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.
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’: