It’s COP season again and as governments, businesses and green groups gather in Azerbaijan’s historic capital, Baku, for this year’s COP29 climate summit, a bunch of reports have been released with new information on the state of the Earth’s climate and action to tackle global warming.
From the heatwaves that plagued Nigeria earlier this year, to floods in Spain that killed at least 220 people this month, and recent hurricanes battering swathes of the US, these reports explain what’s turbo-charging extreme weather worldwide and ring the alarm bell on the need to move faster in addressing the climate crisis and protecting people from its growing effects.
The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) titled this year’s Adaptation Gap Report “Come hell and high water”, underscoring the need to step up efforts to make economies and societies more resilient to climate change impacts. It also highlights the devastating consequences the world could face at the 2.6-3.1 degrees Celsius of warming projected this century without larger cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.
Here are some key numbers from the latest batch of international climate reports intended to inform and drive the negotiations at COP29:
2024 set to be warmest year on record…
The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) released new data showing that 2024 is set to be the hottest year on record.
Based on temperatures from January to October, the climate service said 2024 has become the first year to exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels for that period, surpassing 2023 by 0.16C.
Under the Paris Agreement, countries agreed to limit global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius and ideally to 1.5C, but whether those targets have been broken is not judged on short-term data for one year as they refer to longer-term temperature trends.
The global average temperature for the past 12 months (November 2023-October 2024) was an estimated 1.62C above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial average. That is 0.74C above the 1991-2020 average.
The report added that unless the average temperature anomaly for the rest of the year drops to almost zero – which is very unlikely – 2024 is virtually certain to become the warmest year.
C3S Deputy Director Samantha Burgess said this “marks a new milestone in global temperature records and should serve as a catalyst to raise ambition for… COP29.”
… sounding a red alert for 1.5C warming limit
Outlining similar findings in an update to its “State of the Climate 2024” report, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), said 2024 is on track to be the warmest year on record after temporarily hitting the 1.5C warming limit.
In the period from January to September, the global mean surface air temperature was 1.54C above the pre-industrial average, with climate warming boosted by the El Niño weather pattern, the WMO said.
That does not mean, however, that the world has exceeded the 1.5C temperature goal set in the Paris Agreement as long-term warming measured over decades remains below that benchmark, the report emphasised.
The report said 2015-2024 will be the warmest ten years on record, adding that ocean warming rates show a particularly strong increase in the past two decades and the planet’s seas will continue to heat up irreversibly.
WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo warned that although the world has not yet broken the 1.5C limit, “it is essential to recognise that every fraction of a degree of warming matters. Whether it is at a level below or above 1.5C of warming, every additional increment of global warming increases climate extremes, impacts and risks.”
Over 570,000 deaths in two decades…
As the planet is heating up, the effects are already hitting hard. A report from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group of scientists says the death toll from the 10 deadliest disasters in the last two decades stands at just over 570,000 – that’s a little above the population size of Cabo Verde.
Even then, the researchers say the number of deaths from climate-induced disasters is greatly underestimated, as there may have been millions more heat-related deaths not reported in the official statistics, especially in poorer countries where people are most vulnerable to high temperatures.
Without doubt, these 10 extreme events were made more intense and more likely by human-caused climate change, they note.
… but the world can be better prepared to prevent these deaths…
While many of these deaths were avoidable, threats are becoming more frequent and severe, in the face of today’s 1.3C of warming.
However, there are actions that can drastically reduce the human impacts of extreme weather. One of these is investing in early-warning systems to alert people of extreme weather ahead of time. According to the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), countries are making progress in this regard.
In its latest “State of Climate Services” report, the WMO says that, in 2024, one-third of national meteorological and hydrological services provide climate services, such as early warning activities, at an “essential” level, and nearly one third at an “advanced” or “full” level.
With targeted adaptation funding, countries in Asia and Africa, in particular, have made strides in boosting their capacity, the report says. But, it adds, there are still significant gaps in the coverage of observing networks in Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and Small Island Developing States (SIDS).
Notwithstanding, the WMO says that with better early warnings and disaster risk management, weather and climate-related reported deaths have decreased by nearly two-thirds since the 1970s.
… and countries need to set more ambitious climate plans to curb global warming…
The economic losses and damage caused by climate change should motivate countries to come up with more ambitious “nationally determined contribution” climate plans (NDCs) due early next year, UNEP urges.
In its Emissions Gap Report 2024, the environmental body said failure to do this would put the world at risk of 2.6-3.1C of warming this century, which would be more catastrophic.
Reducing planet-heating emissions, according to UNEP’s Executive Director Inger Andersen, would not only protect economies but also save lives, prevent damage, conserve biodiversity and enable global average temperatures to fall again if they do overshoot the Paris Agreement goals of limiting warming to “well below 2C” and ideally to 1.5C above pre-industrial times.
So there is some hope. The report shows there is technical potential for emissions cuts in 2030 of up to 31 gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent and 41 gigatonnes in 2035, which would close the gap to putting the world on track for limiting global warming to 1.5C pathway if delivered.
Increased deployment of solar photovoltaic technologies and wind energy would allow the world to deliver 27% of that total reduction potential in 2030 and 38% in 2035, it says.
And action to protect forests could deliver around 20% of the potential by both years. Efficiency measures, electrification and fuel-switching in the buildings, transport and industry sectors are other effective ways to deliver emissions reductions.
… but investments in clean energy remain unequal in the global transition…
Given their emissions-cutting potential, investments in clean energy have increased significantly, approaching $2 trillion per year, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA) in its 2024 World Energy Outlook.
Additionally, the costs of most clean technologies are declining, causing renewables to enter the energy system at an unprecedented rate, including more than 560 gigawatts (GW) of new capacity added in 2023.
But deployment is far from uniform across technologies and countries. The IEA’s “Financing Clean Energy in Africa” report stated that the continent attracts less than 2% of global spending on clean energy, despite a recent surge in investments.
On top of that, markets for fossil fuels and clean technologies are becoming more fragmented. The World Energy Outlook states that since 2020, almost 200 trade measures affecting clean energy technologies – most of them restrictive – have been introduced around the world, compared with 40 in the preceding five-year period.
… “transition” gas won’t save the day, instead fuelling risks for investors…
Meanwhile, the uptake of clean energy for the green transition will cause a dwindling market for oil and gas, particularly for liquefied natural gas, according to a recent Carbon Tracker report. This engenders risks for investors who project an increase in demand for LNG.
Some governments, including in Africa, have been pushing for the use of gas as a “transition” fuel to sustain their economies and bridge the gap as they wait for accelerated investments in renewables.
But a rush to boost gas production for domestic use and export could cause an oversupply by the end of the decade, the report says, as global production capacity is expected to increase by around 50% by 2030.
The report warns that in the face of the massive industry push into LNG, there is a need to reassess assumptions because investors risk generating lower returns than anticipated.
… COP hosts chase fossil fuels despite COP28 commitment…
At COP28 in Dubai last year, an agreement to “transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems” was hailed by some as signalling the ‘beginning of the end’ of the industrial era powered by coal, oil and gas. But that may be premature.
The three host nations of the 2023-2025 COPs are among those promising one thing and doing another. New research by Oil Change International shows that the United Arab Emirates (COP28), Azerbaijan (COP29) and Brazil (COP30) plan to collectively expand oil and gas production by 32% by 2035, threatening the climate limits they have pledged to protect.
And they are not the only ones. The International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) reports that some countries are preparing for an oil and gas exploration splurge in the near term, leading to a strong uptick in exploration licensing.
If fully exploited, oil and gas reserves set to be licensed in the next six months could result in 15 billion tonnes of CO2-equivalent emissions – nearly as large as the combined emissions of the US and China in 2022.
Currently, the 10 countries with the biggest oil and gas licensing plans, in terms of embodied emissions – generated by extraction, production, transportation and use of fossil fuels along the whole supply chain – are China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Indonesia, the United States, Iran, Angola, Australia, Nigeria, and India, Oil Change says.
… continued fossil fuel investment will mean national climate plans fall short of expectations…
The recently released UN’s NDC synthesis report shows that countries’ current climate plans “fall miles short of what’s needed” to stop global heating.
While the world needs to cut emissions 43% by 2030 to limit warming to 1.5C and avert climate chaos, the current NDCs from nearly 200 countries combined would see global emissions in 2030 fall by only 2.6% compared to their level in 2019, the report finds.
Therefore UN officials and climate advocates are calling for the next round of NDCs, due by February next year – but likely to be submitted throughout the year in the run-up to COP30 – to deliver a substantial increase in climate action and ambition.
… yet finance for stronger climate action remains far too low…
In meeting their NDC targets, countries – especially vulnerable nations like small island states and the poorest countries – need external finance to help pay for the measures required.
But despite a doubling of annual climate finance between 2018 and 2022 – from $674 billion to $1.46 trillion – there is still a need to increase it at least five-fold to avoid the worst consequences of climate change, a new study by Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) shows.
Climate finance flows reached almost $1.5 trillion in 2022, but that still only represents 1% of global GDP – and CPI says this falls far short of what is needed.
By 2030, emerging markets and developing economies may need to spend as much as 6.5% of their GDP to meet climate goals, it warns.
Reiterating the need for more finance, UNEP in its new Adaptation Gap Report says international public funding to protect communities in poorer, vulnerable countries from worsening extreme weather and rising seas is only a fraction – between 7% and 13% – of what is needed, leaving an estimated gap of $187-359 billion.
From cyclone to drought, Zimbabwe’s climate victims struggle to adapt
At COP29, finance is set to take centre-stage as countries are tasked with agreeing a new climate finance goal for the coming years. With demands running into trillions of dollars, a tough fight over the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) is expected at COP29 as wealthy countries try to push some of the responsibility onto new donors, including richer developing countries and the private sector.
Sandra Guzmán, founder and general coordinator of the Climate Finance Group for Latin America and the Caribbean (GFLAC), told a Climate Home News webinar on climate finance prospects at COP29 that the new goal is fundamental to enable higher ambition in the NDCs – and without it countries will struggle to implement their transition plans.
(Reporting by Vivian Chime; editing by Joe Lo and Megan Rowling)
The post In numbers: The state of the climate in 2024 appeared first on Climate Home News.
N.C. Gov. Josh Stein wants state lawmakers to rethink tax breaks for data centers. The industry’s opacity makes it difficult to evaluate costs and benefits.
Tax breaks for data centers in North Carolina keep as much as $57 million each year into from state and local government coffers, state figures show, an amount that could balloon to billions of dollars if all the proposed projects are built.
The Global Environment Facility (GEF), a multilateral fund that provides climate and nature finance to developing countries, has raised $3.9 billion from donor governments in its last pledging session ahead of a key fundraising deadline at the end of May.
The amount, which is meant to cover the fund’s activities for the next four years (July 2026-June 2030), falls significantly short of the previous four-year cycle for which the GEF managed to raise $5.3bn from governments. Since then, military and other political priorities have squeezed rich nations’ budgets for climate and development aid.
The facility said in a statement that it expects more pledges ahead of the final replenishment package, which is set for approval at the next GEF Council meeting from May 31 to June 3.
Claude Gascon, interim CEO of the GEF, said that “donor countries have risen to the challenge and made bold commitments towards a more positive future for the planet”. He added that the pledges send a message that “the world is not giving up on nature even in a time of competing priorities”.
-
UK imports of “green” jet fuel linked to Amazon deforestation
A Texas refinery shipping sustainable aviation fuel to Europe has sourced beef tallow with links to a meatpacking firm fined over illegal cattle purchases -
Italy pushes coal exit back after gas prices rise
Analysts say the move sends a negative signal, but its impact will be limited given coal’s marginal role in Italy’s energy mix
Donors under pressure
But Brian O’Donnell, director of the environmental non-profit Campaign for Nature, said the announcement shows “an alarming trend” of donor governments cutting public finance for climate and nature.
“Wealthy nations pledged to increase international nature finance, and yet we are seeing cuts and lower contributions. Investing in nature prevents extinctions and supports livelihoods, security, health, food, clean water and climate,” he said. “Failing to safeguard nature now will result in much larger costs later.”
At COP29 in Baku, developed countries pledged to mobilise $300bn a year in public climate finance by 2035, while at UN biodiversity talks they have also pledged to raise $30bn per year by 2030. Yet several wealthy governments have announced cuts to green finance to increase defense spending, among them most recently the UK.
As for the US, despite Trump’s cuts to international climate finance, Congress approved a $150 million increase in its contribution to the GEF after what was described as the organisation’s “refocus on non-climate priorities like biodiversity, plastics and ocean ecosystems, per US Treasury guidance”.
The facility will only reveal how much each country has pledged when its assembly of 186 member countries meets in early June. The last period’s largest donors were Germany ($575 million), Japan ($451 million), and the US ($425 million).
The GEF has also gone through a change in leadership halfway through its fundraising cycle. Last December, the GEF Council asked former CEO Carlos Manuel Rodriguez to step down effective immediately and appointed Gascon as interim CEO.
Santa Marta conference: fossil fuel transition in an unstable world
New guidelines
As part of the upcoming funding cycle, the GEF has approved a set of guidelines for spending the $3.9bn raised so far, which include allocating 35% of resources for least developed countries and small island states, as well as 20% of the money going to Indigenous people and communities.
Its programs will help countries shift five key systems – nature, food, urban, energy and health – from models that drive degradation to alternatives that protect the planet and support human well-being by integrating the value of nature into production and consumption systems.
The new priorities also include a target to allocate 25% of the GEF’s budget for mobilising private funds through blended finance. This aligns with efforts by wealthy countries to increase contributions from the private sector to international climate finance.
Niels Annen, Germany’s State Secretary for Economic Cooperation and Development, said in a statement that the country’s priorities are “very well reflected” in the GEF’s new spending guidelines, including on “innovative finance for nature and people, better cooperation with the private sector, and stable resources for the most vulnerable countries”.
Aliou Mustafa, of the GEF Indigenous Peoples Advisory Group (IPAG), also welcomed the announcement, adding that “the GEF is strengthening trust and meaningful partnerships with Indigenous Peoples and local communities” by placing them at the “centre of decision-making”.
The post GEF raises $3.9bn ahead of funding deadline, $1bn below previous budget appeared first on Climate Home News.
GEF raises $3.9bn ahead of funding deadline, $1bn below previous budget
Tropical cyclones that rapidly intensify when passing over marine heatwaves can become “supercharged”, increasing the likelihood of high economic losses, a new study finds.
Such storms also have higher rates of rainfall and higher maximum windspeeds, according to the research.
The study, published in Science Advances, looks at the economic damages caused by nearly 800 tropical cyclones that occurred around the world between 1981 and 2023.
It finds that rapidly intensifying tropical cyclones that pass near abnormally warm parts of the ocean produce nearly double – 93% – the economic damages as storms that do not, even when levels of coastal development are taken into account.
One researcher, who was not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that the new analysis is a “step forward in understanding how we can better refine our predictions of what might happen in the future” in an increasingly warm world.
As marine heatwaves are projected to become more frequent under future climate change, the authors say that the interactions between storms and these heatwaves “should be given greater consideration in future strategies for climate adaptation and climate preparedness”.
‘Rapid intensification’
Tropical cyclones are rapidly rotating storm systems that form over warm ocean waters, characterised by low pressure at their cores and sustained winds that can reach more than 120 kilometres per hour.
The term “tropical cyclones” encompasses hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons, which are named as such depending on which ocean basin they occur in.
When they make landfall, these storms can cause major damage. They accounted for six of the top 10 disasters between 1900 and 2024 in terms of economic loss, according to the insurance company Aon’s 2025 climate catastrophe insight report.
These economic losses are largely caused by high wind speeds, large amounts of rainfall and damaging storm surges.
Storms can become particularly dangerous through a process called “rapid intensification”.
Rapid intensification is when a storm strengthens considerably in a short period of time. It is defined as an increase in sustained wind speed of at least 30 knots (around 55 kilometres per hour) in a 24-hour period.
There are several factors that can lead to rapid intensification, including warm ocean temperatures, high humidity and low vertical “wind shear” – meaning that the wind speeds higher up in the atmosphere are very similar to the wind speeds near the surface.
Rapid intensification has become more common since the 1980s and is projected to become even more frequent in the future with continued warming. (Although there is uncertainty as to how climate change will impact the frequency of tropical cyclones, the increase in strength and intensification is more clear.)
Marine heatwaves are another type of extreme event that are becoming more frequent due to recent warming. Like their atmospheric counterparts, marine heatwaves are periods of abnormally high ocean temperatures.
Previous research has shown that these marine heatwaves can contribute to a cyclone undergoing rapid intensification. This is because the warm ocean water acts as a “fuel” for a storm, says Dr Hamed Moftakhari, an associate professor of civil engineering at the University of Alabama who was one of the authors of the new study. He explains:
“The entire strength of the tropical cyclone [depends on] how hot the [ocean] surface is. Marine heatwave means we have an abundance of hot water that is like a gas [petrol] station. As you move over that, it’s going to supercharge you.”
However, the authors say, there is no global assessment of how rapid intensification and marine heatwaves interact – or how they contribute to economic damages.
Using the International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship (IBTrACS) – a database of tropical cyclone paths and intensities – the researchers identify 1,600 storms that made landfall during the 1981-2023 period, out of a total of 3,464 events.
Of these 1,600 storms, they were able to match 789 individual, land-falling cyclones with economic loss data from the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) and other official sources.
Then, using the IBTrACS storm data and ocean-temperature data from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, the researchers classify each cyclone by whether or not it underwent rapid intensification and if it passed near a recent marine heatwave event before making landfall.
The researchers find that there is a “modest” rise in the number of marine heatwave-influenced tropical cyclones globally since 1981, but with significant regional variations. In particular, they say, there are “clear” upward trends in the north Atlantic Ocean, the north Indian Ocean and the northern hemisphere basin of the eastern Pacific Ocean.
‘Storm characteristics’
The researchers find substantial differences in the characteristics of tropical cyclones that experience rapid intensification and those that do not, as well as between rapidly intensifying storms that occur with marine heatwaves and those that occur without them.
For example, tropical cyclones that do not experience rapid intensification have, on average, maximum wind speeds of around 40 knots (74km/hr), whereas storms that rapidly intensify have an average maximum wind speed of nearly 80 knots (148km/hr).
Of the rapidly intensifying storms, those that are influenced by marine heatwaves maintain higher wind speeds during the days leading up to landfall.
Although the wind speeds are very similar between the two groups once the storms make landfall, the pre-landfall difference still has an impact on a storm’s destructiveness, says Dr Soheil Radfar, a hurricane-hazard modeller at Princeton University. Radfar, who is the lead author of the new study, tells Carbon Brief:
“Hurricane damage starts days before the landfall…Four or five days before a hurricane making landfall, we expect to have high wind speeds and, because of that high wind speed, we expect to have storm surges that impact coastal communities.”
They also find that rapidly intensifying storms have higher peak rainfall than non-rapidly intensifying storms, with marine heatwave-influenced, rapidly intensifying storms exhibiting the highest average rainfall at landfall.
The charts below show the mean sustained wind speed in knots (top) and the mean rainfall in millimetres per hour (bottom) for the tropical cyclones analysed in the study in the five days leading up to and two days following a storm making landfall.
The four lines show storms that: rapidly intensified with the influence of marine heatwaves (red); those that rapidly intensified without marine heatwaves (purple); those that experienced marine heatwaves, but did not rapidly intensify (orange); and those that neither rapidly intensified nor experienced a marine heatwave (blue).
Dr Daneeja Mawren, an ocean and climate consultant at the Mauritius-based Mascarene Environmental Consulting who was not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that the new study “helps clarify how marine heatwaves amplify storm characteristics”, such as stronger winds and heavier rainfall. She notes that this “has not been done on a global scale before”.
However, Mawren adds that other factors not considered in the analysis can “make a huge difference” in the rapid intensification of tropical cyclones, including subsurface marine heatwaves and eddies – circular, spinning ocean currents that can trap warm water.
Dr Jonathan Lin, an atmospheric scientist at Cornell University who was also not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that, while the intensification found by the study “makes physical sense”, it is inherently limited by the relatively small number of storms that occur. He adds:
“There’s not that many storms, to tease out the physical mechanisms and observational data. So being able to reproduce this kind of work in a physical model would be really important.”
Economic costs
Storm intensity is not the only factor that determines how destructive a given cyclone can be – the economic damages also depend strongly on the population density and the amount of infrastructure development where a storm hits. The study explains:
“A high storm surge in a sparsely populated area may cause less economic damage than a smaller surge in a densely populated, economically important region.”
To account for the differences in development, the researchers use a type of data called “built-up volume”, from the Global Human Settlement Layer. Built-up volume is a quantity derived from satellite data and other high-resolution imagery that combines measurements of building area and average building height in a given area. This can be used as a proxy for the level of development, the authors explain.
By comparing different cyclones that impacted areas with similar built-up volumes, the researchers can analyse how rapid intensification and marine heatwaves contribute to the overall economic damages of a storm.
They find that, even when controlling for levels of coastal development, storms that pass through a marine heatwave during their rapid intensification cause 93% higher economic damages than storms that do not.
They identify 71 marine heatwave-influenced storms that cause more than $1bn (inflation-adjusted across the dataset) in damages, compared to 45 storms that cause those levels of damage without the influence of marine heatwaves.
This quantification of the cyclones’ economic impact is one of the study’s most “important contributions”, says Mawren.
The authors also note that the continued development in coastal regions may increase the likelihood of tropical cyclone damages over time.
Towards forecasting
The study notes that the increased damages caused by marine heatwave-influenced tropical cyclones, along with the projected increases in marine heatwaves, means such storms “should be given greater consideration” in planning for future climate change.
For Radfar and Moftakhari, the new study emphasises the importance of understanding the interactions between extreme events, such as tropical cyclones and marine heatwaves.
Moftakhari notes that extreme events in the future are expected to become both more intense and more complex. This becomes a problem for climate resilience because “we basically design in the future based on what we’ve observed in the past”, he says. This may lead to underestimating potential hazards, he adds.
Mawren agrees, telling Carbon Brief that, in order to “fully capture the intensification potential”, future forecasts and risk assessments must account for marine heatwaves and other ocean phenomena, such as subsurface heat.
Lin adds that the actions needed to reduce storm damages “take on the order of decades to do right”. He tells Carbon Brief:
“All these [planning] decisions have to come by understanding the future uncertainty and so this research is a step forward in understanding how we can better refine our predictions of what might happen in the future.”
The post Marine heatwaves ‘nearly double’ the economic damage caused by tropical cyclones appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Marine heatwaves ‘nearly double’ the economic damage caused by tropical cyclones
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