There is widespread coverage in the UK papers of the Committee on Climate Change’s (CCC) latest annual progress report. The Daily Mail leads with the angle that the UK government’s official climate advisor has warned that the proposed ban on the sale of petrol and diesel cars should be brought forward to 2030. Lord Deben, the CCC’s chair, has said the target to phase out polluting vehicles “was not ambitious enough”. The Times and the Financial Times both lead on this angle, too. The Times says that the CCC has also called on ministers to create new incentives to accelerate the take-up of electric cars by the end of this year. The FT notes that the CCC highlights “transport was the only sector to have its emissions rise between 2012 and 2017, overtaking power and industry to be Britain’s single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions”. The Independentsays that “a decade on from the country’s climate change act, greenhouse gases from electricity generation are falling but virtually every other sector has failed to pull its weight”. The Daily Telegraph explains that the “UK is set to miss its climate targets, despite its multi-billion pound effort to clean up the power sector, due to slow progress in reducing carbon emissions from industry and transport”. It adds that the CCC’s “damning indictment directly contradicts data from the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, which claims it will meet its so-called ‘carbon budgets’, which limit the UK’s emissions over five year periods”. The Guardian reports that Lord Deben accuses housebuilders of “cheating” buyers with energy-inefficient homes. Bloomberg focuses on aviation, headlining its article: “UK Deems Heathrow Runway Compatible With Green Targets.” Meanwhile, BBC News‘s environment analyst, Roger Harrabin, leads with the line that the “young will pick up climate change bill, advisers warn”. He adds: “Without action, the coming generation will have to pay much more to curb emissions in a heating world. The government says it is committed to being a world leader on climate change. It will introduce its low-carbon transport plan soon.” Reuters also covers the CCC’s report and Carbon Brief has published a detailed summary of its conclusions.

Climate Home News has published a draft of the “summary for policymakers” of a forthcoming report by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) examining the Paris Agreement’s 1.5C goal. The website says: “A leaked draft of a major UN climate change report shows growing certainty that 2C, once shorthand for a ‘safe’ amount of planetary warming, would be a dangerous step for humanity. The authors make clear the difference between warming of 1.5C and 2C would be ‘substantial’ and damaging to communities, economies and ecosystems across the world.” In a separate article, it has annotated the draft report, explaining: “While this document is not a finalised or agreement version, it does represent an important progression on earlier drafts.”

New figures published by Global Forest Watch, run by the US-based World Resources Institute (WRI), show that last year a total of 113,000 square miles of forest was cleared globally, mostly from the Amazon and the Congo basin, as well as across Indonesia and Malaysia. The Independent says: “Slash and burn deforestation to make way for farms was largely responsible for the destruction of an area the size of Italy in 2017, making it the second worst year for tree loss since records began in 2001.” It adds that this took place “mostly from the Amazon and the Congo basin, as well as across Indonesia and Malaysia…Overall, global losses of tree cover have doubled since 2003, while deforestation of tropical rainforests has doubled since 2008.” The story is carried widely, including by the Guardian, New York Times and Reuters.

Reuters reports that the lower house of the Dutch parliament said yesterday that it will approve a law requiring the Netherlands to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 95% by 2050, compared with the level in 1990. Reuters adds: “The law also targets a 49% reduction in emissions by 2030, and requires the electricity supply to become carbon neutral by 2050. The proposed bill, expected to come into effect next year, did not give an estimate for the cost of reaching the goals, nor an indication of how they might be achieved.”

The United Nations aviation agency, ICAO, has approved new standards needed to implement a 2016 global agreement that seeks to limit emissions from international flights, reports Reuters. Starting on 1 January 2019, most airlines flying international routes will begin monitoring their fuel and carbon emissions as part of the landmark agreement brokered two years ago by ICAO. The agreement is due to come into effect in 2021. Carbon Brief explained the deal when it was agreed in 2016.

The Guardian columnist argues that the the UK’s members of parliament have “showed a Trumpian disregard for the planet by voting en masse for Heathrow expansion”. He adds: “Yes, climate change can seem like an abstraction – too technical, too distant. I admit my own brain tends to fade out when I hear about it. History may judge that one of the most disastrous consequences of the financial crash was that it distracted from the imperative of dealing with climate change…Brexit, too, sucks in all the political oxygen, starving other crises of attention and giving the Tories a pretext to bet the farm on making departure from the EU look like it can work. But our government is legally bound to cut emissions by 80% by 2050, meaning our aviation emissions must be at the levels they were in 2005 – 37.5m tonnes – by mid-century.” Separately, the Guardian carries an article by Roger Hallam, a PhD researcher at King’s College London, who had been on a 14-day hunger strike in protest against Heathrow expansion.

BusinessGreen has launched a ” Net Zero Now” campaign with a series of articles. It explains that it is a “blueprint for seizing the clean tech opportunity and honouring the Paris Agreement’s most important clause”. It adds: “We are today publishing a Net Zero Manifesto, sketching out how governments and businesses can best deliver the coherent goals, policies, and actions that will drive the emergence of net zero economies by mid-century. The intention is not to source signatories or endorsements for the below manifesto, but rather to help shape debate in a field that is as fast-moving as it is critically important.” The campaign demands includes that governments and businesses “adopt net zero emissions targets that are determined by the latest independent scientific advice and reviewed on a regular basis”. BusinessGreen has also published the full transcript of its editor’s “On Climate Coverage” speech made yesterday at its annual awards.

Technological advances in core industries could help Chinese cities reduce emissions while maintaining their productivity, a new study says. The research presents new, city-level estimates of CO2 emissions for 182 Chinese cities, separated into 17 different fossil fuels, 46 socioeconomic sectors, and 7 industrial processes. It then explores city-level emission reductions under three scenarios of technological progress. The findings suggest that reductions of up to 31% are possible by updating a “disproportionately small fraction of existing infrastructure”, the authors say.