French citizens will go to the polls for two rounds of voting on 30 June and 7 July to elect deputies to the national assembly.
Following the results of the European parliamentary elections earlier in June, French president Emmanuel Macron called a snap election. (He himself is not up for reelection until 2027.)
Macron’s centrists had suffered a “crushing defeat”, securing just 15% of the vote, less than half the tally for Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally (Rassemblement National or RN).
Subsequently, the president took what he described as the “serious” and “heavy” decision to dissolve the country’s national assembly as an “act of confidence” in the French people.
Candidates had until 16 June to register for the 577 seats in the lower house of the national assembly, with campaigning then officially starting on Monday 17 June – just 13 days before the first round of voting is set to take place.
Under France’s electoral system, candidates who obtain at least 12.5% of total registered votes during the first round will advance to the second round of voting. Candidates who then get the most votes during the second round will be elected as deputies (members of parliament).
Macron will then have to appoint a prime minister, taking into account the results of the elections.
In the interactive grid below, Carbon Brief tracks the commitments made by each of the main party alliances in their election manifestos, across a range of issues related to climate and energy. The parties covered are:
- The New Popular Front (Le Nouveau Front Populaire or NFP): a coalition of four of France’s leftwing parties, the Socialist party (PS), Greens, Communists and France Unbowed (LFI).
- Together (Ensemble): a coalition of France’s ruling Renaissance party and other centrist parties, led by current French prime minister, Gabriel Attal.
- National Rally (Rassemblement National or RN): Marine Le Pen’s far-right party. Leading the campaign is Jordan Bardella, who is likely to take the job of PM if the RN win.
Each entry in the grid represents a direct quote from one of these documents.
Approach to net-zero
Climate change and net-zero are not expected to be a key focus in the French election, as perceived opposition to green policies has grown over the past year in Europe.
The election follows significant losses for the French Green party in the European Parliament elections, which contributed to fears that the swing towards rightwing parties could lead to a weakening of climate ambition in the country.
France’s main Green party, EELV, saw its share of votes fall from 13% to 5% in the European parliamentary elections, while RN increased its share of votes from 23.34% to 31.4%.
RN has previously called the EU Green Deal a tool of “punitive ecology” and has pledged to dismantle it, Clean Energy Wire notes. If it gains a majority in the upcoming election, it could “unravel progress in the energy and climate policies of the EU’s second largest economy and weaken ambitions at a critical point in time”, the outlet adds.
The party uses similar language in its election manifesto, which does not mention climate or net-zero directly. It argues that environmental standards penalise economic growth.
The RN manifesto pledges to “develop a common-sense ecology, based on scientific realities, that protects the standard of living of French people and guarantees our national independence”.
The NFP pledges to “implement a climate plan aiming for carbon neutrality by 2050”. Ensemble targets reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 55% compared to 1990 levels by 2030 – in line with the EU target set out in the Green New Deal.
France – the second most populous country in the EU, with around 67 million inhabitants – was the world’s 25th largest greenhouse gas emitter in 2018. (See Carbon Brief’s France profile for more.)
Both NFP and Ensemble recognise the threat of climate change in their manifestos, with the latter citing ecology as one of the “challenges of a generation” facing the country.
The main issues in the French election are expected to be retirement, energy bills and immigration.
(NFP’s manifesto does note that migration has a climate angle and includes an aim to “create a status for climate displaced people”. For more on migration and climate change, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth Q&A.)
Energy bills and security
The energy crisis in recent years, driven by surges in gas prices following the Russian invasion of Ukraine – but amplified in France by significant nuclear outages – has made energy security a key election concern.
Until recently, the French government had owned a 84% stake in national electricity firm and nuclear plant operator EDF. However, in July the country’s then-prime minister, Élisabeth Borne, announced plans to renationalise EDF within her first state-of-the-nation speech as concern about energy prices and security soared.
“We must have full control over our electricity production and performance. We must ensure our sovereignty in the face of the consequences of the war and the colossal challenges to come…That’s why I confirm to you the state’s intention to own 100% of EDF’s capital,” said Borne, a member of Macron’s party Renaissance.
The decision was seen as an attempt to garner cross-party support, given the left had called for the nationalisation of EDF previously and Macron’s centrist Ensemble supported expanding nuclear power.
Ensemble has reiterated its support for nuclear in its manifesto, pledging to build eight new reactors “to ensure France’s energy independence and move towards a carbon-free economy”.
It notes that the construction will be accelerated due to a law passed in May 2023, which followed a similar piece of legislation aimed at speeding up the rollout of renewable energy.
NFP focuses more explicitly on renewables, with minimal mention of nuclear power in its manifesto. It pledges to make France a European leader in marine energy, in particular offshore wind and the development of tidal energy.
Beyond this, it focuses on energy bills, including pledging to scrap Macron’s 10% tax on energy bills – an increase in excise duty on electricity called Contribution to Electricity Public Services (CSPE) – and cancel the planned increase in gas prices of 11% on 1 July.
While French consumers were protected from some of the biggest price spikes between 2021 and 2023 by the government’s “energy tariff shield”, the subsequent removal of this, as well as high inflation, is pushing up energy bills.
All three party groupings include some focus on bills, with Ensemble promising a reduction in electricity bills of 15% due to reform of the European electricity market.
Meanwhile RN pledges to exit European rules that “set energy prices and weaken our competitiveness”. This echos the party’s pledge during the 2019 presidential election that it would exit the European electricity market “to restore decent prices”. It adds:
“The attractive costs and reliability offered by our electricity system are a thing of the past, and the government is making the French pay for its misguidance on nuclear issues and on the disastrous rules of the European energy market.”
RN plans to lower VAT on all energy products, again echoing a pledge from 2019 to drop VAT levels for fuel, energy, electricity, gas and heating oil, from 20% to 5.5%, labelling them as basic necessities.
Other climate policies
Beyond energy, there is limited focus on climate related issues within the manifestos.
NFP pledges to develop industry to end France and Europe’s dependence on international markets for strategic sectors such as electric cars and solar panels. Ensemble also argues it will expand industry, pledging to create 200,000 industrial jobs and 400 additional factories by 2027.
All three party groupings pledge increased support for the agricultural sector, with NFP stating it will ban imports that do not respect France’s environmental standards, Ensemble saying it will boost prices for farmers and RN promising farmers prices that “respect their work”, amongst other pledges.
This follows protests by French farmers at the beginning of the year, partly over plans to reduce agricultural fuel subsidies. Similar protests took place across Europe, which were often framed as a “net-zero revolt” in some parts of the media.
The post France election 2024: What the manifestos say on energy and climate appeared first on Carbon Brief.
France election 2024: What the manifestos say on energy and climate
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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.
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