Worsening water scarcity could take “double digits” of countries’ gross domestic product within the next 35 years, according to new research by the World Bank. Under business-as-usual water usage, shortages could see 14% sliced of GDP in the Middle East and nearly 12% of GDP in the Sahel, said yesterday’s report. Dwindling supplies are likely to be intensified by climate change-induced drought, potentially leading to food price spikes, migration and violent conflict, says The Financial Times. The new warnings show that the way climate change is really going to hurt us is through water, says The Washington Post. The Telegraph, Reuters and Climate Home also cover the new report.

Patricia Espinosa, Mexico’s ambassador to Germany, has been selected to take over from Christiana Figueres as head of the UN’s climate change body, it was announced yesterday. Espinosa, who is well known in climate policy circles for chairing the 2010 negotiations in Cancun after the failure of the Copenhagen talks, will begin on 6 July. Having beaten French climate envoy Laurence Tubiana and Hungarian diplomat Janos Pasztor to the nomination, Espinosa’s appointment to the new, slightly elevated role of “under secretary general” is still subject to approval by the panel.Carbon Pulse, Reuters, The Guardian, The Hill, BusinessGreen and Energy Live News all covered the news.

In his final interview, the late Prof Sir David MacKay described the prospect of the UK meeting its energy needs through wind and solar as unviable, pointing instead to nuclear power and carbon capture technologies as “a zero carbon solution that can work in winter”. Solar could be important in other sunnier countries, he noted, but would be limited in the UK on cost grounds, as well as by the requirement for land and “absurdly large” batteries. In the interview, MacKay labelled progress on CCS as “disappointing” and singled out electric cars as likely to be “a massive hit, just as people went from cassette to modern iPods”. The Telegraph also covers MacKay’s comments.

Energy-related CO2 emissions in the European Union crept up 0.7% in 2015 compared to a year earlier, according to a new official estimate. Increases in emissions from Portugal and Slovakia offset large reductions from countries such as Malta and Estonia, where emissions fell by 26.9% and 16%, respectively. In the UK, energy-related emissions fell by 2.9%, bringing its share of total EU carbon emissions in 2015 to 12.5 per cent. Carbon Pulse has more on the figures.

Huge wildfires have swept through the Canadian province of Alberta, with 80,000 people now forced to flee their homes. Unseasonably hot temperatures together with dry conditions have transformed the area into a “tinder box”, reports the Guardian. Experts are pinning the blame on El Nino, which causes warmer and drier winters, with climate change also tending to make the land more prone to fires, says Global News in Canada. A professor at the University of Lethbridge said, “In general, we’ve had less rainfall; we didn’t really have a winter this year. And so consequently we have a very dry environment.”

A new satellite kitted out with radar technology to make 3-D maps of the world’s forests will be British-built, after the UK arm of Airbus Defence and Space signed a contract with the European Space Agency on Friday. Capable of looking through the forest canopy to the woody parts below, the satellite – due to launch in 2021 and run for five years – will give unprecedented information about deforestation and carbon cycling in and out of the world’s forests.

Academics have a duty to stand up against the kind of “tendentious and misleading coverage” that leads to public misconceptions about climate science, argues Lord Krebs, a professor of Zoology and member of the UK Climate Change Committee. Pointing to a run of articles in the Times newspaper, Krebs describes a “disturbing pattern” in parts of the UK media intended to “systematically undermine climate science and those conducting it – and to amplify marginal dissenting arguments even when they come with no evidence.” While a free press is vital for democracy and editors are well within their rights to seek out divergent views, it’s right that articles intentionally promoting a specific argument should be subject to scrutiny, he argues, adding, “if research is funded by the public, then it is the public’s right to have the findings disseminated accurately.”

Earth is well outside its comfort zone and it’s time to take action commensurate with the scale of the problem, urges McKibben. Though the gentle and patient push from “international conferences and countless symposia and lots and lots and lots of websites” afforded some success in Paris, looking beyond the rhetoric reveals the need to push harder, he says: “Not everyone can do it – there are regimes that are too authoritarian for anyone to dare even peaceful civil disobedience of this kind. But for those of us who still live in places theoretically committed to freedom, it’s time to put that privilege to use.”

A new study assesses methods for tracking funds pledged to help the developing world respond to climate change. Measuring this adaptation finance is problematic, the paper says, as there is no clear definition of what separates adaptation aid from standard development aid. Testing different approaches for categorising aid for the nations of Oceania, the researchers find that adaptation finance grew to 3%–4% of all development aid by the 2008–2012 period, but that could be as high as 37% depending what counts as adaptation.