The 30th United Nations climate conference (COP30) has begun. The UNFCCC COP30 kicked off yesterday in Belém, Brazil. World leaders began gathering ahead of the conference on Thursday, November 6th, for the two-day world summit of world leaders that accompanies every COP. This year, the meeting took place a few days before COP30 began, rather than (as has been normal for the last few COPs) during the first two days of proceedings. Maybe this will leave more time and space at COP30 itself for negotiators to dig into business without the distraction of their boss’s bosses being in town. The leaders of China, the US, and India — the “planet’s three biggest polluters” — are “notably absent” from the two-day leaders’ summit. In fact, there will be no high-level U.S. officials at COP30, but the US may still try to shape negotiations from afar.
Onlookers have critiqued the accessibility of this conference due to COP30’s limited badges and high logistical costs. These barriers priced out many activists from countries at the forefront of the climate crisis, whose presence adds pressure to nations to take concrete, just action.
In late October, the UNFCCC published its 2025 Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) Synthesis Report. Based on the submissions of only 64 parties (countries that signed the Paris Agreement), it’s difficult to draw conclusions. What is clear is that ambitions and goals are not yet big enough. Nor are parties working fast enough to close the gap between the existing projected 2.6°C of heating this century, and the 1.5°C goal which the UN Secretary General recently warned is slipping from our grasp. The initial deadline for submitting 2025 Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to the UNFCCC was February 10, 2025, but most countries missed it, with a cut-off date in September 2025 set by the Secretariat for inclusion in this synthesis report, and most remaining submissions are expected during COP30.
Brazil’s President, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, has called for COP30 to be the “COP of Truth.” He has promised to put a stop to deforestation in Brazil by the end of the decade. He’s been successful so far; Brazil’s emissions fell nearly 17 percent last year, the biggest dip in 15 years, as his government cracked down on illegal deforestation. But the “Amazon COP” is also being overshadowed by Brazil’s decision in October to greenlight exploratory oil drilling at the mouth of the Amazon River. COP30 is expected to heavily focus on two central issues: deforestation and financing climate action.
Brazil has launched an initiative called the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF). The TFFF aims to raise $125 billion, invest it in bonds, and use the returns to pay countries and communities for preserving existing standing forests. The World Bank has agreed to host the TFFF. Indigenous communities and climate justice advocates have criticized the fund, saying that it commodifies the forests rather than protects them, and gives control of preserving forests to global financial actors and the World Bank — institutions dominated by the Global North, and is dependent on the bond investments turning a profit. It could potentially divert funding from existing mitigation, adaptation, and loss and damage funds. Financing climate initiatives is the other central issue expected at COP30. Financing that actually addresses the enormity of the climate crisis has been an ongoing and growing tension between the Global North — countries that have historically benefited from the carbon economy and are most responsible for the climate crisis — and the Global South — those least responsible but most impacted.
Others are calling COP30 the “Implementation COP”, in part because it has been 10 years since the Paris Agreement, which set a goal to limit greenhouse-gas emissions to 1.5 °C. Over those 10 years, the rules and mechanisms have been negotiated, and this year is a pivotal year for countries to actually follow through on their commitments. The Brazilian COP Presidency has declared there will not be a so-called cover decision — the main decision text that telecasts the conference’s political outcomes — this year.
Delegates representing the parties will be addressing the need to measure adaptation goals and will attempt to whittle down and codify a list of “indicators” that started with more than 10,000 different options.
Climate Justice advocates agree that this COP must be different. Given that we’ve passed that temperature limit agreed upon in the Paris Agreement, it will be critical that negotiating parties take action to:
- Phase out fossil fuels – committing to a full, fast, fair, and funded plan to stop producing and using fossil fuels like coal, gas, and oil.
- Protect civic space – elevating the voice of activists, human rights and land defenders in the push for climate action, protecting them from the intimidation, harassment and criminalization they too often experience.
- Massively scale up non-debt-creating climate finance from high-income polluting countries – enabling lower-income countries to phase out fossil fuels and to protect their populations from the inevitable harms climate change is already causing.
The post Your Preview of Negotiations: Nov. 10 appeared first on Climate Generation.
American farmers are drowning in health insurance costs, while their German counterparts never worry about medical bills. The difference may help determine which country’s small farms are better prepared for a changing climate.
Samantha Kemnah looked out the foggy window of her home in New Berlin, New York, at the 150-acre dairy farm she and her husband, Chris, bought last year. This winter, an unprecedented cold front brought snowstorms and ice to the region.
On the Farm, the Hidden Climate Cost of the Broken U.S. Health Care System
Climate Change
A Little-Used Maneuver Could Mean More Drilling and Mining in Southern Utah’s Redrock Country
Two Utah Congress members have introduced a resolution that could end protections for Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Conservation groups worry similar maneuvers on other federal lands will follow.
Lawmakers from Utah have commandeered an obscure law to unravel protections for the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, potentially delivering on a Trump administration goal of undoing protections for public conservation lands across the country.
A Little-Used Maneuver Could Mean More Drilling and Mining in Southern Utah’s Redrock Country
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
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