Elections for the European Parliament are taking place between 6-9 June, kicking off a process that will establish a new EU leadership.
Around 360 million EU citizens are eligible to vote. They will choose between representatives of national parties, each of which is affiliated with a broader political grouping at EU level, ranging from communists to the far-right.
The grouping or coalition with the most parliamentary seats will shape the leadership of the next European Commission – the EU’s executive branch – and help to determine the bloc’s overall direction of travel for the 2024-2029 term.
The balance of power in parliament, which is one of the EU’s legislative bodies, will also play a key role in determining whether or not ambitious new climate policies are voted through.
The elections come at a critical time for climate and energy policy across Europe. Amid geopolitical turmoil, EU member states face mounting pressure to provide secure energy supplies and compete with other major powers such as China and the US.
Meanwhile, there has been widespread reporting of a “green backlash” in many EU countries, exemplified by farmers protesting against perceived injustices that include environmental policies. (Based on recent EU-wide polling, the so-called backlash has been dismissed as “largely overblown”.)
The new European Parliament, the new Commission and member states must also agree in the coming months on an emissions target for 2040, a stepping stone on the bloc’s wider path to “climate neutrality” by 2050.
These decisions will be influenced by which parties triumph in the parliamentary elections.
In the interactive grid below, Carbon Brief tracks the commitments made by each of the main European Parliament groupings in their election manifestos, across a range of issues related to climate and energy. The parties covered are:
- European People’s Party (EPP): A centre-right group that currently holds the most seats in parliament, and to which current European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen belongs.
- Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D): A centre-left group that currently holds the second highest number of seats in parliament.
- Renew Europe Now: The liberal and centrist campaign platform for the European Democratic Party (EDP), the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) – both of which also have their own manifestos – and France’s ruling Renaissance party.
- European Green Party: Representing green parties from across Europe, the Green Party is part of a parliamentary grouping with the European Free Alliance (EFA), which represents regionalist or separatist European groups. Volt Europa, a pro-European, federalist party, is also affiliated with the group.
- European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR): A parliamentary grouping of right-wing Eurosceptics. The far-right Identity and Democracy coalition, which split off from the ECR in 2019, has not released a manifesto.
- Party of the European Left (PEL): An association of democratic socialist and communist parties that sits in a parliament grouping known as The Left in the European Parliament.
Each entry in the grid represents a direct quote from a manifesto document.
Climate targets
When the last European Parliament elections were held in 2019, a “green wave” saw climate-focused politicians winning seats across the continent. This was interpreted as a clear mandate to set ambitious, EU-wide climate targets and policies.
In the years that followed, the EU approved a European Green Deal, with goals to cut emissions by 55% from 1990 levels by 2030, and reach net-zero by 2050. It also passed a package of policies to help member states achieve these goals.
These measures have “significantly improved” the EU’s performance on tackling climate change, according to independent analysis by Climate Action Tracker. However, the group says that the bloc would need to implement further policies to align itself with the goals of the Paris Agreement.
With the 2024 election looming, forecasters predict a swing to the right in EU politics. A surge in far-right MEPs could result in a right-wing majority coalition within parliament.
This, in turn, could jeopardise the next phase of the EU’s climate ambitions, including negotiations over a European Commission proposal to reduce emissions by 90% by 2040.
For example, the right-wing ECR’s manifesto says that it will “prioritise the implementation of existing legislative requirements…before considering any new regulations”.
It also refers to “review[ing] the more problematic objectives” and “negative impacts” of “green” policies, implying it might support weakening existing climate goals.
The centre-right EPP says it is “clearly committed” to existing targets – which include the 2030 and 2050 goals – but it does not mention the mooted 2040 ambition.
There have been reports of internal disputes within the EPP over the 2040 target and broader environmental policies. An earlier draft of its manifesto illustrated these disputes, with a commitment to “rejecting” bans on any technologies and “revising” the 2035 ban on petrol and diesel cars. This language is missing from the final manifesto.
In contrast, parties that are further to the left have backed more ambitious emissions targets, as shown in the chart below.
The relatively centrist S&D and Renew Europe Now groupings support the proposed 90% goal for 2040. (While S&D only mentions achieving “strong” 2040 goals in its manifesto, elsewhere the party has voiced support for the target.)
Meanwhile, other parties have gone even further. The European Green Party has proposed a “revised EU climate law” with a 2030 target that goes “beyond” the current 55% goal and achieves net-zero by 2040. The Left specifies a 65% reduction by 2030 and net-zero by 2035.
All the major parties with manifestos broadly support the European Green Deal, with the ECR stating it backs it “in principle” while noting its concerns about a “centralised top-down approach”. (Identity and Democracy, which has not released a manifesto, broadly opposes the green deal and includes many climate sceptics in its ranks.)
Some groups appear to go further. Both S&D and the Greens mention the creation of a new “Green and Social Deal”, with a greater emphasis on affordable energy, social protections and jobs in low-carbon sectors.
In a piece reflecting on the need for a left-wing vision to combat the growing “anti-green backlash”, Politico argued that, with virtually every party emphasising the need for a “just transition”, it was “not clear” what the S&D’s new deal was “supposed to be”.
Of the major parties, only the Green party includes a target for “phasing out” fossil fuels in its manifesto. (At COP28 last year, the EU and other parties to the Paris climate regime agreed to “transition away” from fossil fuels.) The Greens target a 2030 phaseout of coal, with all fossil fuels phases out by 2040.
Farmers’ demands
From France to Romania, EU farmers have been engaging in often dramatic protests in recent months.
While their demands have been wide-ranging, many have focused on climate and environmental issues. This follows anger from farming communities about cuts to fuel subsidies and efforts to curb the use of fertilisers and pesticides.
All of the manifestos speak directly to these ongoing issues, with some calling for major reforms to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) – the EU’s flagship farming policy. Others try to strike a balance between supporting farmers and maintaining strong climate ambitions.
Agriculture is responsible for one-tenth of the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions. It is the only major sector that is expected to see almost no progress in emissions cuts in the coming decades.
The EPP says climate policies can be achieved “only with and not against farmers” and says more funding for agriculture will be vital to support their environmental efforts. Liberals in Renew Europe Now say they have proposals to “simplify farmer’s lives” because they “want to focus on farming, not filling out forms”.
The ECR, meanwhile, says it “reject[s] unfettered green ideology” in agriculture.
S&D says its members “fundamentally disagree with the conservatives’ approach that sustainability is the enemy of farmers”. Like the EPP, it emphasises the need for more financial support to help farmers transition to “environmentally friendly” practices.
Boosting clean energy industries
Many of the manifestos focus on promoting the EU’s economic success and competitiveness, particularly in relation to the US and China, as well as ensuring it is not reliant on other nations for resources.
This comes amid a period of instability, triggered partly by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which threatened the bloc’s energy security due to its reliance on Russian gas.
Often, parties explicitly make the link between these wider geopolitical struggles and the need to scale up low-carbon industries. This is exemplified by the EPP when it states:
“We are developing the home market for our clean-tech industries. We are decarbonising and revitalising our energy-intensive industries to sell clean products worldwide. Thus, we are increasing our energy independence and overall sovereignty and resilience.”
Both S&D and the Greens focus on the need for investment across industrial sectors, in order to maintain the EU’s competitive edge. ALDE, the main party in Renew Europe Now, emphasises “cross-border” public investment in order to “achieve the economies of scale that the single market offers”.
Right-wing and liberal parties stress the need for “technology neutrality” in their plans.
Greens and left-wing parties, on the other hand, either explicitly reject nuclear power or do not mention it. They also place more emphasis on developing public transport options, including improved rail networks, alongside investment in electric vehicle infrastructure.
The post EU election 2024: What the manifestos say on energy and climate change appeared first on Carbon Brief.
EU election 2024: What the manifestos say on energy and climate change
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 n