Extreme weather hit 62 million people worldwide last year and forced 2 million people to relocate, as human-caused climate change worsened, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), reports Associated Press. The annual state of global climate report from the UN’s weather agency adds that Earth is nearly 1C warmer than when the industrial age started, says AP. “We have seen a growing amount of disasters because of climate change,” says WMO secretary-general Petteri Taalas. He says that about 4.5 billion around the world have been hurt by extreme weather since 1998, adds AP. Taalas says the extreme weather had continued into 2019 “with tropical cyclone Idai, which caused devastating floods and tragic loss of life in Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi. It may turn out to be one of the deadliest weather-related disasters to hit the southern hemisphere,” says Climate Home News.

The report also says that sea levels reached their highest point on record last year, reports a Reuters story published in the Independent. The WMO says the physical and financial impacts of global warming are accelerating, reports BBC News, which points out that the new report comes “in the same week as the International Energy Agency (IEA) reported a surge in CO2 in 2018”. CBS News, ITV News, MailOnline, Press Association and the Sydney Morning Herald also have the story.

Labour has declared a “national environment and climate emergency”, amid growing pressure on ministers to take action to preserve the planet, reports the Independent. Speaking in the House of Commons yesterday, Hayman called on the government to join Labour in the declaration, says BusinessGreen. Environment minister Therese Coffey replied that her party was “already ahead of the game”, the Independent says. Campaigners say the UK will miss nearly all its 2020 nature targets, says the Huffington Post UK.

Separately, Scientific American has a report on how Brexit could impact the UK’s climate goals. And Reuters reports that National Grid shares fell 3% on Thursday after the BBC reported the Labour party is preparing to announce plans to renationalise the utility.

The UK’s greenhouse gas emissions fell 2.5% in 2018, dropping for a sixth straight year but more slowly than before, new government data showed yesterday, reports Reuters. A record output of renewable power ate away at coal-fired generation, adds Reuters, but the rate of decline was less than 2017’s 3% and 6% in 2016. The figures paint the same picture as Carbon Brief analysisreleased earlier this month. Campaigners “warned against complacency in the face of climate disaster” as the steady drop in emissions over the past six years appears to be levelling off, says the Independent. With housing and transport lagging, experts say there is an urgent need for policies to clean these sectors up, it adds. BusinessGreen, Press Association and the Guardian also have the story. The figures, from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), also show the amount of green power generated in Scotland reached record levels last year, reports the Scotsman. Meanwhile, the EU is now on track to cut its emissions by at least 50% emissions below 1990 levels under a business-as-usual scenario, EurActiv reports, based on a new study from climate thinktank Sandbag that takes the latest coal phaseout pledges into account. “[T]here is a substantial opportunity for confidently adjusting the existing 2030 target, to go beyond the new business-as-usual of a 50% cut,” the study concludes.

“Deadly” disease-carrying mosquitos will swarm the UK in a decade due to global warming, a study shows, reports the Daily Mirror. The insects, which spread illnesses such as the Zika virus and dengue fever, will arrive in the summer months, it adds. The scientists mapped the spread of two of the worst disease carriers and found that under extreme warming they are likely to be common as far north as the Midlands by 2030, says the Daily Mirror. By 2050, they are projected to be throughout all of England and Wales, it adds. The study, which was published in the journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, finds that humans could prevent the spread of the mosquitoes if they “aggressively take actions to combat global warming”, says the Guardian. NPR has a chart showing where the mosquitoes will go in the future. CNN and Carbon Brief also have the story.

Two Democrats introduced legislation yesterday to tackle climate change and boost the economy two days after the Senate blocked the “hotly contested” green new deal, reports the Hill. Named the “Healthy Climate and Family Security Act”, the legislation would cap carbon pollution, gradually curtailing CO2 emissions in the next 20 years, impose penalties on companies that violate the pollution regulations and donate all the proceeds to families in the form of dividends, adds the Hill. “The Healthy Climate and Family Security Act is the kind of bold action we need to help save the planet,” said Don Beyer, who co-introduced the bill. “Our market-based approach to putting a price on carbon would help the US economy adapt quickly by reducing carbon and embracing clean energy.”

Meanwhile, Donald Trump has repeated his criticisms of wind energy, arguing that the wind does not always blow, says another Hill article. “If it doesn’t blow, you can forget about television for that night,” he said at a rally in Michigan. A Vox article has four maps showing who is “being left behind in America’s wind-power boom”. Idaho’s state utility says it will phase out coal, with hydroelectric, solar, and wind generating all of its electricity by 2045, says MailOnline.

Carbon emissions from the US power sector rose in 2018, says an Axios article, with overall generation rising enough to outpace declines in emissions per unit of output. Trump is expected to sign an executive order as soon as next week to speed up pipeline development, says another Axios article.

And another Hill article reports that the Democrat’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez this week accepted the invitation of a Republican colleague to tour a Kentucky coal mine in order to see how her green new deal could affect the industry.

In a long feature, Megan Darby of Climate Home News details her long-running investigation into how campaign group Climate Action Network International “failed to act” on warnings about the conduct of its former executive director Wael Hmaidan, both before and after the death of Holly Borday. “Friends and family described a bright and passionate young woman, brought low by bullying in the climate movement,” begins the article.

The Conversation has printed the first edition of its new newsletter that “presents a vision of a world acting on climate change”. “Drawing on the collective wisdom of academics in fields from anthropology and zoology to technology and psychology, it investigates the many ways life on Earth could be made fairer and more fulfilling by taking radical action on climate change,” says the Conversation. In this first edition, the website asked academics how the school climate strikes can translate into long-term impact.

Seven billion tonnes of alkaline materials are produced globally each year as a product or by-product of industrial activity. When mixed with water, these materials create high pH solutions that dissolves CO2 to store carbon. This paper suggests that these materials have a carbon dioxide storage potential of 2.9–8.5 billion tonnes per year by 2100, and may contribute a substantial proportion of the negative emissions required to limit global temperature change to less than 2C.