As the G7 summit begins today, European leaders have piled pressure on President Trump as his refusal to back past US commitments on free trade and climate change, writes the Times. In recent years, the G7 has produced strong proclamations on climate change and decarbonisation, including a 2015 pledge to end all fossil fuel use by the end of the century, writes Climate Home . The risk is that Trump may find himself “in the G1”, writes the Guardian. “His six colleagues, with varying degrees of emphasis, are likely to want to change his instincts on climate change, protectionism, the treatment of refugees and novel ideas like a web tax on the giant technology companies. Japan will be seeking a tougher strategy on North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.” The summit comes after French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday urged Donald Trump not to take any hasty decisions on the Paris Agreement. While Macron said he respected Trump’s decision to put the Paris agreements under review, he said: “I reminded him of the importance these agreements have for us”, adding that the pact was also important for job creation and economic development. A seperate Reuters articles detailed comments on Thursday from White House economic adviser Gary Cohn. He told reporters he expected “fairly robust” talks on whether Trump should honour the US’s commitment to cut greenhouse gas emissions under the Paris Agreement, but stressed that he would put economic development first. He added that Trump would make a final decision when he returned home. Meanwhile UN Deputy Secretary General Amina Mohammed has urged Trump not to backtrack on the Paris climate change agreement, as its participation sends a vital signal to other nations that the pact is critically needed, according to a further Reuters article. However, speaking on the sidelines of a major UN conference on disasters, said also she respected Trump putting the Paris agreements under review.

Over eight in ten British people think Theresa May should use her influence to persuade Donald Trump to keep the US within the Paris Agreement on climate change, a new poll has found. The survey by pollsters Populus, who contacted more than 2,000 people, found 84 per cent of respondents believed Ms May should “convince Trump not to quit the Paris climate agreement”, while only around five per cent thought she should “definitely not” say something. May has previously been accused of keeping a “pact of silence” with Trump, in contrast to other European leaders such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel and new French President Emmanuel Macron. All four will meet for two days at the G7 summit which begins today in Sicily.

The world’s first wind farm powered by giant kites is set to be built in Britain, writes the Times. Twenty kites developed by Kite Power Systems (KPS) will fly higher than the Shard working in pairs to generate electricity. The firm has successfully tested a 40 kilowatt version and this summer will test a 500kW one at West Freugh, a former RAF base in southwest Scotland. It ultimately plans to build ten 500kW systems about 600 metres apart by 2020, with the location yet to be announced.

Royal Dutch Shell is developing a smart charging technology to prevent battery-powered cars causing blackouts, writes the Times. The service intelligently controls when cars draw electricity from the grid,. Shell said it had tested the service in London, Hamburg and San Diego, and was drawing up plans for its commercial deployment. The technology aims to overcome concerns over whether current grid infrastructure can handle charging large numbers of electric cars. “We are developing a smart, connected, charging system that communicates with the grid so cars take energy when there is plenty of it and save our customers money by doing so,” said John Abbott, director of Shell’s downstream — refining and marketing — operations.

Humanitarian groups have welcomed a new model developed by the Met Office which can predict rainfall patterns and provide an early warning system for drought so they can take steps to curb the damage. The highly-accurate new weather forecasting model, developed for the Sahel region of Africa, could bring huge relief to one of the driest regions in the world. The weather model is able to accurately predict rainfall levels over the next five years or more. “The model is very accurate at predicting sustained drought periods. It would have shown that the period of drought in the 70s and 80s that we remember from Live Aid was on the cards,” said Dr Katy Sheen, formerly of the Met Office and now at the University of Exeter.

Russian tycoon Viktor Vekselberg and his Renova Group are planning a record-breaking effort to send a plane around the world nonstop using only the power of the sun. The trip aims for a single pilot to fly for five days straight at altitudes of up to 10 miles, about a third higher than commercial airliners, in an effort to test technologies that are set to be used to build new generations of autonomous craft for the military and business. “Our flight should prove that it’s possible to make long-distance flights using solar energy,” said Mikhail Lifshitz, Renova’s director of high-tech asset development and a qualified pilot-instructor. He added that a “flying laboratory” test-plane will be ready by year-end.

UKIP has reiterated its position as the only main party to fully embrace climate scepticism. In its manifesto, launched on Thursday, the party said it would repeal the Climate Change Act on the grounds it “has no basis in science, and its aim of cutting greenhouse gases by 80 per cent by 2050 is unachievable”. “It is a textbook exercise in legislative folly, brought about by nothing more than a competitive crossparty ‘dash for green’,” the manifesto states. “While our major global competitors in the USA, China and India are switching to low-cost fossil fuels, this Act forces us to close perfectly good coal-fired power stations to meet unattainable targets for renewable capacity.” Carbon Brief has also updated its 2017 election tracker which lays out in detail the energy and climate pledges of each party. The general election campaign restarted yesterday following the terrorist atrocity in Manchester.

In a Guardian long read adapted from a talk given by Barack Obama at the Seeds & Chips Global Food Innovation Summit, the former US President Barack Obama reflects on the challenges around climate change mitigation discusses the links between climate change and food production. “Food has not been the focus of climate change discussions as much as it should have been,” he writes. “Part of the problem is that we haven’t publicised the impact of food production on greenhouse gas emissions. People naturally understand that big smokestacks have pollution in them – they understand air pollution, so they can easily make the connection between energy production and greenhouse gases. Most people aren’t as familiar with the impact of cows and methane.”

A Policy Forum published in Science examines the numerous flaws in the regulation of spent nuclear fuel in the United States, some of which have potential to cost taxpayers trillions of dollars. The authors suggest that the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)’s “skewed approach” to nuclear re­actor safety regulation may be in part due to pressure from the nuclear utilities and a Congress sympathetic to the utilities’ complaints of overregulation. The Daily Mail covers the research, highlighting the finding that a single waste fire could spread radioactive material throughout an area twice the size of New Jersey.

If anything ought to be too big to fail, it is the ocean, writes an Economist editorial. Yet changing temperatures and chemistry, overfishing and pollution have stressed its ecosystems for decades, with coral reefs and fish stocks suffering as a result. Meanwhile the ocean stores more than nine-tenths of the heat trapped on Earth by greenhouse-gas emissions. “Such self-destructive behaviour demands explanation,” it continues, with three reasons standing out: geography, governance and the ocean being a victim of other, bigger processes such as greenhouse gas emissions. “The ocean has warmed by 0.7°C since the 19th century, damaging corals and encouraging organisms to migrate towards the poles in search of cooler waters.” Some of these problems are easier to deal with than others, it continues, with improved access to information, transparency and technology all important. It concludes that while the Paris agreement is the single best hope for protecting the ocean and its resources, the US is not strongly committed to the deal and may even pull out. “And the limits agreed on in Paris will not prevent sea levels from rising and corals from bleaching. Indeed, unless they are drastically strengthened, both problems risk getting much worse. Mankind is increasingly able to see the damage it is doing to the ocean. Whether it can stop it is another question.”

Summer rainfall in the Sahel region of Africa can be predicted months or years in advance, a new study says. The research describes the forecasting potential of the UK Met Office Hadley Centre’s Decadal Prediction System. Forecasting years ahead relies on sea surface temperature in the North Atlantic, whereas the El Niño Southern Oscillation is important for a shorter-term forecast before each summer. Accurate forecasts will help with successful adaptation to climate change, the researchers say, particularly as the local population are reliant on agriculture, and the Sahel is vulnerable to major droughts such as those of the 1970s and 1980s.

The increase in vegetation cover on the Earth’s land surface is causing northern regions to warm and arid areas to cool, a new study suggests. A substantial portion of the planet is greening in response to increasing CO2 levels, nitrogen deposition, global warming and land use change. Using satellite data of “leaf area” between 1982 and 2011, the researchers find that greening in northern regions increases how much sunlight the land surface absorbs, causing warming, while greening in arid areas brings more evapotranspiration, causing cooling.

Extreme multi-year droughts, or “megadroughts,” will become more likely across Spain and Portugal under climate change, a new study suggests. Using observed and downscaled rainfall data from a collection of climate models, the researchers analysed historical drought and future projections for the main Iberian international river basins of Douro, Tagus and Guadiana. All models project an intensification of droughts for the three basins – some only small increases, while most project megadroughts will occur by the end of the century.