Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Earth’s first climate ‘tipping point’ reached
CORAL IN CRISIS: A new report warned that the world has reached its first climate “tipping point” as global warming pushes warm-water coral reefs towards an irreversible decline, the Press Association outlined. The report, co-authored by more than 160 scientists in 23 countries, also warned the world is “on the brink” of reaching other tipping points, including the dieback of the Amazon, the collapse of major ocean currents and the loss of ice sheets, the Guardian noted.
CO2 RECORD: Carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere reached the highest level ever recorded last year, according to a new report by the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) covered by the Associated Press, which said it was fuelling “more extreme weather”. On top of burning fossil fuels, an increase in wildfires contributed to the rise in CO2 levels over the last year, Reuters reported.
DECLINING SINKS: The Guardian said WMO scientists are also “concerned” that the natural land and ocean “sinks” that remove CO2 from the air are “weakening as a result of global heating”. Separate new research concluded that Australia’s tropical rainforests are among the first in the world to start emitting more CO2 than they absorb, Agence France-Presse reported, with the decay of dead trees emitting more than the growing trunks and branches can store.
INCREASED EMISSIONS: Wildfires burned an area of land larger than India during the 2024-25 “global fire season”, emitting more than 8bn tonnes of CO2, almost 10% above average. This is according to the annual “state of wildfires” report covered by Carbon Brief, which also finds that four of the most prominent extreme wildfire events were found to have been more likely to occur as a result of human-caused climate change.
October extremes
MEXICO MOURNING: At least 66 people have died and 77 people are still missing after five days of torrential rain caused “historic” floods and landslides in Mexico, Reuters reported. The Associated Press said that the extreme weather “cut off 300 towns…from the outside world” and the New York Times reported Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum saying that 100,000 homes were affected.
TYPHOONS TOO: At least 14 gold mine workers have been killed in floods after heavy rainfall in Venezuela, according to Agence France-Presse. At least one person was killed, two are missing and more than 1,500 people have been displaced across Alaska due to Typhoon Halong, the Associated Press reported.
Around the world
- ‘HEADING FOR THE ROCKS’: US president Donald Trump’s plan to derail a global climate agreement for the shipping industry is “heading for the rocks”, as more than 100 nations gathered in London for talks to approve the legally binding regulation, with a decision expected today, the Financial Times reported.
- COP FLOTILLA: A group of Amazon Indigenous peoples have departed from Ecuador to attend COP30, planning to travel more than 3,000km on rivers and grow in size along the way, according to Folha de São Paulo.
- KIWI CONCERN: Scientists have warned that New Zealand’s decision to weaken its methane emissions reduction target, from a 24-47% cut on 2017 levels by 2050 to a 14-24% cut, sets a “worrying precedent”, said Bloomberg.
- DIPLOMACY DETOUR: The EU plans to cooperate with US local authorities and businesses to “bypass” the federal government on clean energy, the Financial Times detailed.
- VOTING VICTORY: After years of campaigning, citizens of Hamburg voted for stricter climate targets for the city during a referendum, reported Der Spiegel.
- ‘ENVIRONMENTAL FREEFALL’: A report on the environmental damage after nearly two years of conflict found that Gaza’s energy, water, food and ecosystems have been “devastated” and are “on the brink of a total collapse”, the Independent outlined.
582 gigawatts
The record amount of new renewable energy capacity added globally in 2024, reported Reuters.
Latest climate research
- Just seven African nations “would be able to satisfy their nutrient gaps” through production expansion, given water and land constraints | Nature Food
- An experiment finds that generative artificial intelligence “can alter the information diet [climate] sceptics consume” | Nature Climate Change
- While many frog species show “short-term resilience” to climate-induced wildfires, flooding poses an “underappreciated threat to frog biodiversity” in Australia | Biological Conservation
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
Carbon Brief sat down for an in-depth interview with Emma Pinchbeck, the chief executive of the UK’s Climate Change Committee (CCC). The CCC is a statutory body created under the Climate Change Act 2008 and is the official adviser to the UK government on climate change mitigation and adaptation. The conversation covered a range of topics from the UK’s high energy costs to talking to children about climate change.
Spotlight
Why paediatricians want climate action
This week, Carbon Brief speaks to Dr Helena Clements, a paediatrician who was appointed as the inaugural officer for climate change for the UK’s Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health.
Carbon Brief: How does climate change risk children’s health?
Dr Helena Clements: In lots of ways. Partly it’s about the direct impacts of climate change on health and that might include air pollution as a really easy example here in the UK right now. We know about Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah who died of asthma induced [by] air pollution on her way to school and the little boy in [Rochdale], Awaab [Ishak], who died because of exposure to indoor air pollution. Those are two people that pediatricians have looked after and failed to save, who have been directly impacted by air pollution in this country. Of course it’s much worse in other parts of the world, particularly where people are cooking on open fires. It’s a global problem.
For children who are exposed to air pollution, the answer isn’t to lock them up inside. It’s to clean the air by addressing the burning of fossil fuels. It’s about creating green spaces and active transport, because that’s better for our mental health, our physical well-being and we’re also cleaning the air. All of the solutions are solutions for climate change, as well as for health, and it’s not anything that I can prescribe.
Only about 20-30% of your health is down to what a doctor can do. I can treat asthma, but I’m not in control of the causes.
CB: How do you engage the medical community – and external groups – with health risks facing children from climate change?
HC: What I find helpful is to paint that picture of health and wellbeing, because if we had healthy children and adults, we would reduce demand on our services. I sometimes talk about being a lazy pediatrician. If everybody had their immunisations and a healthy diet, and we had clean air and families who had better health literacy, there would be much less work for me to do because most of what children need is good conditions to grow and thrive in.
A healthy diet is high in fibre, fruit and vegetables, which is also a lower-carbon diet. Pediatricians spend a lot of time treating constipation because children don’t eat a healthy diet and it’s rarely more complicated than that. We need to help children and families to eat more healthily to avoid things that need treatment and become more complex.
So there’s lots of benefits to focusing on the health and wellbeing side, rather than necessarily talking lots about the climate, but I talk about the two things simultaneously. Healthy people have a lower carbon impact than unhealthy people who require lots of medicines and trips to hospital.
CB: What else does your work in this intersection of climate change and children’s health involve?
HC: We’ve got three things really. One is advocating about climate itself because climate change is a health crisis, a massive risk, because of changing demographics and vector-borne diseases coming our way. The second thing is the NHS [National Health Service] is a very carbon-dense business, so we need to decarbonise. There’s the “how do we get rid of all these anesthetic gases or single-use items” practical changes that we need to make. And then there’s the fact that health is expensive and, if we were all healthier through, not directly tackling climate change, but say, tackling air pollution, we’d make health cheaper and be addressing climate change. You can tackle it from different lenses, but the solutions are all the same.
This interview has been edited for length.
Watch, read, listen
TORY LEGACY: Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute released a new Youtube video offering the “inside story” of the UK’s net-zero target, featuring former prime minister Theresa May.
BIG IN BRAZIL: With one month to go until COP30 begins in Belém, Brazil, Agence France-Presse listed “four Brazilians to watch” at the conference.
COX QUIZZED: In a new A Question of Science podcast, Prof Brian Cox and a panel of experts answered listener’s questions on everything from carbon capture to climate sceptics.
Coming up
- 19 October: Bolivia presidential elections (2nd round)
- 20-23 October: Africa energy efficiency policy training week, Accra, Ghana
- 20-24 October: 27th meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice, Panama City, Panama
Pick of the jobs
- Global Green Growth Institute, senior energy officer | Salary: $77,904. Location: Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea
- Mongabay, wire reporter | Salary: Unknown. Location: Remote in Asia
- London School of Economics Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, editorial manager | Salary: £43,277-£55,497. Location: London
- Centre for International Environmental Law, publications manager | Salary: $81,000-$110,000. Location: Remote (EST)
- UN Environment Programme, chief scientist and the director of the office of science | Salary: Unknown. Location: Nairobi, Kenya
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: Earth’s first ‘tipping point’; Climate adviser interview; How warming affects children’s health 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 “two sessions” meeting of the National People’s Congress, including its climate strategy out to 2030, according to the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post. The plan called for China to cut its carbon emissions per unit of gross domestic product (GDP) by 17% from 2026 to 2030, which “may allow for continued increase in emissions given the rate of GDP growth”, reported Reuters. The newswire added that the plan also had targets to reach pe