Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
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This week
Long hot winter
‘WORLD’S WARMEST’: Record heat has affected “everywhere from northern Siberia and central and north-west America to parts of South America, Africa and Australia” this winter, reported the Financial Times. BBC News reported that last month was the world’s warmest February “in modern times”, the ninth month in a row to be the hottest on record since June 2023. This puts the world temporarily above the 1.5C threshold, noted the Guardian.
‘WEIRD’ WINTER HEAT: The New York Times reported that the “fingerprints of climate change” were detectable on the “weird” winter heat, including in Iran’s capital city Tehran, which was 4.2C warmer than average during the winter months. Morocco experienced the hottest January since measurements began, the country’s meteorological department told Agence France-Presse, at 3.8C above normal.
SMOKEHOUSE SCAR: Record winter heat continued to fan the flames of the “largest wildfire on record” in Texas, reported Axios. It added the blazes had left “a burn scar so large it is clearly visible from space”. Known as the Smokehouse Creek fire, it has burned more than 1.2m acres and “killed two people and thousands of cattle”, reported BBC Future. The publication explained that the fire has a “complex link” with climate change.
China’s pivotal ‘two sessions’ meeting
WHAT, WHEN, WHERE: China’s “two sessions” meeting, which sees the annual parliamentary gathering of the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, is currently underway in Beijing, Carbon Brief’s China Briefing newsletter reported. Its centrepiece is the “government work report”, a speech traditionally delivered by the premier that outlines priorities for the year ahead.
CLIMATE TARGETS: One of the few quantitative climate targets China set in the report is to reduce energy consumption per unit of GDP by 2.5% over the coming year, a goal that Bloomberg described as “modest”. The target was lower than analysts’ expectations of 4%, the outlet added.
FOSSIL FUELS REMAIN: The work report also restated a commitment to boosting fossil fuels in the name of “energy security”, Reuters reported. The newswire noted that China also aims to step up exploration of “strategic minerals”.
Around the world
- SURPRISE SNOW: Pakistan experienced unusual snowfall and heavy rains, resulting in the death of at least 35 people, including 22 children, reported BBC News.
- CORAL BLEACH: The world is on the brink of a fourth global mass coral bleaching event, which could see many tropical reefs killed by extreme ocean temperatures, reported Reuters. The Guardian reported that Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is facing its fifth mass coral bleaching event in eight years.
- FUNDING THREAT: Individuals from global south climate groups that depend on finance from the German government “feel unable to criticise Israel’s military action in Gaza” due to pressure from their German-funded employers, Climate Home News reported.
- MISSING MONEY: A UN official said that “Africa will be $2.5tn short of the finance it needs to cope with climate change by 2030”, noted Reuters, despite the continent producing the lowest emissions and experiencing the worst effects.
- NEW ZEALAND LAWSUIT: An elder of the Ngāpuhi and Ngāti Kahu tribes “won the right to sue seven New Zealand-based corporate entities”, including fuel, coal and gas companies and dairy exporters, for their contribution to climate change, noted the Guardian.
- NOTHING TO SEE HERE: The UK’s spring budget announcement was one of the “least green budgets in recent years” experts told the Guardian, with disappointment around electric vehicles and North Sea oil and gas. Carbon Brief had all the details.
2 billion
The amount of land in hectares that has been degraded by human activity over the past 500 years, reported Bloomberg.
Latest climate research
- A Nature Climate Change study found that, while climate change drives population growth in lizards “when trees are present”, deforestation could reverse this effect and even exacerbate the negative impacts of climate change.
- Under an additional 1C of warming, around 800 million people in the tropics will live in areas where “heavy work should be limited for over half of the hours in the year” due to the heat, a One Earth review paper found.
- The severe “Tinderbox drought” in southeast Australia, which preceded the country’s largest wildfires on record from 2019-20, was intensified by human-caused climate change, according to a Science study.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
A victory for Donald Trump (red line) in November’s US presidential election could lead to an additional 4bn tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, compared with Joe Biden’s plans (blue line), new Carbon Brief analysis revealed. It is based on an aggregation of modelling by various US research groups. For context, 4bn tonnes of greenhouse gases is equivalent to the combined annual emissions of the EU and Japan, or the combined annual total of the world’s 140 lowest-emitting countries. “Regardless of the precise impact, a second Trump term that successfully dismantles Biden’s climate legacy would likely end any global hopes of keeping global warming below 1.5C,” the analysis added.
Spotlight
Female climate activist Angel Arutura
On International Women’s Day, Carbon Brief speaks to Angel Arutura, a social and climate justice activist in Northern Ireland passionate about “connecting people and the planet” through social media.
Carbon Brief: How long has environmental activism been part of your life?
Angel Arutura: I’ve always been interested in the world around me, but it goes back to school, where geography was a subject that grabbed me. My teacher made lessons engaging and I became interested in how different parts of the world are affected by issues. I think my mixed-race heritage also helped. I have a multifaceted identity so, naturally, it made sense for me to think about how actions from the global north affected communities in the global south. I’m half Irish, half Zimbabwean, so I’ve been able to see that not just from an academic standpoint, but an emotional standpoint. Since then, I’ve been committed to connecting people to our true nature of love and protection and harbouring that loving connection for the people and the world around us.
CB: How has your identity as a woman shaped your activism, particularly your identity as a Black woman?
AA: I really started being vocal with my activism around the time of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, where the conversation was heavily on social justice. Growing up in a 98% White country, I experienced a lot of racism and my experience as a Black woman living in Ireland has been overwhelmingly negative. I rejected my Zimbabwean culture, my heritage, for so long. I went through a transformation at 17 where I started to connect with my heritage and it was through those years of self-reflection that I was able to speak at the protests. That’s when I found my voice. But, I thought to myself, hold on. Why are we just talking about social justice here? From then, I talked about the intersectionality of climate and social justice. As a Black woman, the driving power behind this was, in a weird way, finding that self-love.
CB: Why is it important to lift up the voices of women, particularly women of colour, when it comes to climate change?
AA: The majority of the time, when people talk about climate change and sustainability, they only talk about the exploitation of the planet. Think about fast fashion and women’s rights violations, and how those brands do sustainability initiatives and all this greenwashing. But how can you talk about the exploitation of the planet and not also the exploitation of women in the global south? The climate crisis, social justice, women’s rights, it’s all interconnected. An intersectional approach is the only one we need to take when it comes to climate change. It’s imperative if we want to create real, sustainable change. One of the best ways we can do this is through storytelling, in particular, elevating and uplifting the voices of the most vulnerable, especially those from the global south. And, unfortunately, that is women.
This interview was edited for length.
Watch, read, listen
SOUND WAVES: A three-part Sky documentary narrated by David Attenborough, revealed – amid glunking elk, popping grouse and laughing insects – how harnessing the sound of fish could be a vital tool to help save coral reefs.
‘FOLKLORIST’: Grist spoke to a “folklorist” about how community, culture and tradition are vulnerable to, but may also hold solutions for, climate change.
REPORTING FOR DUTY: In the face of extreme heat, “chief heat officers” in Sierra Leone and Mexico explain what this rare role entails in BBC World Service’s The Climate Question podcast.
Coming up
- 5-11 March: China’s “two sessions” meeting
- 10 March: Portugal general elections
- 11-12 March: G20 second research and innovation working group meeting, Brasília, Brazil
Pick of the jobs
- The Gecko Project, investigations editor | Salary: £60,000. Location: Remote
- Small World Consulting, chief executive officer | Salary: £70,000-100,000. Location: Lancaster, UK
- Brighton and Hove Energy Services Co-operative, business development manager | Salary: £40,000-45,000. Location: Brighton, UK
- United Nations Environment Programme, associate public information officer | Salary: Unknown. Location: Bonn, Germany
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org
The post DeBriefed 8 March 2024: Climate cost of a Trump victory calculated; ‘Weird’ winter heat; China’s pivotal ‘two sessions’ meeting; Young female activist interview appeared first on Carbon Brief.
At least fifty countries have yet to submit a nationally determined contribution (NDC) climate plan to the United Nations, even though the latest set of plans was due in 2025 – and among them, around half have failed to provide information on why they have not met the deadline.
More than a year past an initial deadline of February 2025, the Paris Agreement’s Implementation and Compliance Committee (PAICC) met this March and said 55 countries had yet to communicate an NDC to the UN climate body. According to the UN’s registry, two have since submitted their plans.
A key requirement of the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement is that governments publish a more ambitious NDC every five years, setting targets to reduce their planet-heating emissions and outlining their policies to adapt to climate change, in order to meet the accord’s goals on limiting global warming and protecting people from its effects.
The latest set – the third round of plans, with new targets for 2035 – was due in 2025.
After India’s recent submission, the countries yet to publish their new NDCs are mostly poorer and smaller nations, with few emissions. The biggest emitters in the group are Egypt, Vietnam, Argentina and the Philippines. The US and Iran are not signed up to the Paris Agreement, although the US submitted a 2035 NDC under the Biden administration before Donald Trump pulled the US out of the UN climate accords.
Some nations have argued that they cannot put together an NDC – which requires a significant amount of work in tracking emissions and consulting on how to curb them across the economy – because of exceptional circumstances. For example, a letter from a Sudanese official to the PAICC committee, seen by Climate Home News, says that the country’s civil war has led to the suspension of its NDC preparation.
No information from some nations
But others have failed to communicate with the PAICC, which is tasked with encouraging governments to respect their commitments under the Paris Agreement.
In a report on its March 27 meeting, the PAICC board said it “noted with concern” that 28 countries have not provided information about either their NDCs or their biennial transparency reports on the climate action they are taking, or both. This was “despite several reminders”, it said.
Despite a push from some board members, the committee did not agree at this meeting to name these 28 countries. But it may do so at a meeting in September.
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Oil crisis could boost struggling sustainable aviation fuel industry
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ICJ follow-up resolution is a test of climate leadership at the UN
If states back the resolution by consensus, it would send a powerful message of commitment to climate action and the rule of law, despite pushback by some big emitters
One source who has seen the list of countries told Climate Home News it was a “mixed crowd” of developing nations, including least developed countries, small island developing states, emerging economies and at least one government with a representative on the PAICC board.
The PAICC decided to send individual letters to these governments requesting that they engage with the committee and “reminding them that it shall take appropriate measures with a view to facilitating implementation and promoting compliance” with the Paris Agreement.
Non-punitive system
The PAICC’s rules of procedure state that it should be “non-adversarial and non-punitive” and the strongest measure it can take is to issue a public finding naming a government that has breached the Paris Agreement rules. It has done this once before in 2023, rebuking the Vatican for not filing an NDC and Iceland for not telling the UN how much climate finance it plans to provide.
Joanna Depledge, a historian of the UN climate process and research fellow at the University of Cambridge, said that “any measures stronger than naming and shaming would have been unacceptable” to some governments when they were negotiating the Paris Agreement.
She added that “naming and shaming in the international arena is not trivial” because governments do not like to be exposed as non-compliant. “But if the PAICC cannot even name, then that is a serious problem,” she warned.
Avoiding Kyoto’s mistakes?
Tejas Rao, who is researching the PAICC as part of a doctoral thesis at Cambridge, said the architects of the Paris Agreement made it less enforceable so as to try and prevent countries leaving or staying out of the agreement as happened with its predecessor, the Kyoto Protocol.
While the Paris Agreement asks all governments to set their own emissions-reduction targets, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol set specific targets for developed countries.
When in 2011 it became clear that Canada was not going to meet those targets, it quit the agreement rather than face formal non-compliance proceedings and a multibillion-dollar obligation to buy carbon credits to cover the shortfall, Rao said.
Japan and Russia also declined to endorse some of their emissions reduction targets and the US never ratified the Kyoto agreement. “Enforcement proceedings became politically toxic,” exposing “the limits of punitive compliance regimes”, Rao said.
The idea of the Paris Agreement’s less stringent compliance system is to engage with governments and keep them within the system rather than threaten them with sanctions and potentially push them out, he added.
Rao said this was “the right trade-off” because governments comply when they feel they have chosen to sign up to the rules rather than having them imposed. He noted that back in April 2025, 171 governments had yet to submit their NDCs and this figure is now down to just over 50.
“We’ve got countries that are at least reporting NDCs,” he said, adding that PAICC is “working as it was designed to”. “It is issuing findings of fact and non-compliance, it’s initiating discussions with parties and, as a result of those discussions, the non-compliance figures are coming down every time.”
The post Paris Agreement committee snubbed over missing NDC climate plans appeared first on Climate Home News.
Paris Agreement committee snubbed over missing NDC climate plans
Climate Change
As Energy, War and Climate Collide, A Climate Summit in Colombia Charts a Path Beyond Fossil Fuels
Participants broke a long-standing taboo by openly linking oil and gas not just to emissions, but to war, displacement and economic instability.
While some major fossil fuel producers keep pushing for expanded oil and gas use, which is linked to warfare, economic shocks and ecological damage, more than 50 countries at the first Conference on Transitioning Away From Fossil Fuels began developing plans to shift toward renewable energy systems designed for stability and abundance rather than scarcity and conflict.
As Energy, War and Climate Collide, a Conference in Colombia Charts a Path Beyond Fossil Fuels
Most of the wild sloths imported by a planned tourist attraction in Orlando did not survive.
The Florida Attorney General’s office announced a criminal investigation into the deaths of dozens of sloths at a now-shuttered Orlando business, a development that signals a new level of animal-welfare accountability in the commercial wildlife trade.
Florida Opens Criminal Probe Into Sloth World After Dozens of Animal Deaths
Paris Agreement committee snubbed over missing NDC climate plans
As Energy, War and Climate Collide, A Climate Summit in Colombia Charts a Path Beyond Fossil Fuels
Florida Opens Criminal Probe Into Sloth World After Dozens of Animal Deaths
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