The UK government is failing to meet its commitments to fund nature protection in the developing world and will need to double its spending to meet its targets, writes the Guardian in coverage of Carbon Brief analysis. Underspending by the previous government has meant funding averaged £450m a year for the three years since 2021, which is less than half of the £3bn pledged, it continues. As such, more than £800m will now need to be spent in the next two years to meet targets, the article notes. This follows Boris Johnson’s pledge made at the COP26 summit in Glasgow in 2021 for the UK to spend £11.6bn on climate finance for developing countries by 2026, of which £3bn was earmarked for nature projects, the Guardian adds. 

In other UK news, the Labour party has appointed Rachel Kyte as climate envoy, a role “axed” under the previous government led by Rishi Sunak, reports the Guardian. Kyte is a former climate chief of the World Bank and has served as special representative for the UN. She will now “take up the role of climate envoy to lead the UK’s return to the front ranks of global climate diplomacy”, the article notes. Labour is also intending to appoint a new nature envoy, with reports that environment secretary Steve Reed is set to confirm the appointment ahead of next month’s COP16 biodiversity summit in Colombia, reports BusinessGreen. 

Elsewhere, climate scientists have called on Labour to pause £1bn plans for carbon capture, reports the Guardian. In a letter to energy security and net-zero secretary Ed Miliband, scientists have argued that “blue hydrogen” technology, which uses carbon capture, usage and storage (CCUS) to produce hydrogen from gas, is unproven, it continues. The letter argues that the process would result in huge emissions of CO2 and methane, the article adds. US company NuScale Power has been eliminated from the competition to build the first mini-nuclear power plants in the UK, reports the Daily Telegraph. The decision by Great British Nuclear leaves four companies in the race to build the first small modular reactors; Rolls-Royce, Westinghouse, GE-Hitachi and Holtec Britain, it adds. The Press Association reports on the impending end to the use of coal for electricity generation in the UK, with the country’s last coal-fired power plant Ratcliffe-on-Soar set to close at the end of this month.  

Hurricane Helene is forecast to hit Florida later today as a category 4 storm, producing “catastrophic” winds up to 156 miles per hour, reports Reuters. Helene entered the Gulf of Mexico and is expected to pick up strength from the warm waters before making landfall, it adds. More than 40 million people in Florida, Georgia and Alabama are under hurricane and tropical storm warnings, with numerous evacuations ordered along Florida’s Gulf Coast and dozens of counties closing schools, it notes. Tallahassee, Florida’s capital, is under a hurricane warning despite being at least 30 miles inland, reports the New York Times. Helene will be the fifth hurricane to hit Florida in two years and tropical storm-force winds – those between 39mph and 73mph – could extend 400 miles from the core, reports the Times. It quotes Brian McNoldy, a senior meteorologist at the University of Miami’s Rosentiel School of Marine, Atmospheric and Earth Science, who says that “record ocean temperatures” have been a factor in Helene’s “rapid, aggressive growth”.

US president Joe Biden has lauded the country’s progress on fighting the climate crisis while speaking at an event as part of Climate Week in New York, says the Guardian. Biden also criticised Donald Trump for his dismissal of the “more dangerous world” that global warming poses to future generations, the article notes. Biden told the crowd at the Bloomberg-run event that “virtually nothing” had been done about climate change when he came to office, but that his policies had “changed the mindset” about the issue, the Guardian states. He pointed to the Inflation Reduction Act, which he said had created more than 330,000 jobs and tens of billions of dollars in investments in electric vehicle, battery and renewable energy manufacturing, it adds. Meanwhile, the New York Times covers an interview at one its own events with Kevin D Roberts, the climate-sceptic president of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, which published the controversial policy blueprint for the next Republican administration known as “Project 2025”. Roberts “blasted the Biden administration’s climate policies and downplayed the consistent rise in average global temperatures that has triggered more severe drought, heat waves, floods and storms”, the article notes. 

Elsewhere, the Institute of International Finance (IIF) has warned that the shift to net-zero is likely to intensify surging debt levels, reports the Daily Telegraph. The “new era of industrial policies to combat climate change” means that government debt globally is projected to rise by 58% to $145tn by 2030, it adds. The article notes that Biden’s “borrowing splurge on net-zero programmes has helped fuel a $2.1tn (£1.6 tn) jump in global debt”. Global debt hit $312tn in the first six months of 2024, driven by the US and China, it adds.

In a story trailed on the frontpage yesterday, the Financial Times reports that UK power firm Drax is planning to spend $12.5bn in the US over the next year, taking “advantage of the country’s lucrative subsidies and expectations of surging energy demand”. The company will build power plants under its Houston-based subsidiary Elimini, which it launched on Tuesday, the article continues. The announcement comes as the US economy faces an “energy supply crunch”, with power needs forecast to soar as data centres proliferate to cope with the demands of artificial intelligence, it adds.

Brazil has already had more wildfire outbreaks this year than the whole of 2023, reports Folha de São Paulo. The country has experienced 200,000 fires so far this year, while the rest of South America has “reached numbers not seen in 26 years”, the outlet adds. Meanwhile, in Colombia, more than 2,200 wildfires have occurred this year, mainly in western areas of the country, reports El Espectador. It adds that the Colombian government institution known as National Unity for Disaster Risk Management had earlier warned that fires would double in 2024 and that it attributes the fires to a drier and warmer climate, in addition to “natural variability”.

Elsewhere, fires have also impacted five tourist sites and 16 nature-protected areas in Peru this year, El Comercio reports. The newspaper notes that, over recent weeks, fires have triggered a “national crisis”, causing 234 emergencies in 22 regions, 16 dead, 140 injured and 377 dead animals, according to Peru’s National Institute of Civil Defense. In a separate article, the outlet reports that a recent modification of the nation’s forestry and wildlife law, passed by the Peruvian government last year, has been blamed by environmental law experts as a contributing factor in the increase in Amazon deforestation and wildfires in the country. Elsewhere, in Cordoba, Argentina, more than 43,000 hectares of forest have been “ravaged” by fires this week, La Nación reports. It notes that wildfires engulfed 21 houses and killed hundreds of animals.

A right-leaning thinktank known as the Centre for Policy Studies has warned that the cost of hitting net-zero will be billions of pounds higher than it needs to be without reforms to green subsidies and transmission costs, reports the Times. Households and businesses are facing steeper energy bills because of “clunky old rules” about how power is generated, regulated, traded, stored and transmitted, it continues. The report recommends allowing “local discounting” for customers who agree to pylons or onshore wind turbines to be built near them and the introduction of “local pricing” for transmission costs, the article notes. Electricity prices should be lower for retailers that move it through the grid when there is spare capacity, and developers should be more transparent about the costs associated with renewable energy, such as the need for storage, it continues. These are some of the report’s 20 recommendations, which are “designed to bring down energy bills while still committing to be greener”, reports the Daily Express. John Penrose, the author of the report and a Conservative MP from 2005 to 2024, warns that getting to net-zero was costing “billions of pounds more than it needs to” without these improvements, it adds. 

In other UK news, Labour is looking to loosen the UK’s “rigid fiscal rules” to help prime minister Keir Starmer “resurrect his ambitious climate investment plans and answer critics who say his government lacks a plan to generate growth,” reports Bloomberg. Chancellor Rachel Reeves has signalled that she supports alternative approaches to measuring the national debt that would allow more infrastructure, it continues, more than seven months after the £28bn “green prosperity plan” was “effectively killed”. While the move would allow borrowing across a range of projects, the “green plan would be the main beneficiary”, the article notes. It quotes energy secretary Ed Miliband, who describes Reeve’s comments at the Labour party conference around alternative approaches as “one of the most significant things a chancellor has said in 29 years I’ve been coming to conference”. Elsewhere, the Daily Telegraph interviews Gary Smith, the net-zero-sceptic general secretary of the GMB union, who warns that the UK’s efforts to cut emissions have been based on the “decimation” of the manufacturing industries, creating “huge social and economic scars”.  

A “big read” in the Financial Times explores how China’s “green transition” is accelerating. Already two-thirds of all new solar and wind projects globally are based in the country and the scale and pace of the transition away from fossil fuels has beaten international forecasts, it states. But to “wean industry off coal, Beijing needs to set up a real energy market”, it adds China will need to spend around $800bn by 2030 to modernise the transmission grid and its underlying software to deliver renewable electricity to the cities and factories where it’s needed, the article continues. Such measures are included in Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s targets, but to complete the shift to renewables “Chinese authorities need to push through a politically toxic shake-up of the electricity system, a long and thorny process that has already dragged on for decades”, it states. The article explores China’s ambitions for its “green transition”, the scepticism around its relationship with coal from environmentalists and the potential climate impact its decarbonisation could have globally. 

In other China news, the country together with the US is closing the divide on the “contentious issue of international climate finance”, reports Agence France-Presse. Yalchin Rafiyev, lead negotiator for COP29 Azerbaijan, tells AFP that he has received “positive signals” following high-level talks between the world’s two largest economies ahead of the upcoming UN climate summit. There had been a “very wide gap among the positions of the US and China,” Rafiyev tells the newswire, but that is “now narrowing and we see visible progress”, with “softening” of stances on both sides. 

A Lex comment piece in the Financial Times explores the impact that the surge in artificial intelligence (AI) will have on the US nuclear industry, following a new deal announced this week in the US between Constellation Energy and Microsoft Constellation that will see the restart of a reactor at Three Mile Island to provide 835MW of power capacity for a data centre run by the “software titan”, it notes. The deal has led Constellation’s market capitalisation to jump by nearly $15bn to $80bn, with the company stating it shows “the power of competitive markets”, the article quotes. Analysts Jefferies has suggested the deal is worth perhaps $115 per megawatt hour, at least twice the current market price in the US, Lex adds. While the benefits of AI are still unclear, the article concludes, “for many, its part in resurrecting nuclear power is a worthy externality all by itself”.

In other comment, the Daily Telegraph’s world economy editor Ambrose Evans-Pritchard argues that China needs to invest in a significant stimulus package, writing that Xi Jingping is instead betting “China can export its way out of its slump”. He points specifically to the production of EVs, solar, batteries and other energy technologies. And in the Times, climate-sceptic commentator Juliet Samual argues that “technocratic groupthink obscures the trade-offs needed to fulfil otherwise dishonest promises on [stopping illegal immigration] and net-zero”. 

Some forests impacted by large fires experience higher land surface warming for up to 10 years after the fires take place, new research shows. Large forest fires have been happening more frequently in recent decades as a result of climate change and other factors, the researchers write. Using satellite observations and datasets on wildfires from 2003-16, the study finds that the size of a fire “persistently amplified” land surface warming in temperate and boreal forests in the northern hemisphere. This trend is lesser in forests with an abundance of broadleaf trees, the researchers say, adding that “climate-smart forestry should aim to mitigate the climate risks of large fires, possibly by increasing the share of broadleaf trees, where appropriate”.