Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
More than halfway to boiling
ASIAN HEAT: Extreme temperatures hit south Asia this week, with Pakistan’s southern province of Sindh reaching 52.2C, according to Bangladesh’s Somoy News, and India’s capital Delhi hitting 52.3C, according to the Times of India. Authorities in India are investigating whether the Delhi record was caused by a faulty sensor in Mungeshpur in the north of the city, as other neighbourhoods consistently recorded deadly temperatures of around 49-50C, the Guardian reported.
LANDSLIDES: Elsewhere in India, at least 25 people were killed in “rain-related incidents and landslides” as cyclonic storm Remal struck four northeastern states, according to Scroll. In Papua New Guinea, more than 2,000 people may have been buried in a landslide triggered by “weeks of heavy rain and other wet conditions in the area”, BBC News reported.
ONGOING EXTREMES: Meanwhile, in North America, more than one million people were left without power in Texas amid severe storms, Le Monde reported. Reuters said that Mexico’s electricity demand hit a new record amid scorching heat in the country. Deutsche Welle had an explainer on how 2024’s widespread extremes are linked to climate change.
Around the world
- OFFSET REFORM: US president Joe Biden’s administration announced first-of-its-kind federal guidelines for the voluntary carbon market, where firms buy credits from carbon-cutting schemes to claim they have reduced their own emissions, the New York Times reported.
- EU VISION: Ahead of European elections, French president Emmanuel Macron and German chancellor Olaf Scholz co-wrote in the Financial Times that Europe can be an “industrial and technological leader” and the “first climate-neutral continent” by pursuing “green and digital transitions”.
- MORE 4-BY-4S: Sales of SUVs reached a record last year, accounting for half of all new cars globally, according to International Energy Agency (IEA) data reported on by the Guardian. If SUVs were a country, they would be the fifth largest CO2 emitter.
- ‘V20’ LAUNCH: The Philippines will lead 19 other countries to establish a group to raise funds for the most climate-vulnerable nations, known as the “Vulnerable 20” or “V20”, Reuters reported.
- RIGHTS TRIAL: An ongoing “historic” trial by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights into whether countries should be held culpable over the impact of climate change on human rights this week heard from Indigenous people in the Brazilian Amazon, Common Dreams reported.
- AFRICAN FORECASTING: The African Union Commission and the European Satellite Agency have signed a new deal aimed at improving Africa’s “obsolete” weather forecasting system, the Independent Uganda reported. Carbon Brief analysis found Africa has the lowest density of weather stations globally.
$115.9bn
The amount of climate finance paid by developed nations in 2022 – meeting a target to provide $100bn two years after the deadline, according to OECD data.
$88.9bn
The amount when funding sourced from existing development aid is subtracted, according to new analysis shared with Carbon Brief.
Latest climate research
- By the end of the century, the surface area of lakes on the Tibetan Plateau will increase by more than 50% (around 20,000km2) and water levels will rise by around 10 metres, even under a low-emissions scenario, new Nature Geoscience research found.
- A “policy forum” article in Science argued that “a social-moral norm against new fossil fuel projects has strong potential to contribute to achieving global climate goals”.
- Research in the Journal of Environmental Psychology examined how the public reacts to the term “climate anxiety”, with most viewing it neutrally yet a minority finding it to be “unfounded, irrational or excessive”.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
Spotlight
One year of DeBriefed
This week, DeBriefed’s editor Daisy Dunne reflects on the past year of Carbon Brief’s weekly climate newsletter – and outlines how readers can help shape its future.
One year ago we published the first edition of DeBriefed, Carbon Brief’s weekly newsletter aimed at summarising key climate developments around the world.
We wanted to provide readers with a “one-stop shop” of the latest in climate news, journalistic investigations and scientific research, as well as key dates for the diary and a hand-picked selection of interesting job vacancies.
It was a key aim of ours to try to cover all corners of the globe, including not only the UK and the US, but emerging Asian economies and typically underrepresented regions, such as sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East.
Another goal was to showcase the work of Carbon Brief’s brilliant and diverse team of journalists, which have been based in countries including India, Nigeria, Mexico, the US and the UK.
Thanks to this, we have published everything from a first-hand report on the impacts of coal mining in India’s elephant country and an exclusive interview with a Just Stop Oil prisoner through to reports on how Palestine has struggled to access climate funding, the origins of Donald Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” slogan and how K-pop fans are campaigning for climate action in East Asia.
I am pleased that DeBriefed has been able to provide an outlet for original climate reporting that may otherwise have not been published.
As we look forward to our next 12 months, we would like to invite readers to send their thoughts on the newsletter: What do you like and dislike? What would you like to see more of? Do you have any suggestions for where DeBriefed could go next – say with a podcast or webinars, for example? Please email any thoughts to: debriefed@carbonbrief.org
Finally, a small request, if you have enjoyed reading this newsletter, please consider forwarding it on to a friend or colleague who may also be interested in receiving a free climate roundup each week. We would be eternally grateful.
Watch, read, listen
‘NOTHING GROWS FOREVER’: A documentary by Al Jazeera examined how Costa Rica has been able to protect its environment and achieve “high levels of wellbeing that have very little to do with money”.
SMALL ISLANDS: Amid the fourth International Conference for Small Island Developing States, Maldives president Mohamed Muizzu called in the Guardian for climate finance to be “unlocked”, adding that small islands seek “not charity but equity and justice”.
ETHIOPIAN DAM: A feature in African Arguments examined how a dam mega-project in Ethiopia affected the ability of Indigenous people to grow food and herd animals.
Coming up
- 1 June: Final phase of India’s election
- 2 June: Mexico’s election
- 3-13 June: Bonn UN climate change conference, Germany
- 6-9 June: European elections
- 7-8 June: High-level event on ocean action, San Jose, Costa Rica
Pick of the jobs
- Guardian Australia, climate and environment reporter. Salary: Unknown. Location: Australia
- Conservative Environment Network, climate programme manager. Salary: £30,000-£39,000. Location: London Bridge
- WaterAid, climate and environment lead. Salary: £56,249-£59,602. Location: One of the following countries: Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Mali, Mozambique, Nepal, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, UK or Zambia
- Friends of the Earth Ireland, climate policy campaigner. Salary: €37,857-€46,588. Location: Dublin
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 31 May 2024: 52C in South Asia; Biden’s carbon offsets overhaul; Tell us what you think appeared first on Carbon Brief.
DeBriefed 31 May 2024: 52C in South Asia; Biden’s carbon offsets overhaul; Tell us what you think
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 potentially driving temperatures to “record highs”, according to Euronews.