Keeping global warming to less than 2C above pre-industrial temperatures is “crucial” for limiting damage to the Antarctic Peninsula’s unique ecosystems, according to a new study.
The paper, published in Frontiers in Environmental Science, reviews the latest literature on the impacts of warming on Antarctica’s most biodiverse region.
The Antarctic Peninsula is home to many types of penguins, whales and seals, as well as the continent’s only two flowering plant species.
The study also analyses previously published data and model output to create a fuller picture of the potential futures facing the peninsula under different levels of global warming.
Under a low-emissions scenario that keeps global temperature rise to less than 2C, the Antarctic Peninsula will still face 2.28C of warming by the end of the century, the study says, while higher-emissions futures could push the region’s warming above 5C.
Limiting warming to 2C would avoid the more dramatic impacts associated with higher emissions, such as ice-shelf collapse, increasingly frequent extreme weather events and extinction of some of the peninsula’s native species, according to the paper.
However, warming of 4C would result in “dramatic and irreversible” damages, it adds.
Importantly, the paper shows that the outlook for the peninsula is “dependent on the choices we make now and in the near future”, a researcher not involved in the study tells Carbon Brief.
‘Alternative futures’
The Antarctic Peninsula juts northwards from West Antarctica, stretching towards the tip of South America.
The region is made up of the main peninsula, which spans around 232,000 square kilometres (km2) and a series of islands and archipelagos that cover another 80,000km2. The mainland peninsula is nearly entirely covered in ice, while its islands – many of which are further north – are around 92% covered.
Taken as a whole, the Antarctic Peninsula is the most biodiverse region of the icy continent, and a “beautiful, pristine environment”, says Prof Bethan Davies, a glaciologist at Newcastle University, who led the new work.
It hosts many species of penguins and whales, as well as apex predators, such as orcas and leopard seals. Each spring, more than 100m birds nest there to rear their young. It is also home to hundreds of species of moss and lichens, along with the only two flowering plant species on the continent.
The peninsula is also the part of Antarctica that is undergoing the most significant changes due to climate change, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) sixth assessment report.
In 2019, a group of researchers published a study on the fate of the Antarctic Peninsula at 1.5C of global warming above pre-industrial temperatures. However, it has since “become apparent” that keeping warming below this limit is no longer in reach, Davies says.
The team selected three warming scenarios for their study:
- a low-emissions scenario, SSP1-2.6
- a high-emissions scenario characterised by growing nationalism, SSP3-7.0
- a very-high-emissions scenario, SSP5-8.5
SSP1-2.6 represents the “new goal” of keeping warming less than 2C, Davies says.
SSP3-7.0 and SSP5-8.5 represent “alternative futures” – with the former being one that “felt quite relevant” to the current state of the world and the latter being “useful to consider as a high end”, she adds.
For each potential future, the researchers conducted a literature review to assess the changes to different parts of the peninsula’s physical and biological systems. To fill gaps in the published literature, the team also reanalysed existing datasets and results from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 6 (CMIP6) group of models developed for the IPCC’s latest assessment cycle.
Dr Sammie Buzzard, a glaciologist at the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling, tells Carbon Brief:
“By choosing three different emissions scenarios, they’ve shown just how much variability there is in the possible future of the Antarctica Peninsula that is dependent on the choices we make now and in the near future.”
Buzzard, who was not involved in the new study, adds that it “highlights the consequences of this [change] for the glaciers, sea ice and unique wildlife habitats in this region”.
Physical changes
The Antarctic Peninsula is already experiencing climate change, with one record showing sustained warming over nearly a century. The peninsula is also warming more rapidly than the global average.
For the new study, Davies and her team assess the changes in temperature for the decade 2090-99 across 19 CMIP6 models.
They find that under the low-emissions scenario, the Antarctic Peninsula is projected to warm by 2.28C compared to pre-industrial temperatures, or about 0.55C above its current level of warming. Under the high- and very-high-emissions scenarios, the peninsula will reach temperatures of 5.22C and 6.10C above pre-industrial levels, respectively.
They also analyse output from 12 sea ice models.
In each scenario, they find that the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula experiences the largest declines in sea ice concentration during the winter months of June, July and August. For the southern hemisphere’s summertime, it is the eastern side of the peninsula that shows the largest decreases.
The maps below show the projected change in sea-ice concentration around the Antarctic Peninsula for each season (left to right) under low (top), high (middle) and very high (bottom) emissions. Decreasing concentrations are shown in blue and increasing concentrations are shown in red.
The paper gives a “great overview of the current literature on the Antarctic Peninsula, examining multiple aspects of the region holistically”, Dr Tri Datta, a climate scientist at the Delft University of Technology, tells Carbon Brief.
However, Datta – who was not involved in the study – notes that the coarse resolution of CMIP6 models means that the “most vulnerable regions are too poorly represented to capture important feedbacks”, such as the forming of meltwater ponds on the tops of glaciers, which warm much more than the icy surface around them.
Ecosystem impacts
The study also looks at potential futures for the Antarctic Peninsula’s marine and terrestrial ecosystems – albeit, much more briefly than it examines the physical changes.
This is because modelling ecosystem change is very difficult, Davies explains:
“If you’re going to model an ecosystem, you have to model the climate and the ocean and the ice and how that changes. Exactly how that ecosystem responds to those changes is still beyond most of our Earth system models.”
Still, by looking at trends in the Antarctic over the past several decades, as well as changes that have occurred in other high-latitude regions, the researchers piece together some of the potential impacts of warming.
They conclude that under SSP1, the changes experienced by ecosystems are “uncertain”, but will “likely” be similar to present day – with some terrestrial species, such as its flowering plants, even benefitting from increased habitat area and water availability.
However, under higher-emissions scenarios, species will become “increasingly likely” to experience warmer temperatures than they are suited for.
Other changes that may occur in the very-high-emissions scenario are closely linked to the projected reductions in sea ice. These include the increased spread of invasive alien species, reduced ranges for krill and the displacement of animals unable to tolerate the warmer temperatures by those more able to adapt.
Prof Scott Doney, an oceanographer and biogeochemist at the University of Virginia, notes that some of these changes are already happening. Doney, who was not involved in the study, is part of an ongoing research programme on the Antarctic Peninsula known as the Palmer Long-Term Ecological Research project.
He tells Carbon Brief that Adélie penguins, which are a polar species, have “seen a massive drop in their breeding population” at their research sites. Meanwhile, gentoo penguins – whose range extends into the subpolar regions – “have been quite opportunistic” in colonising those breeding sites.
‘Changes here first’
Antarctica is home to 50 year-round research stations and dozens of summer-only ones, operated by more than 30 countries.
Around a dozen year-round stations are found on the peninsula and its islands, including the oldest permanent settlement in Antarctica – Argentina’s Base Orcadas, established in 1903 by the Scottish national Antarctic expedition.
The continent is home to commercially important fisheries – particularly krill, which also play a critical role in the Antarctic marine food chain.
Increasingly, the Antarctic Peninsula is also a tourist destination.
Climate change poses a threat to all of these activities, Davies says.
For example, much of the research infrastructure on the Antarctic Peninsula was “built to assume dry, snowy conditions”, she says. Rain can “cause quite a lot of difficulty”, she adds.
(In an article published last year, Carbon Brief looked at the causes of rain in sub-zero temperatures in West Antarctica.)
Decreased sea ice cover can impact krill populations. It can also lead to increased ship traffic, as more of the continent becomes accessible throughout more of the year.
Furthermore, Davies says, the changes occurring on the peninsula will reverberate across Antarctica and around the world. She tells Carbon Brief:
“We’ll see changes here first and those changes will continue to be felt in West Antarctica and continent-wide…What happens in Antarctica doesn’t stay in Antarctica.”
The post Limiting warming to 2C is ‘crucial’ to protect pristine Antarctic Peninsula appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Limiting warming to 2C is ‘crucial’ to protect pristine Antarctic Peninsula
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