Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Raging wildfires
SOUTH KOREAN BLAZE: Wildfires in south-eastern South Korea – the “worst wildfires in its history” – have killed at least 27 people and displaced more than 37,000 from their homes, the Korea Times reported. The Chosun Daily said that the 1,300-year-old Gounsa Temple “was reduced to ashes” and the fire continues to endanger many of the “most prized cultural assets”. A “spate” of recent wildfires in South Korea and Japan have been “linked to climate change”, the Japan Times said.
FUEL TO THE FIRES: Parts of North and South Carolina have been under evacuation orders due to several large, uncontained wildfires, with “millions of downed trees” from September’s Hurricane Helene fuelling the blazes, the Raleigh News & Observer reported. The Guardian added: “Many people in the area are still getting over the hurricane.”
UK climate and energy roundup
DEADLINE DROPPED: The UK’s High Court “agreed to push back the deadline” for the government to modify its “delivery plan” needed to meet its legally binding climate targets, BusinessGreen reported. The plan was published in 2023, but had been “subject to a legal challenge from green groups, which alleged it was not sufficiently detailed”, the outlet added.
‘GREEN SILENCE’: UK chancellor Rachel Reeves made “no mention of green issues” in her spring statement, the Guardian reported, adding that this “silence [came] as a relief” to “green experts”, given cuts announced elsewhere. Meanwhile, the Chinese owner of British Steel “rejected a £500m lifeline offer from the UK government, raising fears about thousands of jobs at the steelmaker”, the Financial Times reported.
Around the world
- IT’S ELECTRIC: Chinese automaker BYD “topped $100bn” in sales of electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids, surpassing electric-only manufacturer Tesla, the Financial Times said. Tesla sales have fallen 49% year-on-year in Europe in 2025, ABC News noted, even as EV sales overall grew 28%.
- CARBON MARKET: China released plans to include its steel, cement and aluminium industries in the country’s carbon-trading market, Reuters reported.
- COAL COMMITMENT: Germany’s incoming coalition “stand[s] by” plans to phase out coal power by 2038, according to a leaked draft reported by Euractiv, which noted the outgoing government had “favoured” 2030.
- POWER SURGE: Record temperatures in 2024 meant “global energy demand surged” last year, according to a report from the International Energy Agency covered by the Wall Street Journal. A record 585 gigawatts of new renewables were added last year, Axios reported, citing International Renewable Energy Agency data.
- SHIP-SHAPE: In Climate Home News, Kenya’s special envoy for climate change, Ambassador Ali Mohamed, “unequivocally” endorsed a proposed carbon levy on emissions from ships.
267
The number of days in 2024 – nearly three-quarters of the year – in which the US was experiencing a “major disaster”, according to analysis of US Federal Emergency Management Agency data by the International Institute for Environment and Development and CNN.
Latest climate research
- Research in the Journal of Environmental Psychology found that political polarisation around climate change becomes more pronounced as countries become wealthier.
- In China, compound hot-dry and hot-wet events became more frequent, long-lasting and intense from 1985 to 2019, with serious implications for crop losses, a new study in Earth’s Future found.
- A study in Environmental Research Letters detailed a machine learning-driven model capable of accurately forecasting marine heatwaves 10 days in advance.
(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 US National Snow and Ice Data Center announced that Arctic sea ice reached its annual maximum extent on 21 March. At 14.33m km2, the winter peak is the smallest in the 47-year satellite record. Dr Julienne Stroeve, a senior scientist at the NSIDC, told Carbon Brief that the record low “continue[s] the overall long-term decline in the ice cover”.
Spotlight
Warming may turn butterfly hotspots from ‘safe havens to graves’
This week, Carbon Brief covers a new study that mapped and analysed the biodiversity of butterfly species around the world.
Up to a third of butterfly biodiversity “hotspots” will become too warm for the species they host by 2070, according to new research.
The study, which analysed distributional data on more than 12,000 butterfly species, was published this week in Nature Ecology & Evolution.
It found that two-thirds of butterfly species are mountain-dwellers, with mountains holding 3.5 times more butterfly biodiversity hotspots than lowland ecosystems.
The lead author of the paper told Carbon Brief he hopes that the approach laid out in the study will “broadly boost the representation of insects in global ecology and conservation”.
Mapping hotspots
Butterflies are “uniquely well-documented among insects”, Dr Stefan Pinkert, a researcher at Germany’s University of Marburg, told Carbon Brief.
But, even so, “much of this information remain[s] fragmented and inaccessible”, said Pinkert, who led the new study.
Pinkert and his colleagues used a country-level database of butterfly occurrences, along with regional range maps and previously published species-distribution models, to model the distribution of 12,119 butterfly species. They then calculated and mapped the “richness” and “range rarity” of butterfly species around the world.
Species richness was calculated as the number of unique species in the database for a given area. “Range rarity” is inversely proportional to the range size of the species in an area.
For both richness and range rarity, the researchers defined a “hotspot” as the 5% of areas around the world with the highest value of each quantity. They found that only 10% of species richness hotspots and 10% of range rarity hotspots overlap. The study said that this underlines the “limited value” of species-richness hotspots for identifying conservation priorities.
Pinkert told Carbon Brief that he was concerned to find that only 40-45% of butterfly biodiversity hotspots overlap with the biodiversity hotspots of land animals. Land-animal biodiversity has historically “served as main surrogates for defining” priorities for global conservation, he added.
Warming warning
The researchers also found that around two-thirds of all butterfly species they studied live in mountain regions, with species richness peaking at around 2,500 metres elevation and range rarity peaking at 3,500 metres. They noted that, while mountains are known for their species richness, the concentration of butterfly biodiversity is “substantially” higher than it is for other types of organisms, such as plants, birds and reptiles.
They then used climate models to project warming over the next 45 years – as well as how those temperature changes will affect butterfly habitat in the future.
They found that “temperature niche loss” – warming beyond the safe temperature range for species in a given area – would erode up to one-third of species-richness hotspots globally, under a very-high emissions scenario, with some areas losing nearly two-thirds of their hotspot area. Under a moderate emissions scenario, sub-Saharan Africa and south-east Asia would each lose a quarter of their temperature niches.
The loss of safe temperature niches was greater for hotspot areas than non-hotspot areas. The authors concluded that under accelerating warming, mountains might be converted “from safe havens to graves”.
Pinkert told Carbon Brief:
“Our results underscore the urgent need to prioritise insect conservation amid global change…Business-as-usual in prioritisation and implementation [of conservation actions] will threaten ecosystem integrity – the foundation of our well-being and that of future generations.”
Watch, read, listen
TIMELY TREK: Latin America Reports chronicled a journey to visit Colombia’s melting Andean glaciers on the country’s “climate change trail”.
ENERGY OUTLOOK: Kaare Sandholt of top Chinese thinktank the Energy Research Institute talked about the country’s energy transformation outlook – recently covered by Carbon Brief – on the Environment China podcast.
TRUMP-PROOF TOOLS: The Guardian recreated a climate-risk tool that had been purged from the US Federal Emergency Management Agency’s website under Trump’s anti-climate directives.
Coming up
- 2-3 April: 41st UN-Water meeting, Rome
- 7-11 April: Meeting of the Marine Environment Protection Committee of the International Maritime Organization, London
Pick of the jobs
- Earthjustice, legislative director, climate and energy | Salary: $164,000-$182,200. Location: Washington DC
- International Maritime Organization, media and communications associate | Salary: £45,347. Location: London
- UN Environment Programme, finance and budget assistant | Salary: Unknown. Location: Nairobi
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 28 March 2025: South Korea’s record-breaking wildfires; Arctic sea ice hits record-low peak; Butterfly biodiversity imperilled appeared first on Carbon Brief.
American farmers are drowning in health insurance costs, while their German counterparts never worry about medical bills. The difference may help determine which country’s small farms are better prepared for a changing climate.
Samantha Kemnah looked out the foggy window of her home in New Berlin, New York, at the 150-acre dairy farm she and her husband, Chris, bought last year. This winter, an unprecedented cold front brought snowstorms and ice to the region.
On the Farm, the Hidden Climate Cost of the Broken U.S. Health Care System
Climate Change
A Little-Used Maneuver Could Mean More Drilling and Mining in Southern Utah’s Redrock Country
Two Utah Congress members have introduced a resolution that could end protections for Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Conservation groups worry similar maneuvers on other federal lands will follow.
Lawmakers from Utah have commandeered an obscure law to unravel protections for the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, potentially delivering on a Trump administration goal of undoing protections for public conservation lands across the country.
A Little-Used Maneuver Could Mean More Drilling and Mining in Southern Utah’s Redrock Country
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.
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