Carbon dioxide emissions from energy consumption grew by 0.1% last year in their smallest advance since 2009 due to lower coal use and sluggish growth, BP says in its latest annual energy review. Last year’s rise, which slowed from 0.5% in 2014, took global CO2 emissions from energy use to around 33.508bn tonnes, BP said in its annual Statistical Review of World Energy. The Guardian runs with a subtly different headline: “World carbon emissions stopped growing in 2015, says BP.” The Financial Times and the Times focus on the report’s numbers for coal, quoting BP’s chief economist, Spencer Dale, who said 2015 had been an “an annus horribilis for coal”, as the the world’s use of the highly polluting fuel fell by the largest amount on record last year. The Daily Telegraph says the record fall in global coal consumption was “driven by low oil prices”. The Times reports that the “oil industry faces two more years in doldrums”, according to BP. Unrelated to the BP report, the Financial Times has a long feature headlined, “North Sea oil: The £30bn break-up”. Carbon Brief will be publishing analysis of the coal decline reported in BP’s data later today.

The on-off approach to funding flood defences must end and the government come up with better long-term plans, MPs have warned after storms this winter that caused losses of £1.3bn. The FT reports the cross-party Environmental Audit Committee’s findings that funding for flood defences was initially cut in the last parliament and only increased after another bout of flooding in the winter of 2013-14. The condition of critical flood defences has also been suffering, the committee found. Roger Harrabin, the BBC’s environment analyst, notes: “The report asks a question that is perplexing flood experts – where did the SUDS go? For more than a decade engineers have been promoting Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems. It means if developers wants to build a new housing estate, they’re not allowed to plug into the main drainage sewer and thereby increase the flood potential of the system.” The Yorkshire Post, which serves a region hit by flooding this winter, says the report finds that “flood-risk Yorkshire communities are being handicapped by a government that is too reactive to flooding and fails to plan long term”. Reuters and Sky News are among the other outlets carrying the news.

The area of the Arctic that is covered in ice is set to reach a record low this summer after falling to a level that is unprecedented for this time of year. Bawden explains: “New figures reveal that the frozen portion of the ocean averaged at 4.63m square miles last month – which is 224,000 square miles below the previous record low for May, set in 2004. And it’s half a million square miles less than the average since 1980 for the time of year – a loss of ice covering an area five times as big as the UK.” The Guardian and ClimateHome are among the other publications reporting the latest data from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Donald Trump signed onto an open letter in 2009 asking President Obama and Congress to enact aggressive climate change legislation and greenhouse gas emissions limits. The letter, first reported by Grist, was published as an advertisement in the New York Times shortly before the climate change conference in Copenhagen. “It’s an urgent push for the exact opposite policies that Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, has endorsed throughout his campaign,” explains the Hill. Andy Revkin also has a Dot Earth post on this “fresh doozy” by Trump. In the Guardian, Dana Nuccitelli has a comment piece carrying the headline: “Trump and global warming: Americans are failing risk management.”

Energy companies are pouring unprecedented sums of money into batteries and other power storage systems long deemed a green pipe dream, in a move experts said would transform the face of the UK’s electricity industry. “It’s potentially very disruptive,” said Hugh McNeal, the new chief executive of the wind industry’s main trade body, RenewableUK, adding that 55 of the group’s 420 members were now investing “millions of pounds” in energy storage. If wind farms can store electricity it will help solve their “key challenge” of not working on windless days, Mr McNeal told the FT. “It might mean we need less of other things”, such as gas and nuclear power, he added.

During a speech before a joint meeting of the US Congress, the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi said “the protection of environment and caring for the planet is central to [Indians’] shared vision of a just world”. He said the climate partnership with the US “aims to balance responsibilities with capacities” as both countries look to deploy more renewable energy. During Modi’s visit to Washington this week, India said it would look to ratify the Paris climate deal, a major step toward having the deal take effect this year. ClimateHome carries analysis by NRDC’s Jake Schmidt on “decoding the latest US-India climate change agreement”.

Climate Home interviews the (in both senses) outgoing UN climate chief in which she talks about “‘project smile”, women’s rights, Donald Trump and her belief the world will avoid 1.5C warming. She says: “Call me an incurable optimist which I’m happy if you do – I do think we will avoid 1.5C…Technology is moving incredibly fast – faster than we could possibly have imagined, that coupling of technology, policy…We will avoid 1.5C.”

Ranganathan, a mathematics major at Swarthmore College in the US, writes about her recent trip to Greenland: “While I am used to hearing ‘climate change could affect us by 2025 or 2050,’ it’s a problem for the communities of Greenland now…Climate change isn’t obvious all over the world, but it is strikingly obvious in Greenland, and it was very clear to me how important it is to preserve such an important place on Earth.”

The author, who is a principal lecturer in physical geography and environmental science at the University of Brighton, explains that “electricity generation is a significant consumer of water: it consumes more than five times as much water globally as domestic uses (drinking, preparing food, bathing, washing clothes and dishes, flushing toilets and the rest) and more than five times as much water globally as industrial production”. He warns: ” If policy makers fail to take into account the links between energy and water, we may come to a point in many parts of the world where it is water availability that is the main determinant of the energy sources available for use.”

Constraining global temperature to under 2C will require a halving of energy system emissions by 2050, dropping to net-zero by 2100. The Deep Decarbonisation Pathways Project has outlined how 16 countries – covering 74% of global energy emissions – can restrain their own emissions while maintaining development aspirations. The project aims to help develop short-term policies that reflect national circumstances, but which are also consistent with long term decarbonisation.

While climate change is expected to raise the risk of wildfires, it is not clear which type of model or degree of complexity is best for predicting the future risk. A new study reviews the current crop of models and what can be learned from the Fire Model Intercomparison Project (FireMIP) – a new initiative that aims to compare different global fire models against present day and historical observations to better refine predictions.