknown. Location: Beijing
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
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The post DeBriefed 28 February 2025: COP16 lands finance deal; More than half of nations skip key nature pledge; UK eyes cost-saving emissions plan 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 potentiall