Officials in Ethiopia say they have broken the world record for tree-planting with more than 350m seedlings in one day, reports BBC News. The project is being led by the country’s prime minister in an effort to counter the effects of deforestation and climate change, BBC News says. The initiative ultimately aims to plant 4bn trees, it adds. The Guardian also has the story. Separately, BBC News reports on comments from the UK’s Committee on Climate Change, reiterating its advice that the country should at least double and potentially triple its current rate of tree planting, as part of plans to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. Meanwhile UN human rights chief Michele Bachelet has urged Brazil’s government to reconsider its plans to open up more of the Amazon rainforest to mining, Reuters reports.

More than 50 local Labour constituency groups have signed a petition calling for the UK to set an earlier net-zero target of 2030, reports the Financial Times. This means the idea is “almost certain to be debated at the party’s annual conference in September”, the paper adds. Meanwhile Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has called on the government to ban fracking, report BusinessGreen and the Guardian. His party is arguing that exploiting UK shale gas reserves would make it impossible to meet the country’s net-zero emissions target, BusinessGreen adds, with the Guardian saying Labour has published analysis to support its claim, ahead of a visit by party leaders to join anti-fracking activists outside shale firm Cuadrilla’s Preston New Road site in Lancashire. PoliticsHome, the Independent, the Mirror and ITV News all have the story. Separately, edie reports on exchanges in the House of Parliament, where new prime minister Boris Johnson said climate change was “at the absolute core of what we are doing”. According to edie, he also told parliament: “This party [the Conservatives] believes in the private sector-generated technology which will make that [net-zero] target attainable and deliver hundreds of thousands of jobs. That is the approach we should follow.” Press Association reports that twelve celebrities – including actor Charles Dance and musician Ellie Goulding – have written to Johnson calling on him to prioritise climate change action, saying: ““There is no greater risk to life on earth than climate change.” BusinessGreenreports that two “green Tories” have been given ministerial roles, with Zac Goldsmith appointed to positions at the departments for environment and international development, while Simon Clarke will be a Treasury minister. Finally, Press Association reports that a Whitehall probe into Conservative MP Mark Field’s “clash with a climate change protester” has been dropped. Field had been suspended from a ministerial role after he “manhandled” a Greenpeace activist, PA adds.

Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg is to sail across the Atlantic in a “zero-carbon” racing yacht so as to attend the UN climate action summit in New York in September, as well as the COP25 summit in Chile in December, the Times and others report. Thunberg is taking a year off school to make the journey, the Times adds. She refuses to fly because of the environmental impact, BBC Newsnotes. The Daily Telegraph, the Independent, the Guardian, the New York Times, Climate Home News and the Hill all cover the story. Meanwhile Axios carries a column by Amy Harder on the “new social movement on climate change”, in which she argues: “Climate change has traditionally not spawned intense, organised and continued protest. That’s been gradually changing.”

“Companies and governments are this year renewing efforts to investigate whether hydrogen could help decarbonise key sectors of the global economy, from industry and power to shipping and transport,” says a feature by Financial Times energy correspondent Nathalie Thomas. She describes a European “first” in Italy, where utility firm Snam has blended its gas with 5% hydrogen to test safety and reliability, with plans to raise the share in future. Thomas notes: “For energy majors, hydrogen, which can be produced from fossil fuels, could offer a way of securing a function for their natural gas reserves in an environment where more governments are adopting policies to end their contribution to global warming.” She says that the “clean credentials [of hydrogen] depend on how it is produced” and adds that previous waves of enthusiasm for hydrogen have been”snubbed out” by low oil prices. Thomas writes: “This time the potential uses of clean hydrogen are many. Planned schemes include powering ferries on hydrogen, using it as a replacement for natural gas in domestic boilers, power generation, and as a way of storing excess electricity produced by renewables such as wind and solar on particularly sunny and windy days.”

“Some people say ‘the climate has changed before,’ as though that should be reassuring. It’s not,” writes Kate Marvel in her latest blog for Scientific American. She recounts the traces of Cahokia, a city “larger than London”, which was the centre of a lost civilisation that abruptly ceased to exist. Marvel explains: “The North American Drought Atlas, a historical record of climate conditions pieced together from the rings of old trees, provides a hint of what might have happened.” She continues: “Many historical events have happened against a backdrop of natural climate change…The natural climate changes that have shaped human history have almost always been smaller and more regionally contained than the large-scale human-caused change we are currently experiencing. And even these changes have provoked suffering, scapegoating, and the collapse of civilizations.”

A new study uses satellite images to quantify annual forest area, loss and gain in the Brazilian Amazon during 2000-17. The finding suggest that forest area during that period was around 15% higher than the estimate by the official Brazilian forest dataset, but annual rates of forest loss were twice as fast. The dataset also suggests that deforestation increased after a low peak in 2013, and “the El Niño and drought year (2015-16) drove large forest area loss”, the researchers note.

New research uses a combination of data from rain gauges and satellites to assess changes in rainfall extremes across sub-Saharan Africa. “Robust 1950–2013 trends indicate that in well-gauged areas extreme events became wetter, particularly in wet areas,” the researchers say, while “annual totals decreased due to fewer rain days”. “Between 1983 and 2013 there were positive trends in average precipitation intensity and annual maximum 1-day totals,” the researchers add. However, “these trends only represent 15% of sub-Saharan Africa”, the study notes, although “a promising result for identifying regional changes is that numerous satellite products do well at interannual variations in precipitation totals and number of rain days, even as well as some gauge-only products”.

The amount of carbon held in tropical forests “was approximately in balance during 2010 to 2017”, a new study suggests. Researchers used satellite data to quantify changes in “annual aboveground carbon” across tropical forests. The data show “large interannual and spatial fluctuations” in aboveground carbon during the wet 2011 La Niña year and throughout the extreme dry and warm 2015-16 El Niño.