The UK government has confirmed this morning that the UK has “become the first major economy to legislate to end its contribution to global warming”, reports the Metro. The official announcement comes after both Houses of Parliament passed the required legislation to commit the UK to achieving “net-zero” emissions by 2050. The Evening Standard quotes Chris Skidmore, the acting energy and clean growth minister: “The UK kick-started the Industrial Revolution, which was responsible for economic growth across the globe but also for increasing emissions. Today we’re leading the world yet again in becoming the first major economy to pass new laws to reduce emissions to net zero by 2050 while remaining committed to growing the economy – putting clean growth at the heart of our modern industrial strategy.” Carbon Brief recently published an in-depth Q&A on the UK’s net-zero climate goal.

Denmark’s government has announced a “new political direction” based on an ambitious climate manifesto, reports Climate Home News. It adds: “Social Democrat leader Mette Frederiksen, 41, became the country’s new prime minister on Wednesday, after she secured a political deal with three other left-wing parties to form a one-party minority government. Under the agreement, the new government pledged to introduce binding decarbonisation goals and strengthen its 2030 target to reduce emissions by 70% below the 1990 level – the current target is 40%.” The New York Times says the new government “is likely to usher in major new action on climate change and a softening of some policies on migrants, after elections this month in which those issues were top of many Danish voters’ list of priorities”. EurActiv says the government, which has been formed after three weeks of negotiations, has pledged to deliver “one of the most ambitious climate policies in the world”.

Meanwhile, BBC News reports on the ongoing UN climate talks in Bonn: “A ‘triple whammy’ of events threatens to hamper efforts to tackle climate change say UN delegates. At a meeting in Bonn, Saudi Arabia has continued to object to a key IPCC scientific report that urges drastic cuts in carbon emissions. Added to that, the EU has so far failed to agree to a long term net-zero emissions target. Thirdly, a draft text from the G20 summit in Japan later this week waters down commitments to tackle warming. One attendee in Bonn said that, taken together, the moves represented a fierce backlash from countries with strong fossil fuel interests.”

As the G20 leaders head for their annual meeting which this year is being hosted by Japan, the New York Times reports comments made by France’s Emmanuel Macron yesterday: “Taking up the cudgel on climate change in the face of American opposition, [Macron] threatened Wednesday not to sign any joint statement from the Group of 20 summit in Japan this week unless it deals with the issue, which he called a ‘red line’. In a rebuke of American officials, Mr Macron emphasised the importance of reiterating support for the Paris climate agreement of 2015.” Macron is reported as saying: “If we don’t speak about the Paris Agreement, and if, to come to an agreement in a meeting of 20, we are no longer able to defend our climate goals, it will be without France. It’s simple. It will be without France.” France24 says that Japan is hoping to find “common ground” on climate change, but that the host’s “own environmental record is under increasing scrutiny” because of its continued use of coal. (Last year, Carbon Brief published a detailed profile of Japan.)

There is widespread coverage in the US of the first of two televised debates between the Democratic party’s presidential candidates. Vox notes how seven minutes of last night’s debate was focused on climate change, but that’s “more than it received in all of the 2016 presidential debates between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump”. Vox adds: “That’s still surprisingly little for an issue that is near or at the top of the list for Democratic primary voters, that has such massive implications for the United States, and that provides an easy opening for the candidates to sell their climate plans”. The Washington Post has published a full transcript of the debate, which shows that Elizabeth Warren was the first candidate to raise the issue: “[The US economy is] doing great for giant oil companies that want to drill everywhere, just not for the rest of us who are watching climate change bear down upon us.” Associated Press has factchecked some of the candidates’ statements on climate change.

Separately, Reuters reports on a new poll: “Nearly 70% of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, want the US to take ‘aggressive’ action to combat climate change – but only a third would support an extra tax of $100 (£79) a year to help, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released Wednesday.”

The UK’s largest carbon-capture project will be built at a Tata Chemicals plant in Cheshire after securing £4.2m in government funding, reports the Times. It adds: “Tata Chemicals, part of Tata, the Indian conglomerate, said that it would build a £16.7m facility to capture 40,000 tonnes of CO2 a year before purifying and liquifying it for use in making sodium bicarbonate. The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy said that the technology would be equivalent to taking 22,000 cars off the road and would capture 100 times more CO2 than the country’s existing largest facility.” The Guardian says the project will “soon block thousands of tonnes of factory emissions from contributing to the climate crisis, by using them to help make the chemicals found in antacid, eyedrops and Pot Noodle”. The Guardian explains that, in addition to funding the Tata project, “Drax will receive a £5m government grant for a pilot, which could keep up to 16m tonnes of carbon from the air by the mid-2020s. In total the government plans to spend £26m to spur nine carbon capture projects which are ‘essential’ if the UK hopes to reach its goal of cutting carbon emissions to net-zero by 2050. It is also spending £170m to create a net zero carbon ‘industrial cluster’ in the UK by 2040.” The Financial Times and Reuters also carry the story, as does BusinessGreen, which poses the open question: “Has carbon capture’s time finally come?”

There is continuing and widespread coverage of the ongoing heatwave affecting larges parts of Europe. The Guardian says “European cities are taking exceptional steps to limit the impact of a historic early summer heatwave as temperatures across the continent approached monthly and, in some places, all-time records”. It adds: “In Germany, where the 38.6C recorded on Wednesday in Coschen, near the Polish border, exceeded the country’s previous June high, officials imposed a 120km/h speed limit on stretches of the Saxony-Anhalt autobahn as the road surface began to deteriorate, while rail tracks buckled near Rostock on the Baltic Sea.” The Daily Telegraph says the heatwave “hell” has claimed its first lives as temperatures moved above 40C in some places. BBC News says many schools in France have been closed: “About 50 schools in the Essonne region, just south of Paris, are being shut, as they lack sufficient air conditioning.” The Sun says the Glastonbury Festival, which starts tomorrow, is set to be the “hottest ever”. Meanwhile, the New York Times says the European heatwave is the “new normal”: “As the climate changes because of greenhouse gas emissions, heatwaves around the world are occurring more often, and they are hotter and last longer.”

Several news outlets cover the “Time is Now” climate change protest that took place in central London yesterday. “Thousands of people have gathered around Westminster to call on their MPs to take urgent action on the climate and environmental ‘emergency’,” says the Evening Standard, adding: “MPs have been meeting their constituents around the Houses of Parliament and along the Thames to discuss the need to take action on cutting emissions, protecting nature and tackling plastic pollution.” The Guardian says “about 12,000 people gathered in Westminster on Wednesday to put pressure on politicians, according to the organisers the Climate Coalition and Greener UK, whose members include aid agencies, social groups and conservation organisations”. BBC News has published a picture gallery of the protesters.

The Times runs a column by Emma Duncan who is the social policy editor at the Economist in which she explains why she has changed her mind on a range of environmental issues: “My diet is increasingly veggie and even my holiday arrangements have gone green…Environmental concern is rising in the polls: in a survey commissioned by the government, 80% say they are ‘very’ or ‘fairly’ concerned about climate change, a larger number than has been recorded since the polling started in 2008.” She adds: “I suspect we are seeing a shift in the ‘Overton window’, a notion among political scientists used to describe the range of views that are acceptable at a particular time and in a particular society…The window shifted on race and homosexuality at the end of the last century. In the 1980s, it was just about OK to be racist and homophobic. By 2000, it wasn’t. In this century the climate change window has shifted. At the beginning of it, arguing that climate change wasn’t happening or didn’t matter was acceptable; now it isn’t.”

Writing in the Guardian, Nicky Hawkins, who is a communications strategist for the FrameWorks Institute, says that “it’s time to change the climate disaster script” and that “people need hope that things can change”. She adds: “Research is clear that to overcome fatalism and inspire change we must balance talk of urgency with talk of efficacy – the ability to get a job done…To help us avoid the worst effects of climate change we need a steady stream of stories that bring to life our capacity to dream big and get things done.”

Meanwhile, in the Independent, the travel writer Cathy Adams explains why she, despite “climate guilt”, she still intends to get flying many times a year: “Don’t tell me to stop flying.”

A study in World Development explores how indigenous communities in the Solomon Islands dealt with two past extreme events. Drawing from the villagers’ experiences, the authors found that aid and support from family and community, referred to by the respondents as the “wantok” system, was key to recovering from the disasters, which included a tsunami in 2007 and a flash flood in 2014. “Many respondents identified climate change as one leading factor that explained such catastrophic events,” the authors add.

Methane emissions increased by around 1.5m tonnes a year across the African continent from 2011-15, a study finds. The largest source of the increase came from the Sudd, a vast swamp in South Sudan, according to the research. The overall size of the swamp has increased in recent years due to inflow from the White Nile, the authors say. The research makes use of data from Japan’s Greenhouse Gas Observing Satellite (GOSAT).