How can we stop climate change?
by Elissa Tennant
It’s not your imagination. It’s getting hotter. Climate change is caused by burning fossil fuels, which releases climate pollution that traps heat in the earth’s atmosphere. The earth is overheating, just as if it were wearing a heavy blanket in the middle of summer.
To stop this from happening, we have to reduce our dependence on dirty energy and move to clean, safe alternatives like renewable electricity. One of the biggest myths about climate change solutions is that responsibility falls mostly on the consumer. There are things you can personally do to help, like recycling, driving less, or using less plastic, but they don’t address the root of the problem: systemic carbon pollution.
We need to stop letting companies burn the fossil fuels that cause global warming, and instead encourage a system-wide adoption to use other forms of clean energy. We can actually reduce climate change through policy change.
Here are three key policy areas that will drive down carbon pollution and help stop climate change.
#1 Moving our economy to clean energy
Our economy is using more and more energy every day, for several reasons, including an increase in artificial intelligence data centers and U.S. manufacturing growth. Clean energy sources are the cheapest, fastest, and healthiest way for us to fuel this growth.
The U.S. government has the power to propel a transition to clean energy through legislation. Subsidizing and incentivizing energy sources like solar, wind, nuclear, and geothermal, as well as energy storage solutions, would encourage companies to use cleaner sources and ditch fossil fuels.
Another major roadblock for clean energy is the current permitting process. The U.S. needs to speed up the approval process for clean energy projects like wind, solar, and transmission lines. Current regulations often delay necessary projects for years. Reforming permitting laws can help deploy clean energy faster, which will improve air quality and help us meet our climate goals.
Citizens’ Climate Lobby supports energy permitting reform policies that:
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- add to America’s capacity to transmit clean electricity.
- speed up the approval of clean energy projects that are waiting to be built.
- allow communities to make their voices heard on the environmental and other impacts of proposed energy projects.
We saw several permitting reform bills introduced in the 118th Congress. The 119th Congress is expected to address clean energy permitting reform again.
Urge Congress to move forward on clean energy permitting reform with a quick email.
Let’s reform America’s clean energy permitting reform process
#2 Protecting our forests
America’s natural resources like forests, grasslands, and oceans are natural climate solutions that pull carbon out of the air, reducing the impacts of climate change. We can manage these natural resources in urban and rural areas to maximize their ability to prevent climate change.
Trees, specifically, are a major natural resource that support America’s emissions reductions goals. Forests act as carbon sinks, absorbing CO₂ from the atmosphere. Protecting, restoring, and expanding forests nationwide is crucial for long-term carbon sequestration.
Protecting America’s trees has major bipartisan support. There are a few proven methods we can use to keep our nation’s trees healthy.
Planting trees
“Afforestation” is the term used to describe the process of planting new trees and forests. “Reforestation” is the act of re-planting trees in an area where a forest used to exist. Both are excellent methods for mitigating climate change.
Supporting urban forests
More trees in cities, known as urban forests, means cooler temperatures as the earth’s average temperatures increase, lowering the risk of heat stress. It’s important to plant trees in cities, focusing on neighborhoods that suffer from a lack of tree equity.
Mitigating wildfires
Wildfires are getting bigger, faster, and harder to contain. Their increasing frequency and intensity has become a burning issue in recent years. While wildfires are a natural part of many ecosystems, their growing destructive power is not natural.
Climate change is worsening wildfires, which release massive amounts of carbon. As climate change makes the weather hotter and drier, wildfire seasons last longer, creating more fires and burning more land. Forest management programs reduce wildfire risk. These include controlled burns, forest thinning, and other wildfire risk reduction measures.
The Fix Our Forests Act aims to help address the forest management side of the problem. CCL has advocated for this bill since its introduction in January 2025. Among many other provisions, the legislation would simplify and expedite the most critical forest management projects while maintaining strong environmental standards and providing support for wildland firefighters.
In addition to CCL, the Fix Our Forests Act is supported by many organizations including American Forests, the National Congress of American Indians, the Western Fire Chiefs Association, the Federation of American Scientists, the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, and many more.
Learn more about the Fix Our Forests Act and write Congress in support of it.
#3 Driving down carbon pollution
To stop climate change, it’s imperative we drive down the root cause: carbon pollution. The best way to do this is through an economy-wide carbon price, where the money is given to people. This policy is typically referred to as a carbon fee and dividend.
Here’s how it works:
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- Companies are charged for the amount of carbon emissions they create.
- This fee (minus administrative costs) is returned to households each month as a dividend.
- Companies are incentivized to reduce their emissions to avoid the fee.
- We reduce carbon pollution.
A price on carbon is the single most powerful tool available to reduce America’s carbon pollution. A fee is applied wherever fossil fuels enter the economy. This price flows through the economy, incentivizing businesses and people to switch to clean energy.
Many economists and major companies advocate for carbon pricing as an effective way to cut emissions. A price on carbon will help us lower America’s carbon pollution and spur the transition to clean energy while putting extra money in the pockets of consumers. This policy saves lives, creates jobs, and (as a market-based solution) maintains a strong economy.
Learn more about our favorite policy for tackling carbon pollution.
See why a price on carbon works
Can we reverse climate change?
Yes, it is possible to stop, and even reverse, global warming if we take serious action. While the change will not happen overnight, we can slow the rate of climate change and protect ourselves from even more damage. Reducing the worst effects of climate change requires systemic solutions, not just individual actions.
Policies that reduce carbon pollution, accelerate clean energy, and protect natural carbon sinks are key. Everyone can play a role by advocating for these policies.
How to take action on climate change NOW
There are policies, and even proposed legislation out right now that will help us stop climate change. By moving to clean energy, protecting America’s trees, and putting a price on carbon, we can make a serious dent in reducing our carbon emissions and meeting America’s climate goals. These long-term solutions are what will protect the health of our climate.
Once you’ve written Congress in support of the bills and policies mentioned in this article, there’s always more to do! Take action for climate right now:
Volunteer for the environment locally
Electrify your home with clean energy
Write or Call Congress and let them know which policy you support
Attend one of our climate change conferences this year
Spread the word on social media
Support candidates and policies advocating for clean energy infrastructure and permitting reform
Talk to your friends and family about climate change
Support organizations working on reforestation and land conservation
Share this blog!
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The post How can we stop climate change? appeared first on Citizens' Climate Lobby.
Drought and heatwaves occurring together – known as “compound” events – have “surged” across the world since the early 2000s, a new study shows.
Compound drought and heat events (CDHEs) can have devastating effects, creating the ideal conditions for intense wildfires, such as Australia’s “Black Summer” of 2019-20 where bushfires burned 24m hectares and killed 33 people.
The research, published in Science Advances, finds that the increase in CDHEs is predominantly being driven by events that start with a heatwave.
The global area affected by such “heatwave-led” compound events has more than doubled between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, the study says.
The rapid increase in these events over the last 23 years cannot be explained solely by global warming, the authors note.
Since the late 1990s, feedbacks between the land and the atmosphere have become stronger, making heatwaves more likely to trigger drought conditions, they explain.
One of the study authors tells Carbon Brief that societies must pay greater attention to compound events, which can “cause severe impacts on ecosystems, agriculture and society”.
Compound events
CDHEs are extreme weather events where drought and heatwave conditions occur simultaneously – or shortly after each other – in the same region.
These events are often triggered by large-scale weather patterns, such as “blocking” highs, which can produce “prolonged” hot and dry conditions, according to the study.
Prof Sang-Wook Yeh is one of the study authors and a professor at the Ewha Womans University in South Korea. He tells Carbon Brief:
“When heatwaves and droughts occur together, the two hazards reinforce each other through land-atmosphere interactions. This amplifies surface heating and soil moisture deficits, making compound events more intense and damaging than single hazards.”
CDHEs can begin with either a heatwave or a drought.
The sequence of these extremes is important, the study says, as they have different drivers and impacts.
For example, in a CDHE where the heatwave was the precursor, increased direct sunshine causes more moisture loss from soils and plants, leading to a drought.
Conversely, in an event where the drought was the precursor, the lack of soil moisture means that less of the sun’s energy goes into evaporation and more goes into warming the Earth’s surface. This produces favourable conditions for heatwaves.
The study shows that the majority of CDHEs globally start out as a drought.
In recent years, there has been increasing focus on these events due to the devastating impact they have on agriculture, ecosystems and public health.
In Russia in the summer of 2010, a compound drought-heatwave event – and the associated wildfires – caused the death of nearly 55,000 people, the study notes.
The record-breaking Pacific north-west “heat dome” in 2021 triggered extreme drought conditions that caused “significant declines” in wheat yields, as well as in barley, canola and fruit production in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada, says the study.
Increasing events
To assess how CDHEs are changing, the researchers use daily reanalysis data to identify droughts and heatwaves events. (Reanalysis data combines past observations with climate models to create a historical climate record.) Then, using an algorithm, they analyse how these events overlap in both time and space.
The study covers the period from 1980 to 2023 and the world’s land surface, excluding polar regions where CDHEs are rare.
The research finds that the area of land affected by CDHEs has “increased substantially” since the early 2000s.
Heatwave-led events have been the main contributor to this increase, the study says, with their spatial extent rising 110% between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, compared to a 59% increase for drought-led events.
The map below shows the global distribution of CDHEs over 1980-2023. The charts show the percentage of the land surface affected by a heatwave-led CDHE (red) or a drought-led CDHE (yellow) in a given year (left) and relative increase in each CDHE type (right).
The study finds that CDHEs have occurred most frequently in northern South America, the southern US, eastern Europe, central Africa and south Asia.
Threshold passed
The authors explain that the increase in heatwave-led CDHEs is related to rising global temperatures, but that this does not tell the whole story.
In the earlier 22-year period of 1980-2001, the study finds that the spatial extent of heatwave-led CDHEs rises by 1.6% per 1C of global temperature rise. For the more-recent period of 2022-23, this increases “nearly eightfold” to 13.1%.
The change suggests that the rapid increase in the heatwave-led CDHEs occurred after the global average temperature “surpasse[d] a certain temperature threshold”, the paper says.
This threshold is an absolute global average temperature of 14.3C, the authors estimate (based on an 11-year average), which the world passed around the year 2000.
Investigating the recent surge in heatwave-leading CDHEs further, the researchers find a “regime shift” in land-atmosphere dynamics “toward a persistently intensified state after the late 1990s”.
In other words, the way that drier soils drive higher surface temperatures, and vice versa, is becoming stronger, resulting in more heatwave-led compound events.
Daily data
The research has some advantages over other previous studies, Yeh says. For instance, the new work uses daily estimations of CDHEs, compared to monthly data used in past research. This is “important for capturing the detailed occurrence” of these events, says Yeh.
He adds that another advantage of their study is that it distinguishes the sequence of droughts and heatwaves, which allows them to “better understand the differences” in the characteristics of CDHEs.
Dr Meryem Tanarhte is a climate scientist at the University Hassan II in Morocco, and Dr Ruth Cerezo Mota is a climatologist and a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Both scientists, who were not involved in the study, agree that the daily estimations give a clearer picture of how CDHEs are changing.
Cerezo-Mota adds that another major contribution of the study is its global focus. She tells Carbon Brief that in some regions, such as Mexico and Africa, there is a lack of studies on CDHEs:
“Not because the events do not occur, but perhaps because [these regions] do not have all the data or the expertise to do so.”
However, she notes that the reanalysis data used by the study does have limitations with how it represents rainfall in some parts of the world.
Compound impacts
The study notes that if CDHEs continue to intensify – particularly events where heatwaves are the precursors – they could drive declining crop productivity, increased wildfire frequency and severe public health crises.
These impacts could be “much more rapid and severe as global warming continues”, Yeh tells Carbon Brief.
Tanarhte notes that these events can be forecasted up to 10 days ahead in many regions. Furthermore, she says, the strongest impacts can be prevented “through preparedness and adaptation”, including through “water management for agriculture, heatwave mitigation measures and wildfire mitigation”.
The study recommends reassessing current risk management strategies for these compound events. It also suggests incorporating the sequences of drought and heatwaves into compound event analysis frameworks “to enhance climate risk management”.
Cerezo-Mota says that it is clear that the world needs to be prepared for the increased occurrence of these events. She tells Carbon Brief:
“These [risk assessments and strategies] need to be carried out at the local level to understand the complexities of each region.”
The post Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes
Greenhouse Gases
DeBriefed 6 March 2026: Iran energy crisis | China climate plan | Bristol’s ‘pioneering’ wind turbine
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Energy crisis
ENERGY SPIKE: US-Israeli attacks on Iran and subsequent counterattacks across the Middle East have sent energy prices “soaring”, according to Reuters. The newswire reported that the region “accounts for just under a third of global oil production and almost a fifth of gas”. The Guardian noted that shipping traffic through the strait of Hormuz, which normally ferries 20% of the world’s oil, “all but ground to a halt”. The Financial Times reported that attacks by Iran on Middle East energy facilities – notably in Qatar – triggered the “biggest rise in gas prices since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine”.
‘RISK’ AND ‘BENEFITS’: Bloomberg reported on increases in diesel prices in Europe and the US, speculating that rising fuel costs could be “a risk for president Donald Trump”. US gas producers are “poised to benefit from the big disruption in global supply”, according to CNBC. Indian government sources told the Economic Times that Russia is prepared to “fulfil India’s energy demands”. China Daily quoted experts who said “China’s energy security remains fundamentally unshaken”, thanks to “emergency stockpiles and a wide array of import channels”.
‘ESSENTIAL’ RENEWABLES: Energy analysts said governments should cut their fossil-fuel reliance by investing in renewables, “rather than just seeking non-Gulf oil and gas suppliers”, reported Climate Home News. This message was echoed by UK business secretary Peter Kyle, who said “doubling down on renewables” was “essential” amid “regional instability”, according to the Daily Telegraph.
China’s climate plan
PEAK COAL?: China has set out its next “five-year plan” at the annual “two sessions” meeting of the National People’s Congress, including its climate strategy out to 2030, according to the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post. The plan called for China to cut its carbon emissions per unit of gross domestic product (GDP) by 17% from 2026 to 2030, which “may allow for continued increase in emissions given the rate of GDP growth”, reported Reuters. The newswire added that the plan also had targets to reach peak coal in the next five years and replace 30m tonnes per year of coal with renewables.
ACTIVE YET PRUDENT: Bloomberg described the new plan as “cautious”, stating that it “frustrat[es] hopes for tighter policy that would drive the nation to peak carbon emissions well before president Xi Jinping’s 2030 deadline”. Carbon Brief has just published an in-depth analysis of the plan. China Daily reported that the strategy “highlights measures to promote the climate targets of peaking carbon dioxide emissions before 2030”, which China said it would work towards “actively yet prudently”.
Around the world
- EU RULES: The European Commission has proposed new “made in Europe” rules to support domestic low-carbon industries, “against fierce competition from China”, reported Agence France-Presse. Carbon Brief examined what it means for climate efforts.
- RECORD HEAT: The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has said there is a 50-60% chance that the El Niño weather pattern could return this year, amplifying the effect of global warming and potentially driving temperatures to “record highs”, according to Euronews.
- FLAGSHIP FUND: The African Development Bank’s “flagship clean energy fund” plans to more than double its financing to $2.5bn for African renewables over the next two years, reported the Associated Press.
- NO WITHDRAWAL: Vanuatu has defied US efforts to force the Pacific-island nation to drop a UN draft resolution calling on the world to implement a landmark International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling on climate, according to the Guardian.
98
The number of nations that submitted their national reports on tackling nature loss to the UN on time – just half of the 196 countries that are part of the UN biodiversity treaty – according to analysis by Carbon Brief.
Latest climate research
- Sea levels are already “much higher than assumed” in most assessments of the threat posed by sea-level rise, due to “inadequate” modelling assumptions | Nature
- Accelerating human-caused global warming could see the Paris Agreement’s 1.5C limit crossed before 2030 | Geophysical Research Letters covered by Carbon Brief
- Future “super El Niño events” could “significantly lower” solar power generation due to a reduction in solar irradiance in key regions, such as California and east China | Communications Earth & Environment
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
UK greenhouse gas emissions in 2025 fell to 54% below 1990 levels, the baseline year for its legally binding climate goals, according to new Carbon Brief analysis. Over the same period, data from the World Bank shows that the UK’s economy has expanded by 95%, meaning that emissions have been decoupling from growth.
Spotlight
Bristol’s ‘pioneering’ community wind turbine
Following the recent launch of the UK government’s local power plan, Carbon Brief visits one of the country’s community-energy success stories.
The Lawrence Weston housing estate is set apart from the main city of Bristol, wedged between the tree-lined grounds of a stately home and a sprawl of warehouses and waste incinerators. It is one of the most deprived areas in the city.
Yet, just across the M5 motorway stands a structure that has brought the spoils of the energy transition directly to this historically forgotten estate – a 4.2 megawatt (MW) wind turbine.
The turbine is owned by local charity