Published

2 years ago

November 15, 2023

Alice Rush

Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.

This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.

This week

Countdown to COP

FOSSIL PHASEDOWN: The “high ambition coalition” – a group of 15 nations including France, Spain and Kenya – has called for the phasing out of all fossil fuels at preliminary talks ahead of this month’s COP28 climate summit in Dubai, the Financial Times reported. This puts the group “at odds” with major fossil fuel producers, particularly in the Middle East, the paper added.

RENEWABLES ‘RALLY’: The EU, US and the United Arab Emirates are “rallying” other governments to join a global deal to triple renewable energy this decade at COP28, according to documents shared with Reuters. The countries are working to recruit others to sign the pledge ahead of COP28, with a launch event likely to be held at the start of the summit, it said.

PAPAL PARTICIPATION: Pope Francis has announced that he will attend COP28, becoming the first pontiff to participate in such an event, the Wall Street Journal reported. UK monarch King Charles will attend the opening ceremony, a year after he was advised by former prime minister Liz Truss’s government not to attend COP27 in Egypt, reported the Guardian. Reuters noted that US president Joe Biden is not scheduled to attend.

‘Carbon budget’ cuts

SHRINKING BUDGET: The remaining “carbon budget” for limiting global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures has shrunk further, according to a new study reported on by BBC News. The study found that only 250bn tonnes of CO2 can be released if the planet is to have a 50% chance of staying below 1.5C, BBC News reported. The study authors revealed the reduced carbon budget in a Carbon Brief guest post last year and the new study includes small methodology updates.

COUNTDOWN: The Guardian reported that, according to the study, the remaining carbon budget will be exhausted in six years, given current levels of emissions. The UN goal of reaching net-zero by 2050 would give the planet only a 40% chance of staying below 1.5C, the paper added. New Scientist noted that, to have half a chance of limiting global warming to 1.5C, the planet would need to reach net-zero emissions by 2034.

TEMPERATURE TARGETS: Elsewhere, a separate study led by Dr James Hansen, a NASA scientist best known for his striking testimony on climate change before Congress 35 years ago, projected that the world will warm by 1.5C this decade. “The 1.5C limit is deader than a doornail,” said Hansen, according to the New York Times. The newspaper carried comments from Carbon Brief’s climate science contributor Dr Zeke Hausfather, who says: “I think everyone agrees that 1.5C is in the rearview mirror at this point.”

Adaptation gap

‘WOEFULLY INADEQUATE’: The United Nations Environment Programme has published its annual “adaptation gap” report, which found that current spending is “woefully inadequate,” according to the New York Times. The report warned that developing countries need 10-18 times more climate adaptation funding than they currently receive, the Washington Post reported.

BILLIONS NEEDED: Developing countries need $215bn-387bn per year to adapt to the impacts of climate change – a $47bn increase since last year’s assessment – the Financial Times reported. However, adaptation finance flows to developing countries declined by 15% to $21bn in 2021, leading to a finance gap of $194bn-366bn per year, according to the South China Morning Post.

‘MAJOR GAPS’: In a Carbon Brief guest post, two of the report’s authors identified the major gaps in adaptation finance and explained why they have emerged. Over 2017-21, only 66% of the allocated funds were successfully disbursed to their recipient countries, the authors estimated.

Around the world

PRICE SPIKE: The World Bank has warned that the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas could drive up oil prices, Reuters reported. According to the newswire, the bank outlined three scenarios, the worst of which could see oil prices jump above $150 per barrel.
THREE BASINS: Rainforest countries from across three continents have agreed to work together to finance and protect their ecosystems – but failed to firm up a unified alliance, Carbon Brief reported.
WIND WOES: The world’s biggest offshore wind developer has taken a £4.6bn hit after scrapping two projects in the US due to rising costs and delays, the Times reported. The decision is a “blow” to Joe Biden’s plan to reach 30GW of offshore wind capacity in US waters before 2030, the Guardian said.
LICENCE TO DRILL: The UK’s North Sea Transition Authority has issued 27 new oil and gas licences, the Press Association reported. The Times said the decision has attracted criticism, with Scottish first minister Humza Yousaf calling it the “wrong move”.
INDONESIA EMISSIONS: Indonesia aims to cut CO2 emissions from its on-grid power sector to 250m tonnes by 2030 and increase its share of renewable electricity generation to 44%, Reuters reported. The plan is part of the nation’s “just energy transition partnership”.

$150bn

The amount that banks pumped into companies with “carbon bomb” projects – extraction projects that release more than one gigatonne of CO2 – in 2022, according to the Guardian.

Latest climate research

The Denman Glacier in East Antarctica will contribute 0.33mm per year to global sea level rise until the year 2300 – a level that is “comparable to half of the contemporary sea level contribution of the entire Antarctic ice sheet” – according to new research in Science Advances.
Forests in the Brazilian Amazon that have been disturbed by human activity have much lower resilience to heat stress and atmospheric water stress than intact forests, according to a new study in Global Change Biology.
New research in Communications Earth and Environment found that the rise in global average surface temperature shows a consistent 50-year trend of 0.18C per decade, with an increased rate from 1990.

(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)

Captured

Global South Climate Database

Carbon Brief’s Global South Climate Database, a project that aims to ensure that journalists from all over the world can contact climate experts from developing countries, recently celebrated its one-year anniversary. The database now includes 1,003 experts from 107 countries, who collectively speak more than 75 languages. Carbon Brief launched the publicly available, searchable database of climate experts from the global south in October 2022, with the support of the Reuters Institute’s Oxford Climate Journalism Network.

Spotlight

Prof Saleemul Huq: A ‘climate revolutionary’

This week, Carbon Brief profiles the life of loss-and-damage pioneer Prof Saleemul Huq.

Tributes have been flooding in from politicians, scientists and activists for Prof Saleemul Huq – the influential Bangladeshi climate scientist who died on 28 October at the age of 71.

Born in 1952 in then-East Pakistan, Huq attended university in the UK. After obtaining his PhD in biochemistry at Imperial College London, he returned to Bangladesh where he founded the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies – an independent thinktank focused on environment policy.

Huq quickly became a leading voice in community-based adaptation and organised annual conferences on the topic from 2005, bringing together experts from around the world.

In 2009, Huq was appointed the director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCAD). He also set up the climate change research group at International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) in Bangladesh, and was its initial director – continuing as a senior fellow until 2021.

Huq was a prominent scientist. He worked as lead author on the third, fourth and fifth assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He also published hundreds of papers in high-profile journals throughout his career.

The Queen awarded Huq an OBE in the 2022 New Year’s honours list for his “services to combating international climate change”. Later that year, Nature named Huq as one of its top-10 scientists, calling him a “climate revolutionary”.

Huq also played an active role in international climate negotiations. He attended every single set of UN climate talks, from COP1 in Berlin in 1995 to COP27 in Egypt, where he used his expertise to advise the least developed and most climate-vulnerable countries.

Huq was widely known for his campaign work on providing “loss and damage” funding for less developed countries. At COP27, he was front and centre when countries came to a historic agreement to set up a loss and damage fund.

“He worked tirelessly for 30 years,” Harjeet Singh, head of global political strategy at the Climate Action Network, told the Washington Post. “Despite many moments of frustration, he never lost hope.”

ICCAD has launched a petition calling for the UN loss and damage fund to be named after Huq, after the idea gained traction with many prominent voices in the climate community.

Huq was part of the advisory committee to the presidency of COP28 and had planned to attend the talks in Dubai.

In his final piece of writing, published days after his death, Huq emphasised the need to “keep pressure on the biggest emitters” at COP28. Prof Farhana Sultana, his co-author, wrote that he “was a visionary and steadfast leader on climate justice, a champion of developing countries at climate negotiations, an advocate for the global poor, and a source of inspiration to thousands worldwide”.

Huq was a “titan of the climate movement who stood out in a field dominated by scientists from Europe and North America”, said Mohamad Adow, director of energy and climate thinktank Power Shift Africa.

German climate envoy and former Greenpeace head Jennifer Morgan called Huq “a driving force for climate justice since the beginning of the climate debate”.

ICCAD called him “a visionary leader who was not only the torch bearer for Bangladesh’s fight against climate change but for the entire global community”.

On Sunday afternoon, hundreds gathered at the Gulshan Society mosque in Dhaka to pay their respects. Huq is survived by his wife, son and daughter.

Watch, read, listen

‘KILLER LAKE’: A joint investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and Reuters revealed the “preferential treatment and backroom deals” behind the Canadian winner of gas rights on Congo’s “killer” Lake Kivu.

SUN AND WIND: On her blog Sustainability by Numbers, Dr Hannah Ritchie walked through the numbers from a policy paper (pdf) published by the University of Oxford looking at the potential for solar and wind to meet the UK’s energy needs.

ECUADOR VS OIL: BBC podcast The Climate Question explored why the people of Ecuador voted to stop oil drilling in the Amazon rainforest.

Coming up

6-10 November: Group on Earth Observations (GEO) week 2023, Cape Town, South Africa
6-10 November: 52nd Meeting of the Pacific Islands Forum, Cook Islands
7 November: Liberia second round of presidential elections
10 November: IEA Energy Policy Review of Uganda, Kampala, Uganda

Pick of the jobs

Carbon Brief, multimedia producer | Salary: £30,000 a year, dependent on experience. Location: A UK/Europe time zone
UK Met Office, scientific manager – sea level rise | Salary: £49,149 a year. Location: Exeter
The Nature Conservancy, policy adviser, northern Caribbean programme | Salary: BSD$53,000-58,000. Location: Bahamas
The Stockholm Environment Institute, research fellow, climate finance | Salary: Unknown. Location: Bangkok, Thailand

DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org

The post DeBriefed 3 November 2023: King at COP28; 1.5C in ‘rearview mirror’; Life of ‘climate revolutionary’ Prof Saleemul Huq appeared first on Carbon Brief.

DeBriefed 3 November 2023: King at COP28; 1.5C in ‘rearview mirror’; Life of ‘climate revolutionary’ Prof Saleemul Huq

Climate Change

Corpus Christi Cuts Timeline to Disaster as Abbott Issues Emergency Orders

Published

12 hours ago

March 19, 2026

Alice Rush

The governor’s office said the city’s two main reservoirs could dry up by May, much sooner than previous timelines. But authorities still offer no plan for curtailment of water use.

By Dylan Baddour

City officials in Corpus Christi on Tuesday released modeling that showed emergency cuts to water demand could be required as soon as May as reservoir levels continue to decline.

Corpus Christi Cuts Timeline to Disaster as Abbott Issues Emergency Orders

Climate Change

Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems

Published

13 hours ago

March 19, 2026

Alice Rush

Lena Luig is the head of the International Agricultural Policy Division at the Heinrich Böll Foundation, a member of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food. Anna Lappé is the Executive Director of the Global Alliance for the Future of Food.

As toxic clouds loom over Tehran and Beirut from the US and Israel’s bombardment of oil depots and civilian infrastructure in the region’s ongoing war, the world is once again witnessing the not-so-subtle connections between conflict, hunger, food insecurity and the vulnerability of global food systems dependent on fossil fuels, dominated by a few powerful countries and corporations.

The conflict in Iran is having a huge impact on the world’s fertilizer supply. The Strait of Hormuz is a critical trade route in the region for nearly half of the global supply of urea, the main synthetic fertilizer derived from natural gas through the conversion of ammonia.

With the Strait impacted by Iran’s blockades, prices of urea have shot up by 35% since the war started, just as planting season starts in many parts of the world, putting millions of farmers and consumers at risk of increasing production costs and food price spikes, resulting in food insecurity, particularly for low-income households. The World Food Programme has projected that an extra 45 million people would be pushed into acute hunger because of rises in food, oil and shipping costs, if the war continues until June.

Pesticides and synthetic fertilizer leave system fragile

On the face of it, this looks like a supply chain issue, but at the core of this crisis lies a truth about many of our food systems around the world: the instability and injustice in the very design of systems so reliant on these fossil fuel inputs for our food.

At the Global Alliance, a strategic alliance of philanthropic foundations working to transform food systems, we have been documenting the fossil fuel-food nexus, raising alarm about the fragility of a system propped up by fossil fuels, with 15% of annual fossil fuel use going into food systems, in part because of high-cost, fossil fuel-based inputs like pesticides and synthetic fertilizer. The Heinrich Böll Foundation has also been flagging this threat consistently, most recently in the Pesticide Atlas and Soil Atlas compendia.

We’ve seen this before: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 sparked global disruptions in fertilizer supply and food price volatility. As the conflict worsened, fertilizer prices spiked – as much from input companies capitalizing on the crisis for speculation as from real cost increases from production and transport – triggering a food price crisis around the world.

Mar 16, 2026

News

‘Completely delusional’: UN climate chief warns against fossil fuel push after Iran crisis

As Gulf disruptions send oil and gas prices soaring, Simon Stiell urges leaders to double down on renewables and fight fossil fuel dependency

Read more
Mar 4, 2026

Energy

Gulf oil and gas crisis sparks calls for renewables investment

Energy analysts and some politicians say the Iran war’s effect on oil and gas prices shows renewables are the path to energy security

Read more

Since then, fertilizer industry profit margins have continued to soar. In 2022, the largest nine fertilizer producers increased their profit margins by more than 35% compared to the year before—when fertilizer prices were already high. As Lena Bassermann and Dr. Gideon Tups underscore in the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s Soil Atlas, the global dependencies of nitrogen fertilizer impacted economies around the world, especially state budgets in already indebted and import-dependent economies, as well as farmers across Africa.

Learning lessons from the war in Ukraine, many countries invested heavily in renewable energy and/or increased domestic oil production as a way to decrease dependency on foreign fossil fuels. But few took the same approach to reimagining domestic food systems and their food sovereignty.

Agroecology as an alternative

There is another way. Governments can adopt policy frameworks to encourage reductions in synthetic fertilizer and pesticide use, especially in regions that currently massively overuse nitrogen fertilizer. At the African Union fertilizer and Soil Health Summit in 2024, African leaders at least agreed that organic fertilizers should be subsidized as well, not only mineral fertilizers, but we can go farther in actively promoting agricultural pathways that reduce fossil fuel dependency.

In 2024, the Global Alliance organized dozens of philanthropies to call for a tenfold increase in investments to help farmers transition from fossil fuel dependency towards agroecological approaches that prioritize livelihoods, health, climate, and biodiversity.

In our research, we detail the huge opportunity to repurpose harmful subsidies currently supporting inputs like synthetic fertilizer and pesticides towards locally-sourced bio-inputs and biofertilizer production. We know this works: There are powerful stories of hope and change from those who have made this transition, despite only receiving a fraction of the financing that industrial agriculture receives, with evidence of benefits from stable incomes and livelihoods to better health and climate outcomes.

New summit in Colombia seeks to revive stalled UN talks on fossil fuel transition

Inspiring examples abound: G-BIACK in Kenya is training farmers how to produce their own high-quality compost; start-ups like the Evola Company in Cambodia are producing both nutrient-rich organic fertilizer and protein-rich animal feed with black soldier fly farming; Sabon Sake in Ghana is enriching sugarcane bagasse – usually organic waste – with microbial agents and earthworms to turn it into a rich vermicompost.

These efforts, grounded in ecosystems and tapping nature for soil fertility and to manage pest pressures, are just some of the countless examples around the world, tapping the skill and knowledge of millions of farmers. On a national and global policy level, the Agroecology Coalition, with 480+ members, including governments, civil society organizations, academic institutions, and philanthropic foundations, is supporting a transition toward agroecology, working with natural systems to produce abundant food, boost biodiversity, and foster community well-being.

Fertilizer industry spins “clean” products

We must also inoculate ourselves from the fertilizer industry’s public relations spin, which includes promoting the promise that their products can be produced without heavy reliance on fossil fuels. Despite experts debunking the viability of what the industry has dubbed “green hydrogen” or “green or clean ammonia”, the sector still promotes this narrative, arguing that these are produced with resource-intensive renewable energy or Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), a costly and unreliable technology for reducing emissions.

As we mourn this conflict’s senseless destruction and death, including hundreds of children, we also recognize that peace cannot mean a return to business-as-usual. We need to upend the systems that allow the richest and most powerful to have dominion over so much.

This includes fighting for a food system that is based on genuine sovereignty and justice, free from dependency on fossil fuels, one that honors natural systems and puts power into the hands of communities and food producers themselves.

The post Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems appeared first on Climate Home News.

Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems

Climate Change

Are There Climate Fingerprints in Tornado Activity?

Published

13 hours ago

March 19, 2026

Alice Rush

Parts of the Southern and Northeastern U.S. faced tornado threats this week. Scientists are trying to parse out the climate links in changing tornado activity.

By Kiley Price

It’s been a weird few weeks for weather across the United States.