Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Plastic treaty pause
BUSAN BUST: Efforts to finalise a global treaty on plastic pollution failed to reach agreement in Busan, South Korea, Reuters reported. The newswire said more than 100 nations wanted the treaty to cap plastic production, but “a handful of oil-producers were prepared only to target plastic waste”. Carbon Brief previously explained how failure to address plastics production could affect efforts to tackle climate change.
FINGER POINTING: Saudi negotiators were accused of “leading” efforts to block limits on plastic production, which relies mostly on fossil fuels, said the New York Times. A French official was quoted by Agence France-Presse saying: “We also are worried by the continuing obstruction by the so-called like-minded countries.” Members of this group include China and India, which opposed limits on plastic production, according to the Hindustan Times.
POST MORTEM: The talks foundered, in part, because, as with the UN climate regime, they rely on making decisions by consensus, found analysis from the Independent. Negotiations will continue next year based on the current draft text, said the Earth Negotiations Bulletin.
Around the world
- DESERT COP: UN talks on desertification began in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on Monday, reported Le Monde. The COP16 land summit will last for two weeks, it said.
- PRABAWO’S PLEDGE: Indonesia leader Prabawo Subianto’s pledge to phase out coal power by 2040 would entail “massive costs, reforms”, the Jakarta Post reported. The country would need to build 8 gigawatts (GW) of renewables and retire 3GW of coal each year to meet the target, according to Ember analysis cited by Bloomberg.
- COAL CURTAILED: A high court in South African capital Pretoria overturned plans for 1.5GW of new coal-fired capacity, the Mail and Guardian reported. It said the “landmark” ruling found the government had failed to adequately consider the impact of coal on children’s rights, particularly their right to a health environment.
- MONSOON FLOODS: More than 30 people were killed and tens of thousands displaced by floods in Malaysia and Thailand, Al Jazeera reported. The outlet noted climate change is “causing more intense weather patterns that can make destructive floods more likely”, according to scientists.
- CHINESE CURBS: Beijing has banned exports to the US of a series of critical minerals needed for low-carbon technologies, Reuters reported. China wanted to “safeguard its national security and interests”, said China Daily.
- HISTORIC DISCOVERY: Brazilian oil giant Petrobras and Colombian Ecopetrol have discovered Colombia’s “largest ever gas deposit”, according to Oilprice. The gas could double the country’s existing reserves, but the outlet says its energy sector is “grappling” with a government that supports the “transition away from fossil fuels”.
$100bn
The funds needed by Caribbean countries over the next 20 years to become “climate resilient”, according to comments from the International Monetary Fund reported by La Vanguardia.
Latest climate research
- The Arctic Ocean could see its first ice-free days before 2030, according to findings in Nature Communications.
- The recent “surge” in global temperatures has been “intensified by record-low planetary albedo” (reflectiveness), said a study in Science.
- A Nature Climate Change perspective critiqued the idea of climate “tipping points”, saying they “confuse and can distract from urgent climate action”.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
At COP29 in Baku, developed-country parties such as the EU, the US and Japan agreed to help raise “at least” $300bn a year by 2035 for climate action in developing countries. This target faced a strong backlash – and a closer inspection of climate-finance data helps to explain why. Carbon Brief analysis showed how pledges from before the COP29 deal would already bring climate finance up from $115.9bn in 2022 to around $200bn by 2030. Counting contributions from developing countries – something “encouraged” under the new goal – could raise this to $265bn. These pre-existing funds mean the target is achievable for developed countries with virtually “no additional budgetary effort”, according to experts.
Spotlight
Landmark climate case kicks off
This week, Carbon Brief interviews a leading international law scholar about a landmark climate case at the UN international court of justice.
The international court of justice (ICJ) has opened two weeks of hearings on states’ climate-related legal obligations – and the consequences, if “significant harm” is caused.
The case stems from a UN general assembly (UNGA) request for an “advisory opinion” from the ICJ. It is the ICJ’s largest ever case, with more than 100 countries and international organisations making interventions, deploying a wide variety of legal arguments.
In his opening address, Ralph Regenvanu, climate envoy for Vanuatu, which pushed for the case, said: “[T]his may well be the most consequential case in the history of humanity.”
Carbon Brief interviewed leading international law scholar Prof Philippe Sands to find out more about the legal issues at stake and the wider significance of the ICJ case.
Carbon Brief: Would you be able to start by situating this case in its wider legal context and explaining why it could be so consequential?
Philippe Sands: Well, it’s the first time the international court of justice has been called upon to address legal issues relating to climate change. The ICJ is the principal judicial organ of the United Nations and, although the advisory opinion that it hands down will not be binding on states, it is binding on all UN bodies. The determinations that the court makes will have consequences that go very far and that will have a particular authority, in legal and political terms. Of course, everything turns on what the court actually says.
CB: Would you be able to summarise the key legal arguments that are being fought over in this case?
PS: [F]or me, the crucial issues are, firstly, what the court says about the state of the science: is it established, or is there any room for doubt? Secondly, what are the obligations of states having regard to the clarity of the science. Thirdly, are there legal obligations on states in relation to the climate system that exist and arise outside of the treaty regime – the 1992 [UN Framework] convention [on climate change], the Kyoto Protocol, Paris Agreement and so on and so forth. And, related to that, fourthly – this is the most intense, legally interesting aspect – what are the responsibilities of states for historic emissions under general international law? And, in particular, are the biggest contributors liable under international law to make good any damages that may arise from their historic actions…The practicalities are that islands are disappearing with sea level rise. Are historic polluters of greenhouse gases responsible for the consequences of those disappearances?
CB: If you were going to make a bet, which way would you say the court would go on that key question of whether it’s just the [UN] climate regime that gives rise to obligations [on states], or whether there could be obligations from other parts of the law?
I think the court will proceed very carefully. I don’t think it will want to close the door to the application of other rules of international law…The broader issue here is that, essentially, the legislative system has broken down. The states have been unable to legislate effectively and efficiently to address the issues related to climate change. And, so, what has happened is that a group of states have essentially gone to the General Assembly and said: “The legislative system is broken down. Let’s now ask the judges to step in and tell us what the applicable principles and rules are.” The difficulty that that poses for the judges, who will be conscious that the legislative system has not delivered, is that it’s not the function of judges to legislate.
Photo credit: Christian André Strand.
The full transcript of the interview can be read here.
Watch, read, listen
ZHENMIN SPEAKS: In a long interview with China Newsweek, Chinese climate envoy Liu Zhenmin reflected on the outcome of the COP29 climate talks, including the “disappoint[ing]” $300bn finance goal, and said the global energy transition is “irreversible”.
‘WAKE UP’: In a “viewpoint” article, Guardian economics editor Heather Stewart wrote that rising food prices were a sign of the “destabilising impact of [the] climate crisis”.
TALKING COP: Carbon Brief’s Anika Patel joined the All Things Policy podcast to discuss COP29, the upcoming Trump presidency and China’s actions at the summit.
Coming up
- 2-13 December: UN Desertification Conference, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
- 2-13 December: International court of justice hearings on the obligations of states in respect of climate change, The Hague, Netherlands
- 7 December: Ghana presidential and parliamentary elections
Pick of the jobs
- International Energy Agency, junior energy modeller/analyst | Salary: €5,741 a month. Location: Paris
- University of Oxford, director of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History | Salary: Unknown. Location: Oxford, UK
- Mongabay, staff writer – California biodiversity | Salary: $54,000-$75,000. Location: California
- University of East Anglia, senior research associate – land use resource and engagement | Salary: £37,999. Location: Norwich, UK
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
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The post DeBriefed 6 December 2024: Plastics talks collapse; $300bn finance goal analysed; Landmark climate case kicks off 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 “