Five climate change stories to keep an eye on this year
This year will be one of the hottest ever. It’ll probably feature horrendous extreme weather, crop failures and a further crackdown on climate activism.
But it’s also a year in which we may see huge progress on renewable energy, a global agreement on plastic pollution, and the next set of global emissions targets.
This week’s Imagine newsletter is an overview of a few climate-related events and trends to look out for in the coming year.
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An ICJ ruling on climate change
Sometime in the next few months, the international court of justice (ICJ) will issue a major ruling on “the obligations of states in respect of climate change”. The court is based in the Netherlands and is the UN’s main judicial body. It may rule that states are obliged to take full stewardship of the environment for both present and future generations.
“This would go beyond global climate change agreements,” points out Claudia Ituarte-Lima, a human rights and climate law expert at Lund University.
“The problem currently is that certain state actions (and inactions) may be considered sufficient under the UN’s Paris agreement, but that does not mean those states are complying with their duties to tackle climate change under international human rights law. Climate change and ecosystem degradation can, of course, violate a wide range of human rights. If the ICJ were to legally clarify that states do have climate obligations that go beyond the Paris agreement, that would represent a significant step forward in international law.”
Read more: On climate change, the international court of justice faces a pivotal choice
(Even) more expensive food
We might not see the massive price spikes of 2022 and 2023, but climate change will continue to make food more costly to produce. About a third of recent UK food inflation is estimated to come from climate impacts, for instance.
Jessica Boxall and Michael Head of the University of Southampton point out that, among other factors, “Higher temperatures can cause long-established and predictable farming seasons to shift and so may hinder crop production.”
“The drivers of food inflation,” they write, “are already worsening food insecurity.”
Read more: Food prices will climb everywhere as temperatures rise due to climate change – new research
Laurie Laybourn and James Dyke of the University of Exeter see food prices as a key part of a “doom loop” of escalating climate impacts and political instability often driven by inflation.
“This is a vicious circle,” they write. “Climate change is making geopolitics less stable, which harms climate action. This will worsen climate change, meaning more geopolitical instability, and so on. The risk is that this "doom loop” runs faster and faster and ultimately derails our ability to phase out fossil fuels fast enough to avoid the worst climate consequences.“
Read more: A 'doom loop' of climate change and geopolitical instability is beginning
Climate action to continue – despite Trump
The re-election of Donald Trump certainly isn’t good news for climate action. But there are good reasons to think some progress will continue anyway.
In a piece looking at why Trump can’t derail global climate action researchers from UNSW Sydney point out that the global transition to clean energy is a "historic megatrend” that won’t be changed by a single US president.
Clean energy momentum is likely to continue in the US, they say, as “much of the Biden-era spending on clean energy industries went to Republican states and Congressional districts”.
They also point out that the US still wants to beat China, which “currently dominates global production of electric vehicles, batteries, wind turbines and solar panels”. That means “internal pressure in the US to counter China’s manufacturing might will continue”.
Read more: 10 reasons why US president-elect Donald Trump can’t derail global climate action
A climate summit in the ‘gateway to the Amazon’
The Brazilian city of Belém will host this year’s UN climate summit, Cop30, in November. It will be the tenth summit since the Paris agreement was signed in 2014 (the pandemic meant we missed a year) and it’s expected to be a particularly important meeting, as countries lock in their next set of pledges to reduce emissions.
Belém is capital of the state of Pará, which stretches from the coast hundreds of miles into the heart of the Amazon basin. As such, the city is often called the gateway to the Amazon.
Eloisa Beling Loose and Claudia Herte de Moraes, both professors of communication in Brazil, say the location of the summit exposes competing narratives for Brazil and the Amazon:
“While the region is seen as part of the solution to the crisis (due to the possibility of carbon capture and biodiversity preservation), the exploitation of its resources and the marginalization of its populations are evident.”
They talk about the challenges of making the capital of Pará a place of “climate defence”. After all, they write, “the discourse of progress combined with deforestation remains strong in this region”.
The third hottest year ever?
Last year was the hottest year on record, probably the hottest for about 130,000 years. This year is expected to be slightly cooler, but still hotter than every single other year in human history aside from 2023 and 2024.
Writing when temperatures peaked in summer 2024, Christopher Merchant, a climate scientist at the University of Reading, pointed out that “global warming doesn’t happen in a smooth progression. Like UK house prices, the general trend is up, but there are ups and downs along the way.”
One of the drivers of those “ups” is El Niño, a weather phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean which tends to increase global temperatures. 2023 and 2024 were both El Niño years, but that phase has now ended.
Merchant says: “El Niño acts a bit like a ratchet on global warming. A big El Niño event breaks new records and establishes a new, higher norm for global temperatures. That new normal reflects the underlying global warming trend.”
“A plausible scenario is that global temperatures will fluctuate near the 1.4°C level for several years, until the next big El Niño event pushes the world above 1.5°C of warming, perhaps in the early 2030s.”
Read more: Earth has just ended a 13-month streak of record heat – here's what to expect next