The Financial Times reports that the UK has confirmed it is to suspend foreign aid for thermal coal. The announcement was made by UK prime minister Boris Johnson at the first UK-Africa summit, according to the FT. “Not another penny of UK taxpayers’ money will be directly invested in digging up coal or burning it for electricity,” Johnson said, according to the FT. “Climate campaigners described the announcement as a ‘small first step’, but said that only a tiny amount of UK export credit guarantees for energy projects went to coal, with 97% focused on oil and gas,” the FT article reads. Climate Home News reports that Johnson also pledged to help African countries “extract and use” oil and gas, as part as a transition to “lower and zero-carbon alternatives” to coal. “In practice, very little of the UK’s development money has been used to support coal projects overseas in recent years,” Climate Home News adds. The Department of International Development (Dfid) has not supported coal-fired power plants abroad since 2012, according to an earlier statement reported by Climate Home News. BusinessGreen also has the story.

Many publications report on an “emergency tree plan” by the Woodland Trust arguing that the UK should cover one-fifth of its land with trees and woodland by 2050 in order to tackle climate change and revive wildlife. The Independent reports that the plan also recommends that all new housebuilding developments in the UK have one-third of their land covered with trees. ITV News reports that the plan also stresses the importance of protecting existing trees and preventing the spread of plant diseases. Politics Home describes the plan as “the first of its kind and a challenge to governments”. It adds: “The UK is one of the least wooded countries in Europe with just 13% tree cover compared to the European average of 37%.” The Daily Mail also covers the story. Elsewhere, BBC News reports that plans to plant 20m more trees in Wales has stoked fears from Farmers’ Union of Wales.

Coverage of climate discussions at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos continues. A new Greenpeace reports shows that 24 banks which regularly attend the forum have provided $1.4tn (£1.1tn) of financial support for the hydrocarbons sector since 2015, the Guardian reports. “The financial cooperation with fossil-fuel firms includes loans, debt underwriting, equity issuances and direct investment,” the Guardian adds. The report, called “It’s the Finance Sector, Stupid”, also shows how some major insurers and pension funds that attend Davos each year are key supporters of polluting industries such as coal, the Guardian adds. Elsewhere, the Independent reports on how climate campaigners are planning to “win over” the business elite at Davos. The Guardian has a live blog covering the forum as it happens.

Elsewhere, Reuters reports on a a new book by the Bank for International Settlement which says that banks “can’t be expected to save the world from climate change”. “There is no silver bullet,” one of the book’s authors tells Reuters. “Central banks are not going to save the world again.” A second Reuters story reports on how policymakers are pushing investors to do more to ensure their portfolios help to tackle climate change.

Australia’s bushfires have so far released the equivalent of the country’s greenhouse-gas emissions from fossil-fuel use for an entire year, Bloomberg reports. Bloomberg adds that Australian bushfires have likely contributed 900m metric tons of carbon emissions, according to early estimates from scientists behind the Global Fire Emissions Database. (This is significantly higher than earlier estimates.) The New York Times reports that smoke from the fires is slowing coal production in the country. “The irony was not lost on many in Australia,” writes NYT journalist Isabella Kwai. In addition, the Guardian reports that most Australian chief executives believe climate change to be a threat to business, according to annual survey from global accounting firm PwC.

Elsewhere, the Financial Times reports that the Australian prime minister Scott Morrison “has defied a call within his party to reform policies on climate change”. Morrison said on Monday that he would not do anything that would “wipe out” his nation’s resources industries, according to the FT.

Writing in Nature, Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), writes that “mindset” is the biggest barrier stopping world leaders from pledging to up their efforts to cut emissions. She writes: “As political leaders, industry executives and celebrities gather this week for their yearly networking meeting in Davos, Switzerland, top of their agenda is the need to halve global carbon emissions by 2030. Of the many barriers to achieving this goal, the greatest is mindset. I had to learn this a decade ago when I was appointed to lead the international climate-change negotiations that resulted in the 2015 Paris Agreement.”

A business column in the Economist argues that the 2020s could be a crucial year for big oil as a result of climate change. “The 2020s are poised to be to energy firms what the 2010s were to utilities – disruptive,” the article reads. It adds: “Without the oil industry’s balance-sheets and project-management skills, it is hard to imagine the world building anything like enough wind farms, solar parks and other forms of clean energy to stop catastrophic global warming. The question is no longer “whether” Big Oil has a big role to play in averting the climate crisis. It is ‘when’.”

Elsewhere, researchers Naomi Oreskes and Geoffrey Supran argue in the Guardian that big oil is the “new tobacco industry” and should be investigated by Congress. “Americans had the right to know the harms of smoking. They have the right to know the harms of the energy industry, too,” the researchers say.

The powerful global warming impact of ozone-depleting halogens, such as chlorofluorocarbons, could be responsible for nearly half of the rapid warming in the Arctic, a new study suggests. The researchers ran climate model simulations for 1955-2005, when atmospheric concentrations of ozone-depleting substances (ODS) “increased rapidly”. In simulations where ODS are kept fixed, “forced Arctic surface warming and forced sea-ice loss are only half as large as when ODS are allowed to increase”, the researchers find. The large impact of ODS on the Arctic “occurs primarily via direct radiative warming, not via ozone depletion”, the researchers find, adding that “the dominant role” in Arctic warming by CO2 is still “undisputed”. A separate study in Nature Climate Change investigates the impact of natural halogens – primarily emitted by marine phytoplankton and algae – on tropospheric ozone.

A transformation to a more sustainable global food system and more balanced diets could support 10.2 billion people within “four interlinked planetary boundaries”, a new study says. Assessing agricultural systems and the planetary boundaries of biosphere integrity, land-system change, freshwater use, nitrogen flows, the researchers show that “almost half of current global food production depends on planetary boundary transgressions”. Strictly holding to these boundaries, the current food system could “provide a balanced diet for 3.4 billion people only”, the researchers say. However, the system could be transformed through “spatially redistributed cropland, improved water–nutrient management, food waste reduction and dietary change”.

A new paper raises “serious questions” about the long-term success of voluntary commitments made around the world to restore degraded forests. “Restoration commitments are generally large,” the authors say – an average of two million hectares – and “will be challenging to meet without the wholesale transformation of food production systems”. For example, “one third of countries committed >10% of their land area to restoration (maximum: 81%)”, the study notes. In addition, “high rates of land cover change may reverse gains: a quarter of countries experienced recent deforestation and agricultural expansion that exceeded their restoration commitment area”, the authors say.