English farmers received tens of millions of pounds more in flood-relief funding in 2024 than in any year over the past decade, following intense rainfall last winter.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) recently paid £57.5m from the farming recovery fund to farmers who were hit by extreme rain and floods between October 2023 and March 2024.
This is 75 times more than the amount paid out the last time the fund opened to applicants, which was £768k in 2020, according to figures released to Carbon Brief.
It is also more than six times higher than all of the payments dispersed between 2015 and 2020, which totalled £9.4m.
Between October 2022 and March 2024, England experienced its wettest 18-month period since records began in 1836, according to Met Office data
In 2024, the country had its second-worst harvest in four decades for key crops such as wheat, barley and oats, according to the thinktank the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU).
Rachel Hallos, the vice chair of the National Farmers’ Union, welcomes the “long-awaited” payments for last winter’s flooding, but tells Carbon Brief that farmers now face “further devastation in the midst of a new storm season”.
The fund is a “sticking plaster to a much wider problem” facing agriculture, says Alice Groom, the head of sustainable land use policy at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.
Record-breaking rain
The farming recovery fund provides one-off emergency payments to farmers impacted by flooding in England. It opened for the first time in 2014 and has re-opened four times since: in 2015, 2019, 2020 and 2024.
The money is intended to help cover the cost of actions to restore flooded land that are not already covered by insurance, such as soil remediation and removing debris.
The fund opened in April this year for farmers hit by last year’s winter flooding.
In October 2023, Storm Babet damaged crops and left “entire fields…submerged in water” across the UK, reported the Guardian. In January 2024, Storm Henk flooded thousands of acres of crops and farmland.
Up to September 2024, £2.2m had been paid out under the fund, according to figures released to Carbon Brief via an Environmental Information Regulations request. This was followed by £57.5m in November, Defra said in a press release.
Carbon Brief received figures showing the total annual payments under the fund since 2015, outlined in the table below. The amount for 2024 is the combined total figures from the request and Defra’s press release.
| 2015 | 2019 | 2020 | 2024 |
| £8,002,300 | £636,271 | £767,628 | £59,662,885 |
October 2023 to March 2024 was the wettest winter half-year period in England since records began in 1836, the Environment Agency said.
Climate change made this record rainfall in the UK and Ireland about 10 times more likely to occur, according to a rapid attribution study.
The extent and significance of extreme weather impacts on farms during this time led to the increased budget for the farming recovery fund in 2024, Defra says.
The fund ran into controversy earlier this year after thousands of farmers waited months to receive their payments.
Extreme weather over the past couple of years has “time and time again render[ed] farmland completely saturated and unusable”, says Rachel Hallos, the vice president of the National Farmers’ Union (NFU). She tells Carbon Brief:
“While it’s welcome news that over £57 million in long-awaited farming recovery fund payments has been paid out to farmers, many of our members are only now receiving this support for events that happened over a year ago.
“Yet here we are, facing further devastation in the midst of a new storm season. We also still have members badly affected by the storms last winter who are unsure why they are not eligible for support.”
Fund breakdown
Between 2015 and 2020, around £9.4m was paid out under the farming recovery fund.
The fund opened for the first time in February 2014 with a £10m budget allocation. This year did not fall into the scope of Carbon Brief’s figures, but Farmers’ Weekly reported at the time that less than £530,000 had been paid out by May 2014.
The fund re-opened in December 2015 to help farmers hit by Storm Desmond, which flooded swathes of the UK and Ireland, bringing heavy rainfall and intense winds.
In England, the north of the country was worst affected. The fund was available for flood-hit farmers in Cumbria, Lancashire and Northumberland who had suffered “uninsurable losses” to apply for grants of £500-£20,000.
Just over £8m was paid out under the fund that year, the figures show. Farmers in east Cumbria received the biggest portion (£2.8m), followed by west Cumbria (£1.9m) and north Yorkshire (£1.4m).
The fund re-opened in September 2019 to help farmers affected by summer flooding. Hundreds of homes were evacuated in Lincolnshire after severe flooding in June. Flash floods hit other parts of the country throughout the year, including North Yorkshire in July.
The fund was available for farmers in parts of North Yorkshire and Lincolnshire to apply for grants worth £500-£25,000. This was extended to cover flood-hit farmers in more parts of the country in November.
In 2019, just over £636,000 was awarded to farmers. North Yorkshire received the biggest chunk of funding – around £270,000.
The fund opened again in June 2020 for farmers impacted by floods in February that year. At this stage, Defra said £10m had been allocated for farmers hit by floods in 2019-20.
However, according to the figures released to Carbon Brief, just under £768,000 was spent in 2020. This means that from 2019-20, around £1.4m was paid out – significantly below the total budget.
Defra confirms that 250 farmers were paid out through the fund in 2019-20. The department says the disparity between fund allocation and payouts was due to the budget being set before assessing the extent of the impacts from the weather extremes.
No money was given out under the fund from 2016-2018 and 2021-2023, the Environmental Information Regulations response shows.
The fund lay dormant until April 2024, when it re-opened for farmers hit by winter flooding, including storms Henk and Babet. The fund was then expanded further in May and the then-Conservative government allocated £50m towards the fund – significantly more than payouts in previous years. (The new Labour government increased this again to £60m.)
The payments under the fund – previously set between £500-£25,000 – also rose to £2,895-£25,000, depending on the size of land and the amount affected by floods.
The figures show that almost £2.2m was paid out to farmers between January and September this year. A Defra statement said that more than 12,700 payments, worth £57.5m, were sent to farmers in November. As a result, the combined 2024 total was at least £59.7m – just below the £60m budget.
Defra did not comment directly on the figures when contacted by Carbon Brief, but pointed to a November press release. In this, the farming minister Daniel Zeichner says the farming recovery fund payouts, along with Labour’s farming budget, “demonstrates this government’s steadfast commitment to farmers”.
Future of farming
Extreme weather last winter “created havoc for farmers, making it much harder to establish and manage crops”, says ECIU land, food and farming analyst Tom Lancaster. He tells Carbon Brief:
“It’s right that [the] government should support farmers to rebuild from these impacts, but this strategy will quickly become unaffordable as the impacts of climate change take hold.”
Heavy rainfall and other weather extremes occur more frequently and more intensely as a result of climate change, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Earlier this year, Carbon Brief analysis found that the average UK winter has become around 1C warmer and 15% wetter in the past century. Four of the top 10 rainiest winters in recorded history have occurred in the 21st century.
More widely, farmer “confidence” has taken a hit, according to NFU surveys. The Guardian reports that income for almost every type of farm fell in England last year.
More than 10,000 farmers also protested against inheritance tax changes in London in November. Demonstrators gathered again on 11 December, with hundreds of tractors blocking central London streets.
Extreme weather continues to have a “significant effect” on UK food production, especially arable crops, fruits and vegetables, according to Defra’s food security report published this week.
Alice Groom, the head of sustainable land-use policy at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, says the farming recovery fund is a “sticking plaster to a much wider problem”. She tells Carbon Brief:
“As we see the effects of the climate crisis undeniably worsen, farmers need support in equal measure to farm in a climate and nature friendly way to boost their businesses’ resilience.
“We, therefore, need ambitious packages of support for farmers from [the] government that go beyond managing the effects of climate change and instead build climate resilience and nature into the very core of our farming systems for the benefit of us all.”
Earlier this week, the RSPB was among dozens of NGOs and campaigners who wrote to Defra secretary Steve Reed urging him to “act quickly” on reforming farm subsidies and tackling “supply-chain injustices”.
Hallos, the NFU’s vice president, tells Carbon Brief:
“These increasingly frequent extreme weather events demonstrate that we cannot keep getting stuck in this reactive cycle – we simply must invest in our water management systems.
“The farming recovery fund is one part, but we need [the] government to invest in a long-term plan for how we protect our towns and countryside from what is becoming more regular, and expensive, flooding events.”
Lancaster from the ECIU tells Carbon Brief that a “better approach” to supporting farmers is building “resilience to these extreme events, an area where the government’s new green farming schemes will be vital”.
The post Revealed: English farmers received record-high flood relief after last winter’s extreme rain appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Revealed: English farmers received record-high flood relief after last winter’s extreme rain
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