newsletters
Climate change in 2025: An era of record heat and rising disasters
Summary
While the year's first major climate disaster playes out in California, and the world reaches heat levels, what can we look forward to in climate action in 2025?
Dear reader,
Hello and welcome to the first edition of 2025 of Climate Change And You. It’s been two months since Sayantan and I started the newsletter, and it has been a busy time in terms of climate news. 2024 did not cover itself in glory when it comes to meaningful climate action. Meanwhile, the global climate became more perilous and unpredictable.
As of writing this newsletter, the first big climate disaster is unfolding in California. The Los Angeles wildfires have burnt tens of thousands of acres of forests and neighbourhoods, in the Pacific Palisades and the famous coast of Malibu. The city of LA is itself threatened, as well as famous landmarks like the Hollywood Hills.
A combination of the hottest summer in California’s history, a dry rainy season and a record high Santa Ana winds have caused a crisis of historic proportions. This is a classic case of what climate scientists call a “compound climate disaster", where multiple climate change impacts combine to create a mega disaster.
In light of such persistent and increasing global disasters, what do we have to look forward to in 2025? One thing that’s for certain is that this will be an important year for climate politics, which will in turn affect international climate diplomacy and, ultimately, climate action.
Also Read How global warming smashed all safety barriers in 2024
The first big event in climate politics will be climate change denier Donald Trump assuming the US presidency on 20 January. His policy decisions—which will almost certainly adversely impact US emission mitigation measures—will shape how other developed countries will approach climate action this year. And given the rapid progress that China is making on renewable energy (RE), governments around the world may end up looking to them for cues.
The second major political signalling will come from the annual international climate summit—COP30, which will be held in November—in Belém, Brazil. After a couple of anticlimactic summits, this one has the scope to move the needle because, as a G20 nation, Brazil will want the summit to be a resounding political success. The fact that it will be taking place in the Amazon delta will also ensure that environment and fragile habitats will be more in focus this year.
State Of The Climate
In the previous newsletter, Sayantan did an excellent job of highlighting the threat posed by the climate crisis to India’s crop yields. His analysis showed how inflated agricultural prices due to climate shocks can persist for years. And as such shocks become more common, how crop productivity will get affected more and average food inflation will rise.
On the macroeconomic front, a recent study found that in 2022, India lost 8% of its GDP to climate impacts, while the Asian Development Bank’s (ADB) Asia-Pacific Climate Report 2024 warns that 24.7% of India’s GDP could by lost by 2070 (the year that India plans to reach net zero carbon emissions), due to climate change.
The report also highlights the future losses to India’s agriculture: wheat yields could see a decline of 45% and maize yields 20%. This is in keeping with other studies that show how the world’s bread baskets are at risk of a dramatic downturn in productivity.
However, the ADB report also notices some green shoots, especially when it comes to India and not least in the fact that our fiscal subsidies to fossil fuel are on a downward trajectory (from $23 billion in 2013 to $3.5 billion in 2023), while renewable energy subsidies are (slowly) rising.
The News In Brief
-For a more detailed look at the threats to India’s economy from climate change, read this comprehensive feature by my colleague Puja Das.
-A country’s carbon policy should go hand-in-hand with ambitious green targets from its biggest corporates. So, what are the climate targets of India’s Nifty50 firms? Read this excellent story by my colleague Nehal Chaliawala to find out.
-The UK recently announced an ambitious policy prescription to decarbonize its economy by 2030. Called the Clean Power 2030 Action Plan, it seeks to address three key goals: achieving energy security, spurring new growth industries, and reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Read about it here.
Climate Change Tracker
2024’s losses and damages
Throughout December and January, we see the release of “state of the year" reports that collate the latest data on a variety of climate-related issues for the year gone by. And although the biggest of these, the World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO’s) State of the Global Climate 2024 will be out only in March, we did get an update on exactly how hot 2024 was.
The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) confirmed on 10 January that 2024 indeed was the hottest year ever recorded, with the average global temperature exceeding 1.6 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times. This amount of warming exceeded even the 1.5 degree safety limit. Moreover, 2015-2024 was the hottest decade on record, with planet-heating CO2 emissions also reaching a record high: 442ppm (parts per million), 2.9ppm higher than 2023.
The India Meteorological Department (IMD) has already gone on record to state that it was India’s hottest year since records began in 1901.
Meanwhile, some interesting studies on 2024 are already out. One of these is from the UK-based charity Christian Aid, titled Counting the Cost 2024: A Year of Climate Breakdown. It is a ranking of the ten most costly natural disasters that were caused by climate change last year, based on available information of insurance payouts. The top 10 disasters resulted in $229 billion in damages, while claiming the lives of 2,000 people.
Also Read The climate future: We're entering a world of falling GDP and overheated seas
That’s a staggering figure by any metric, and yet probably much less than the actual financial cost of such disasters through the year. As Christian Aid has itself pointed out, the true cost will be much higher because most people are uninsured, especially in developing nations.
World Weather Attribution (WWA), a collaboration of climate science academics from around the world, is an important resource that evaluates data to determine to what extent an extreme weather event is caused by climate change. Its annual survey—titled When Risks Become Reality:Extreme Weather In 2024—found that 219 separate events from around the world were caused due to climate change. Of these, the report studies the 26 major ones, and finds that they caused the deaths of at least 3,700 people, while displacing millions.
“In 2024, the average person experienced 41 additional days of dangerous heat added by climate change," states the report. On just one day, 21 July, 5.3 billion people around the world experienced dangerous heat that they otherwise might not have, but for the climate crisis. As far as individual nations go, WWA found that South Asian countries experienced additional days of dangerous heat ranging from 18 days (India), 42 days (Bangladesh and Nepal), 13 days (Pakistan), 56 days (Bhutan) and 77 days (Sri Lanka).
In a separate report, the UK’s national weather and climate service, the Met Office, has predicted 2025 to be the third hottest year on record, after 2024 and 2023.
Know Your Jargon
NDC
The NDC or Nationally Determined Contribution is a crucial component of the 2015 Paris Agreement, that governs the extent to which a member-country of the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) needs to take action domestically to end their energy reliance on fossil fuels like oil, coal and gas. The sum total of the NDCs submitted by all the countries (or ‘parties’ to the agreement), determines to what extent the world will heat up in the future.
This is an entirely voluntary effort, but all parties—especially the ones that emit the highest amount of GHGs—are expected to raise the ambitions of their NDCs every five years, so that the world can meet the long-term goal of restraining global warming to a rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial (1850-1900) levels by 2100.
Also Read Under pressure: How climate change is impacting Indian cities
The current set of NDCs submitted by member nations in 2020 has been widely criticized for falling woefully short of the target, as it would lead to catastrophic warming of at least 2.9 degrees Celsius by 2100. In 2025, nations will submit new NDCs with 2035 target dates that will, hopefully, show more ambition.
While NDCs are a set of policy pledges, in the real world they are a deeply political act. Issues of climate justice, loss and damage, equity and climate finance are woven into the process of submitting fresh NDCs. With the US under Donald Trump likely to withdraw from the Paris Agreement (again!), the stage will be set for fireworks by the time COP30 rolls around in November.
Prime Number
6
The world has a carbon budget. This is the amount of fossil fuels that countries can burn while still keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100. And this budget runs out in about 6 years.
According to the Global Carbon Project (GCP), an organisation comprising independent scientists, at current emission levels, the world has a 50% chance of reaching 1.5 degrees of warming on a permanent basis in six years (the world is currently about 1.3 degrees Celsius hotter than pre-industrial times).
And while the carbon budget for 1.7 degrees Celsius of warming and that for 2 degrees of warming run out in 14 and 27 years respectively, this should not be a source of complacency. After all, every fraction of excess heating will make the global climate more unstable, and trigger climate tipping points (like a die-off of the Amazon rainforest) that would be impossible to come back from.
Book Of The Month
When developing and poor nations call for climate justice at international summits, it is based on the fact that the world’s richest nations prospered (while heating up the planet) over the past 200 years at the expense of the Global South. They did so by extracting natural resources and impoverishing nations through colonial conquests. Amitav Ghosh’s powerful 2021 non-fiction book The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis documents this in forensic detail. It is essential reading to understand why these same rich countries are today refusing to pay climate finance to countries like India.
So that’s it for this edition of Climate Change And You, dear reader. See you again in a fortnight, when Sayantan will be writing the newsletter.
Also Read Climate Change and You: Food Price Shocks
