In a article for German daily Hanelsblatt, Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe said he wants the G20 group of leading nations to work together on climate protection, including the Paris Agreement, from which the US is withdrawing, reports Reuters. “Global warming has already resulted in the earth, which sustains human life, experiencing various crises for a long time,” Abe wrote, adding: “That’s why we must all take action together quickly.” The G20 summit is taking place on Friday and Saturday in Hamburg. Meanwhile the Guardiancovers a new report that says G20 public financing for fossil fuels was more than four times greater than support for renewable energy between 2013 and 2015. Carbon Brief recently published a detailed look at the debate over fossil fuel subsidies.

Every model produced by carmarker Volvo will have an electric motor from 2019, reports the Financial Times. The firm is the first traditional carmaker to call time on vehicles solely power by combustion engines, the paper says. Future models will include pure electric, plug-in hybrids and battery vehicles with small petrol back-up engines. Volvo, which was bought by Chinese carmaker Geely in 2010, hopes to sell 1m electrified cars by 2025. Bloomberg also has the story. An opinion piece for Bloomberg, by physicist and science writer Mark Buchanan, repeats the well-known point that electric vehicles are only as clean as the electricity that supplies their power, under the headline: “China’s Electric Cars Are Actually Pretty Dirty.” Meanwhile BusinessGreen reports on new figures from the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), showing sales of electric vehicles “continued to outperform the wider European auto market during 2016”. The share of electric, plug-in hybrid and hybrid vehicles grew from 2.5 to 3.2% of sales, the figures show. Separately, the New York Times reports from Hamburg, where it says efforts to roll out hydrogen car refuelling infrastructure is struggling from a lack of customers. Hydrogen, the paper says, is: “still struck at the prototype stage, struggling with high costs, competition from electric vehicles, and worries, perhaps exaggerated, about the risks”.

India’s largest utility, the state-run NTPC, plans to invest $10bn in new coal-fired power stations with a capacity of more than 5 gigawatts (GW) over the next five years, reports Reuters. That is despite the country’s electricity regulator saying coal plants already under construction will be able to meet demand until 2022, Reuters notes, adding that the firm has not made the plans public because it so far lacks government approval. The firm has plans to build 10GW of renewable power capacity by 2022, but, citing a “company official”, Reuters says this effort is moving slowly due to land acquisition issues.

The National Environment Research Council and Economic and Social Research Council are to carry out an £8m publicly funded investigation into the environmental impacts of and public attitudes to fracking, reports the Guardian. Topics will include drinking water safety and the role of shale gas extraction in earth tremors of the kind caused in Blackpool in 2011.

Climate change is one of the biggest long-term risks to the global economy, Shell boss Ben van Buerden said yesterday, according to Reuters. Van Beurden said the risks extend to companies, including big oil and gas firms, adding: “It is right that it should be transparent which companies are truly on firm foundations over the long-term.” Reuters notes that Shell has not so far disclosed in detail the potential financial impact climate risks could pose for the company, even though it assesses this internally. Separately, InsideClimate News reports how activist investors that have pressured oil firms into disclosing climate risks are now targeting food companies.

The UK could save £750m a year by 2030 by encouraging more combined heat and power (CHP) plants, according to a report form trade group the Association for Decentralised Energy (ADE), covered by the Telegraph. The ADE wants the government to ignore calls to scrap the UK’s top-up carbon tax, the Carbon Price Floor, and to allow CHP to bid into its capacity market scheme, designed to ensure sufficient electricity supplies.

The US administration of Donald Trump has “proceeded with quiet efficiency in its dismantling of…major environmental policies,” writes Oliver Milman in the Guardian. It has faced few obstacles in the process, Milman notes. He includes a timeline of the rollbacks, from the 14 February repeal of anti-corruption rules relating to energy company payments to foreign governments through the 16 February axe for the stream protection rule that prevented mining firms dumping waste. Other rollbacks include a review of vehicle efficiency standards, a delay of ozone pollution standards and a two-year pause [recently struck down in court] on regulations to reduce emissions from oil and gas operations.

Unlike the UK, Australia has suffered from a lack of a cross-party consensus on climate policy, writes Labor frontbencher Mark Butler in the Guardian, in an extract from his book Climate Wars. He cites the 2015 joint statement on climate signed by the leaders of the three major UK parties, a move he says “would seem unimaginable to Australians”. Butler notes how, in the early days of climate discussions, Australian parties were “much closer”. Yet he then chronicles the collapse of consensus, and the political turmoil that has been created by arguments over climate, toppling a series of prime ministers in the process.

Heat stress, drought and very wet weather explain around 40% of the fluctuations in wheat yields from one year to another, a new study suggests. Researchers assessed the effects of hot, wet and dry climate extremes on wheat yields on global and national scales between 1980 and 2010. They then developed a new Combined Stress Index to help understand the effects of concurrent heat and water stress events on wheat production. The relative importance of heat stress and drought on yields depends on the region, the researchers say, and in several countries, water excess affects wheat production more than drought.

Print news coverage of the Paris climate talks in 2015 was “heavily skewed towards the developed world,” a new study says. Researchers assessed 2580 articles published during the two week conference in the online versions of the two or three leading print newspapers in four developed countries, six emerging economies, and three developing countries. The media largely focused on updates on the talks, the researchers say, or focused on activists, the actions of world leaders, and the impacts of climate change. Articles “under-reported key issues for poorer nations such as equity, human rights, and the effects on human populations,” the study notes.

“Massive efforts put into fire suppression” has helped to reduce the number of wildfires in Mediterranean France in recent decades, but the risks continue to increase, a new study says. The number and size of wildfires have decreased between two 20-year periods (1975–1994 vs. 1995–2014), the researchers find, while fuel biomass, human-caused ignition, and the fire weather index have all increased – “thus making the study area more hazardous.” The results suggest that aggressive fire suppression “has great potential for counterbalancing the effects of climate changes and human activities” in the short term, the researchers conclude, but a “more comprehensive fire policy” will be needed in the long term.