Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
COP29 fall-out
FINANCE DEAL: Developed nations agreed to help channel “at least” $300bn a year into developing countries by 2035 to support their efforts to deal with climate change, at the end of fractured talks at COP29 in Azerbaijan. The new climate-finance goal has left developing countries bitterly disappointed, with Nigeria branding it a “joke”. Developing countries had called for developed countries to raise $1.3tn a year.
FOSSIL FUELS: Countries also failed to reach an agreement on how the outcomes of last year’s “global stocktake”, including a key pledge to transition away from fossil fuels, should be taken forward – instead shunting the decision to COP30 next year in Brazil. They did find agreement on the remaining sections of Article 6 on carbon markets, meaning all elements of the Paris Agreement have been finalised nearly 10 years after it was signed. Read Carbon Brief’s in-depth summary of all of the key outcomes from COP29.
NATURE MISSING: Despite taking place just days after a major UN biodiversity summit, COP29 produced few new commitments on food, forests, land and nature. Countries managed to negotiate a text “reaffirming” the “importance of conserving, protecting and restoring nature”. However, countries failed to adopt it by the end of COP. See Carbon Brief’s separate article on key takeaways for food, forests, land and nature.
Around the world
- JAPAN NDC: Japan has published its new UN climate pledge, or “nationally determined contribution” (NDC), aiming to cut emissions by 60% by 2035, compared to 2013 levels, NHK Japan reported.
- EXXON PROBE: Reuters reported that the FBI in the US “has been investigating a longtime Exxon Mobil consultant over the contractor’s alleged role in a hack-and-leak operation that targeted hundreds of the oil company’s biggest critics”, including environmental activists. Exxon compared the allegations to “conspiracy theories”.
- IRELAND ELECTION: Against the backdrop of Ireland’s general election today, Carbon Brief examined where each party stands on energy, climate change and nature.
- ELECTRIC CROSSROAD: The UK government has announced it will hold a consultation on its electric vehicle sales mandate, after the closure of a car manufacturing plant sparked industry backlash, the Associated Press reported.
- AFRICA EXTREMES: Landslides caused by heavy rains in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo left nine people dead, seven houses destroyed and 31 damaged, according to Reuters. Climate experts told the newswire that the frequency and intensity of extreme rainfall in Africa is increasing due to climate change.
28 years
The length of time that the Greenland ice sheet has continuously lost ice, according to a guest post by climate scientists for Carbon Brief.
Latest climate research
- Ten of 16 2026 FIFA World Cup sites in North America are at high risk of experiencing extreme heat stress conditions, according to Scientific Reports research.
- Research in Science Advances found that deep ocean waters are becoming increasingly acidic because of rising CO2 levels, “exposing many organisms to corrosive conditions”.
- China’s forests increased in size by 4m hectares a year from 2000-2015 and by 2m hectares a year from 2015-2022, according to a Geophysical Research Letters study.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
Countries are currently gathering in South Korea with the aim of agreeing a new legally binding pact for reducing plastic pollution. Plastics account for 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon Brief analysis found that, if negotiators fail to agree on such a treaty, plastics could take up half the remaining “carbon budget” for keeping temperatures to 1.5C (see “projected emissions” on the chart above). Conversely, if the world strikes an agreement to reduce plastic production by 40% by 2040, relative to 2025 levels – as proposed by Ottawa, Rwanda and Peru earlier this year – plastics would emit 52bn tonnes of CO2 equivalent by 2050.
Spotlight
How Belém is preparing for COP30
With COP29 over, eyes are on Brazil as it races to prepare for the next annual round of climate talks.
Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was keen to hold COP30 near the Amazon, with the rainforest city of Belém chosen to host the summit from 10-21 November 2025.
However, media reports suggest the city of 2.5 million people is “plagued by pollution and violence” and, currently, does not have enough accommodation to host the expected 60,000 delegates. Organisers have said they are building new hotels and considering bringing in cruise ships to house attendees during the summit.
Carbon Brief interviewed two experts from Brazil: Dr Patricia Pinho, deputy science director at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM,) and Claudio Angelo, international policy coordinator at the NGO Observatório do Clima, to explore these challenges.
Carbon Brief: What is expected to be achieved at COP30 in Brazil?
Patrica Pinho: I think the expectations are huge. Brazil is right now defining who is going to be our [COP president]. We have a few names, including [minister of environment] Marina Silva. It’s always speculation.
In my view, [COP30 will have] four huge goals: phasing out fossil fuels, [taking forward] the global stocktake, the loss and damage funds, [and] the global goal of adaptation.
Claudio Angelo: What we inherited from Baku [was] the whole global stocktake decision, meaning the discussions were stalled and taken to the next COP. Also the mitigation work programme, the whole ambition debate, the roadmap to the 1.3tn.
What civil society would really like to see is the establishment of a process or a calendar for the phase-out of fossil fuels provided in the global stocktake decision.
CB: Brazil’s government expects 60,000 attendees at COP30. What are the main challenges that Brazil is facing to host the summit and how are they being addressed?
PP: I don’t think Belém, or any other city in the Brazilian Amazon has the capacity to host such a [large] number of people. [Many] people are already booking hotels to attend the COP. This is a challenge in terms of logistics, capacity, hotels. Belém is already working to improve that.
CA: Lula could [have chosen] between Belém and [Amazon city] Manaus. Manaus has a far better infrastructure, but, since the governor of the Amazon state is a Bolsonaro supporter, Lula picked Belém as the COP30 host city.
Belém still has huge infrastructure challenges. It is a task in the hands of the Brazilian government now to deliver on the promise.
CB: What do you think of proposals to move the venue or to accommodate attendees on cruise ships?
PP: There is a solution proposed by the government of Pará state to bring large ships to the Amazon River so people can stay there. We are witnessing severe droughts in the Amazon. If we have another severe drought next year, that will be affecting the water level of the river, and it will be a challenge to bring large ships to the shore.
There was also a question on whether or not [to] have negotiators in Rio [and civil society in] Belém, but this will not work. [Carbon Brief understands that a final decision has not yet been taken on whether COP30 will, in its entirety, be located in Belém, or shared with another Brazilian city with more hotel capacity.]
CB: What could COP30 deliver to the world, besides negotiations outcomes?
PP: One of the outcomes of the COP [could be] the visibility of people, of the challenges we face and, hopefully, a mind shift of paradigms to protect the forests and people and have a resilient future.
CA: What I would like to see as a legacy of Belém is a repeated reliance on the multilateral system as a way to solve the climate crisis.
Watch, read, listen
AFRICA REACTION: BBC Africa Daily addressed the reactions of African negotiators to the COP29 finance outcome, featuring an interview with Adonia Ayebare, Uganda’s ambassador to the UN and a former lead negotiator for the largest country bloc at COP, G77.
PLASTICS FIGHT: Leaked documents revealed by the New York Times suggested that major plastics companies are waging a social-media battle “to win over” youth concerned about the environment.
TOAST TO ADAPTATION: An ABC News video explored how wine farmers in Australia have adapted to climate change by cultivating new grape varieties.
Coming up
- 25 November-1 December: Fifth session of negotiations for an international plastics treaty (INC 5), Busan, South Korea
- 2-13 December: UN Desertification Conference, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
- 2-13 December:International Court of Justice hearings on the obligations of states in respect of climate change, The Hague, Netherlands
Pick of the jobs
- Salud sin Daño, climate programme manager for Latin America | Salary: Unknown. Location: Remote
- Climate Action Network International, coordinator, platform of action for renewable energy | Salary: €42,000-€48,000. Location: Unknown
- European Environment Agency, expert in communications | Salary: Unknown. Location: Copenhagen, Denmark
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
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The post DeBriefed 29 November 2024: COP29 disappoints developing countries; Plastics treaty talks; Brazil’s rocky road to COP30 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