India, Vietnam and Argentina are among the roughly 70 nations that did not submit updated climate plans to the United Nations in 2025, despite the 2015 Paris Agreement’s requirement that countries do so every five years.
According to Climate Action Tracker, about three-fifths of countries have submitted their latest nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to the UN climate body. Most of them landed in late 2025 and outline targets and measures to cut planet-heating emissions and adapt to climate impacts through to 2035.
Those countries that have formally submitted new NDCs include all G20 nations except India and Argentina. The Trump administration, meanwhile, has indicated it will not deliver on the US’s Biden-era NDC as it pulls the world’s second-largest emitting country out of the Paris Agreement. Saudi Arabia submitted its NDC, which does not contain any firm emissions reduction targets, on December 31.
Many of the governments that have not submitted NDCs are low-emitting small or poorer nations, especially in Africa. But major economies that have not submitted an NDC – some of which also have energy transition deals with donors – include Egypt, the Philippines and Vietnam.
The United Nations tried to encourage on-time submission of this third round of NDCs by setting soft deadlines. Just 13 countries met a first February 10 deadline and around 60 of the 195 signatories to the Paris Agreement met a September deadline, allowing them to be included in a key UN synthesis report.
The UN’s Paris Agreement Compliance Committee – made up of climate negotiators from different governments – has expressed concern about governments not submitting NDCs, or doing so late, and asked them to explain themselves.
After talking to governments that missed the February deadline, it found a host of obstacles including insufficient financial support; technical challenges like a lack of data or problems coordinating across sectors and including different groups; and other issues like political instability or genocide.
India keeps world guessing
The Indian government has been tight-lipped on its NDC, although an unnamed official told the Indian Express back in February that it was in “no hurry”.
The official added that the NDC would reflect India’s disappointment at the new global climate finance goal for 2035, agreed at COP29 in 2024. India has repeatedly argued that without sufficient climate finance, developing countries cannot be as ambitious as they would like to be in reducing emissions.
Some media outlets and analysts were expecting India to announced its NDC at COP30 in November. Instead, the Indian government said only during the summit that it would submit an NDC “on time”, with environment minister Bhupender Yadav telling reporters it would be “by December”.
Argentina sets emissions caps but no NDC
The right-wing government of Argentina, which has considered leaving the Paris Agreement, unveiled caps on the country’s emissions for 2030 and 2035 in an online event on November 3, but has yet to formalise those targets in an NDC.
At the event and in subsequent communications with Climate Home News, Undersecretary of the Environment Fernando Brom said the country would present its NDC during the first week of COP30. But that did not happen, although Argentinian negotiators participated in the climate summit.
Some local experts have pointed to November’s trade deal with the US as one of the reasons for the delay in submitting the NDC, while others cited the government’s disinterest in the climate agenda.
In contrast, the governments of Egypt and Vietnam have faced less scrutiny and have not publicly commented on whether and when their NDCs will be released.
In August, the Vietnamese government said it was “actively advancing the update” of its NDC. The country has a Just Energy Transition partnership with rich nations, but the International Energy Agency predicts coal use will continue to grow there until at least 2030, driven by power-hungry manufacturing.
The Philippines government has organised consultation events on its new NDC but has not said when it will be released.
This article originally said that Saudi Arabia had not submitted its NDC in 2025. Climate Home News later learned that the Saudi NDC was submitted to the UN climate body on December 31 by email but not published on the UNFCCC website until the start of 2026. The article has been amended to reflect this information.
The post India, Vietnam and Argentina fail to submit climate plans in 2025 appeared first on Climate Home News.
India, Vietnam and Argentina fail to submit climate plans in 2025
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Drought and heatwaves occurring together – known as “compound” events – have “surged” across the world since the early 2000s, a new study shows.
Compound drought and heat events (CDHEs) can have devastating effects, creating the ideal conditions for intense wildfires, such as Australia’s “Black Summer” of 2019-20 where bushfires burned 24m hectares and killed 33 people.
The research, published in Science Advances, finds that the increase in CDHEs is predominantly being driven by events that start with a heatwave.
The global area affected by such “heatwave-led” compound events has more than doubled between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, the study says.
The rapid increase in these events over the last 23 years cannot be explained solely by global warming, the authors note.
Since the late 1990s, feedbacks between the land and the atmosphere have become stronger, making heatwaves more likely to trigger drought conditions, they explain.
One of the study authors tells Carbon Brief that societies must pay greater attention to compound events, which can “cause severe impacts on ecosystems, agriculture and society”.
Compound events
CDHEs are extreme weather events where drought and heatwave conditions occur simultaneously – or shortly after each other – in the same region.
These events are often triggered by large-scale weather patterns, such as “blocking” highs, which can produce “prolonged” hot and dry conditions, according to the study.
Prof Sang-Wook Yeh is one of the study authors and a professor at the Ewha Womans University in South Korea. He tells Carbon Brief:
“When heatwaves and droughts occur together, the two hazards reinforce each other through land-atmosphere interactions. This amplifies surface heating and soil moisture deficits, making compound events more intense and damaging than single hazards.”
CDHEs can begin with either a heatwave or a drought.
The sequence of these extremes is important, the study says, as they have different drivers and impacts.
For example, in a CDHE where the heatwave was the precursor, increased direct sunshine causes more moisture loss from soils and plants, leading to a drought.
Conversely, in an event where the drought was the precursor, the lack of soil moisture means that less of the sun’s energy goes into evaporation and more goes into warming the Earth’s surface. This produces favourable conditions for heatwaves.
The study shows that the majority of CDHEs globally start out as a drought.
In recent years, there has been increasing focus on these events due to the devastating impact they have on agriculture, ecosystems and public health.
In Russia in the summer of 2010, a compound drought-heatwave event – and the associated wildfires – caused the death of nearly 55,000 people, the study notes.
The record-breaking Pacific north-west “heat dome” in 2021 triggered extreme drought conditions that caused “significant declines” in wheat yields, as well as in barley, canola and fruit production in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada, says the study.
Increasing events
To assess how CDHEs are changing, the researchers use daily reanalysis data to identify droughts and heatwaves events. (Reanalysis data combines past observations with climate models to create a historical climate record.) Then, using an algorithm, they analyse how these events overlap in both time and space.
The study covers the period from 1980 to 2023 and the world’s land surface, excluding polar regions where CDHEs are rare.
The research finds that the area of land affected by CDHEs has “increased substantially” since the early 2000s.
Heatwave-led events have been the main contributor to this increase, the study says, with their spatial extent rising 110% between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, compared to a 59% increase for drought-led events.
The map below shows the global distribution of CDHEs over 1980-2023. The charts show the percentage of the land surface affected by a heatwave-led CDHE (red) or a drought-led CDHE (yellow) in a given year (left) and relative increase in each CDHE type (right).
The study finds that CDHEs have occurred most frequently in northern South America, the southern US, eastern Europe, central Africa and south Asia.
Threshold passed
The authors explain that the increase in heatwave-led CDHEs is related to rising global temperatures, but that this does not tell the whole story.
In the earlier 22-year period of 1980-2001, the study finds that the spatial extent of heatwave-led CDHEs rises by 1.6% per 1C of global temperature rise. For the more-recent period of 2022-23, this increases “nearly eightfold” to 13.1%.
The change suggests that the rapid increase in the heatwave-led CDHEs occurred after the global average temperature “surpasse[d] a certain temperature threshold”, the paper says.
This threshold is an absolute global average temperature of 14.3C, the authors estimate (based on an 11-year average), which the world passed around the year 2000.
Investigating the recent surge in heatwave-leading CDHEs further, the researchers find a “regime shift” in land-atmosphere dynamics “toward a persistently intensified state after the late 1990s”.
In other words, the way that drier soils drive higher surface temperatures, and vice versa, is becoming stronger, resulting in more heatwave-led compound events.
Daily data
The research has some advantages over other previous studies, Yeh says. For instance, the new work uses daily estimations of CDHEs, compared to monthly data used in past research. This is “important for capturing the detailed occurrence” of these events, says Yeh.
He adds that another advantage of their study is that it distinguishes the sequence of droughts and heatwaves, which allows them to “better understand the differences” in the characteristics of CDHEs.
Dr Meryem Tanarhte is a climate scientist at the University Hassan II in Morocco, and Dr Ruth Cerezo Mota is a climatologist and a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Both scientists, who were not involved in the study, agree that the daily estimations give a clearer picture of how CDHEs are changing.
Cerezo-Mota adds that another major contribution of the study is its global focus. She tells Carbon Brief that in some regions, such as Mexico and Africa, there is a lack of studies on CDHEs:
“Not because the events do not occur, but perhaps because [these regions] do not have all the data or the expertise to do so.”
However, she notes that the reanalysis data used by the study does have limitations with how it represents rainfall in some parts of the world.
Compound impacts
The study notes that if CDHEs continue to intensify – particularly events where heatwaves are the precursors – they could drive declining crop productivity, increased wildfire frequency and severe public health crises.
These impacts could be “much more rapid and severe as global warming continues”, Yeh tells Carbon Brief.
Tanarhte notes that these events can be forecasted up to 10 days ahead in many regions. Furthermore, she says, the strongest impacts can be prevented “through preparedness and adaptation”, including through “water management for agriculture, heatwave mitigation measures and wildfire mitigation”.
The study recommends reassessing current risk management strategies for these compound events. It also suggests incorporating the sequences of drought and heatwaves into compound event analysis frameworks “to enhance climate risk management”.
Cerezo-Mota says that it is clear that the world needs to be prepared for the increased occurrence of these events. She tells Carbon Brief:
“These [risk assessments and strategies] need to be carried out at the local level to understand the complexities of each region.”
The post Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes appeared first on Carbon Brief.
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