Top UN climate official Christiana Figueres is to leave her post in July, reports Climate Home, confirming a widely expected move after six years on the job, having helped secure the Paris agreement. In a letter to governments officially announcing the decision, Figueres said the world must now “move into a phase of urgent implementation”, reports Reuters. The BBC, the Hill, Associated Press and Business Green all have the story. Meanwhile the head of the Green Climate Fund is also stepping down, report Climate Home and Carbon Pulse.

The Zika epidemic in Brazil should be seen as a warning about the spread of diseases in a warming climate, say scientists, according to the New York Times. It will take years to say if there is a direct link between last year’s record heat and the emergence of the public health emergency, it says, with many other factors at play. Still, the population exposed to the mosquito responsible could double under warming. The UN is urging action on climate change as a way to prevent the spread of diseases like Zika and Ebola, says the Hill.

Gatwick will announce a plan to cut carbon emissions “dramatically” over the coming decade, reports the Times. The airport already aims to cut its direct emissions in half, between 1990 and 2020. The move is part of an effort to win the race to build a new runway for southeast England, the Times says.

The El Niño weather phenomenon has peaked and is now set to decline over the next few months, reports the BBC, noting that global temperatures in January were the hottest on record. Researchers say there is a 50:50 chance of the cool La Niña phase beginning before the end of the summer, with the odds increasing into the autumn.

The world must reinvent the way it generates, buys and distributes electricity if it is to successfully tackle climate change, according to a report from the International Energy Agency covered by Business Green. The regulatory structure and market design in most countries has failed to keep pace with technological change, the paper suggests. Business Green lays out the “five key recommendations” of the report, including long-term policy, responsive price signals and carbon pricing.

“We are in the midst of nothing less than a revolution in the provision of our energy,” writes departing National Grid chief executive Steve Holliday in the Telegraph. When he joined 15 years ago, fewer than 50 power plants supplied the electricity we needed. Today, there are thousands of smaller generating stations. Combined with smart grids, demand response and other technologies, he says, the energy system of the future will be much more flexible, cleaner and more efficient.

The Paris climate summit was a “triumph” and the “strongest ever reached” on climate, writes former UN climate chief Yvo de Boer. Yet there needs to be a stronger sense of objectivity and reality in the wake of the deal, he says, because the commitments agreed in Paris are “modest from the perspective of environmental challenges”.

Over the weekend Fiji was buffeted by Cyclone Winston, leaving a trail of destruction and at least ten people reported killed, writes Kevin Walsh in the Conversation. He runs through the science of cyclone formation and explores whether climate change is affecting the process.

There are concerns that the “diplomatic masterstroke” of Paris was the zenith for climate change, writes Ed King, and that world leaders now “have other things on their mind”. There’s the distraction of global events and a “mini exodus of the key figures who helped make Paris a success”. The challenge now is to maintain momentum and turn words into action. “It’s time to get to work people,” he concludes.

A new study discusses the effect of using imperfect climate models in single event attribution, concluding that ensembles tend to be overconfident in their representation of climate variability, which leads to systematic increase in the attributable risk to an extreme event. One way forward for studies that use a single climate model is to account for model inadequacies in the same way as is done in operational forecasting, by means of ensemble calibration.

A study of 138 abandoned oil and gas wells across the US found that while most don’t emit methane, 6.5% had measurable emissions with a quarter of all unplugged wells emitting more than 5g of methane per hour. This is a relatively small contribution to regional methane emissions in each of the study areas but more work is needed to determine the combined impact of abandoned wells on a national scale, say the authors.