This weekly round-up brings you key climate news from the past seven days, including an attribution study linking climate change to central Europe’s deadly floods and California’s latest lawsuit against Big Oil.
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1. ‘Heaviest Rain Ever’ That Triggered Deadly Floods in Central Europe Made Twice As Likely By Climate Change, Study Finds
The exceptionally heavy downpours that triggered deadly floods in Central Europe earlier this month, affecting two million people, was made at least twice as likely by human-made climate change, a new attribution report has revealed.
Storm Boris unleashed unprecedented rains throughout the region, causing rivers and reservoirs to swell to alarming levels. All affected countries – Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and northern Italy – experienced flooding and power cuts. Tens of thousands were evacuated and at least 24 were killed.
The four-day downpours were made at least twice as likely and 7% heavier due to human-made climate change, World Weather Attribution (WWA), an academic collaboration studying extreme event attribution, said on Wednesday. The group’s rapid attribution study revealed that the amount of rain that fell between September 12-16 was the heaviest ever recorded across Central Europe, and covered an area even greater than previous historical floods recorded in 1997 and 2002.
WWA warned that the continuous burning of fossil fuels will further increase the likelihood and intensity of devastating storms. In a 2C-warmer world, an event like Storm Boris would be 5% more intense and 50% more frequent, the 24 researchers involved in the study warned.
Read more here.
2. California Sues ExxonMobil Over ‘Decades-Long’ Deceiving Plastic Recyclability Campaign
Filed by the state’s Attorney General Rob Bonta in the San Francisco County Superior Court, the first-of-its-kind lawsuit seeks to hold the American multinational accountable for its active contribution to plastic pollution, one of the biggest environmental threats of our lifetime.
“For decades, ExxonMobil has been deceiving the public to convince us that plastic recycling could solve the plastic waste and pollution crisis when they clearly knew this wasn’t possible,” Bonta said in a statement issued on Monday.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) accuses ExxonMobil, one of the world’s largest petrochemical companies, of deceiving Californians for five decades about the real environmental impact of its plastic products. Through “misleading public statements” and “slick marketing,” the company allegedly tricked consumers into thinking that all of its products are recyclable, despite knowing that this option is neither technically nor economically viable for “the vast majority” of its products.
Read more here.
3. COP29 Host Azerbaijan’s Climate Action ‘Critically Insufficient’ to Meet Paris Goal, Assessment Reveals
Azerbaijan, the country selected to host the year’s most important climate summit, is “moving backward” on climate action, an assessment of its climate policies revealed.
Conducted by Climate Action Tracker (CAT), an independent scientific project monitoring governments emissions reduction plans, the analysis concluded that the country’s policies and targets are “far from consistent” with the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to “well below” 2C by the end of the century.
To avoid overshooting the Paris goal completely, the world would need to reduce emissions by 43% compared with levels in 2019. And yet, according to CAT, Azerbaijan’s greenhouse gas emissions are set to rise by 20% to 2030.
In its latest Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) submission, the country pledged to achieve a 40% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century compared to 1990 levels. However, it dropped a 2030 target that was included in its predecessor.
“Overall, we rate Azerbaijan’s climate action as ‘Critically insufficient’,” the assessment concluded. “Along with setting a more stringent climate target, Azerbaijan needs to significantly increase the ambition of its climate policies to reverse the present rapid growth in emissions and set its emissions on a firm downward trajectory.”
Read more here.
4. World Leaders Commit to ‘Inclusive, Networked Multilateralism’ As They Adopt UN Pact For Future
The United Nations General Assembly on Sunday adopted a blueprint to bring the world’s increasingly divided nations together to tackle the challenges of the 21st century.
The 42-page “Pact for the Future” covers a broad range of themes, including peace and security, sustainable development, climate change, digital cooperation, human rights, gender, youth and future generations, and the transformation of global governance. It also includes two annexes: a Global Digital Compact and a Declaration on Future Generations.
“We are here to bring multilateralism back from the brink,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres as he thanked world leaders and diplomats for unlocking “the door” to a better future. “Now it is our common destiny to walk through it. That demands not just agreement, but action.”
Among the 56 actions and commitments that countries pledged to achieve are some addressing the climate crisis, such as accelerating efforts to meet obligations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Paris Agreement. The signatories also reaffirmed the COP28 deal – which calls on nations to “transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner to achieve net-zero by 2050” and to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030 – and their commitment to the conservation targets set in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.
Read more here.
5. Earth in ‘Critical Condition’ As Six of Nine Planetary Boundaries Breached
According to the assessment, the first yearly scheduled report on the wellbeing of Earth systems, six boundaries have already been transgressed: climate change, biosphere integrity, land system change, freshwater change, biogeochemical flows, and the introduction of novel entities. Only three boundaries – atmospheric aerosol loading, stratospheric ozone depletion, and ocean acidification – remain within the safe operating space, though the latter is also quickly approaching the threshold.
“For the first time Patient Earth goes through a full Health Check. The verdict is clear – the patient is in critical condition,” Rockström said in a post on X (formerly known as Twitter).
First published in 2009, the planetary boundaries framework defines and quantifies the limits within which human activities can safely operate without causing irreversible environmental changes. It does so by identifying several critical Earth system processes and defining thresholds – or boundaries – that should not be exceeded to maintain a stable, sustainable, and habitable planet. Transgressing them heightens risks of breaching critical tipping points that would bring about irreversible shifts to the planet, threatening humanity and life as we know it.
Read more here.
