Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Drought in southern Africa
NATIONAL DISASTERS: An ongoing extreme drought in southern Africa is threatening millions of people with hunger, Sky News reported. According to Reuters, Zimbabwe has declared the drought a national disaster. The drought has also reached crisis levels in neighbouring Zambia and Malawi, with both countries declaring national disasters, the Associated Press said. Botswana, Angola, Mozambique and Madagascar are also affected, it added.
EL-NIÑO: Dry weather conditions linked to the El Niño weather pattern have worsened the drought, which emerged in its latest phase in mid-2023, Deutsche Welle reported. El Niño reached a peak in December, according to the World Meteorological Organization, but is still expected to result in above-normal temperatures until May, the outlet added. Scientists told Sky News that El Niño could be “amplifying the existing impacts of climate change”.
CALL FOR AID: Zimbabwe president Emmerson Mnangagwa said the country needs more than $2bn in aid to feed the millions of people facing hunger, the Associated Press reported. It added that the United Nations’ World Food Programme has already rolled out a food assistance programme targeting 2.7 million people.
Electric car sales slump
POOR QUARTER: The world’s top sellers of electric vehicles (EV), Elon Musk’s Tesla and Chinese rival BYD, reported sharp falls in sales in the first financial quarter of this year, adding to “concerns over the slowing shifts towards EVs”, the Financial Times reported. It added that both carmakers have repeatedly cut prices since the start of the year in a bid to stimulate demand.
DIRE FUTURE?: Tesla’s shares fell following the news, extending their 2024 slide to 33%, the second-worst showing in the S&P 500 stock market index, Bloomberg reported. The dip in sales comes amid a “sharp deterioration in growth” for US EVs, the New York Times said. However, Musk is mulling over the possibility of building a £3bn Tesla EV factory in India, the Daily Telegraph reported.
ELECTRIC SUBSIDIES: Only seven out of 500,000 EV charging stations have been built under a $7.5bn US government subsidy programme launched in 2021 and scheduled for completion by 2030, the Independent reported. The Federal Highway Administration told the Independent that “the slow pace has been deliberate, to avoid costly mistakes while navigating a brand-new law and building a network from scratch”.
Around the world
- SEARING HEAT: India’s national weather service has forecast “hotter-than-usual” temperatures for April to June, raising the risk of water shortages and crop damages, Bloomberg reported.
- UNUSUAL FIRES: Venezuela is battling a record number of wildfires – with satellites detecting more than 30,200 fires between January and March – as a climate change-driven drought consumes the Amazon rainforest region, according to Reuters.
- CLIMATE JUSTICE: Shell began its appeal against a ruling at The Hague that compelled it to slash its emissions by 45% by 2030, relative to 2019, the Financial Times reported. A judgement is expected in the second half of this year, the paper added.
- AID BY FOSSIL: White House officials have suggested that they are open to ending president Joe Biden’s pause on approvals of new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals in order to get a Ukraine aid package through Congress, Reuters reported. A White House spokesperson denied the story.
- WARNING BELLS: According to a new study reported by the Guardian, a boom in mining projects for minerals needed in renewable energy technologies is now threatening up to a third of apes in Africa.
- STANDING TALL: A new analysis found that the number of trees lost in Brazil and Colombia was down “dramatically” in 2023 – falling by 39% – largely due to changes in political leadership in these nations, according to BBC News.
57
The number of fossil fuel and cement producers responsible for 80% of the world’s CO2 emissions from 2016-2022, according to the Carbon Majors project by non-profit thinktank InfluenceMap.
Latest climate research
- A study in npj Climate Action evaluated the perceptions of climate change among a selection of academics at a local university in Cameroon and suggested a framework to support educators as they help to foster critical thinking.
- The optimal location for North American birds has shifted northward by an average rate of 1.5km each year in response to climate change, a new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found, representing a total distance moved of 82.5km over the past 55 years.
- A new study in Climate and Development investigated the “policy blind spots” around the contribution of women to rangeland cultivation in Tunisia and the effects of climate change on their livelihoods.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
The UN climate change body, the UNFCCC, is largely funded by industrialised nations, such as the US, China, Japan, UK and France. However, these nations have not yet paid anything towards the UNFCCC’s core budget for this year, according to Carbon Brief analysis of UN data. This shortfall could be impacting the body’s functioning. For example, the UNFCCC recently cancelled this year’s Regional Climate Weeks, which are a “vital platform to express the concerns of people and communities most affected by climate change,” according to a comment piece by WaterAid’s Dulce Marrumbe published on Climate Home News. “The suspension of the Regional Climate Weeks is hugely disappointing news,” Marrumbe said.
Spotlight
How is Nigeria coping with extreme heat fuelled by climate change?
This week, Carbon Brief zooms in on how Nigerians are responding to the extreme heat affecting west Africa.
Since the start of this year, Africa’s most populous nation Nigeria has faced prolonged stretches of severe heat.
A recent quick-fire analysis found that the conditions in February, when temperatures exceeded 40C, were made 10 times more likely by human-caused climate change.
But the heat is still ongoing, with temperatures reaching a record 44.8C in Sokoto, a city in north-western Nigeria, on 1 April.
With comprehensive record-keeping of heat and its impacts lacking in Nigeria, Carbon Brief spoke to doctors, farmers and meteorologists about how this episode of extreme weather is affecting the country.
Health impacts
The impact of the heat is “catastrophic”, Dr Ugo Uguwanyi, a doctor in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city, told Carbon Brief:
“Don’t even bother to step out from 10am to 6pm. And make sure you burn the diesel to power the air conditioning to be able to sleep at night.”
Information about the heatwave’s impact is limited, but this does not mean the weather conditions are not dangerous, according to the authors of the recent analysis into the role of climate change in Nigeria’s extreme heat. Rather, a lack of systematic reporting may obscure what they described as a “silent killer”.
In mid-February, the Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NiMet) issued a public forecast warning on the prolonged heatwave.
The agency advised citizens to stay hydrated, wear light clothing and avoid direct exposure to high temperatures during peak periods. A group of Nigerian doctors also issued safety tips.
NiMet’s director of Weather Forecast Services, Vincent Weli, had advised that a state of emergency be declared in states most affected by the heatwave and workers be allowed to take breaks between noon and 3pm. Speaking to Nigeria’s Channels Television, Weli said:
“Of course, you know, with high temperature, cognitive development will be affected and productivity will be affected. There will be a loss of concentration.”
However, no such directive has yet been issued by state governments.
Agricultural and workforce impacts
Meanwhile, in Lagos, Nigeria’s most populated city, ride-hailing drivers are operating under melting conditions, stuck between preserving their health or livelihood, according to a Rest of World report.
The heatwave is also expected to reduce agricultural productivity, a sector that contributes about 22% to Nigeria’s gross domestic product (GDP) and accounts for more than a third of total employment.
Wasiu Adeniyi Ibrahim, a meteorologist from NiMet, told Carbon Brief:
“Heatwaves can reduce agricultural productivity by causing heat stress to crops and livestock.”
There is not a lot of data on how the current heat is affecting agriculture in Nigeria.
However, the national secretary of the All Farmers Association of Nigeria, Yunusa Halidu, told Carbon Brief that its members expect the heatwave to affect productivity yield this year. He said:
“The heat is extreme this year, although we have been expecting it, as we work with the Nigerian Meteorological Agency. We know it is global warming and we are working to see how we can mitigate the effects.”
Watch, read, listen
STRATEGIC DOMINANCE: Eric Olander and Cobus van Staden of the China-Global South Podcast interviewed automotive analyst Lei Xing on Chinese EV brands’ plans to dominate global-south car markets.
CLIMATE FUTURES: The New York Times investigated whether Guyana’s oil is a “blessing or a curse”.
CARBON POLITICS: In a new episode of Political Heat, environmental campaigner Amy Mount spoke to Prof Rebecca Willis about democracy and the challenge of responding to climate change.
Coming up
- 10 April: South Korea parliamentary elections
- 12 April: Launch of the International Energy Agency (IEA) oil market report
- 12-13 April: Second G20 environment and climate sustainability working group, Brasilia
Pick of the jobs
- Politico, sustainability editor | Salary: Unknown. Location: Brussels
- Climate Action Network International, finance and grants officer | Salary: €36,000-48,000. Location: Flexible
- International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), senior cryosphere specialist | Salary: Unknown. Location: Kathmandu, Nepal
- Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, senior researcher, just energy transition and natural resources | Salary: £37,500-40,000. Location: UK, Germany or remote
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
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The post DeBriefed 5 April 2024: Southern Africa’s drought ‘disaster’; Top electric car sales slump; Is Nigeria coping with extreme heat? 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 w