Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Trump ‘SOS’
‘CHAOS’ GRIPS: More than 1,900 scientists from US national academies of sciences, engineering and medicine wrote an “SOS letter” warning of the risks to science imposed by the current administration’s grant cuts and mass layoffs, reported the Guardian. The Guardian also said a “sense of chaos has gripped” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, after Trump-sanctioned layoffs have affected 20% of staff.
WEAKER STANDARDS: Trump is weighing returning to weaker car emissions standards from 2020, saying pollution limits introduced by Joe Biden are “too onerous” for motor companies, Bloomberg reported. The US transportation sector is the country’s leading source of greenhouse gas emissions.
TARIFFS TURMOIL: The New York Times said that the renewable energy industry in the US is “bracing for particularly large effects” from Trump’s ongoing tariffs war with the rest of the world. It noted that the turmoil is “expected to drive up the costs of nearly every component of clean-energy production in the US, from the steel in wind turbines to the batteries in electric vehicles”.
Around the world
- SOFTENING GOALS: EU Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra is considering softening the bloc’s 2040 climate goal amid a “backlash” from some quarters, Politico said. A second Politico story reported that the release of the goal will be delayed while Hoekstra “struggles” to rally support.
- COAL STICKS: The world’s total coal-fired power “inched up” by 18.8 gigawatts in 2024, the lowest rise in two decades, with new additions in China and India continuing to offset closures elsewhere, according to Reuters coverage of a new Global Energy Monitor report.
- ASIA HEAT: Large swathes of India will experience intense heatwaves this summer with above normal temperatures expected across much of the country, the nation’s meteorological office has warned, according to BBC News.
- RENEWABLE AFRICA: Africa increased its renewable energy capacity by 6.7% last year, equivalent to 4.2GW, according to an International Renewable Energy Agency report covered by Energy Capital and Power. Egypt, Ethiopia and South Africa were among countries to build the most clean power.
40%
The percentage by which the “average person would become poorer” if the world warmed by 4C, according to an Environmental Research Letters study covered by the Guardian.
Latest climate research
- An “extraordinary” heatwave in Central Asia in March was made up to 10C hotter by human-caused climate change, a new World Weather Attribution analysis found.
- A Proceedings of the National Academy of Science study found that the limits of human heat tolerance are lower than previous estimates.
- Climate change has played a dominant role in destabilising communities of plankton, microorganisms that form the basis of the food web for marine wildlife, a new study in Communications Earth and Environment found.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
China’s exports of solar panels to the global south have doubled in the past two years, overtaking global-north sales for the first time since 2018, according to data from the thinktank Ember explained in a new Carbon Brief guest post. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan were among the top importers of Chinese solar panels in 2024.
Spotlight
Deep-sea mining talks
Carbon Brief explains the outcomes of the latest deep-sea mining talks held last week in Jamaica.
The deep sea has emerged as a new mining frontier in the global race towards energy security, with countries vying to explore and exploit its reserves of metals, such as nickel, copper, cobalt and manganese.
These minerals – critical to the energy transition – are held in the deep ocean’s nodules, hydrothermal vents and crusts, but the impacts of mining these deposits are still far from being fully understood.
In 2021, the Pacific island state of Nauru triggered a legal process for countries to agree rules around mining the seabed, or – in their absence – allow commercial mining of the deep sea to begin by 2025.
The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) is an international treaty that provides a framework to regulate the use of the world’s seas and oceans.
Among other bodies and orders, UNCLOS established the International Seabed Authority (ISA), which is based in Kingston, Jamaica, and oversees all resource extraction in the deep sea.
From 17-28 March this year, the ISA held the first part of its 30th annual session, with the aim of making progress on draft rules to govern commercial deep-sea mining.
Jamaica talks
The ISA said that there was “significant progress” on various aspects at the meeting and other areas that “require further deliberation”.
Some of this progress is the agreement to use the term “harmful effects” rather than “serious harm” to the marine environment, which aligns with the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the Earth Negotiations Bulletin noted.
However, it added that there were “major issues unresolved”, related to “regulations” crucial for the protection of the marine environment, such as environmental impact assessments and the rights and interests of coastal states.
Duncan Currie, the international legal advisor to the Deep-Sea Conservation Coalition, said parties did not agree on any of the 55 reviewed regulations, but rather just discussed their positions on those regulations.
He also pointed out the lack of discussion over financial matters, liability, the royalties that are paid and the benefit sharing from deep-sea mining, telling Carbon Brief:
“There are 80 standards and guidelines that can’t be developed until [countries] have developed the regulations. I think most people think that they’re quite a long way away from being adopted.”
Current and future outlook
So far, 32 ISA member states are in favour of a moratorium on deep-sea mining, while other countries are seeking to exploit minerals in the seafloor “as soon as possible”.
Among those promoting the deep-sea mining industry are India, China and Norway, while countries such as Palau, Fiji and Samoa are promoting a “pause on deep-sea mining until its ecological impacts are better understood”, Carbon Brief previously reported.
In a surprise move that sent “alarm bells ringing” in the ISA and beyond, the US subsidiary of the Metals Company announced on 27 March that it is moving ahead with applying for deep-sea exploration permits under existing US legislation in the second quarter of 2025.
The announcement came on the last day of the ISA talks, where it dominated discussions at the end of the meeting.
On 31 March, Reuters reported that the Trump administration is “weighing an executive order” that could let miners bypass the ISA, its safeguards and “fast-track” permits. The US is not a party to UNCLOS.
Both developments signal that the ISA is “at a crossroads”, according to the Earth News Bulletin, and its next session in July will be closely watched for how the body responds to a potential unilateral action to allow deep sea-mining.
Watch, read, listen
NOT WITH SPORTS: A Discovery+ documentary explored how extreme weather is already affecting sport events.
STRENGTHENING MENTAL HEALTH: A psychologist writing in the Revelator offered strategies to reduce the effects of climate change on mental health.
FOSSIL LOBBY: Former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres and political strategist Tom Rivett-Carnac addressed the fossil fuel lobby within COPs on their Outrage and Optimism podcast.
Coming up
- 2-5 April: Global Youth Climate Summit, Belo Horizonte, Brazil
- 7 April: International Mother Earth Day
- 7-11 April: International Maritime Organization Marine Environment Protection Committee meeting (MEPC 83), London
Pick of the jobs
- Sky News, senior news editor – science, climate and technology | Salary: Unknown. Location: London
- Australian National University, postdoctoral research fellow in climate systems | Salary: AU$85,010-$131,227. Location: Canberra, Australia
- Dialogue Earth, social media officer | Salary: £36,035 per annum. Location: London
- Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, policy officer (adaptation policy and governance) | Salary: from £42,679-£54,730. Location: London
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 4 April 2025: Scientists issue Trump ‘SOS’; EU climate goal in jeopardy; Deep-sea mining talks 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 “highli