Coverage of the Trump administration’s presence at the UN climate talks in Bonn continued today. The BBC reports that Trump’s special adviser on climate, George David Banks, said that the US was considering restarting the Major Economies Meeting (MEM). The Bush-era forum allowed the US to remain in climate discussions even when outside the formal process. Under Obama’s administration, the MEM became the ‘Major Emitters Forum’, which helped shape the approach of larger economies in the run up to the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009. Banks told reporters: “We are looking into the possibility of having a major economies meeting, it is being discussed. The only way you are going to have a rational discussion about climate mitigation and policy in general is if you bring in the economic and energy advisers, you are not going to have kind of conversation as long as it dominated by environment ministries.” Elsewhere, The Hill reports that Banks said that his top priority is ensuring all nations, including large polluters such as China, play the same role in international climate change deal. “We want to make sure that we do what we can to avoid bifurcation,” he told reporters. Scientific American also has the story.

Zurich is the latest insurance company to cut ties with coal-intensive businesses, bringing the amount insurers have pulled from these companies to around £15.2bn in just two years. The company has decided to pull money and stop offering insurance to companies that depend on coal for more than half of their turnover. Fifteen insurers with over $4 trillion in assets covered by coal divestment decisions have now changed or are planning to change their policies around coal, with $20bn worth of investments so far pulled, according to a report published by the Unfriend Coal campaign. “Coal needs to become uninsurable,” said Unfriend Coal coordinator Peter Bosshard. “If insurers cease to cover the numerous natural, technical, commercial and political risks of coal projects, new coal mines and power plants cannot be built and existing operations will have to shut down.” Allianz, Aviva and Axa are among the companies to have previously made similar moves, The Guardian reports.

Leaders at the UN climate talks in Bonn have pledged to provide insurance against the damage increasingly being caused by global warming, which could help to protect 400 million of the world’s most poor and vulnerable people who are facing the consequences of climate change. The project, called the InsuResilience Global Partnership, started in 2015 but has now secured the funding to expand outwards, reaching more more nations like Ethiopia and Madagascar. “Instead of only reacting to catastrophes we want to shift to planning, preparing and protecting,” said Thomas Silberhorn, a senior official in the German government, which on Monday announced an additional $125m of funding for the project.

The UK’s carbon tax has pushed the country to the top 10 of a global low-carbon electricity league at a faster rate than any other nation, research finds. The UK has climbed from a 2012 ranking of 20th out of 33 industrialised countries to 7th on the low-carbon electricity league table, the report from Imperial College London finds. The report has sparked calls from clean energy industry for the upcoming budget to keep support for the carbon tax in place. Andy Koss, the chief executive of Drax Power, said it is “vital” that Treasury maintain the carbon price in the Budget if the UK is to meet its climate change targets. “Without it we could see a reversal of the impressive results achieved so far – look at what’s happened elsewhere,” he said.

“The idea that burning fossil fuels would cause global warming was predicted all of 121 years ago by the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Svante Arrhenius,” reads an editorial in The Scotsman. Since then, evidence that climate change is having an impact on the world is “undeniable as gravity”, the editorial says. It notes that the discovery of oil in the North Sea was a “godsend for Scotland”, but adds that the country has “also been blessed with copious amounts of wind, tidal and wave energy”. “The trick will be managing the change from one to the other over the coming years and decades in as smooth a way as possible,” it concludes. “This may prove difficult to pull off but still we must try.”

“We have delivered a unified message to the world: American society remains committed to our pledge under the agreement,” write former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and California governor Jerry Brown in the New York Times. Bloomberg and Brown have been at the centre of a group of US state and business leaders who have pledged their commitment to meeting climate goals at COP23 despite inaction from the Trump administration. They write: “The Paris agreement succeeded where previous attempts failed because it solicited nationally determined pledges from nations based on local actions already taking place. For the United States to reach its commitment, much more needs to be done. But the world should know: We are not waiting for Washington.”

Rising temperatures and decreasing sea ice cover in the Arctic is driving a shift in fish communities in the Barents Sea as species from boreal regions are moving to higher latitudes, a new study says. The investigation reveals that small, slow-growing fish species that tend to dwell on the seabed are being “rapidly replaced” by incoming boreal species, particularly the larger, faster-growing, fish-eating ones. The speed and magnitude of this climate-driven “borealisation” will “profoundly alter ecosystem functioning in the Arctic”, the researchers warn.