While 2023 made headlines for smashing global temperature records, last year also saw some truly remarkable events in the Antarctic.
After crashing to a record-low summer extent in February, sea ice around the southern continent regrew extremely slowly.
By July, when sea ice should be approaching its maximum winter coverage, there was an area of ice “missing” that was bigger than Algeria – the world’s 10th largest country.
When the annual maximum extent arrived – early – it was the smallest on record by a “wide margin”.
This made 2023 the second record-breaking year in a row, continuing the recent erratic swings in sea ice cover that had otherwise been preceded by several decades of steady, gradual increase.
In our new paper, published in the Royal Meteorological Society’s journal Weather, my coauthor and I explore what happened to sea ice in 2023, what caused the dramatic events and what the implications are for the future.
The importance of Antarctic sea ice
Antarctic sea ice is a critical puzzle piece in the regional and global climate picture.
The frozen continent as a whole acts as the Earth’s principal refrigerator, reflecting the sun’s energy from its bright, white mirror-like surface, helping keep temperatures cool.
Sea ice formation around its coastline acts as an engine for ocean currents and influences weather patterns that can have far-reaching effects.
Floating ice also acts as a buffer that can protect the exposed edges of the ice sheet from the destructive action of waves, meaning that it can curb Antarctica’s contribution to sea level rise. By influencing the availability of water from the open ocean, it also affects how much snow can fall to replenish the ice sheet’s losses.
And sea ice is vitally important for marine life, as demonstrated by the “catastrophic breeding failure” of Emperor penguin chicks following the (then) record-low sea ice coverage in 2022.
Long-term trends
Thanks to satellite data, scientists have a detailed picture of how Arctic and Antarctic sea ice have behaved since the late 1970s. And for Antarctica, this picture has been something of a puzzle.
Between 1979 and 2015, average Antarctic sea ice extent – the area of ocean with at least 15% sea ice cover – increased slightly, but fairly steadily. This is in stark contrast to the Arctic, where sea ice at the minimum summer extent plummeted by nearly 12% per decade.
Then, after a record high year in 2014, Antarctic sea ice extent dropped to a record low in 2017. Several years of low sea ice came after that, with the summer minimum record smashed in 2022, when it fell below 2m square kilometres for the first time.
How extreme was 2023?
Antarctic sea ice waxes and wanes throughout the year, reaching a minimum in February at the end of the southern-hemisphere summer and a maximum in September after a long, cold winter.
This seasonal expansion causes the area covered by sea ice to grow six-fold within a single year – as the chart below shows. It depicts Antarctic sea ice extent for each day of 2023 (blue line), along with how it compares to the historical range (blue shading) and the record low for the time of year (dotted line).
Antarctic daily sea ice extent from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center. The bold lines show daily 2023 values, the shaded area indicates the two standard deviation range in historical values between 1979 and 2010. The dotted line shows the record low. Chart by Carbon Brief.
As the chart shows, 2023 was an exceptional year in the satellite record, remaining well below average for the entire year.
The year started with a record-breaking minimum extent of 1.79m km2 in February 2023, which was 10% lower than the already record-breaking 2022.
Although the autumn freeze-up started off as usual, from April the seasonal expansion of sea ice was very slow. By July, the total sea ice extent was 13.5m km2 – 15% lower than average for the month.
The area of “missing” sea ice for the month of July, relative to the 1981–2010 average, was nearly two-and-a-half million square kilometres – an area larger than Algeria.
The period of extreme departure from average persisted from mid-May until mid-November, with conditions recovering a little, meaning that by the end of the year, they were no longer record-breaking.
Overall, the largest deviations from average conditions in 2023 were recorded in winter (June to August). To see this in context, the chart below shows winter sea ice extent from 1979 to 2023 and highlights how dramatically low winter sea ice was last year.
In addition, the table below shows the average winter sea ice extent and the anomaly – that is, the departure from the 1981-2010 average. It is clear that at 2.34m km2, the anomaly in the winter of 2023 was larger than in any other year. The next largest was 0.93m km2 in 2022.
| Year | JJA mean extent (million km2) | JJA anomaly (million km2) |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 13.34 | -2.34 |
| 2022 | 14.75 | -0.93 |
| 2002 | 14.95 | -0.73 |
| 2017 | 14.97 | -0.71 |
| 1986 | 15.00 | -0.69 |
Table showing the top five years with largest negative winter sea ice extent anomalies with respect to 1981–2010, ranked from lowest sea ice extent to highest. All extents and anomalies are shown in millions of square kilometres. Source: Gilbert & Homes (2024)
Drivers of low sea ice conditions
There is no single cause of record-low sea ice conditions, but it is likely that a combination of oceanic and atmospheric factors conspired to produce 2023’s record sea ice conditions.
Recent studies have pointed to the important role of ocean processes and heat stored below the surface, which have kept sea ice extent low since 2016. Warm sea surface temperatures in the Southern Ocean during the first half of 2023 probably also partly explain both the record minimum extent in February and the slow freeze-up afterwards.
But Antarctic sea ice is also closely controlled by atmospheric circulation. One such circulation pattern is the Amundsen Sea Low, which is a low-pressure weather system that consistently forms off the coast of West Antarctica. Exactly where it is and how low the atmospheric pressure gets can control winds and temperature in the region, impacting the movement, breakup, formation and destruction of sea ice.
The pattern in sea ice in 2023 was closely tied to the behaviour of the Amundsen Sea Low, which was unusually deep and far to the east in winter when the sea ice anomalies were at their peak.
This situation tends to blow warm air towards the coast and push sea ice back, limiting sea ice growth during the freeze-up season.
Other large-scale weather patterns – such as the Southern Annular Mode and El Niño-Southern Oscillation have historically contributed to the ups-and-downs observed in Antarctic sea ice, but they do not seem to have had a major influence in 2023.
These weather patterns can interact to either amplify or suppress sea ice changes by affecting the ways that sea ice moves, melts and freezes.
Links with climate change
Deciphering the role of climate change in Antarctic sea ice trends is much more complicated than in the Arctic because conditions are impacted by so many competing factors.
However, the sheer magnitude of 2023’s sea ice lows suggests that something unusual is happening.
Sea ice conditions during 2023 were far outside the bounds of normality, but it is difficult to say exactly how far. That is because the satellite record is relatively short (45 years) and the system is highly variable. In addition, climate change is already impacting the Southern Ocean in complex ways, making an estimation of what is “normal” impossible.
Climate models project a decline in Antarctic sea ice in response to greenhouse gas emissions and rising temperatures. However, until 2015 this prediction was largely at odds with what scientists were seeing – in part due to the complexity and uncertainty of the processes involved, and the impractically high detail required to accurately represent sea ice in models.
However, despite their limitations, it seems inescapable that models will ultimately be correct about Antarctic sea ice decline. Human emissions are raising temperatures in the Southern Ocean, and studies show a link between ocean warming and low Antarctic sea-ice extents.
Several papers – including one discussed in a previous Carbon Brief guest post – have argued that recent record-low sea ice years may be a taste of what is to come.
With 2024 likely to be another year of high global average temperatures and weather extremes, it may emerge as another year of low Antarctic sea ice. Although current sea ice extent is no longer the lowest on record, conditions are still well below the 1981-2010 average, and this situation may well persist into the 2024 melt season.
So, while it is too early to say conclusively that the recent sea-ice lows are the beginning of a regime shift in Antarctic sea ice, it seems inevitable that it will eventually decline in response to human-caused climate change.
For now, all scientists can say for certain is that the events of 2023 were entirely remarkable and unlike anything seen in the satellite record.
The post Guest post: Why 2023 was an exceptional year for Antarctic sea ice appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Guest post: Why 2023 was an exceptional year for Antarctic sea ice
Starting on Monday, about 10,000 government negotiators, scientists, journalists and campaigners will gather at a purpose-built venue in a national park in Mongolia’s capital Ulaanbaatar to discuss how to stop land turning into desert as the world warms.
Drought is currently sweeping much of the Northern hemisphere, leaving normally green urban parks looking like dry savannah, causing crops to fail, food prices to rise and billions to be shaved off economic output.
On Wednesday, Britain’s prime minister chaired an emergency meeting of the government’s Cobra committee. These are usually reserved for wars, terrorist attacks, riots and pandemics – but this one was on the extreme heat and drought the UK has been suffering since May.
With many countries facing far worse with fewer resources than the UK, the issues to be discussed at the UN’s COP17 summit in Mongolia – often overlooked – should be nearer the top of policy-makers minds.
But what is COP17? What will be decided and announced there over the next two weeks? How does it relate to climate change and how will it help restore the lands on which we all rely for our food, water and other essential resources? Climate Home News explains all below.
What is COP17?
It is the conference of parties (COP) to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). The parties are 196 governments, which includes all of the countries recognised by the UN.
The convention was conceived at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, at the same time as the other two larger “Rio trio” conventions on climate and biodiversity.
While the climate convention’s COP takes place every year, the UNCCD COP happens only once every two years. COP17 will be its seventeenth gathering.
What is desertification?
It is the process by which land degrades and becomes more like a desert, making it harder – and sometimes impossible – to grow crops or graze livestock there.
Climate change and other human activities – like excessive irrigation which depletes ground water – are making this process worse, causing poverty, hunger, health problems, forced migration and loss of species.
It’s a widespread problem. The UN estimates that half a billion people live within areas that have experienced desertification since the 1980s and that two-fifths of the world’s land is degraded.
What has it got to do with climate change?
The planet’s climate is heating up, mainly due to humans burning fossil fuels, and drying out its land. This kills plants and exposes the soil which can then be blown away by wind and washed away by water.
Without a top layer of soil, plants struggle to grow again and the land gets closer to being a desert. So combating desertification is a way of adapting to climate change.
It is also a way of lessening the pace of climate change, as land degradation releases carbon dioxide previously stored in healthy soils and plants.
What will be negotiated at COP17?
The main issue is what form a new initiative to tackle drought could take. The last COP saw Africa push hard for this to be a protocol – a kind of binding sub-treaty to the UNCCD.
But the US, Europe, Argentina and others argued that would take too long to set up, cost too much and take money away from what can be spent on the ground. They prefer a legally weaker alternative – a framework instead of a protocol.
Negotiations went late into the last night of talks in Riyadh, with the Saudis hosting informal consultations, but eventually governments had to agree to disagree and pick up talks again in Ulaanbaatar.
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Governments will also negotiate a new policy on protecting rangelands and pastoralists from degradation. Rangelands are areas where animals graze. They cover around half the Earth’s land and include almost everything other than forest, deserts, farms, glaciers and cities. Pastoralists are people who herd animals on these rangelands, often moving from place to place to find fresh pasture.
COP17 host country Mongolia has a lot of both – and pushed successfully for the UN to declare 2026 the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists. It is keen to agree a decision at COP17 bringing those issues more to the forefront of the UNCCD.
Negotiators will also debate the UNCCD’s post-2030 strategic framework, which they hope to adopt at COP18 in 2028. Campaign groups like the World Wildlife Fund want a stronger focus on biodiversity and nature-positive food systems.
What will happen when?
The COP will formally open with a ceremony on Monday August 17, followed by opening statements by governments and the adoption of the agenda.
Negotiations will begin, mostly behind closed doors for two weeks until the closing plenaries on Friday August 28.
While talks rumble on in the background, the second week will see senior government representatives including ministers get involved, with a “high-level segment” running from August 24-26.
They will discuss issues like drought resilience, finance and pastoralist communities. This is likely to be when any announcements – of new funding, for instance – are made.
On Monday August 24, there will also be an open dialogue between government officials and civil society members. Here, local practitioners are likely to share stories of how they are helping their communities reverse land degradation. UNCCD prides itself on being a bottom-up convention.
Unlike climate COPs, which often end a day or two over time, UNCCD COPs usually finish on the evening of their last day and – while they have gone late into the night – have never run into the next day.
What else should we watch out for?
At the last COP two years ago, host Saudi Arabia led the creation of an initiative called the Riyadh Global Drought Resilience Partnership to help 80 of the poorest nations deal with drought.
It received $12 billion in pledges, mainly from Gulf-based development finance institutions. Saudi Arabia is expected to report back on whether these pledges have been delivered and how the money will reach those in need now.
There are also hopes that governments will announce financial support for Mongolia’s Rangelands Flagship Initiative, which aims to mobilise investment in projects to fight land degradation.
Who will preside over COP17?
While the last five and the next two climate COPs have been or will be presided over by men, COP17 will be woman-led with Mongolia’s foreign minister, Battsetseg Batmunkh, as president.
This will also be the first COP for the UNCCD’s new executive director Yasmin Fouad. Before being appointed environment minister in her native Egypt, Fouad was a scientist and lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s special report on desertification. She played a key role at the COP27 climate summit in Egypt in 2022.
Although Saudi Arabia’s UNCCD COP presidency is ending, the Gulf power house will likely continue to be influential. It has supported the COP financially as part of the Riyadh-Ulaanbaatar action agenda and will be following up on initiatives announced two years ago.
While Saudi Arabia is often blamed for obstructing progress at climate talks, as a desert nation it is generally thought to have played a constructive role at UNCCD COPs.
What are the negotiating dynamics?
The UNCCD has six main negotiating groups: Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Northern Mediterranean, Central and Eastern Europe, and developed donor countries. Governments can also speak in their own capacities.
While divisions between the Global North and Global South do exist at UNCCD COPs, they are not as stark as at climate COPs. The Global South’s umbrella group – the G77 and China – usually only speaks on finance issues, on which developing countries tend to be united.
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Civil society groups are present but not as vocal or as confrontational as at climate COPs. There are generally no protests and campaigners tend to try to hold governments accountable more quietly. There are likely to be far fewer journalists than at climate COPs too.
What role will the US play?
While the US has left the UN’s climate convention, it remains in the UNCCD and is expected to bring a delegation of officials from its departments of agriculture and state. It is likely to resist any renewed push from Africa for a drought protocol.
The post Will the world’s drying lands get relief from COP17 in Mongolia? appeared first on Climate Home News.
Will the world’s drying lands get relief from COP17 in Mongolia?
Helen Phillips’ book, ‘Hum’, is set in a dystopian near future, in a city suffering the effects of climate breakdown and with dire air quality. Robots (the Hums) press advertising messages during conversations, meetings and even as they carry out medical procedures.
The Hums are vehicles for these ad messages, which are often for products like cosmetics, sweets or anything that might be relevant during interactions with humans. This advertising is poorly disguised, and merges with sentiments that lean towards concerns of well-being, convincing people how much better off they’ll be if they make a purchase.
While the novel is futuristic, the insidious way advertising permeates daily life is resonant of how adverts show up in our world today. And these ads are directly contributing to the worsening future climate Phillips describes in her book.
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Already by the summer of 2026, Europe had seen a 57% increase in wildfires in just four years with western Europe recording the hottest ever June and July on record. We’re facing droughts and floods, as well as predicted hikes in food costs or even chronic food shortages – and that’s before the expected additional effects of a strong El Niño later this year.
Frequent flying and bigger burgers
A portion of this climate breakdown is fuelled by over-consumption in richer countries, particularly of products that are high carbon – for which advertising can take some of the blame. Research shows that adverts drive citizens to consume about a third more goods and services in general, over and above what they might have purchased.
Yet despite a clear link between promoting high-carbon behaviours and climate breakdown, little advertising regulation exists in the UK. Take frequent flying for instance, one of the most carbon-intensive activities we can partake in.
EasyJet’s latest ad campaign is called “Drop Everything”. It encourages consumers to book cheap flights departing within the next 48 hours for presumably short or weekend getaways. Rather than promoting a specific destination, “Drop Everything” promotes a mindset that encourages indiscriminate consumption of flying. The ads were shown on billboards with clever creative slogans, as well as on digital media and through influencer campaigns.
Overall, flight numbers are increasing. The UK Civil Aviation Authority reported the highest number of UK passengers in the first quarter of 2026 (more than 61 million, breaking previous records for travel between January and March). It seems we’re still not joining the dots between flying and a worsening climate.
And how about meat consumption? Scientists advocate for less meat-eating, especially beef which has the highest carbon footprint of nearly all foods. Yet adverts from McDonald’s proliferate, helping make it one of the highest-volume sellers of fast-food chain beef burgers. In 2024, the outdoor advertising budget for McDonald’s UK rose to £86 million, an increase of 71% on previous years.
Small share for sustainability
While over half of UK ad professionals feel increasingly queasy about their profession and its effects on the climate crisis, the people running the show – the UK trade bodies – prefer to focus on the growth advertising brings.
In the first three months of 2026, they stated that UK advertising spend increased by 9.3%, reaching a total of £11.7 billion for that quarter, fuelling consumption and market growth.
But how many of those adverts actually promote low carbon goods and services? Kantar’s Sustainable Ads Tracker shows the percentage of ads featuring sustainability messaging in 2026 is around 4.3%. That’s woefully low, and much of this is made up of messaging that promotes recycling.
Additionally, the ad industry continues to happily produce adverts for the large oil and gas corporations that are fuelling climate breakdown. These adverts only narrowly pass the Advertising Standards Authorities’ advertising codes, allowing the continued greenwashing of the world’s most polluting brands.
There is essentially no leadership from the UK trade bodies, likely because they are directly funded by the brands and advertisers themselves. They are essentially ‘ad shushing’ – pushing for indiscriminate growth and directing attention to their sustainability awards, while confusingly denying that adverts drive higher consumption overall.
Let’s ‘un-shush’
Where does this leave us as we are subjected to hundreds, if not thousands, of persuasive advertising messages every day that support high-carbon lifestyles? Most ad professionals are unable to push back against this agenda at work, often due to the threat of job loss. The advertising trade bodies won’t take the lead as they work in service to big brands and advertisers.
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So, who can push for the changes we need? Members of the public.
Through pressuring our city officials and governments, we can force through restrictions, such as the watershed bans on unhealthy foods on TV before 9pm in the UK. Through supporting the efforts of organisations such as Ad Free Cities and others, we can help achieve bans on outdoor advertising for fossil fuels, aviation, meat and even single-use plastics in cities and regions such as Amsterdam, The Hague, Edinburgh, Florence, Uppsala and many more.
If we’re serious about climate change and stopping big global brands pushing their high-carbon products onto us, then advertising restrictions are one of the best ways to achieve this. If we don’t want a world like the one Phillips describes in her book, we need to make our voices heard above the advertising noise.
The post Pushing the climate crisis: How advertising fuels high-carbon lifestyles appeared first on Climate Home News.
Pushing the climate crisis: How advertising fuels high-carbon lifestyles
An upcoming UK government consultation on weakening targets for electric vehicles (EVs) could cost consumers as much as £3bn a year by 2030, according to Carbon Brief analysis.
It could require the UK to import an extra 17m barrels of oil in 2030, raising expected net imports by 8%, as well as adding 2.5% to national emissions that year, the analysis shows.
After years of fierce lobbying by parts of the car industry – and despite the significant savings on offer for EV drivers – media reports suggest that EV targets could be “watered down”.
Under current rules, battery EVs – BEVs, those which run only on electricity – must make up a rising share of new car sales in the UK.
This policy, known as the “zero-emission vehicles” (ZEV) mandate, was introduced by the previous Conservative government and sets a goal for 33% BEV sales in 2026, rising to 80% in 2030.
(Carmakers are able to use “flexibilities” to help meet their targets, which reduces the effective target under the ZEV mandate to an estimated 25% of sales in 2026.)
Now, the government under new Labour prime minister Andy Burnham is reported to be considering a cut in the BEV target for 2030 to just 50% of new car sales, alongside options for 60% or 70%.
Carbon Brief understands that a consultation on weakening the ZEV mandate is being reviewed by the prime minister’s office in Number 10, ahead of being formally released.
If the mandate is weakened to 50% by 2030 – and if carmakers make more use of “flexibilities” – there could be up to 3m fewer BEVs on UK roads by 2030, according to the NGO T&E.
Previous Carbon Brief analysis found that BEVs are around £1,100 cheaper to run per year than a petrol car, thanks to far lower fuel costs.
Overall, BEVs are more than £1,000 per year cheaper to own than either petrol cars or plug-in hybrids (PHEVs, which can run on petrol or electricity).
This is according to analysis of the “total cost of ownership” by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), including purchase price, fuel costs, insurance and proposed pay-per-mile charges.
In total, Carbon Brief analysis shows that UK drivers could be hit with an extra £3bn in annual ownership costs by 2030, if the ZEV mandate is weakened, as shown below.
A weaker ZEV mandate could “put billions of pounds of committed investments at risk”, reports BusinessGreen, including in the EV charging network and battery supply chains.
Industry group Energy UK says that the mandate is “working in the way it was designed to work” and that it is the “single biggest driver of emissions reductions” in government climate plans.
However, Carbon Brief analysis shows that a weaker ZEV mandate could result in an extra 7.4m tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions (MtCO2) in 2030. This would add the equivalent of 2.5% to national emissions in 2030, under the UK’s international climate goal for that year.
In addition, a weaker ZEV mandate could result in the UK needing to import an extra 17m barrels of oil in 2030, equivalent to 8% of projected net imports that year.
Energy UK says that shifting to EVs will help to reduce household energy bills “for everyone”. This is not only through direct cost-of-ownership savings for EV drivers, but also by spreading the costs of upgrading the electricity system across a wider user base.
Car industry group the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders claims that its members are spending “blilions…on discounts, finance incentives and marketing support” and that “natural” EV demand is below the level required to meet the current ZEV mandate. Its claims are disputed.
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The post Analysis: Weaker EV targets could cost UK consumers £3bn a year by 2030 appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: Weaker EV targets could cost UK consumers £3bn a year by 2030
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