The Guardian Climate Change

Months after devastating rains displaced 420,000 people in Rio Grande do Sul, an unusual consensus has formed around the need for a faster transition to renewables

Beside a narrow canal that runs through the outskirts of Porto Alegre in southern Brazil, a row of wooden houses with makeshift fences lean among piles of debris and power poles tangled in sagging wires. From the dirt road, Alexandra Marina Romero, 27, gazes at the aftermath of a disaster. “There used to be a church here,” she says. “Now it’s all gone.”

In May, a devastating flood ravaged her neighbourhood, leaving a trail of chaos and triggering a humanitarian crisis. “What we went through was horrific. The water took over everything,” says Romero, a supermarket assistant who migrated to Brazil from Venezuela in 2018.

Join us for all the latest developments from day 4 of the climate summit in Azerbaijan

Josh Gabbatiss, from Carbon Brief has published an update on social media about where negotiations at Cop29 have got to.

You may have seen talk of new texts about the climate finance negotiations doing the rounds.

These proposals have been produced by the co-chairs and circulated among negotiators and civil society observers, but for some reason they are not being published on the UNFCCC website.

Dutch appeal court ruled in favour of oil and gas company over judgment telling it to limit emissions

A court ruling in favour of Shell does not spell the end of climate litigation against companies, legal experts have said.

The oil and gas company celebrated on Tuesday when it won an appeal against a landmark climate judgment by a Dutch court.

Crops have failed in several countries, with 27m people at risk of hunger according to World Food Programme

Emmanuel Himoonga paced his dry field, picking up stalks of maize that had been bleached almost to bone white.

The 61-year-old chief of Shakumbila, a mainly agricultural community of about 7,000 people roughly 70 miles west of Zambia’s capital, Lusaka, had seen droughts before.

Analysis by Climate Action Tracker puts median temperature rise by 2100 at 2.7C if current policies continue

World leaders have promised to try to stop the planet heating by more than 1.5C (2.7F). But current policies put the temperature rise on track for 2.7C, a report has found.

The expected level of global heating by the end of the century has not changed since 2021, with “minimal progress” made this year, according to the Climate Action Tracker project. The consortium’s estimate has not shifted since the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow three years ago.

Study says funding to cope with climate breakdown needed five years earlier than expected

Poor countries need $1tn a year in climate finance by 2030, five years earlier than rich countries are likely to agree to at UN climate talks, a new study has found.

Waiting until 2035 to receive the funding, which is to help them cut greenhouse gas emissions and cope with extreme weather, would place damaging burdens on vulnerable countries, warned the Independent High-Level Expert Group on Climate Finance, a group of leading economists.

The climate crisis created the setting for Trump’s economy-first win and it’s the global south that will suffer most

Donald Trump’s election is a triumph for the politics of the doomsday bunker, which is bad news for the world’s environment.

This is the idea that in an age of climate disruption, nature extinction and ever wider social inequality, the best chance of survival for those who can afford it is to construct a personal shelter, where they can keep the desperate masses at bay. It is survival of the richest.

One expert says climate targets can seem abstract but matter because they serve as an ‘investment signal’ to cashed up investors

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The UK’s announcement of an 81% emissions cut below 1990 levels by 2035 shows the Australian government should set an ambitious climate target that will quickly drive investment and create clean industries, experts say.

The UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, was praised by campaigners and experts after confirming the pledge at the Cop29 UN climate summit in Azerbaijan, though they said it would need to be backed by clear plans. The UK is one of the first larger countries to announce a 2035 target before a UN deadline next February.

Exclusive: Mia Mottley, who has championed climate action, says she would seek common ground with US president-elect

Mia Mottley, the climate-championing prime minister of Barbados, has invited Donald Trump to a face-to-face meeting where she would seek “common ground” and persuade him that climate action was in his own interests.

“Let us find a common purpose in saving the planet and saving livelihoods,” she told the Guardian at the UN’s Cop29 climate summit in Azerbaijan. “We are human beings and we have the capacity to meet face-to-face, in spite of our differences. We want humanity to survive. And the evidence [of the climate crisis] we are seeing almost weekly now.”

Move adds to concerns about the stability of the Paris agreement after the election in the US of Donald Trump

Argentinian negotiators representing the government of the climate science denier Javier Milei have been ordered to withdraw from the Cop29 summit after only three days, adding to concerns about the stability of the Paris agreement.

More than 80 representatives from the South American country are in Baku, Azerbaijan, for two weeks of negotiations about climate finance for the energy transition. Argentina’s far-right leader has previously called the climate crisis a “socialist lie”, and during his election campaign last year he threatened to withdraw from the Paris agreement, though he has since backed down.

Royalties earned from The Golden Mole, published in the US this week as Vanishing Treasures, will be given towards counteracting ‘the election of a climate-change denier’

British author Katherine Rundell will give all the royalties from one of her books to climate charities in response to the re-election of Donald Trump.

The author of bestsellers for children and adults has said she will donate 100% of author royalties earned from sales of The Golden Mole, her 2022 book on endangered species, “in perpetuity”. The book was published in the US on Tuesday under the title Vanishing Treasures. So far she said she has donated more than £10,000, and hopes it could eventually be much more.

From olive oil to butter, extreme weather is pushing up the cost of living and having a dramatic political impact. Economists need a solution

In the US, where Donald Trump swept the board last week, it was the experience of sharply increasing essentials prices, from food to energy, that glued together the Republicans’ new electoral coalition. About 75% of those voting Republican reported that they had faced “hardship” or “severe hardship” as a result of price rises; only 25% of Democrats said the same. When Trump asked if Americans felt better now than they did four years ago, the answer for most was a clear no.

Price surges are having political impacts. In elections this year in three of the world’s largest economies, incumbent parties were hammered by voters angry about their helplessness in the face of the steeply rising cost of essentials.

James Meadway is the host of the podcast Macrodose

Global Carbon Budget report finds emissions from fossil fuels will rise to another record high this year

Giorgia Meloni, Prime Minister of Italy, is now speaking at the leaders’ event, reports my colleague Damian Carrington, having “arrived late and a little out of breath.”

Meloni points out that the world population will be 8.5bn by 2030 and global GDP much higher, all bringing more demand for energy. As well as renewables, she says “gas, biofuels, hydrogen and carbon capture and storage” all have a role, though scientists are clear all fossil fuels must be phased out.

She also cites nuclear fusion as a potential “gamechanger”, though the joke that fusion is always 40 years away is not showing much sign of getting old. Large scale power from nuclear fusion is very unlikely to arrive in time to stop the global heating aleady wrecking communities around the world.

Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has missed her slot at the leaders summit part of Cop29. Meloni and the UK’s Keir Starmer are the only G7 leaders to attend.

Meanwhile, the Crown Prince of Kuwait, Sabah Khaled Al-Hamad Al-Sabah, pledges to cut his nation’s carbon emissions by 80% by 2040, which sounds very impressive but is very unlikely to include the state’s substantial oil and gas production.

Despite nations’ pledges at Cop28 a year ago, the burning of coal, oil and gas continued to rise in 2024

There is “no sign” of the transition away from burning fossil fuels that was pledged by the world’s nations a year ago, with 2024 on track to set another new record for global carbon emissions.

The new data, released at the UN’s Cop29 climate conference in Azerbaijan, indicates that the planet-heating emissions from coal, oil and gas will rise by 0.8% in 2024. In stark contrast, emissions have to fall by 43% by 2030 for the world to have any chance of keeping to the 1.5C temperature target and limiting “increasingly dramatic” climate impacts on people around the globe.

During the US time out, Australia and its allies must remain steady and seek to deepen cooperation among themselves

The idea of open international exchange that framed the Australian reforms of the late 20th century and its subsequent economic success are being challenged in the 21st century. The challenge is intensified by the restoration of Donald Trump as president of the United States. He is committed to higher protection, tax cuts that will set record highs for budget deficits, a trade war with Australia’s largest trading partner with a risk of worse, and separation of the United States from the rules-based international trading system. He is also committed to withdrawal from international cooperation and domestic action to reduce climate-changing emissions of greenhouse gases. Global financial crisis is not out of the question.

These developments will damage Australian interests. Global long-term interest rates set a base against which Australian rates settle, and will be higher than they would otherwise have been. International inflation will be higher, increasing Australia’s own inflation challenge. Australia is the developed country that has most to lose from a failure to stop global heating. Australia has more to gain economically than any other country from success in the world achieving net zero carbon emissions, as an exporter of zero-carbon goods to countries which lack rich renewable energy and biomass resources of their own.

Meteorologists track disturbance in Caribbean Sea predicted to become storm named Sara

Florida is at risk of being hit by yet another major tropical storm only weeks after Hurricanes Helene and Milton devastated towns across the state.

Meteorologists are currently tracking a new disturbance predicted to evolve into a storm in the Caribbean Sea. The storm, to be named Sara, will form in the western Caribbean later this week and may make a turn towards south Florida as a powerful hurricane next week if wind patterns change, according to the Hurricane Tracker App.

António Guterres says global heating is super-charging disasters, and Cop hears warning of ‘inflation on steroids’

This year has been “a masterclass in human destruction”, the UN secretary general has said as he reflected on extreme weather and record temperatures around the world fuelled by climate breakdown.

António Guterres painted a stark portrait of the consequences of climate breakdown that had arisen in recent months. “Families running for their lives before the next hurricane strikes; workers and pilgrims collapsing in insufferable heat; floods tearing through communities and tearing down infrastructure; children going to bed hungry as droughts ravage crops,” he said. “All these disasters, and more, are being supercharged by human-made climate change.”

Sir Keir Starmer’s pledge on emissions is an encouraging step at a frightening moment

Predictions that this will be the first calendar year in which the 1.5C warming limit enshrined in the Paris agreement is surpassed provide a stark backdrop to the UN’s 29th climate conference. This year – 2024 – has already seen the hottest-ever day and month, and is expected by experts to be the hottest year too. Addressing delegates on Tuesday, the UN chief, António Guterres, referred to a “masterclass in climate destruction”. The escalating pattern of destructive weather events, most recently in Valencia, is a warning of what lies ahead.

When the 1.5C figure was included in the 2015 deal, it was known to be a stretch. The treaty says countries must hold the average temperature “well below 2C above pre-industrial levels” and aim for 1.5C. Busting this target in 2024 will not mean it has been definitively missed; the measurement of global temperatures relies on averages recorded over 20 or more years. But the crossing of this threshold is a menacing moment. Around the world, people as well as governments and climate specialists should take notice – and act.

This live blog is closed

Leadbeater introduces the next speaker, Nat Dye, who has terminal cancer. She says she thinks his views are the most important for people to hear at this press conference.

He says he has known “positive” experiences of death. His fiance and his mother both had relatively peaceful deaths. He says palliative care can work for some people.

Imagine I am dying and palliative care hasn’t improved. Well, I have no choice whatsoever: I die in pain or I die in pain.

I see this as a chance just to act with kindness and a choice for people at their darkest hour.