As announced, the new US president, Donald Trump, has signed on his first day in office an executive order for the United States to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. This is the second time Trump has withdrawn his country from the signatory states of the most important climate change agreement, as he did in 2020.
There are still no clear signs that global fossil carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions have peaked, according to the 2024 Global Carbon Budget. The report - which is published in the journal Earth System Science Data in preprint format and will be launched at COP29 in Baku - estimates that these emissions will grow by 0.8% this year compared to 2023, to 37.4 billion tonnes of CO2. If this rate continues, there is a 50% chance that global warming will exceed the 1.5°C limit in six years.
The largest carbon balance report shows that carbon dioxide emissions have not yet peaked and are projected to reach 37.4 billion tonnes by 2024. In a briefing organised by SMC Spain, Pep Canadell, one of the people in charge of the Global Carbon Budget 2024, analysed these data and what Donald Trump's return as US president means for climate action in the framework of COP29 in Baku.
Next Monday sees the start of COP29 in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, a summit marked by Donald Trump's victory as president of the United States on Tuesday. His denial of climate change and his commitment to fossil fuels during his previous term in office will weigh down a meeting from which no major agreements are expected and from which experts are calling for greater ambition.
Research published in Nature analyses future scenarios in which the 1.5°C temperature limit set in the Paris Agreement would be temporarily exceeded, assuming that temperatures could be lowered in the long term by reducing carbon dioxide emissions using different techniques. The authors stress that exceeding this threshold would have irreversible consequences for the Earth system in key areas such as biodiversity, sea level and carbon stocks. ‘Only rapid, short-term emission reductions are effective in reducing climate risks,’ they stress in the paper.
More frequent and severe wildfires increase the temperature of the exposed land surface one year after the fire, according to an analysis of forest satellite data collected from 2003 to 2016. In recent decades, large wildfires have doubled or tripled their average size in eastern Spain, Canada, and western United States, as noted in the research published in Nature. The authors call for consideration of these effects on surface temperature when managing forests.
Coastal cities around the world appear to be adapting slowly to the effects of climate change and are relying on past and present experiences rather than projections of future risks, according to a systematic review published in Nature Cities.
Abandoned farmlands in Europe could find new life through rewilding, a movement aimed at restoring devastated landscapes to their wild state before human intervention. A quarter of the European continent, 117 million hectares, is ready for rewilding, according to a study published today in the journal Current Biology.
August 2003 was the month of the heatwave that killed 70,000 people in Europe. In France, with 14,800 deaths, the Minister of Health resigned, and in Spain, with 6,500, the first prevention plan for the extreme heat was put in motion, which came into force in 2004. Two decades later, campaigns and preventive measures in social services, nursing homes, and hospitals have generated the so-called "heat culture," and although temperatures continue to rise due to climate change, this adaptation is limiting its impact.
Climate tipping points are thresholds at which elements of the Earth could reach a point of no return, accelerated by climate change and with consequences for the rest of the planet. These drastic changes could affect, for example, the Atlantic Meridional Circulation (AMOC), polar ice sheets or tropical rainforests. A study published in Science Advances concludes that there is too much uncertainty to extrapolate historical data and reliably estimate when these inflections will occur.