Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
US climate credentials and consequences
CLIMATE VEEP: US vice president Kamala Harris’s selection of Tim Walz as her running mate is being heralded by climate advocates, Inside Climate News wrote. The Star Tribune summarised Walz’s environmental record, saying that the current Minnesota governor has “passed ambitious climate policy” while in office – but “also clashed with environmental advocates” on other issues, including the Line 3 oil pipeline.
RAINFALL WRECKAGE: Tropical Storm Debby has wreaked havoc across the south-eastern US, with slow wind speeds contributing to the historic rainfall levels, NPR said. The Post and Courier documented some of the storm’s impacts, including flooding and downed trees and powerlines. Meanwhile, fire- and flood-prone areas of the US are seeing a net influx of residents, the Washington Post reported.
Around the world
- CARBON CAP: China’s State Council announced a new “dual control” plan for its emissions that will put a cap on carbon for the first time, Carbon Brief’s China Briefing said. Analysis published by Carbon Brief also revealed that China’s emissions have seen their first quarterly fall since the nation’s Covid lockdowns.
- CLIMATE COLLAB: Brazilian president Lula da Silva stressed the need for regional cooperation against climate change at a meeting with Chilean president Gabriel Boric that saw the two countries sign 19 bilateral agreements, Agencia Brasil reported.
- HEAT STRESSED: The Korea Times reported that five Koreans died of heat-related causes over the weekend, bringing the year’s total to 13. Meanwhile, heatstroke claimed more than 120 lives in Tokyo during July, according to the Associated Press.
- IPCC UNCERTAINTY: Governments failed to agree upon the timeline for producing the next set of climate change assessment reports amid “deep divergences” at the meeting of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Home News reported. (See Carbon Brief’s detailed summary.)
- KEEPING THE COAL: Global commodity company Glencore walked back on its plan to split its business in two, deciding instead to retain its coal division – a “major profit engine”, the Financial Times wrote. The newspaper explained that most shareholders had opposed the proposed restructure.
- REQUESTING RELIEF: Bloomberg reported that the UN World Food Programme “is seeking 290,000 tonnes of corn from as far afield as Mexico and Ukraine” in an attempt to alleviate the effects of the El Niño-driven drought that decimated harvests across southern Africa.
$52,071,133
The amount of “lifetime campaign contributions” that the 123 climate-sceptic members of the current US Congress have together received from the fossil-fuel sector, according to a report from the Center for American Progress.
Latest climate research
- Ocean temperatures around Australia are the hottest they have been in 400 years, imperilling the Great Barrier Reef’s iconic corals, a Nature study found.
- According to research published in Earth’s Future, sea-level rise, land subsidence and other factors may cause increasingly saline groundwater in coastal areas by the end of the century.
- A study in Nature Cities concluded that urbanisation increases local drought severity, while a majority of urban areas will “consistently suffer exacerbated drought severity” by mid-century.
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
Many of the world’s largest emitting countries also stand atop the Olympic medal table, with the US and China securing the most medals so far, with Japan, France and South Korea all in the top 10 across both categories. In contrast, the world’s most populous country and third-highest annual emitter – India – has received four medals, while Dominica is the lowest-emitting country to win a medal at these games. (One notable omission from the chart is Russia, the world’s fourth-largest emitter of CO2. Russia is officially excluded from the Paris games following its invasion of Ukraine.)
Spotlight
What will sport look like in a warming world?
This week, Carbon Brief looks at the impact of climate change-driven warming on global sport.
Amy Steel was an Australia-based professional netball player, in peak physical condition, when she collapsed following a pre-season match on a 39C day in 2016.
At the time, she was not aware that heat could have such devastating long-term consequences. “It was sort of like, ‘All right, well, off you go and get better then,’” she said. But she “just really never got better after that day”.
Today, Steel shares her experience in order to raise awareness of the risks that heat poses to athletes and to advocate for change. She told Carbon Brief:
“As an athlete, you do feel a little bit invincible. You do feel like – you’re at your peak fitness; nothing can really touch you.”
Feeling the heat
Exertional heat illness – that which arises from intense exercise – is “not the same thing as the heat stroke that would kill your grandma sitting in her apartment without AC”, Dr Madeleine Orr, an assistant professor of sport ecology at the University of Toronto, told Carbon Brief.
Exertional heat stress occurs when the body accumulates heat during exercise and – whether due to protective gear or environmental factors – is unable to dispel it. “You can experience exertional heat illness in almost any condition,” Orr said.
However, climate change is making dangerous conditions more likely – as well as expanding the range over which they occur. By 2050, 60% of urban areas around the world will be unsuitable for holding an Olympic Games in late July and early August, according to a recent analysis published by Axios.
Dr Jessica Murfree, an assistant professor of sport administration at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told Carbon Brief:
“These things are happening frequently. They’re severe. They’re happening to men and women, boys and girls.”
Murfree added that heat-related illness is “not going to necessarily discriminate” in terms of who it affects. But, she stressed, the reality of who is most affected by heat is influenced by myriad other factors, including socioeconomic status and historical discrimination.
Rethinking sport
According to Orr, there are four actions that can help mitigate the dangers of heat in sport: educating people on what heat illness looks like; providing safety equipment, such as shade and ice baths; creating and enforcing policies around heat; and rearranging the sporting calendar.
These changes do not occur without resistance, Orr said:
“The challenge again, always, is that sport is very traditional…The way things are is the way they should be. And that’s not necessarily an equation that works.”
Heat policies, when in place, are not always enforced. And particularly at the grassroots level, Steel said, there is “not a great amount of understanding of the policy and what [are] the actual risks”.
Steel told Carbon Brief she worries about the future of grassroots sport and the “ability to rock up on a weekend and know that there’s going to be sport”. Whereas professional leagues can afford to build high-tech facilities to protect their athletes, most communities do not have that luxury.
At the same time, Murfree said, those organisations have the advantage of being “ingrained in their immediate community” and, thus, being able to advocate most directly for the solutions that will work for them. That gives her hope, she told Carbon Brief:
“No one knows the realities of climate change in a community more than the people who are in it every single day.”
Watch, read, listen
ISLAND IN THE SUN: Channel News Asia documented Kiribati’s efforts to fortify its land – and its geopolitical alliances – to keep the island nation from being swallowed by the sea.
HIDDEN HISTORY: A historian of science has uncovered documents revealing that US politicians have known the dangers of climate change since at least the 1960s, Grist reported.
DEADLY HOT: The Guardian’s Today in Focus podcast looked at the dangers of extreme heat – and how society can mitigate them.
Coming up
- 12-16 August: Meeting of the working group on benefit-sharing from digital sequence information, Montreal
- 14 August: Kiribati parliamentary election
- 26-30 August: Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting, Tonga
Pick of the jobs
- EarthRights International, Mekong campaign director | Salary: ฿110,000-160,000 per month. Location: Chiang Mai, Thailand
- University of Helsinki, doctoral researcher in biodiversity change science | Salary: €2,400-2,600 per month. Location: Helsinki
- Alliance Bioversity & CIAT, system agronomist | Salary: unknown. Location: Bukavu, Democratic Republic of the Congo
- Carbon Brief, section editor (science) | Salary: £47,000. Location: UK/hybrid
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
The post DeBriefed 9 August 2024: China’s first quarterly emissions fall since Covid; Harris chooses ‘climate vice president’; Athletes feel the heat appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Climate Change
‘Ride the wave of momentum’: Australia announces once-in-a-decade Marine Parks Network review
In response to the federal government announcing its once-in-a-decade review of Australia’s Marine Parks Network, the following lines can be attributed to Elle Lawless, Senior Campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific:
“Greenpeace Australia Pacific welcomes today’s announcement that the Albanese Government will review Australia’s Commonwealth Marine Parks Network. This is a rare, once-in-a-decade opportunity to strengthen our marine parks and ban industrial fishing in Australia’s marine protected areas.
“Australians would be appalled to know that more than half of Australia’s Marine Parks Network currently allows for extractive industries, like longlining, bottom trawling and oil and gas mining. These so-called ‘protected’ areas were designed to safeguard our beloved ocean wildlife and underwater ecosystems – that is what Australians expect. Damaging industrial industries should not be given a free pass to trawl, fish, drill or extract from our marine parks.”
“With the first Ocean COP just around the corner, and off the back of Australia’s move to ratify the Global Ocean Treaty earlier this year, the Australian government has a unique opportunity to ride the wave of this momentum and solidify itself as a true global ocean leader.
“Greenpeace Australia Pacific is calling for industrial activities to be banned from our protected waters and for at least 30% of Australia’s ocean to be protected as ocean sanctuaries. This review presents a rare opportunity to create more ocean sanctuaries, true blue havens where ocean life can recover, thrive and repopulate the surrounding waters.”
—ENDS—
‘Ride the wave of momentum’: Australia announces once-in-a-decade Marine Parks Network review
In recent days, prominent climate sceptics and rightwing commentators have shared charts on social media incorrectly implying that Europe is having its “quietest” year for wildfires in 2026.
These include Dr Matthew Wielicki, a former University of Alabama geochemist and self-described “professor in exile”, who was recently appointed by the Trump administration to lead the US Global Change Research Program.
However, these charts paint a misleading picture as they are skewed by encompassing the entirety of Russia in the data – including the vast plains of Siberia.
These charts also use data that include fires that are deliberately lit to manage cropland, which is a declining practice across much of Europe.
In this factcheck, Carbon Brief shows that the area burned by wildfires across the European Union in 2026 is second only to 2022 for this time of year.
The latest data from the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) also shows that France has set a new modern record for area burned and Spain’s wildfire season is among the worst on record.
The fires have displaced more than a third of a million people across south-western Europe, while an impending heatwave has also raised fears of the fires worsening in the coming days.
‘Quietest year’
On 27 July, as wildfires raged across multiple European countries, former Conservative peer and climate-sceptic commentator Matt Ridley posted on Twitter that “2026 is the quietest year for wildfires in Europe by some distance”.
Ridley, who sits on the academic advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a UK-based climate-sceptic lobby group that refuses to reveal the sources of its funding, was responding to an article by Daily Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley.
Stanley’s column, headlined: “Climate change is real – and the right needs to get serious about it”, warned:
“This is no longer a matter of speculation: the wildfires of Europe, pitiless and persistent, are the way we live now.”
Ridley included a chart from Our World In Data, showing the cumulative area burned by wildfires by week for Europe. The chart puts 2026 as having the smallest area for this time of year in a dataset going back to 2012.
Ridley’s post was widely shared by prominent rightwing figures – including Richard Tice, deputy leader of the hard-right, climate-sceptic Reform UK party, former Conservative cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg and multiple commentators.
Separately, Wielicki also shared a chart on Twitter to imply that wildfires in Europe are declining. Wielicki has previously claimed that the “science is not settled on climate change”.
The charts posted by Ridley and Wielicki both use data from the Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS). The GWIS category for “Europe” encompasses all the countries on the continent and includes the whole of Russia.
As a result, Russia accounts for about 74% of the area included in the GWIS definition of “Europe”.
Wildfires in Russia typically account for 80-90% of the burned area in the GWIS Europe dataset. In 2026, fires in Russia are substantially below average. Therefore, including Russia in this comparison creates the false impression that wildfire activity across Europe is unusually low.
Dr Calum Cunningham, a research fellow at the University of Tasmania’s Fire Centre, says that such claims are “highly misleading”, noting that “they rely on aggregating fire activity across an enormous and climatically diverse region”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“A relatively quiet season in Russia can easily mask an exceptionally active season in France or Spain. If the analysis is focused on the regions actually experiencing the current fires, the picture is very different.
“The reality is that western Europe has experienced an extraordinary sequence of climate conditions this year.”
In contrast, the EFFIS provides a subset of wildfire data specifically for the area covered by the 27 nations of the EU, which, therefore, excludes Russia.
Another difference between the two datasets is that GWIS monitors all fires – including those on agricultural land that are intentionally set alight. The burned area as measured by GWIS contains significant cropland area.
By contrast, EFFIS uses land-cover data and other information to filter specifically for forest fires.
Looking at the EU-only data from EFFIS reveals that Europe is far from having its “quietest” year. The bloc’s burned area, as of 29 July, is almost 435,000 hectares (ha) – second only to 2022 for this time of year.
Notably, Wielicki has actually continued to post charts based on GWIS data, even after acknowledging that “includ[ing] all of Russia, including vast areas of Siberia…isn’t a good proxy for Europe”.
French fires
Even looking at EU-wide data misses the scale of this year’s wildfires for some individual countries.
The chart below shows the surge in burned area in France since mid-July.
For much of the first half of the year, the country was having a wildfire season that was only slightly above average in terms of total burned area. However, a notable uptick began in the first week of July.
The third week of the month saw France break its previous cumulative annual record by more than 19,000ha. That gap has widened as the fires continue to burn; as of 29 July, the cumulative burned area in France during 2026 was nearly 24,700ha above the previous record.
The fires in France follow a record-breaking June heatwave that “dried out vegetation across the region, allowing fires to spread quickly”, wrote the New York Times.
On 27 July, French president Emmanuel Macron called a “crisis cabinet meeting” in order to address the fires “ravaging several areas of south-west France”, said France 24.
More than 220,000 people have been evacuated due to the Gironde fire, west of Bordeaux, in “what may be France’s largest peacetime evacuation”, reported the Associated Press.
In the Conversation, Cunningham and two other University of Tasmania researchers write that evacuation orders “protec[t] human lives, but makes it more likely houses and other structures will burn if there’s no one to defend them”. They add:
“There is little doubt climate change has made France and Spain’s wildfires worse. They represent yet another reason to redouble our efforts to tackle climate change and stabilise our climate.”
Central Spain scorched
While Spain’s fire season has not broken records in the same way that France’s has, it is on track to be among the worst since EFFIS began reporting data in 2006.
The chart below shows the rapid increase in burned area in Spain since 8 July. The latest data from EFFIS reveal that, as of 29 July, Spain has almost matched its previous record at this point in the year. It is also nearly five times the average area burned for this time of year.
In Spain, the wildfires have been concentrated in the central part of the country, near Madrid.
BBC News reported that the fires outside the capital have burned “an area more than twice as large as the city itself”.
Nearly 90,000 people were forced from their homes in central Spain by the fires, said the Associated Press.
Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s prime minister, called the fires a “painful expression” of climate change.
Meanwhile, the UK, French and Spanish governments have issued joint statements this week in response to the fires. The UK/Spain statement begins:
“This summer’s wildfires demonstrated that climate change was now a national security emergency facing Europe and threatening our way of life.”
Related
The post Factcheck: No, Europe is not having its ‘quietest’ year for wildfires appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Factcheck: No, Europe is not having its ‘quietest’ year for wildfires
The general public often underestimate support for climate action, while overestimating the real-world actions taken by other people to address the problem, according to new research.
The study, published in Nature Climate Change, explores the differences between people’s support for climate change, their behaviour and their assumptions about other people’s behaviour.
It is based on multiple surveys of more than 5,000 people across Germany and the US.
The study expands on previous research on how the general public systematically underestimate the climate commitment of their peers.
The difference between actual and perceived support for climate action among the public is sometimes known as a “perception gap”.
The surveys tested how people’s perceptions of climate attitudes and behaviours relate to their own willingness to contribute and undertake “climate-friendly” actions.
One of the authors tells Carbon Brief that this perception gap is not due to “ignorance or bias”, but because “people are just not good at making good estimations”.
The research also reveals that people’s opinions and behaviours are more “nuanced than previously assumed” and suggests that simply “correcting misperceptions” does not automatically lead to greater climate action.
Measuring climate actions
The study notes that correcting the perception gap is often seen as a “cost-effective” way to promote public engagement and drive action to reduce the intensification and impacts of climate change.
Most studies that explore the perception gap have primarily focused on surveys that have asked people to report their willingness to support climate change.
In other words, researchers have relied upon people saying they would support efforts to tackle climate change, rather than measuring people’s real-world actions, such as financial donations, attending protests or changing their behaviour.
To fill this gap, the researchers behind the new study surveyed a total of more than 5,000 people in Germany and the US over 2024-25. Surveys were split across five different experiments, each focused on public perceptions of climate attitudes and how they relate to individuals’ actual behaviour:
| Experiment | What they did |
| Survey one | Participants were asked if they were willing to donate 1% of their household income to WWF – and then were given the chance to do so. Follow-up questions asked participants to predict how many of their peers said “yes” and how many actually donated to the charity. |
| Survey two | Participants read a constitutional complaint against the German government, led by Greenpeace, which demands for stricter climate policies. They were asked if they were willing to participate as a claimant and/or donate to the cause – and then were given the chance to do so. Follow-up questions asked participants to predict how many of their peers said “yes” and how many went on to support the complaint. |
| Survey three | Participants were requested to complete an online “work for environmental protection task” where the more “pages” they completed resulted in more donations to WWF. They then predicted how many pages their peers completed. Participants also rated their individual behaviours and support for eight climate policies and then estimated the same for other people. |
| Surveys four and five | Participants were split into three groups that were either informed that 4% of participants had donated 1% of their household income to WWF, that “68% were willing to contribute” or given no information. They then had to state whether they were willing to support WWF and then were given the opportunity to do so. |
The authors note that Germany and the US are two of the “top 10 CO2 emitters” and are places where climate action is “especially necessary”. However, they add that the two countries are not reflective of “diverse cultural contexts” and further research is needed across the world.
The perception gap
The researchers find that most of their participants supported climate action, but much fewer actually performed verifiable behaviours.
For example, survey one finds that 37% of participants said they were willing to donate to WWF, yet just 4% did when given the opportunity.
Participants generally overestimated the climate actions of their peers, predicting that 23% of other people donated. Willingness, on the other hand, was slightly underestimated with respondents averaging around 34%.
The results from survey three suggest that this perception gap is likely due to general cognitive processes within the human brain that make accurate estimations about large groups difficult, say the authors.
The chart below shows the actual percentage of people who supported different environmental policies and performed climate-friendly behaviours (blue dots) compared to average predictions from the surveys (red dots).
They reveal a “consistent pattern” where “small proportions were overestimated and large ones were underestimated”, the authors say, driving predictions towards the middle. This phenomenon is known as “regression to the mean”.
In other words, where public support for a policy was high, participants in the survey estimated it was lower than it was. When the support was lower, estimates would be higher.
The study finds that individual and environmental factors played a role in shaping people’s perceptions of their peers’ climate actions, which were distinct from general misestimations.
For example, people who were already involved in climate action, had more frequent climate discussions and consumed more climate-focused news and media predicted a higher proportion of climate support “across the board”.
The results from the fourth and fifth surveys show that knowing the context of other people’s beliefs and behaviour in surveys can impact the attitudes of participants.
Participants that were told that 68% of people were willing to donate 1% of their household income to the WWF were more willing to donate.
In contrast, participants that were told that 4% of people actually donated did not report more willingness to “discuss climate change, sign petitions or donate” than the control group.
However, there was no obvious impact on actual donations for any of the three groups, the study notes.
Lead study author Dr Kevin Tiede, scientific managing director of the Institute for Planetary Health Behaviour at the University of Erfurt, tells Carbon Brief that the findings suggest that “just telling people how many people support climate action is likely not enough to really change something”.
However, Tiede adds that “direct comparability” between people saying they would donate and actually donating is “limited” and that giving people more time to answer and autonomy over where to donate might result in more people taking action.
‘Pluralistic ignorance’
Tiede explains that the study findings demonstrate the existence of “pluralistic ignorance”, where a person believes their own views differ from the majority.
For climate change, this means that the “vast majority of people around the world support climate action, but people considerably underestimate the extent of this support”, the study says.
However, the surveys reveal that pluralistic ignorance “in the climate domain” is more nuanced than previously thought, say the authors.
Prof Madalina Vascleanu, an assistant professor at Stanford University’s Doerr School of Sustainability, who was not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that encouraging climate action is complex.
It may take multiple and repeated “attempts” at effective communication, or for people to directly “experience” the “norm” that climate change is widely supported, she says, rather than simply being told.
“Observable” behaviours, such as “identity signalling” – which could involve anything from protesting to vegetarianism – might have more of an impact on encouraging climate action among peers than “private behaviours like donations”, she adds.
The study is a “great addition to the literature”, Vascleanu says, because “correcting” the perception gap did not have an effect on climate-friendly behaviour, as “scholars had previously assumed”. She adds that it has “sparked several new hypotheses” that her “lab is now working on”.
Prof Mauro Bertolotti, associate professor of social psychology at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, explains that the “attitude-behaviour gap” revealed by the research is a “rather common finding”.
However, he is “sceptical” of the “simplified and abstract” measures, warning that experiment environments often come with “assumptions and expectations” that are different from real life.
As a result, they might not “replicate” the process people go through when choosing to “make a donation to an environmental cause”, he says.
‘Targeted’ communication strategies
The researchers argue that it is more effective to focus on “targeted” communication strategies – encouraging climate-friendly behaviours that aim to reach the majority who already support climate action, rather than trying to convert climate sceptics.
They call for attention to be paid to the attitude-behaviour gap between people saying they support efforts to tackle climate change and following up with real-world climate actions.
The study suggests strategies for decision-makers to reduce the attitude-behaviour gap, such as “facilitating climate-friendly behaviour” with “convenience and subsidies”. They also recommend ensuring environmental policy prioritises fairness to gain visible and widespread public support.
They add that the public would benefit from understanding the “effectiveness and co-benefits” of climate action.
Tiede, K.E. et al. (2026) People systematically under- and overestimate public engagement in climate action, Nature Climate Change, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-026-02668-z
Related
Scientists are ‘most trusted’ source of climate information in global-south survey
Survey: ‘Very few’ Africans place responsibility for climate action on ‘rich nations’
Guest post: How public attitudes towards ‘CO2 removal’ differ in the UK and US
Guest post: How ‘discourses of delay’ are used to slow climate action
The post Correcting climate ‘misperceptions’ may not boost climate action appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Correcting climate ‘misperceptions’ may not boost climate action
-
Greenhouse Gases12 months ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
-
Climate Change12 months ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
-
Greenhouse Gases2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
-
Climate Change2 years ago嘉宾来稿：满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
-
Climate Change2 years ago
Bill Discounting Climate Change in Florida’s Energy Policy Awaits DeSantis’ Approval
-
Renewable Energy9 months agoSending Progressive Philanthropist George Soros to Prison?
-
Carbon Footprint2 years agoUS SEC’s Climate Disclosure Rules Spur Renewed Interest in Carbon Credits
-
Greenhouse Gases1 year ago
嘉宾来稿：探究火山喷发如何影响气候预测