Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
UK sees Labour landslide
‘HISTORIC’ RESULT: The UK Labour party has declared a “historic” victory in the country’s general election, while the Conservatives suffered their worst-ever defeat, the Financial Times reported. BusinessGreen said that Labour’s “sizeable majority” would provide the party with a “clear mandate for its ambitious green plans”. It added this includes a decarbonised power system by 2030 (more on this below), ending new oil and gas licences and a foreign policy “reset” based around international climate diplomacy.
GREEN SURGE: The UK’s Green party won three new seats in parliament, bringing its total number of MPs up to four, the Guardian reported. Across the UK, Green votes increased to around 7% from 2.7% of the vote share in 2019, from a total of 866,000 votes in 2019 to around 2m votes in 2024, according to Greenpeace. Below, Carbon Brief outlines some of the key climate players from across the parties that won seats in the early hours of this morning.
FREE WEBINAR: Following the results, Carbon Brief is hosting a free webinar at 10am UK time on Tuesday 9 July to discuss key climate issues facing the new Labour government. Carbon Brief journalists Dr Simon Evans and Molly Lempriere will be joined by Chris Stark, CEO of the Carbon Trust and former chief executive of the Climate Change Committee, Emma Pinchbeck, chief executive of Energy UK, and Camilla Born MBE, independent climate advisor and former UK senior official at COP26. Register here.
Hurricane Beryl wrecks havoc
KILLER STORM: Hurricane Beryl struck islands across the Caribbean and Venezuela this week, as the earliest category 5 hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic, reported the Associated Press. The hurricane killed at least 11 people across islands including Grenada, St Vincent and the Grenadines, as well as in northern Venezuela, Reuters said.
‘ARMAGEDDON-LIKE’: After making landfall in the Grenadian island of Carriacou on Monday, the hurricane brought “devastating winds and storm surges” to Jamaica on Wednesday, Sky News reported. Beryl is now set to hit the Cayman Islands before moving further west and reaching the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico, reported the Washington Post.
RECORD SEASON: The Financial Times noted that the US’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warned that there was an 85% higher chance of an above-average hurricane season in the Atlantic this year. According to the FT, NOAA said the increased risk was due to a “confluence of factors”, including record-breaking ocean temperatures, the onset of the natural weather phenomenon La Niña and reduced Atlantic trade winds, which allow hurricanes to grow in strength more easily.
Biden unveils heat protections
‘REALLY, REALLY DUMB’: US president Joe Biden has launched a first-ever federal workplace standard for extreme heat, reported the Guardian. If finalised, the standard “will substantially reduce heat injuries, illnesses and deaths for over 36 million workers”, Biden said. Announcing the rules, Biden took aim at Republicans working to undo his climate measures, calling such actions “really, really dumb”, the New York Times said.
CHEVRON DOCTRINE: The US Supreme Court overturned the principle that has guided UK regulatory law for the past 40 years, known as the Chevron doctrine, reported Inside Climate News. The sweeping away of the “Goliath” of modern law will weaken the Environmental Protection Agency’s legal authority, as courts “weigh Biden’s policies to cut greenhouse gases”, the publication said.
LNG PERMITS: A federal judge has ruled that the Biden administration must resume issuing permits for new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export facilities, the New York Times reported. The decision comes in response to a lawsuit filed by 16 Republican state attorney generals who argued that Biden’s pause on licensing, brought in to allow time to analyse how those exports affect climate change, amounted to a ban that harmed their states’ economies, it added. Bloomberg noted that the decision is “unlikely to immediately jump start approvals”.
Around the world
- CHINESE FLOODS: Local authorities in China’s Hunan province declared a “wartime” emergency after torrential rainfall led to “the most severe flooding seen in 70 years”, the South China Morning Post reported.
- BRAZILIAN FIRES: Wildfires in the Brazilian Amazon in the first half of 2024 were the worst in 20 years, with 13,489 individual fires registered, Agence France-Presse reported.
- SBTi CEO RESIGNS: The head of the Science Based Targets initiative, Luiz Amaral, who came “under fire for a controversial decision to loosen guidelines around carbon offsets”, will step down at the end of July, Bloomberg reported.
- THOMPSON FIRE: Around 28,000 residents have been forced to evacuate in northern California after a wildfire broke out as the “state simmers in a brutal and potentially historic heatwave”, the Guardian reported.
- ‘FEROCIOUS STORMS’: Seven were left dead after “ferocious storms and torrential rains” hit France, Switzerland and Italy last weekend, Agence France-Presse reported.
- INDIAN LANDSLIDES: Heavy rains in northeastern India have “triggered floods and landslides in the region”, killing at least 16 people and displacing more than 300,000 over the last two weeks, Deutsche Welle reported.
14
The number of times women are more likely to die in extreme weather disasters, according to Women’s Environmental Leadership Australia, reported the Australian Associated Press.
Latest climate research
- Tropical forest degradation due to “edge effects” – those at the edges of forests – is 200% higher than previously thought, increasing the areas more vulnerable to drought, a study published in Nature and covered by Carbon Brief found.
- As the climate warms, the cities of Hai Phong in Vietnam, Yangon in Myanmar and Bangkok in Thailand will all face increases in the peak intensity and duration of tropical cyclones, a new study published in npj Climate and Atmospheric Science indicated.
- The gradual trend towards a warmer and drier climate “poses immense uncertainty for the future of British festivals” stated the author of a new “short research article” published in Weather, which examined the “more extreme weather events” in Glastonbury festival’s history.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
One of the new Labour government’s key manifesto pledges is to reach “zero-carbon electricity” by 2030. While this target is seen as extremely ambitious, the UK has already made significant progress in slashing fossil fuels while rolling out renewable power. Under the Conservatives, coal power has already been all but phased out, falling from 40% of electricity generation in 2012 to near-zero in 2024, just 12 years later. To meet its target, Labour will need to phase out unabated gas twice as fast, from 29% in 2024 to near-zero in 2030.
Spotlight
Key climate figures in the new UK parliament
After a “historic” win for the Labour party and loss for the Conservatives in the UK’s general election, Carbon Brief takes a look at who will be setting the climate agenda in the years to come.
The Labour party has secured a landslide victory in the country’s general election, winning 412 seats in parliament, up by 211 from 2019.
Former Labour leader and MP for Doncaster North Ed Miliband is expected to take on the role of energy security and net-zero secretary, leading one of Labour’s “five main missions”, to “make Britain a clean energy superpower”. This includes targeting lower energy bills, creating jobs and delivering energy security by transitioning to zero-carbon electricity by 2030, the party said.
Beyond the department of energy security and net-zero, other key ministers who will have a say in steering a range of climate and energy policy over the next five years are likely to include Louise Haigh as secretary of state for transport, Steve Reed as secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs and Rachel Reeves as chancellor of the exchequer.
Beyond government positions, a number of pro-climate action Labour MPs have won seats, including:
- Katie White in Leeds North West, who led the campaign that created Britain’s first Climate Change Act.
- Polly Billington in East Thanet, who founded the environmental network UK100.
- Melanie Onn, in Great Grimsby & Cleethorpes, who was previously deputy chief executive of trade association RenewableUK.
- Luke Murphy in Basingstoke, who was head of the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) Fair Transition Unit and associate director for the energy, climate, housing and infrastructure team.
The Green party also won four seats and the Liberal Democrats won 70.
According to research by Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth in June, these two parties had the most environmentally friendly manifestos, with the Greens and Liberal Democrats scoring 39 and 32 out of 40, respectively. (Labour scored 21).
Greens MPs include co-leaders Carla Denyer, who beat Labour’s shadow culture secretary Thangam Debbonaire by 10,000 votes in Bristol Central, and Adrian Ramsay, who overturned a 22,000 Conservative majority in Waveney Valley, with a 32.1% swing to the Green Party.
Additionally, Siân Berry has won Brighton Pavilion, the seat previously held by former Green MP Caroline Lucas.
For the Liberal Democrats, it was a “record-breaking” night with the number of seats held by the party surging from 11 in 2019.
This includes Pippa Heylings for South Cambridgeshire, who was team leader for the UK’s Global Biodiverse Landscapes Fund at the multinational company PwC. She also founded the climate-focused advisory company Talking Transformation, along with other climate-focused Liberal Democrat MPs.
Watch, read, listen
CONSPIRACY INFLUENCERS: Rolling Stone took a look at how Europe’s “conspiracy influencers” have gone from a focus on Covid-19 to climate change, with conspiratorial narratives about climate action entering the mainstream.
FOOD PRICES: A “big read” in the Financial Times looked at how shifting weather patterns are “reducing crop yields and squeezing supplies”, which could create a permanent source of inflation.
ELECTION MEANING: Ahead of the UK general election, Carbon Brief’s deputy editor and senior policy editor Dr Simon Evans spoke to Michael Liebreich and Baroness Bryony Worthington about what the results mean for climate and energy on the Cleaning Up podcast.
Coming up
- 7 July: France national assembly elections, second round
- 9-11 July: NATO Summit, Washington DC
- 16-17 July: G7 trade meeting, Reggio Calabria, Italy
Pick of the jobs
- Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice, communications coordinator | Salary: Up to $38,400. Location: Fully remote, preferred location in the global south
- Uplift, senior political adviser | Salary: £46,259-£50,548. Location: London
- Sustainable Housing Observatory, senior project manager – adaptation to climate change | Salary: Unknown. Location: Paris
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
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The post DeBriefed 5 July 2024: Key climate MPs in new UK parliament; Hurricane Beryl; Biden calls deniers ‘really, really dumb’ appeared first on Carbon Brief.
American farmers are drowning in health insurance costs, while their German counterparts never worry about medical bills. The difference may help determine which country’s small farms are better prepared for a changing climate.
Samantha Kemnah looked out the foggy window of her home in New Berlin, New York, at the 150-acre dairy farm she and her husband, Chris, bought last year. This winter, an unprecedented cold front brought snowstorms and ice to the region.
On the Farm, the Hidden Climate Cost of the Broken U.S. Health Care System
Climate Change
A Little-Used Maneuver Could Mean More Drilling and Mining in Southern Utah’s Redrock Country
Two Utah Congress members have introduced a resolution that could end protections for Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Conservation groups worry similar maneuvers on other federal lands will follow.
Lawmakers from Utah have commandeered an obscure law to unravel protections for the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, potentially delivering on a Trump administration goal of undoing protections for public conservation lands across the country.
A Little-Used Maneuver Could Mean More Drilling and Mining in Southern Utah’s Redrock Country
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.
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