The year's worst climate news you have not heard about

The lack of flood waters for dams, increase in coal burning and rising demand for Indonesian palm oil show that efforts to slow global warming are flagging.

- David Fickling

There's been no shortage of grim climate news to hit the headlines over the past year. In March, the United Nations' weather agency declared 2023 was the hottest year on record; in November, it said the current 12 months will be even more scorching. In the US, Donald Trump was re-elected, promising more petroleum production and a shredding of support for clean energy. Hype around energy-hungry artificial intelligence is prompting utilities to slow down on plans to close fossil-fuel generators, in expectation of soaring demand from data centres.

As if that wasn't bad enough, some of the most troubling trends out there have flown mostly under the radar. Here are three additional things, which mostly haven't hit the headlines in 2024, to keep you up at night.

A DRY PATCH FOR HYDRO

We hear plenty about the travails of nuclear power and the growth of wind or solar, but far too often, the biggest source of clean power, hydroelectricity, is an afterthought. That's an unfortunate oversight, because it's going through a worryingly bad patch. Hydro generation hasn't increased in five years, and in many of the places where we most needed it, the failures are even more pronounced.

Electricity production from dams is down in the US by about a fifth since it peaked in 2017. In China, the failure of late-summer rainfall in the Yangtze basin caused output to plummet to drought-like levels, forcing coal generators to ramp higher in September to make up the shortfall. Brazil has been importing record amounts of coal to offset weak production from the dams that dominate its grid.