“Extreme” wildfires emitted more than 8bn tonnes of carbon dioxide during the 2024-25 “global fire season”, according to a new report.
The annual “state of wildfires” report from an international team of scientists finds that fires burned at least 3.7m square kilometres of land – an area larger than India – between March 2024 and February 2025.
This is almost 10% below the average annual area burned over the past two decades.
But, due to an increase in wildfires in carbon-rich forests, the CO2 emissions resulting from these fires were almost 10% above average.
The report also zooms in on four of the most prominent extreme wildfire events during this time: southern California; north-east Amazonia; South America’s Pantanal-Chiquitano region; and the Congo Basin.
All of these events were found to have been more likely to occur as a result of human-caused climate change.
The researchers identify that, in some cases, the area burned by these fires was 25-35 times larger than it would have been without global warming.
The report also estimates that more than 100 million people around the world were exposed to wildfires in 2024 and 2025.
These fires are “reshaping lives, economies and ecosystems on a global scale”, one of the report authors, Dr Carmen Steinmann from ETH Zürich, said in a statement.
‘Increasing extent and severity’
Scientists from dozens of institutions analyse “extreme wildfires” globally between March 2024 and February 2025 in the second annual edition of the report.
The report explains that the “March-February definition of the global fire season latest global fire season is chosen so as to align with an annual lull in the global fire calendar in the boreal spring months”.
According to the report, the authors “harness and adopt new methodologies brought forward by the scientific community”. They add that in future reports, they hope to “enhance the tools presented in this report to predict extremes with increasing lead times, monitor emerging situations in near-real time and explain their causes rapidly”.
In the report’s “summary for policymakers”, study author Dr Matthew Jones, from the University of East Anglia, says:
“[The report] focuses on the global extreme wildfire events of the global fire season, explains why they happened and fingerprints the role of climate change as one of the key drivers of changing wildfire risk globally.”
The authors aim to “deliver actionable information” to policy experts and wider society about wildfires, the report says.
Using satellite data, the authors find that 3.7m square kilometres (km2) of land burned globally between March 2024 and February 2025. This means that the 2024-25 fire season ranks 16th out of all fire seasons since 2002, indicating below-average burned area compared to the rest of the 21st century.
However, the global fire emissions database shows that the 2024-25 wildfire season drove more than 8bn tonnes of CO2 emissions, according to the report. This is 10% above the average of wildfire seasons since 2002.
Jones explains that this is indicative of a trend towards “increasing extent and severity of fire in global forests, which are carbon-rich”, as opposed to less carbon-rich grassland biomes.
The chart below shows global burned area (top) and carbon emissions (bottom) during the 2024-25 wildfire season, compared to the average over 2002-24, for different world regions. Red bars indicate that the 2024-25 wildfire season had higher-than-average burned area or emissions for the given region, while blue indicates lower-than-average numbers.
Savannas, grasslands and shrublands account for more than 80% of the burned area in a typical year, with forests and croplands making up the rest.
According to the report, burned area in tropical and subtropical grasslands, savannah and shrublands was 10% below the 2002-24 average over 2024-25, but still contributed 70% towards the total global burned area.
The 2024-25 wildfire season was the second consecutive year that African savannahs “experienced a low fire season”, the report notes, with below average burned area and carbon emissions.
Meanwhile, the report finds that the greatest increases in burned area and carbon emissions during the 2024-25 wildfire season were seen in the Canada’s boreal forests, the moist tropical forests in the Amazon region, the Chiquitano dry forests of Bolivia and the Cerrado – a tropical savannah in central Brazil.
The graphic below shows some key figures from the 2024-25 wildfire season.
Study author Dr Douglas Kelley, from the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, told a press briefing that the author team spent time “actively engaging with a big regional panel of experts”.
The team identified four “focal events” – extreme wildfire events that were chosen both for the severity of the fire and the impacts on people and the environment.
For each focal point, the study authors assessed the drivers of the wildfire. They also used attribution – a field of climate science that aims to identify the “fingerprint” of climate change on an extreme event – to determine the contribution of human-caused climate change.
Finally, the authors estimated the likelihood of similar events occurring in the future as the climate continues to warm over the coming century.
Kelley told the press briefing that “capturing fires themselves can be quite tricky”, because they are affected by a range of different factors.
The report notes that wildfires are affected by changes in weather, with hot and dry weather providing the best conditions for wildfires. It adds that changes in land use are also important, as they can affect ignition.
Kelley explained that the report authors used “multiple types of attribution” to capture these different factors, using a range of fire models, weather forecasting models and land use data.
North America
In North America, 2024-25 was an “extreme” fire year, the report says.
Both burned area and carbon emissions reached their second-highest levels since records began in 2002 and 2003, respectively. Across the continent, the burned area was 35% higher than the average since 2002 and the carbon emissions were more than double the average emissions since 2003.
In Canada, 46,000km2 of land burned during the 2024-25 fire season, releasing 282m tonnes of carbon (Mt). The burned area was 85% higher than average, but the associated emissions were more than 200% higher than average, according to the report.
The report also notes that the wildfire season started early in Canada in 2024, due to earlier-than-normal snowmelt, as well as persistent, multiyear drought and “holdover fires” that reignited in the spring after smouldering through the winter months.
In the US, more than 64,000 individual wildfires contributed to a total burned area larger than 36,000km2. More than 8,000 wildfires in Mexico led to a record 16,500km2 of burned area.
The regions experiencing record or near-record burned area and carbon emissions were varied: from the Canadian tundra and the north-western US mountain ranges to California’s grasslands and Mexico’s tropical forests. In the far-northern boreal forest – which contains around 20% of the world’s forest carbon – the season trailed only the record-breaking 2023-24 fire season in burned area and associated emissions.
The researchers select the January 2025 southern California wildfires as one of the four “focal events” of the report.
The maps below show the locations of the four focal events: southern California, the Congo Basin, north-east Amazonia and the Pantanal-Chiquitano. The colours show the percentage difference from the average burned area, with blue indicating less burned area than average and darker browns showing more burned area.
In early January 2025, more than a dozen fires broke out in and around Los Angeles. Although January is “well outside the typical fire period”, the fires “became the most expensive wildfires ever recorded in just a few short days”, Prof Crystal Kolden – a study author and the director of the University of California, Merced’s Fire Resilience Center – wrote in the report.
The two largest fires, named the Palisades fire and the Eaton fire, resulted in at least 30 deaths, more than 11,500 homes destroyed and more than 153,000 people being evacuated from their homes.
The fires resulted in estimated economic losses of $140bn, placing “substantial pressure on the already volatile home insurance market in California”, according to the report. It notes that the fires also contributed to the “housing and affordability crisis” in southern California.
The report says that the severity of the January fires was largely due to intensifying extremes in the water cycle – an unusually wet period that allowed vegetation to flourish, followed by an unusually arid winter that dried out that vegetation, turning it into fuel. It notes:
“Between 5 and 25 January, favourable weather, fuel availability and ignition sources aligned, leading to create ideal conditions for ignition and rapid fire spread.
“The substantial suppression efforts deployed is unaccounted for in our modelling framework and could be one of the possible reasons the fires did not escalate even further.”
Previous attribution analysis found that the January 2025 fires were “likely influenced” by human-driven climate change. The report authors also find that the burned area in the southern California event was 25 times greater due to climate change.
However, whether extreme fire activity in southern California continues to intensify depends largely on how the region’s plants and trees respond to increased atmospheric CO2, the report says. It also notes that climate models disagree as to whether wintertime rainfall will increase or decrease in future climates.
South America
The report finds that South America had a total area burned by wildfires of 120,000km2 during the 2024-25 fire season – 35% higher than average.
That translated into the release of 263Mt of carbon – the “highest carbon emissions on record for the continent” and 84% above average, the report says.
Jones, a study author, said in a press briefing that South America “hasn’t seen carbon emissions like this on record before”.
The report underlines that South America’s fire season was “unprecedented” in many ways, such as fire extent, emission levels, intensity and their impacts on society and the environment, although not in the number of fires.
For example, fires in the north-east Amazon impacted air quality, crops, houses and native vegetation, affecting people living in the region, including Indigenous peoples such as the Yanomami, the report says.
The country with the largest area burned by wildfires during the 2024-25 fire season was Brazil, with a total burned area of 243,000km2, followed by Bolivia, with a total of 107,000km2 of burned area, and Venezuela, with a total of 43,000km2 of burned area.
The most-affected biomes in the region were the Amazon rainforest, with 47,000km2 of wildfires above the average since 2002.
Second was the Chiquitano and Chaco dry forests – encompassing parts of Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina. These biomes experienced a “record-breaking” fire season with more than 46,000km2 of burned area. These fires resulted in 100Mt of carbon emissions – six times higher than the average since 2003.
More than 46,000km2 of the Pantanal – the largest tropical wetland located in Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay – burned in 2024-25, with associated carbon emissions of 67Mt above the average.
According to the report, fire activity in the region was primarily driven by “anomalous dry weather”.
In the north-eastern Amazon, the severity of the fire season between January and April 2024 was compounded by natural sources of climate variability, such as El Niño and the Atlantic Meridional Mode, which contributed to very high temperatures and absence of rainfall. There, deep soil moisture dropped to 1%.
Meanwhile, in Pantanal and Chiquitano, “extreme dry weather” since 2023 and “multiple years of below-average rainfall” contributed to the severe fires, the report says. Study author Dr Francesca Di Giuseppe said in a briefing that the “wet season that usually happens between February and May failed completely to recharge the soil that kept completely dry and this drove most of the fire season” in the region.
The authors conduct an attribution analysis and find that the fire weather conditions in the north-eastern Amazon that season were “significantly more likely” due to climate change. In the Pantanal and Chiquitano, the conditions were 4.2-5.5 times more likely due to climate change.
Africa
Overall, the scale of fires across Africa was “well-below average” in 2024 and 2025, the report finds, except in certain areas, including the Congo Basin, northern Angola and South Africa.
In 2024, a record-high amount of land was burned in the Congo Basin – a biodiverse region in central Africa spanning six countries that holds the world’s second-largest tropical forest. This burned area was 28% higher than the annual average and there were 4,000 fires in total, 20% more than usual, in 2024.
Fires also caused “hazardous” air pollution and contributed to the Congo Basin’s highest loss of primary forest in a decade.
The analysis in the report finds that it is “virtually certain” that human-caused climate change contributed to the extreme fire weather in this region in July and August 2024.
The hot, dry and windy conditions were 3-8 times more likely to occur as a result of climate change and the area scorched by fires was three times greater than it would have been otherwise, the findings show.
Climate change has also driven an increase of more than 50% in the average annual burned area in the Congo Basin, which the researchers say is “one of the most robust signals of climate influence” in the fire trends they analysed.
Drought was a major factor behind the fires, the report finds, and water stress is expected to be the main driver shaping future fires in the Congo Basin.
These fires are “part of a long-term trend of increasing fire encroachment into African moist forests, driven by climate change and human pressure”, says Prof Michael Wimberly, a professor at the University of Oklahoma who was not involved in the report, but has researched wildfires in Africa. He tells Carbon Brief:
“The increased fire activity in the Congo Basin is troubling because of the vast expanses of unfragmented forests and peatlands that store massive amounts of carbon, provide habitat for threatened species and supply vital resources to local populations.”
The report notes that there is “sparse reporting and poor media coverage” on the impacts of fires in the Congo Basin in 2024, despite millions of people being impacted.
In South Africa, 34 people were killed and thousands of livestock and homes were destroyed in fires last year. In Ivory Coast, 23 people were killed and 50km2 of land was burned.
Dr Glynis Humphrey, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Cape Town, who was not involved in the study, adds that a below-average burned area across Africa “does not necessarily indicate a decline in fire risk or impact”. She tells Carbon Brief:
“In some ecosystems, fewer but more intense fires are being observed, which can still have severe ecological and atmospheric consequences.”
Using climate models, the researchers project that fires to the extent of those in the Congo Basin last year could occur up to 50% more often by 2100, under a medium-emissions pathway.
The region is also projected to see more increases in extreme wildfire risk by the end of this century. Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and the central part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo could see some of the largest increases in burned area, which, the report estimates, could double or quadruple in some cases.
Humphrey notes that fire patterns are “shifting” in response to climate change, which is “leading to significant consequences for ecosystems that don’t typically burn – like the forests in the Congo Basin”. She tells Carbon Brief:
“This is of concern, as primary forests harbour critical biodiversity that supports ecosystem functioning and provide services to people…These forests are also sanctuaries for endangered species.”
The post Global wildfires burned an area of land larger than India in 2024 appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Global wildfires burned an area of land larger than India in 2024
© Harriet Spark / Grumpy Turtle Film / Greenpeace
The banner drop is a distinctive part of the Greenpeace repertoire.
The moment of the unfolding is intrinsically dramatic. It is the reveal; when the moral and scientific truth of a situation is unveiled to the world. The wrong is being labelled—not through a written submission, or a social media post, or a statement in a meeting—but in words emblazoned in real physical space, chosen and occupied with precision, for all to see. There is jeopardy and transgression. And there are consequences—for the activists and for Greenpeace, as well as for the target of the communication. One of the reasons the banner remains such an effective tool in our toolbox is because of its undeniable clarity in cutting through, driving change and accountability in a way that few other tactics can. It is naming the wrong: in giant, clear letters.
We’ve hung these massive messages at environmental crime scenes, corporate headquarters, and iconic landmarks; on government buildings, ships and planes—in locations all around the world, for years.
My own memories unfurl even as I write this, but because the campaign to stop Woodside at Scott Reef is so pressing, what immediately springs to mind are two of our banners in that campaign: one on a crane outside their Perth HQ, and another on some of their corroding industrial junk at sea. What about you? Is there a particular banner that you picture when you think of Greenpeace?
The banners can attract global attention, but they have quiet beginnings. Each one is made by hand, often by volunteers. It is the invisible labour behind each spectacular public moment. One of the key pieces of equipment in our workshop at Rainbow Warrior House is the sewing machine. Sometimes our workshop is full of people and noise; at others it is quiet, the only sound being the gentle, purposeful, whir and buzz of a banner being sewn. It is usually our warehouse manager, Kieran Holmes, on the tools, head over the machine, carefully pouring over the raw canvas or tarp as the banner takes shape. Kieran’s one of those people who seems to be able to turn his hand to almost anything, but you wouldn’t know it because he’s old-school modest. In addition to being incredibly skilled, Kieran’s an all-round beaut human to have in the heart of our headquarters; never too busy to take the time to show a newcomer, or curious visitor, around his domain.
Once the banner is sewn up, the lettering needs to be outlined. This is done on a magnetic wall—a fit-for-purpose feature at Rainbow Warrior House, where the banner is held up with magnets, and the edges of the letters neatly traced from a projection.
Next comes the painting. It usually starts late in the afternoon, sometimes going into evenings and weekends, with volunteers, staff, mates crowded around, brushes in hand. It is a calming meditative feeling of shared purpose, giving each letter its visual heft, the colour building power and presence with each stroke.
Then you stand back, stretch, and look at the message, now ready.
S A V E S C O T T R E E F
Throughout history, every great push for social change has required some form of invisible labour; preparation in the form of quiet things seldom seen, but vital. It is the enabling work of love instantiated in action. And of course, so much of the time it has been women who have done this labour, so that the men could get the chance to make the speeches and stand on the podiums. The inaugural Greenpeace voyage to stop nuclear testing in 1971 had a male-only crew, but wouldn’t have happened without the ideas and work of women behind the scenes.
It is what we do together, after all, that changes the world. Sometimes that work happens on a stage, a ship on the wild seas, or up the side of a building. But mostly, it is the hidden diligence of those who care and contribute to all the enabling work that makes a change once thought impossible, inevitable. It is Kieran at his sewing machine. It was Dorothy Stowe doing the administrative work of the ‘Don’t Make A Wave Committee’ that became Greenpeace.
When we think of social change, it is the sturm and drang that we remember. The drop of the banner, the chant of the crowd, the raising of the new flag. But look behind the curtain, and there’ll be a crew of people who are taking responsibility for the administration, the sewing and the painting, making the food, checking the bus timetables, getting stuff done. And behind them are even more handsinvisibly donating time and trust; the financial, material and expert resources that make it all possible. There’s love, camaraderie and know-how at every stage.
We are social and cooperative creatures by nature. And we human beings have been stitching for millenia, sewing the possibilities of our common future. Political and corporate bullies and algorithmically manipulative platforms would have us forget this, and abandon who we are. But we should be in no doubt that the brighter prospects for ourselves and life on earth continue to be stitched and painted; collaboratively and with love, by the diligent hands of millions of people who care, each day, in every community and city across the world.
With Love,
David
Q & A
I always get great questions when interviewing prospective new team members. One that came up again recently was: “Is Greenpeace actually one organisation?”
Around the world, people know Greenpeace by our one global name, united by a shared mission: securing an Earth capable of nurturing life in all its magnificent diversity, with a particular focus on climate and biodiversity. Behind the scenes, though, we’re organised as a network of 25 legally autonomous national and regional offices, including Greenpeace Australia Pacific, working alongside Greenpeace International.
That structure gives us the best of both worlds: we work together leveraging the power of a global network on the issues that matter most, while each office remains legally independent and deeply connected to the communities, cultures and political realities where we’re embedded. Local knowledge informs global action, and global collaboration strengthens and supports local campaigns.
It’s a model that has enabled Greenpeace to take on some of the world’s biggest challenges for over five decades–while withstanding challenges and attacks from governments and corporations. Global enough to tackle global problems, local enough to understand our communities and the natural places we love.
If you’re curious to learn more, you can read about the Greenpeace Global Network structure here.
Steven Stone is acting director of the United Nations Environment Programme’s Office of Science
In 1934, American economist Simon Kuznets presented a paper to Congress advocating for a new way of measuring economic performance.
The United States was reeling from the Great Depression, and Kuznets – a future Novel prize winner – wanted to gauge just how badly the country’s economy had been dented.
His metric, which would come to be known as gross domestic product (GDP), was a breakthrough. But as pioneering as it was, Kuznets saw its limitations.
“The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income,” he wrote in the 1934 paper.
Some nine decades on, we have largely forgotten that message. GDP has become a barometer of economic progress, a kind of one-number-that-rules-them-all upon which national policies turn and governments rise and fall.
With the climate crisis deepening by the day – as evidenced by the heatwaves and wildfires now searing Europe – our attachment to GDP is looking like a problem.
In a single-minded pursuit of GDP growth, humanity is inadvertently feeding several environmental crises that, over the long run, threaten to make most of us poorer, sicker and more miserable. Climate change alone could slice 20 per cent off global GDP by 2100 – a staggering number.
Clear-cutting boosts GDP not wealth
We need to broaden our vision and definition of economic success before it’s too late.
I grew up in the 1970s and 80s surrounded by the mixed hardwood forests of the northeastern United States. For me, the trees were a refuge, a place to run, discover and savor the history and mystery of the land and its people.
Those experiences with my friends were more important than the amount of money in my pocket. And they led to a realization early on in my career as an economist: that wealth is about more than just income.
This is one of GDP’s most significant oversights.
With every forest we clear cut and every ounce of fossil fuel we burn, GDP rises. But through those actions, we are whittling away at the natural world, which supplies us with food, water, medicine, clean air and countless other essentials.
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By focusing only on GDP, we’re ignoring what’s happening to the natural assets on which our prosperity ultimately depends. It’s like we’re driving a car and only looking at the speedometer, not the energy remaining in the battery.
That is the difference between measuring income versus measuring wealth.
The answer to this dilemma lies in looking beyond GDP. We must start considering a broader range of indicators when making policy decisions.
From an environmental perspective, that means measuring and valuing natural assets like forests, water, soil, biodiversity and clean air. By assigning a value to nature, decision-makers can better understand the economic consequences of, say, strip-mining a mountain top or letting plastic waste overwhelm a river.
There is still some debate over how exactly to do this kind of natural capital accounting. But that’s not a reason to dismiss it, as many have done. It took years of refinement to end up with the GDP formula we have today.
Costa Rica’s example
The idea of looking beyond GDP isn’t only a theoretical debate. Countries and communities around the world have started to make economic decisions based on their natural assets. A prime example is Costa Rica, a biodiversity hotspot where a years-long effort to conserve land and seascapes has led to a boom in tourism. That in part helped elevate the country into the club of high-income nations.
This kind of environmentally focused economic decision making can pay huge dividends. By stabilizing the climate, ending pollution and halting the loss of the natural world, humanity could save millions of lives a year and create US$20 trillion in economic benefits annually by 2070, found the Global Environment Outlook 7, a 2025 report from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The report was funded by the European Union among others.
I began my career as an economist before moving to UNEP, which focuses on solving the world’s thorniest environmental problems. During that time, I’ve come to appreciate that “wealth” means more than simply “income.” True prosperity means being able to provide for ourselves now and into the future. Anything short of that is an empty kind of affluence – and ultimately doomed to be short-lived.
As deadly heat blankets our cities, species slip into extinction and the planet struggles with rising toxicity and pollution, I am convinced that we can do better at measuring what matters. And that means updating and expanding how we measure economic progress.
The post As fires burn and temperatures soar, it’s time to imagine a world beyond GDP appeared first on Climate Home News.
As fires burn and temperatures soar, it’s time to imagine a world beyond GDP
Amira Odeh Quiñones is a hydrologist and Caribbean organiser for the 350.org climate campaign group
El Niño, likely to be one of the strongest in modern history, has arrived on Caribbean shores.
Drought is slowly creeping up on our islands. But unlike the fiery wildfires ravaging parts of Europe, there’s no smoke signalling the damage being done, no sirens to warn of the danger. Only announcements from public health officials to stay indoors and remain hydrated — as if outdoor workers and farming communities have the luxury to heed such advice.
During El Niño, strong atmospheric winds alter rain patterns and trap heat across the Caribbean. But while we have experienced El Niño many times before, it has become very visible in recent years how climate change is making this natural phenomenon worse.
Across the Greater Antilles, temperatures are soaring past 38°C (100°F), with real-feel indexes reaching a gruelling 43°C in parts of Puerto Rico where I live. Cuba has it worse. Widespread power outages mean that methods for cooling down are unavailable for most of the day, leaving millions of vulnerable people at risk of heat stroke when temperatures hit 38°C.
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During the last strong drought a decade ago, I had water only two days a week in my home. Today, there are many families whose taps are about to run completely dry. Water authorities have already begun strict rationing in some municipalities, with more on the list scheduled for rationing if conditions don’t change.
Water rationing is far more than an inconvenience; it is an immediate health risk. This means thousands of people need to constantly haul heavy buckets up flights of stairs just so they could bathe, cook, stay hydrated – the basics of survival.
Heat causes health problems
Puerto Rico is home to roughly 300,000 elderly residents. Many live alone, isolated and without support. They risk severe physical injury when carrying heavy water containers, and are wont to suffer from silent heat exhaustion in unventilated rooms.
Furthermore, when water shortages force residents to store water in open household containers, it inadvertently creates breeding grounds for Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. Paired with scorching temperatures that tend to shorten the mosquito breeding cycle, the region is facing explosive outbreaks of dengue fever that endanger our most vulnerable: children and the elderly.
The economic fallout is equally devastating. Dry fields mean millions of dollars in lost crops, forcing small agricultural businesses to collapse, needing urgent government relief to survive. Extreme fuel shortages have already paralyzed Cuba’s agricultural sector, cutting food output by 60% – the El Niño dry spell threatens to decimate it.
At sea, warmer ocean waters fuel massive influxes of sargassum seaweed. Rotting sargassum chokes our beaches, destroying the local tourism industry that so many working families rely on. Tangled seaweed also damages nets and boat engines, slashing fish catches and driving up equipment costs for local fishers.
In the south of Puerto Rico, the coastal town of La Parguera is currently witnessing a historic amount of sargassum on its shores. This has halted most of the boating activity in the area, which is the seaside town’s main tourist draw and economic driver.
All over the Caribbean, from town halls to local group gatherings, the story I hear is always the same: constant headaches, lost work hours, failing health, and a sense that quality of life is silently being stolen. The compounding effects of heatwaves, drought, and marine destruction are exhausting our people, our islands.
Climate change to blame
Climate change makes each El Niño year hotter and more damaging. Higher baseline global temperatures increase the energy and moisture available for extreme weather. Latest projections show that El Niño may push the monthly global average temperature past 2°C of warming for the first time in early 2027. In the Caribbean islands, that will not just be breaking records – it’ll be breaking lives.
Recently, I had the opportunity to share a panel with climate scientists behind what is known as the field of “attribution science” – or the science that compares today’s climate conditions to what the Earth’s climate would be like without human activity, particularly burning fossil fuels. They’re unequivocal: it’s no longer a question of whether extreme weather is caused by climate change, it’s just a question of how much.
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Attribution science recently got a boost from the U.S.’ top scientific advisory body. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine recognized that researchers’ methods have advanced considerably in recent years, resulting in better assessments on how much extreme weather can be attributed to human-caused climate change. It noted that attribution findings could be relevant in some types of legal cases, including those seeking damages from oil companies for climate impacts.
This crisis, which is already taking a heavy toll on our communities’ survival, needs real, urgent, and structural action that goes beyond aid. With similar droughts now gripping parts of Asia and Africa, we’re falling into the familiar narrative of treating the looming humanitarian crisis as if no one was to blame, as if it is being caused solely by a natural phenomenon we can’t control.
It’s not. The world was already on fire before its regular visitor, El Niño, came. While we need humanitarian action, we need climate action too, in order to permanently put out the flames.
The post When taps run dry in the Caribbean, it’s not enough to blame El Niño appeared first on Climate Home News.
When taps run dry in the Caribbean, it’s not enough to blame El Niño
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