Cop29: ‘We’re here for life and death reasons,’ says ex-climate minister of Pakistan

Sherry Rehman said the negotiations so far had delivered ‘more talk than action’. Photograph: Peter Dejong/AP

 Sherry Rehman says rich nations should pay ‘internationally determined contributions’ to help poorer and worst-affected countries

Amid the endless politicking and inscrutable arguments at the UN climate negotiations in Baku, Azerbaijan, this month, it can be hard to remember what is at stake. That’s why Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s former climate change minister, is calling on global leaders to “keep an eye on the big picture”.

“We’re here for life and death reasons,” Rehman said.

In August 2022, devastating flash floods submerged one-third of Rehman’s country, affecting 33 million people. Roads, crops and infrastructure were washed away, and damage to water systems forced millions of people to rely on contaminated water from ponds and wells.

The key goal for Cop29 negotiators is to set an expanded goal for climate finance, something Rehman said Pakistan desperately required. The country needs to build resilient homes – a kind of investment, she noted, that had a net benefit of $4 for each $1 invested.

 

In addition, she said, Pakistan needs capacity and technical assistance to help manage its decarbonisation and adaptation plans. And though a solar boom is already under way in the country, it is overburdening consumers, so officials need funding to help speed up the energy transition, she said.

As Pakistan faces a future of increasing climate vulnerability, countries have failed to transition away from the burning of fossil fuels despite having made a pledge a year ago, and global carbon emissions are continuing to rise.

So Rehman is calling for a new UN climate framework. In addition to “nationally determined contributions” wherein individual countries track their climate action targets, she says the UN should require “internationally determined contributions” from wealthy nations to align with the climate plans of the developing and most-affected countries.

She said UN climate negotiations were the main way countries such as Pakistan could advocate for their needs to be met. That meant they had no choice but to come to the table.

“We’re one of the most climate-vulnerable countries in the world,” she said. “So we can’t walk away.”

Still, she harbours frustration about the negotiations, which in her estimation have delivered “more talk than action”. On finance, there is a yawning gap between what countries need and what the global north is willing to put up.

Poor countries will need $1tn a year in climate finance by 2030, experts said last week. That is five years earlier than rich countries are likely to agree to at UN climate negotiations. Meeting the target is likely to be even more difficult owing to the re-election of Donald Trump in the US, who has vowed to pull the US from the Paris climate agreement and drop commitments to cut carbon emissions.

“There will be a huge impact, a blow to the negotiations, if [the world’s] biggest economy goes out and says it’s taking its money and going elsewhere and it’s taking its expertise and its commitment and its values elsewhere,” Rehman said.

At Cop29, rich nations have argued that the private sector should have an increased role in fulfilling climate finance targets. But that could be dangerous for countries such as Pakistan, especially when it comes to funding for climate adaptation, which does not tend to produce desirable profits, Rehman said.

 

“Why would the private sector that revolves around markets and profits rush to the frontlines of climate catastrophe where only humanitarian agencies go?” she asked. “The private sector can be incentivised and certainly used to mobilise capital, yes, but capital and finance mobilisation has to happen at the international public sector as well.”

Finance should also be provided in grants, not loans, said Rehman, to avoid increasing countries’ debt burdens. “Countries are drowning, both in floods and debt,” she said.

Negotiators should ensure that finance is easily accessible. At present, because Pakistan doesn’t meet the definition of a “least developed country”, it is unable to access some crucial funds. And when funding is available, it can take two years to access.

“The barriers are too many,” Rehman said. “By the time it often comes to you, it’s too late: the needs on the ground have changed.”

A long history of climate inaction means that developing countries are increasingly facing irreversible impacts, known as loss and damage. Two years ago at Cop27 in Egypt, Rehman was a lead negotiator on this controversial issue, helping secure a groundbreaking commitment to set up a dedicated fund for loss and damage. But two years on, pledges from developed countries amount to a tiny fraction of what is needed. Rehman said the pressure must stay on donor countries to deliver the finance needed.

“We used to say what went on in Pakistan will not stay in Pakistan,” she said. “What’s happening to us will happen to you tomorrow, so, think collectively.”

Nuclear Power Was Once Shunned at Climate Talks. Now, It’s a Rising Star. Growing worldwide energy demand and other factors have shifted the calculus, but hurdles still lie ahead.

 

 

Cooling towers at the shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Middletown, Pa., last month. One reactor will be brought back online in 2028.Credit...Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA, via Shutterstock

 

 

By Brad Plumer

Reporting from the COP29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan

 

 For years at global climate summits, nuclear energy was seen by many as part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Sama Bilbao y Leon has been attending the annual United Nations climate change talks since 1999, when she was a student of nuclear engineering. And for most of that time, she said, people didn’t want to discuss nuclear power at all.

“We had antinuclear groups saying, ‘What are you doing here? Leave!’” she said.

These days, it’s a very different story.

At last year’s climate conference in the United Arab Emirates, 22 countries pledged, for the first time, to triple the world’s use of nuclear power by midcentury to help curb global warming. At this year’s summit in Azerbaijan, six more countries signed the pledge.

 

“It’s a whole different dynamic today,” said Dr. Bilbao y Leon, who now leads the World Nuclear Association, an industry trade group. “A lot more people are open to talking about nuclear power as a solution.”

The list of countries pledging to build new nuclear reactors, which can generate electricity without emitting any planet-warming greenhouse gases, includes longtime users of the technology like Canada, France, South Korea and the United States. But it also includes countries that don’t currently have any nuclear capacity, like Kenya, Mongolia and Nigeria.

Over the past few years, interest in nuclear power has steadily grown in tandem with concern about global warming. That shift is apparent at these U.N. climate talks, known as COP29. Along with the chants by vegan activists and the solar power booths that have enlivened past summits, countries like Turkey and Britain are now hosting panels on how to finance new nuclear plants or how small reactors could generate the heat needed for all kinds of industrial purposes.

Nuclear energy still has plenty of detractors, including environmentalists who point to the technology’s high costs and radioactive waste. Yet many politicians at this year’s climate talks seem eager to give it a second look.

“It gives me hope that nuclear energy is more and more popular around the world,” Prime Minister Petr Fiala of the Czech Republic said in an address to other leaders this week. “I strongly believe that nuclear power is essential to meet climate goals.”

 

The interest has been driven by several factors. In Britain and the United States, politicians and businesses who want to phase out fossil fuels say they need a steady source of carbon-free electricity to complement solar and wind power, which aren’t available at all hours. In Eastern Europe, many countries have been seeking alternatives to Russian gas.

Elsewhere, some developing countries see nuclear power as crucial for cleaning up air pollution while meeting rising energy demand.

Turkey is ramping up its use of renewable power and improving energy efficiency, but “it’s not enough,” said Abdullah Bugrahan Karaveli, president of the country’s energy and nuclear agency. The country’s electricity use is growing at around 4 percent per year, he said, and “we cannot do it without nuclear in our long-term plan.”

While Turkey doesn’t have any working nuclear power plants today, construction is underway on the country’s first plant along the southern coast and officials are in talks with Russia, China and South Korea to build a second and third plant.

 Yet the obstacles are enormous. Over the past two decades, the amount of electricity generated by nuclear plants worldwide has largely flatlined. Many countries have been deterred by the delays and soaring costs that often plague efforts to build new reactors. Others, like Germany and Japan, have shut down reactors because of public opposition and a fear of accidents.

 

The Neckarwestheim 2 nuclear power plant in southwestern Germany, which was shut down in April 2023.Credit...Michael Probst/Associated Press

 

 

Critics have called the pledge to triple nuclear capacity “meaningless,” doubting that it could ever be done affordably or safely.

“We need to be practical and work on real issues,” said Shinichi Kihara, a senior official at Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. “In particular, nuclear projects often face uncertainty about future cost overruns.”

The Biden administration has been particularly active in promoting nuclear power at the talks. On Tuesday, the White House put out a detailed road map for how the country could triple its nuclear capacity by 2050.

Later in the week, the administration signed a letter of intent to provide a loan of roughly $979 million to a project in Poland that would build three large new nuclear reactors designed by Westinghouse, an American company.

 

Jake Levine, the senior director for climate and energy at the White House, said that the United States was interested in expanding the use of nuclear power in Eastern Europe to help countries avoid dependency on Russian gas.

Nuclear power, he said, provides “a clear energy security value for many of our partners and allies.” And while President Biden will leave office in January, Mr. Levine said that efforts to promote U.S. nuclear technology overseas had “strong bipartisan support” in Congress.

One U.S. ally in Eastern Europe, Romania, already gets one-fifth of its electricity from two large reactors. The country is now in talks with Western nations about reviving two other reactors that were partly built at the same site but never completed.

At the same time, an Oregon-based start-up called NuScale plans to build six smaller reactors in Romania, backed by a U.S. government loan. Some experts think a new generation of smaller reactors might be easier to finance than traditional large reactors, though the technology is still unproven.

 

One hurdle for Romania: Many of the country’s nuclear workers have left for the United Arab Emirates, which recently built an enormous nuclear power plant and can pay higher salaries.

“Still, there is clear momentum for nuclear power,” said Andrei Covatariu, a senior research associate at the Energy Policy Group, a Romanian think tank. “It’s not a topic that will just go away.”

Dr. Bilbao y Leon said that financing was still a major challenge for nuclear projects. The World Bank, for instance, has not bankrolled a nuclear project since 1959. But pressure is growing.

“It’s one thing if I tell the World Bank they should support nuclear,” she said. “But if there are dozens of countries, including emerging nations, saying we’re interested in this, that’s a little different.”

Outside the closed negotiating rooms in Baku, where diplomats and experts were trying to hash out a deal on providing climate aid to developing countries, there were demonstrations for and against nuclear power this week.

 

On Thursday, a group of several dozen protesters held signs with slogans like “Don’t Nuke the Climate” and “Stop Nuclear.”

“Nuclear is not clean energy if you take into account all the mineral production and the pollution that it sometimes causes,” said Ivonne Yanez, the president of Acción Ecológica, an environmental nonprofit group based in Ecuador. “We have to stop nuclear.”

Elsewhere in the venue, a group of young nuclear professionals called Nuclear for Climate held a rally of their own. Two of them dressed up as polar bears and danced while holding up an atom symbol as others handed out bananas to a curious crowd.

 

A demonstration in support of nuclear energy at the conference venue in Baku on Friday.Credit...Douglas Alteen/The New York Times

 

 

A banana contains the same amount of radiation as a person would get from living next to a properly maintained nuclear power plant for one year, one said.

The group has been around since the 2015 climate summit, where the Paris Agreement was signed. “Initially we were very tiny,” said Hugo Bernat, 27, a nuclear engineer based in Brussels. “But the movement is growing.”

 David Gelles contributed reporting.

 

Exxon Chief to Trump: Don’t Withdraw From Paris Climate Deal. Darren Woods was one of only a few Western oil executives attending a global climate conference in Baku, Azerbaijan.

 

 

Darren Woods, the chief executive of Exxon Mobil, said if President-elect Donald J. Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, that would “leave a void with respect to what the Trump administration could bring to this process.”Credit...Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg

 

 

By Rebecca F. Elliott

 

Darren Woods, the chief executive of Exxon Mobil, cautioned President-elect Donald J. Trump on Tuesday against withdrawing from the Paris agreement to curb climate-warming emissions, saying Mr. Trump risked leaving a void at the negotiating table.

Mr. Woods, speaking at an annual U.N. climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, described climate negotiations as opportunities for Mr. Trump to pursue common-sense policymaking.

“We need a global system for managing global emissions,” Mr. Woods said in an interview with The New York Times in Baku. “Trump and his administrations have talked about coming back into government and bringing common sense back into government. I think he could take the same approach in this space.”

Mr. Woods, who also attended last year’s climate talks in Dubai, urged government officials to create incentives for companies to transition to cleaner forms of energy in a profitable way.

“The government role is extremely important and one that they haven’t been successfully fulfilling, quite frankly,” he said, noting that his company was obligated to generate profits for its shareholders.

Mr. Woods’s presence in a stadium teeming with diplomats is all the more noteworthy because of who is not here in Azerbaijan, a petrostate on the Caspian Sea that was once part of the Soviet Union. Many heads of state, including President Biden, have taken a pass, as have the leaders of several big oil companies like Shell and Chevron.

Hanging over this year’s negotiations is the election of Mr. Trump, who has falsely called global warming a hoax, encouraged oil companies to “drill, baby, drill” and vowed to withdraw from the Paris climate treaty — again.

Mr. Woods’s views on Paris are not new. Exxon also asked Mr. Trump not to withdraw from the treaty in 2017.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, Karoline Leavitt, said that he would pursue policies he campaigned on. “The American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin, giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail,” she said in a statement. “He will deliver.”

The Wall Street Journal first reported that Mr. Woods was again seeking to dissuade Mr. Trump from withdrawing from the Paris agreement.

Earlier Tuesday, during a taping of a Bloomberg podcast, Mr. Woods sought to ease concerns about the effect Mr. Trump might have on efforts to address climate change.

“I’m not sure that any one administration is going to significantly advance the pace of the transition or conversely significantly slow the pace,” Mr. Woods said, calling the energy transition “a long-term investment.”

The Exxon chief also called for global standards to account for carbon dioxide emissions, a system that would serve as the basis for governments to set regulatory standards.

In that interview, hosted by the Atlantic Council, a research organization, Mr. Woods praised the Inflation Reduction Act — a law Mr. Trump has criticized — for encouraging companies to invest in cleaner forms of energy without directing them to pursue specific technologies.

Exxon is pursuing technologies that are similar to drilling and processing oil and gas. Those include harvesting lithium from briny water and using natural gas to make hydrogen.

Exxon is poised to spend around $3 billion this year on projects that provide alternatives to fossil fuels or reduce emissions, the Swiss bank UBS estimates. That amounts to about 11 percent of the company’s planned capital outlay for the year, a smaller share than many large oil companies expect to spend, according to the bank.

Exxon’s spending on projects related to the energy transition is poised to rise in the coming years, totaling more than $20 billion from 2022 through 2027.

Oil and gas companies’ participation in annual U.N. climate talks rankles some environmentalists who worry that they will press negotiators to preserve too big a role for fossil fuels in the energy industry.

For years, Exxon’s executives expressed doubt about whether greenhouse gas emissions were causing temperatures to rise, even though the company’s scientists accurately predicted how much burning fossil fuels would warm the climate.

Mr. Woods has defended the company, saying Exxon’s position has evolved with the scientific consensus. He has acknowledged the relationship between emissions from humanity’s use of fossil fuels and climate change. On Tuesday, he said that Exxon brought an important view to climate discussions.

“Some people can sit around and talk about it,” Mr. Woods said. “There are other people who are actually involved in doing it, and I think the perspective changes.”

The company has backed the Paris climate accord’s goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels and committed to reducing its own emissions to net zero by 2050.

That goal does not include the greenhouse gases that are released when people burn Exxon’s fuels. The company also expects demand for oil and gas to remain stronger than most scientists believe is consistent with meeting the Paris target.

U.S. demand for oil and gas is likely to rise if Mr. Trump succeeds in spurring economic growth, Mr. Woods said. If consumption patterns shift, Exxon is prepared to pivot.

“Our strategy is robust to any number of future scenarios,” he said.

Rebecca F. Elliott covers energy with a focus on how the industry is changing in the push to curb climate-warming emissions. More about Rebecca F. Elliott

Extreme weather cost $2tn globally over past decade, report finds. US suffered greatest economic losses, report commissioned by International Chamber of Commerce finds, followed by China and India.

 

A man cleans debris inside a gas station in Lakewood Park, Florida, in the aftermath of Hurricane Milton. Photograph: Giorgio Viera/AFP/Getty Images

 

Violent weather cost the world $2tn over the past decade, a report has found, as diplomats descend on the Cop29 climate summit for a tense fight over finance.

The analysis of 4,000 climate-related extreme weather events, from flash floods that wash away homes in an instant to slow-burning droughts that ruin farms over years, found economic damages hit $451bn across the past two years alone.

The figures reflect the full cost of extreme weather rather than the share scientists can attribute to climate breakdown. They come as world leaders argue over how much rich countries should pay to help poor countries clean up their economies, adapt to a hotter world and deal with the damage done by increasingly violent weather.

“The data from the past decade shows definitively that climate change is not a future problem,” said John Denton, secretary-general of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), which commissioned the report. “Major productivity losses from extreme weather events are being felt in the here and now by the real economy.”

The report found a gradual upward trend in the cost of extreme weather events between 2014 and 2023, with a spike in 2017 when an active hurricane season battered North America. The US suffered the greatest economic losses over the 10-year period, at $935bn, followed by China at $268bn and India at $112bn. Germany, Australia, France and Brazil all made the top 10.

When measured a person, small islands such as Saint Martin and the Bahamas saw the greatest losses.

Fire, water, wind and heat have wiped more and more dollars off government balance sheets as the world has grown richer, people have settled in disaster-prone regions, and fossil fuel pollution has baked the planet.

But until recent years, scientists struggled to estimate the extent of the role that humans played by warping extreme weather events with planet-heating gas.

Climate breakdown was responsible for more than half of the 68,000 heat deaths during the scorching European summer of 2022, a study found last month, and doubled the chance of the extreme levels of rainfall that hammered central Europe this September, an early attribution study found. In some other cases, researchers found only mild effects or did not observe a climate link at all.

Ilan Noy, a disaster economist at Victoria University of Wellington, who was not involved in the ICC study, said its numbers align with previous research he had done but cautioned that the underlying data did not capture the full picture. “The main caveat is that these numbers actually miss the impact where it truly matters, in poor communities and in vulnerable countries.”

A study Noy co-wrote last year estimated the costs of extreme weather attributable to climate breakdown at $143bn a year, mostly due to loss of human life, but was limited by data gaps, particularly in Africa.

 

Por que o nível do mar está subindo cada vez mais rápido? Aumento vem causando o desaparecimento de praias e a destruição de casas principalmente durante tempestades

 

Água invade a faixa de areia na Praia de Copacabana, no Rio; nível do mar está subindo cada vez mais rápido. Foto: PEDRO KIRILOS/ESTADÃO - 14/06/2023

 Por Fernando Reinach

 Em 2024 comemoramos 30 anos em que altímetros instalados em satélites medem continuamente o nível dos oceanos ao redor do planeta. Uma análise cuidadosa dos dados coletados nessas três décadas mostra que o nível do oceano está subindo e que o ritmo do aumento dobrou nos últimos anos.

 

Qualquer pessoa olhando o mar pode imaginar quão difícil é medir seu nível. A cada segundo, ondas sobem e descem, a cada dia as marés sobem e descem e os grandes sistemas climáticos cíclicos como o El Niño provocam mudanças que duram anos. Além disso, a água dilata e contrai com mudanças da temperatura dos oceanos. Tudo isso combinado torna uma tarefa hercúlea medir o aumento do nível médio do mar com uma precisão de milímetros.

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Foi somente com a colocação de altímetros precisos em satélites 30 anos atrás, capazes de medir a distância entre a superfície do oceano e o satélite, que isso se tornou possível. A cada segundo a distância de milhares de pontos em todos os oceanos e o satélite são determinadas. E, depois de corrigir para todas as flutuações, os computadores calculam o nível médio global do oceano.

O gráfico obtido ao longo dos 30 anos e as projeções para o futuro podem ser vistos na figura abaixo.

 Nesses últimos 30 anos, o nível do mar subiu 111 milímetros, subindo em média 3,5 milímetros por ano. Esse é um número pequeno, mas o preocupante é que a velocidade da subida vem aumentando. No início do período de 30 anos, em 1993, o mar subia 2,5 milímetros por ano, mas em 2023 ele subiu 4,5 milímetros em um ano. Extrapolando esse aumento até o ano de 2050, é provável que o nível do mar subirá mais 169 milímetros.

 

Esse aumento se deve principalmente ao derretimento das geleiras e a dilatação da água devido ao aquecimento da atmosfera e a transferência desse calor para os oceanos. Esse número é relativamente pequeno, mas, por não ser distribuído igualmente ao longo das costas de todos os continentes, vem causando o desaparecimento de praias e a destruição de casas principalmente durante tempestades.

 

Nas próximas décadas não vai ser o aumento do nível do mar que vai afetar a vida das cidades costeiras, mas o aumento da intensidade das tempestades causadas pelo aumento da temperatura. A importância desse resultado é que ele confirma uma das premissas mais importantes dos modelos climáticos: a velocidade da subida do nível dos oceanos. As outras duas medidas globais são a temperatura média da atmosfera e o nível de gás carbônico na atmosfera.

Essas medidas experimentais são extremamente importantes pois são elas que ancoram os modelos preditivos do IPCC.

Mais informações: The rate of global sea level rise doubled during the past three decades. Communications Earth & Environmental. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-024-01761-5 2024

  

Climate breakdown will hit global growth by a third, say central banks New modelling finds risk to global economies much worse than previously thought, but group of central banks says even this may be an underestimate

 

The business losses alone from the devastating floods in Valencia have been calculated at well over €10bn. Photograph: Ana Beltran/Reuters

 

The physical shocks caused by climate breakdown will hit global economic growth by a third, according to a risk assessment by a network of central banks.

The rise in the estimated hit to the world’s economies as a result of the shocks from flooding, droughts, temperature rises, and mitigating and adapting to extreme weather was the result of new climate modelling published this year.

The Network for Greening the Financial System, a membership body of global banks and financial organisations, said in a report this week that the huge increase in the risk from physical shocks to the economy marked a considerable change in the overall severity of the damage caused.

The report was published as the business losses alone from the devastating floods in Valencia, which killed more than 200 people, were calculated at well over €10bn (£8.3bn).

 

“This new study is based on the most recent climate and economic datasets,” the report said. “They offer highly granular and robust data with excellent geographic and temporal coverage. With the consequences of climate change gradually becoming more apparent, adding the most recent data makes our estimates much more robust.”

Despite the increase in risk to global economies, some experts say the analysis is a huge understatement of the impact climate breakdown will wreak on economic growth.

Sandy Trust, an actuary who works on sustainability and the climate crisis, said the small print in the report by the network of central banks revealed they had failed to take in to account the impact of climate tipping points, sea temperature rises, migration and conflict as a result of global heating, human health impacts or biodiversity loss. Climate tipping points, for example the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, and the deforestation of the Amazon, are critical thresholds that, if crossed, will lead to huge, accelerating and sometimes irreversible changes in the climate system.

 Climate tipping points, for example the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, are critical thresholds that, if crossed, will lead to huge changes in the climate system. Photograph: Luis Leamus/Alamy

 

Trust said: “This is a massive one-third hit from physical damage on GDP. It has increased more than five times, from about 6% to 33%.

“But while this is a much more severe damage risk, it is by no means comprehensive. The analogy I would use is a model of the Titanic where you can see the iceberg, but the modelling fails to recognise that there are not enough lifeboats on board, or that the cold water is a threat to human life. So this report is still systemically underestimating the risk.”

The NGFS is a group of global banks that provide environmental and climate risk modelling in the financial sector. Its update on climate risks using the new methodology foresees more than 30% losses due to the climate crisis by 2100 from a 3C rise in global average surface temperatures. The report said: “The new damage function does a much better job than its predecessor at representing the physical risks posed by climate change.”

This is a vast difference compared with previously used economic predictions that damages from global heating would be as low as 2% of global economic production for a 3C rise in global average surface temperature.

Yet the group warned that the future economic outlook may be significantly worse. “It cannot be excluded that the economic effects of climate change might turn out to be even more severe than visualised under the NGFS scenarios, for instance, if certain tipping points are reached,” the report said.

“Thus, users should also take into account the tail risks of climate change, along with other risks such as nature-related ones, which are not necessarily captured by these scenarios.”

Trust wrote a report last year with the University of Exeter, which said widely available climate crisis scenarios systematically underestimated the risks, and he said underestimating the impact of global heating was “extremely dangerous”.

 

Severe drought puts nearly half a million children at risk in Amazon – report. Warming climate has caused rivers used for transport to dry up, leaving children with little food, water or school access, says Unicef

 

Children walk to school along part of a tributary of the Amazon in Santo Antônio community in Novo Airão, Amazonas state, Brazil, 1 October 2024. Photograph: Michael Dantasmichael Dantas/AFP/Getty Images

 

Two years of severe drought in the Amazon rainforest have left nearly half a million children facing shortages of water and food or limited access to school, according to a UN report.

Scant rainfall and extreme heat driven by the climate crisis have caused rivers in what is usually the wettest region on Earth to retreat so much that they can no longer be traversed by boats, cutting off communities.

The effects are being felt most by children, with more than 1,700 schools and 760 health centres in the Amazon having become inaccessible or out of reach, according to the report from the children’s agency Unicef.

“For the most remote communities it really is a life-threatening situation,” said Antonio Marro, a Unicef manager. “Children are contracting dengue fever, malaria and other serious diseases and there is no way they can reach a health centre for treatment.”

Deforestation and a warming climate in tandem with weather phenomena such as El Niño have scorched the rainforest and left vast sandbanks where rivers once flowed.

In October, the Solimões and the Rio Negro – some of the Amazon’s largest tributaries – reached their lowest levels since records began in 1902.

A member of a Solimões riverside community carries food and drinking water distributed by the state due to the ongoing drought, Careiro da Várzea, Amazonas state, October 2023. Photograph: Edmar Barros/AP

 Riverside communities rely on travelling by boat to towns for everything from food and water to medical treatment and schools but the water levels have dropped so much that travel has been paralysed.

 Half of families surveyed in 14 communities in the southern Amazon in Brazil said their children were currently out of school due to dry conditions.

Teachers have been unable to get to work, closing schools and leaving children more vulnerable to being recruited into the armed groups that rule over vast swathes of the rainforest, Unicef says.

Children aged five and under are at a higher risk of infections, malaria and malnutrition, while studies have found that babies born during extreme drought or flooding in the Amazon were more likely to be premature or underweight.

“This, the worst drought in the last century, is a clear demonstration that climate change is unfortunately already here and it’s getting stronger and stronger,” Marro said. “Rivers in the Amazon are our roads and they are drying up. Neither us nor our grandfathers have ever seen anything like this.”

The Amazon is a bulwark against the climate crisis, regulating regional weather patterns and sucking in carbon, but it is being transformed by warming temperatures and deforestation.

Local communities also say fish are dying off en masse. Hundreds of pink river dolphins have died in the extreme temperatures, concerning conservation organisations.

 

Gentil Gomez, a member of the Ticuna Indigenous community in Lake Tarapoto in the Colombian Amazon, said: “We rely on the river for everything, but it’s raining maybe once a month, so now it takes a long time to get to town and sometimes we just give up pushing and pulling our boats because the river is too low.

“We hope a politician or someone somewhere can help us with climate change because we are feeling it here.”

Unicef estimates that $10m is needed in the coming months to address urgent needs such as delivery of essential supplies and medicines while strengthening public services in Indigenous communities in Brazil, Colombia and Peru.

“The health of the Amazon affects the health of us all,” said the organisation’s executive director, Catherine Russell.