Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
China’s ‘two sessions’
‘CONCRETE MEASURES’: China’s premier Li Qiang said the country will work “diligently” and take a “series of concrete measures” to achieve the country’s “dual-carbon” goals of peaking CO2 emissions before 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality by 2060, state newspaper China Daily reported. Li made the comments as he delivered the “report on the work of the government”, a major policy document that outlines key priorities for 2025, at the nation’s all-important annual “two sessions” meeting, it said.
RENEWABLES PACKAGE: China also announced plans to develop a package of major projects to tackle climate change at the meeting, Reuters reported. A new report from the country’s National Development and Reform Commission outlined plans to develop new offshore wind farms and accelerate the construction of “new energy bases”, it added. However, coal will remain a “key fuel”, with plans to increase production and supply, the article noted.
NEW NEGOTIATOR: Li Gao was promoted to vice minister at China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment, replacing Zhao Yingmin, who served as the head of China’s delegation to COP29, according to Bloomberg. Li is a “climate negotiator” with “two decades of experience in global climate change talks” and an “advocate of the country’s carbon-credit programme”, the article noted.
Trump continues cuts
CUTTING FORESTS: Trump signed an executive order to expand logging across 280m acres of US national forests and other public lands, the Guardian reported. Conservation groups warned that this could have a “disastrous impact on climate change, endangered species and local economies dependent on ecotourism”, added Inside Climate News.
‘NATIONAL DISASTER’: BBC News reported that around 880 workers at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) were fired last week. Reuters said that Jane Lubchenco, the former NOAA administrator under Barack Obama, called the layoffs a “national disaster and a colossal waste of money”, adding: “Destroying NOAA’s ability to provide life-saving information, keep our ocean healthy and strengthen the economy makes no sense – no sense at all.”
‘PIVOTAL CENTERS’: The Trump administration told NOAA that “two pivotal centres for weather forecasting will soon have their leases cancelled”, sources told Axios this week. Elsewhere, Reuters reported that the US is pulling out of the Just Energy Transition Partnership, where wealthy countries help support developing countries to move away from coal, according to several participating countries.
Around the world
- INDIAN AVALANCHE: An avalanche in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand that killed eight people was triggered by a 600% surge in precipitation within 24 hours, fuelling “climate concerns”, reported the Times of India.
- EU EMISSIONS: The European Commission announced that carmakers will have three more years to meet emissions rules, but the 2035 ban on the sale of petrol and diesel cars remains in place, according to the Financial Times. Reuters added the EU is also still committed to its interim target for zero-emission car sales for 2030.
- JAPANESE WILDFIRE: Japan’s biggest wildfire in 30 years has burned around 2,100 hectares and killed one person so far, the South China Morning Post reported.
- CLIMATE MULTILATERALISM: Brazil will use the COP30 climate summit in November to “press for multilateralism and respect for science”, said president-designate Andre Aranha Correa do Lago, according to Reuters.
- NORTH SEA: The UK has confirmed it will not issue new North Sea oil and gas licences and announced a 2030 end date for the “windfall tax”, first introduced when fossil-fuel company profits skyrocketed in 2022, in new plans released ahead of a consultation, the Press Association reported.
36
The number of fossil-fuel companies responsible for half of global CO2 emissions, the Guardian reported.
Latest climate research
- An AI-driven assessment of COP side events from 2003-23 published in Nature Climate Change examined how fossil-fuel lobbyists have been gaining access to UN climate summits to “uncover power dynamics at the highest levels of climate governance”.
- In a high-emissions future, melting Antarctic ice could lead to Earth’s strongest ocean current slowing down by 20% by 2050, according to a new study in Environmental Research Letters.
- Women and girls continue to bear a disproportionate impacts from heatwaves in South Sudan, according to a new World Weather Attribution analysis.
(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 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) meeting in Hangzhou, China, governments failed for a third time to agree to a timeline for the next round of UN climate science reports, according to Climate Home News. The absence of US federal scientists “cast a shadow” over the IPCC meeting, reported the Financial Times. The chart above, from Carbon Brief’s in-depth coverage of the meeting, highlights that the US has provided around 30% of the voluntary contributions to the IPCC’s financial budgets since it was established in 1988.
Spotlight
The ‘Super Grid’ campaign of the 1950s
As the UK looks to expand its grid, Carbon Brief takes a look at what can be learned from the Super Grid expansion 70 years ago.
Electricity demand in the UK is expected to at least double by 2050, requiring an expansion of the grid to keep pace. National Grid has launched the “Great Grid Upgrade“, with at least 17 major infrastructure projects being built as part of this.
However, there has been repeated pushback, with critics condemning plans to “carpet” the countryside with pylons, “devastating” locals and “shattering” rural dreams.
Speaking earlier this year, energy and climate change secretary Ed Miliband said there would need to be a communication campaign to convey the benefits of the expansion, pointing to one during the last big expansion in the 1950s and 60s – known as the “Super Grid”.
Super Grid
The UK’s first electricity transmission grid began operation in 1933 – this excludes Northern Ireland, which is part of Ireland’s power grid. National Grid was created in 1935 and the regional grids were connected into the world’s first integrated national grid in 1938.
By 1950, the grid was at capacity, with demand rising ninefold in just 15 years.
Out of this the idea for a “Super Grid” was born. Made up of 1,150 miles of power lines held by 136-feet-high steel pylons, the grid cost £52m, roughly £1.4bn in today’s prices, over 10 years.
It was designed not just to increase capacity, but also to strengthen the north-to-south interconnections of the existing grid, especially as generation capacity shifted to large coal-fired power stations to the north of London.
After it was announced, opposition around the UK was voiced by local authorities, preservationist groups, voluntary societies and residents, citing concerns about the visual impact of the new pylons on the countryside, as well as concerns around industrialisation and the economy.
Speaking to Carbon Brief, Prof Katrina Navickas at the University of Hertfordshire said that the Super Grid expansions were undertaken during a time when there was a post-war “desire for modernisation, efficiency and growth”, adding:
“These aims were often in tension with popular demands for amenity and countryside preservation, as the national parks were set up from 1949 and a popular idea of preservation of the rural landscape arose out of the right to roam movement.”
Attempts were made to minimise the impact of the pylons on the landscape. For example, the electricity boards argued that the large scale of the infrastructure would fit the landscape better than a “cluster” of smaller grid, noted Navickas.
Debate continued into the 1960s, with ministers questioning the impact of the Super Grid “upon the beauty of the countryside”, calling on army specialists to look at the potential of camouflage and arguing against the pylons being “painted in antinationalisation Tory colours”.
Communication challenges
To try to counter the opposition to the Super Grid and wider grid expansion, the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) launched an information campaign, using articles and adverts to try to convey the benefits of an expanded electricity network.
For example, one advert (above left) highlighted surging electricity demand and the need to ensure supply for future generations.
Others sought to highlight that the CEGB appreciated the need to protect the countryside and expand.
As an advert in Country Life (above right) highlighted, there is a “double duty” that falls on the shoulders of those tasked with managing the grid expansion. This is to “maintain an efficient, economical electricity supply, but also to preserve the amenities of the country”.
Some of the challenges around the attachment to the “amenity value of local landscapes” still exist today, Navickas added:
“But the ecological and environmental considerations are also much more to the fore than they had been in the 1950s and 1960s. Local community consultation has to be at the heart of any planning schemes too, whereas the earlier schemes were implemented in a much more top-down way that assumed that local opposition was based on lack of understanding of national benefits.”
Watch, read, listen
CLIMATE LENS: A new podcast titled Lights, Climate, Action discussed film and TV through a climate lens, with hosts talking about the film Don’t Look Up in their first episode.
ACTIVISM AND TRUMP: Yale360 interviewed activist and author Bill McKibben about “rethinking the role of protest, the global push on clean energy and why he sees reason for hope” in the “age of Trump 2.0”.
WOMEN’S DAY: To mark International Women’s Day, Costa Rican diplomat and former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres is joined by top climate scientist Dr Katharine Hayhoe on her Outrage and Optimism podcast to discuss why ignoring women endangers the climate.
Coming up
- 11 March: Greenland’s general election
- 16-25 March: Climate and Clean Air Conference, Brasilia, Brazil
- 17 March: G20 Second International Financial Architecture Working Group Meeting, Pretoria, South Africa
- 18-19 March: OECD x IEA Global Forum on the Environment and Climate Change, Paris, France
- 18-19 March: Berlin Energy Transition Dialogue, Berlin, Germany
Pick of the jobs
- Union of Concerned Scientists, senior climate scientist | Salary: $134,805. Location: Washington DC/remote
- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, head of communication in the IPCC working group I technical support unit | Salary: Unknown. Location: Paris, France
- Community Energy England, chief operating officer | Salary: £46,000-£52,470. Location: Remote/Sheffield
- Irish Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications, head of circular economy and resource efficiency | Salary: Unknown. Location: Ireland
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
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The post DeBriefed 7 March 2025: China’s pivotal ‘two sessions’; IPCC indecision; Lessons from UK’s 1950s ‘Super Grid’ 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 ‘BEN