A coalition of the world’s largest oil producing regions have failed to come to agreement at a meeting in Vienna aimed at putting a upper limit on production. Saudi Arabia’s new energy minister, Khalid Al Falih, told reporters that it was “premature” to try and restrict output when production growth was already declining and the market is “rebalancing as we speak”. While no formal agreement was reached, analysts say the meeting was notably more amicable than previous ones, reports The Financial Times. Nevertheless, bitter in-fighting and internal power wranglings are putting the relevance of the organisation in question, said Telegraph business reporter Jillian Ambrose ahead of this week’s meeting, with tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran growing increasingly heated in the past six months. While it is too early to announce Opec’s death, its flexibility will be key to its secret to survival, says a separate piece in The Financial Times.

Central Europe is braced for more heavy rain in the next few days, worsening the floods that have so far cost ten lives and forced thousands to evacuate their homes. The low pressure system that has swept across central France, Belgium, Germany, southern Poland, Romania, Moldova and Ukraine is expected to bring more thundery and slow moving downpours over the weekend, say forecasters. The Louvre museum in Paris has been forced to close its doors today, with the river Seine five metres above normal levels. While President Francois Hollande declared the scenes a “natural catstrophe”, French news outlet RFI features comments from scientists saying that such events fit with what they expect from climate change, together with increased building on floodplains. Dr Laurens Bouwer says that although these events can happen at any time, “with increasing temperatures, we see higher temperatures and more rainfall.” The Independent, Reuters and Telegraph have more on extent of the floods.

Ministers are considering allowing coal-fired power stations to continue to operate providing they can reduce emissions through fledging carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, reports the Independent. The months since the government’s pledge to set out proposals to close coal by 2025 has seen some “impassioned lobbying” by a coal industry claiming to be “in crisis”, says the Independent. A Whitehall source said of an upcoming government consultation document, “If coal is partially abated, if you have installed CCS, could you carry on burning coal? These are all the points the consultation is going to try to address and set out what would be allowed and seek people’s views on it.”

British prime minister David Cameron made the environmental case for staying in the European Union on Thursday, saying that the UK needs to work with Europe to tackle climate change and cross-boundary pollution. “The environment is a subject that has not really been discussed enough in this European referendum campaign, but actually, it really does matter…Climate change is something we cannot deal with on our own. The EU has played a key role in getting the Paris Agreement.”

Newsweek take a long look at the consequences of rising temperatures for once-frozen land in Alaska, which is now beginning to thaw and release carbon back to the atmosphere. Discussions of climate change often focus on the release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels., says the piece, but rarely does one talk about this slow and steady unlocking of carbon from the earth, which so far remain unaccounted for in scientists’ projections of future climate change.

Adding biochar to soil has been proposed as a way to increase the uptake of carbon from the atmosphere, but the efficacy for reducing atmospheric CO2 remains uncertain. A new study analysing 91 published papers finds that, overall, biochar increases soil CO2 uptake by about 22% but suppressed CO2 fluxes when added to fertilised soils. The findings should help develop more rational strategies towards widespread adoption of biochar as a soil amendment for climate change mitigation, say the authors.