A joint report published by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) calls on the world to rewild and restore an area the size of China in order to meet commitments on nature and the climate, reports the Guardian. In launching a “decade on ecosystem restoration”, the UN bodies say they are issuing an urgent call for the large-scale revival of nature in farmlands, forests and other ecosystems. The report says that governments must deliver on a commitment to restore at least 1bn hectares (2.47bn acres) of land by 2030 and make a similar pledge for the oceans, says the Guardian. It adds: “Half the world’s GDP is dependent on nature and the degradation of ecosystems is affecting about 40% of the world’s population already, threatening human health, livelihoods and food security, according to the foreword written by the UNEP executive director, Inger Andersen, and the FAO director-general, Qu Dongyu.” The i newspaper says: “[The report] estimates the nature restoration required to stem biodiversity loss will cost at least £141bn ($200bn) a year by 2030. But it stresses that for every US dollar spent on nature restoration, humans will reap up to $30 in economic benefits such as improved pollination, cleaner air and water, and less extreme weather events.” Reuters quotes Tim Christophersen, who leads UNEP’s nature for climate branch, who tells the newswire: “[Rehabilitating 1bn hectares would require] a completely different mindset…away from small projects to a scaled-up effort. It’s essential for our biodiversity and climate change targets, but also for many of the sustainable development goals.”

Politico reports that “senior figures” in Boris Johnson’s ruling Conservative party are warning that “cuts to overseas aid will compromise the UK government’s attempts to negotiate ambitious climate change goals at the G7 and COP26 summits”. Andrew Mitchell, the former international development secretary, is “leading the charge”, says Politico, which quotes him saying: “The UK is the only G7 country cutting aid: the French are set to reach 0.7%, the Germans will exceed 0.7% this year and the Americans are increasing aid by $14bn…To persuade developing countries to tackle climate change, we need to help them to adapt to zero carbon solutions and mitigate the impacts of the floods and droughts they are already experiencing. Without keeping our promise on aid, we risk alienating both our G7 partners and developing nations, ahead of the COP climate summit we are hosting later this year.“ Politico’s report adds: “Separately, several Conservatives claimed Alok Sharma, president of COP26 and a member of Johnson’s cabinet, is unhappy at the position he has been placed in by the international aid changes. ‘It makes him look weak because he promised others it wouldn’t happen,’ said one MP.” Separately, writing for BusinessGreen, Conservative MP Nick Fletcher argues that car manufacturers in the UK should be given regulatory targets to produce electric vehicles to help deliver the UK’s net-zero goals.

Meanwhile, in other UK news, the Daily Telegraph reports that “Germany could be forced to import [electricity] from Britain within [five] years, according to new research, as the UK’s shift to green power takes off”. [Electricity is traded between the UK and other countries according to market supply and demand.] The newspaper adds: “Energy generated from offshore wind farms could soon be exported to continental Europe as energy prices are forecast to rise, especially in Germany, according to S&P Global Platts. The UK energy market is set to become ‘structurally longer, while the whole of western Europe is moving in another direction’, said Sabrina Kernbichler, its European power analyst. The UK imports about 7% of its [electricity] from the continent, but that trend is set to be reversed as countries such as Germany shut down their coal and nuclear power plants.” Bloomberg also covers the story, concluding: “It won’t last. While wind-power growth in the coming decade will depress prices in the UK, the increased electrification of energy use will subsequently drive them up.” Another Daily Telegraph article covers new PwC analysis which claims that homeowners will take “at least 10 years on average” – and up to “74 years” – to recoup the costs of energy efficiency upgrades, such as double glazing, loft and wall insulation and draughtproofing.

Finally, the Press Association, via Yahoo News, covers a new YouGov survey, commissioned by climate thinktank E3G, which finds that “nearly two-thirds of people back government commitments to provide financial and tech support to poorer countries to shift to clean energy”. The newswire continues: “More people thought the Government should stick to its long-held promise to help developing countries move away from fossil fuels to cleaner tech than felt circumstances had changed and it could go back on its pledge. And more than half agreed that everyone would suffer the consequences of climate change, so it was in Britain’s interests to help poor countries switch to clean energy.”

The Guardian covers new research published in the journal Earth System Dynamics which says that “ice sheets and ocean currents at risk of climate tipping points can destabilise each other as the world heats up, leading to a domino effect with severe consequences for humanity”. The newspaper adds: “The new research examined the interactions between ice sheets in West Antarctica, Greenland, the warm Atlantic Gulf Stream and the Amazon rainforest. The scientists carried out 3m computer simulations and found domino effects in a third of them, even when temperature rises were below 2C, the upper limit of the Paris agreement. The study showed that the interactions between these climate systems can lower the critical temperature thresholds at which each tipping point is passed. It found that ice sheets are potential starting points for tipping cascades, with the Atlantic currents acting as a transmitter and eventually affecting the Amazon.” The Guardian quotes one of the authors, Prof Ricarda Winkelmann at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Germany: “We provide a risk analysis, not a prediction, but our findings still raise concern…[Our findings] might mean we have less time to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and still prevent tipping processes.” Forbes also quotes Winkelmann: “While these mechanisms are well-known, the dynamics brought about by the interactions of these tipping elements were not. In our study, using a novel network approach, we provide a risk analysis of potential climate domino effects, where the tipping of one element triggers further tipping processes.”

In other news about new scientific findings, the Guardian carries a separate report about research published in the Cryosphere, which shows that “sea ice across much of the Arctic is thinning twice as fast as previously thought”. The newspaper continues: “The new research used novel computer models to produce detailed snow cover estimates from 2002 to 2018. The models tracked temperature, snowfall and ice floe movement to assess the accumulation of snow. Using this data to calculate sea ice thickness showed it is thinning twice as fast as previously estimated in the seas around the central Arctic, which make up the bulk of the polar region.” And Carbon Brief reports on new findings in Nature Climate Change which show that clouds could have a greater cooling effect on the planet than climate models currently suggest.

Meanwhile, the Financial Times carries a comment piece by the University of Bristol’s Prof Jemma Wadham, author of “Ice Rivers”, on the “secret life of glaciers”: “Over my 25-year career as a glaciologist, their majesty has dwindled as our climate has warmed…what we are seeing now is unprecedented in human history – and it’s happening with nearly 8bn people on the planet, many of whom have come to rely on glaciers for fresh and clean water, fisheries, stable seas and a habitable climate…Recent records of global glacier change signal that we are sleepwalking towards a humanitarian crisis. The question is – will we choose to wake up?”

Reuters reports that China’s state planner has “warned provincial and regional governments against missing their energy consumption and efficiency targets for 2021 after two-thirds of them fell short of at least some of their goals in the first quarter”. The newswire continues: “Only 10 out of 30 mainland Chinese regions and provinces met their goals to cut energy consumption and energy intensity, or the amount of energy consumed per unit of economic growth, in the first quarter…The worst offenders were the eastern province of Zhejiang, the provinces of Yunnan and Guandong and the Guangxi region in southern China, which received red ratings, the lowest, for both their consumption and intensity targets.” (See this Twitter thread by Hongqiao Liu, Carbon Brief’s China specialist, for more on the story.)

In other China news, Qin Wenbo, dean of the Shanghai Academy of Sciences, says that the nation needs “comprehensive and in-depth” reform in all aspects to hit its “carbon neutrality” goal before 2060. His comments were reported by the Paper, a Shanghai-based news website. Qin noted that China only has 30 years to drop its carbon emission volume from the peak to zero. He added that reform would be essential in economic development, energy structure, technological innovation, climate policy and other areas, the outlet says.

Meanwhile, Prof Du Xiangwan, honorary director of China’s National Expert Committee on Climate Change, has told 21st Century Business Herald that China would need to spend “extraordinary efforts” to realise its “carbon neutrality” goal on time. Prof Du expects China’s CO2 emissions to peak at 10.5-11bn tonnes, the outlet says. Yesterday, Carbon Brief published an article explaining how a new climate “leaders group” can help China fulfil its climate pledges.

Elsewhere, a Reuters report visits a Chinese family that has been fighting desertification on the barren land of north-western China for decades by planting trees. The newswire also reports that German automaker BMW has said that its factories in China plan to reach carbon emissions neutrality by the end of 2021. China’s National Business Daily also carries the story. Bloomberg runs a feature under the headline: “How China beat the US to become world’s undisputed solar champion.” And, finally, CGTN, the English arm of China’s state broadcaster CCTV, explains how residents in a village in southern China learned to live a “carbon neutral” life in a “net-zero carbon community”.

An editorial in the Washington Post comments on the “seemingly unending saga” of whether drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge should be allowed or not. The newspaper believes the debate should now end: “There is no doubt about what the outcome should be: the case for drilling in this unique national treasure is weaker now than it has ever been…There is good reason for a moderate approach: The world economy will need oil for years to come, even with strong climate change policies in place. But it will not need every last drop still in the ground, unless humanity decides to fry the planet. The US and the world can afford to leave this stretch of wilderness alone.”

Separately, the Washington Post carries a comment piece by Daniel J Hopkins, professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, and David Masur, executive director of PennEnvironment, under the headline: “What the Affordable Care Act can teach Democrats about climate-change policy.” They write: “To avoid this pitfall in the climate fight, one common-sense approach would be to push policies with straightforward mechanisms that the public can easily understand and that are harder for special interests to interfere with. One starting point is undoing the Trump administration’s moves to weaken fuel efficiency standards. What could be simpler?…Conversely, while cap-and-trade programs and carbon taxes have proved successful in reducing carbon emissions at the regional and international levels, their complexity makes them a tough sell nationwide.”

In other US-related features, a photo essay in Bloomberg looks at how “California’s epic drought is parching reservoirs and worrying farmers”.

The Guardian (and several other outlets) carry a comment piece by Mark Hertsgaard, the environment correspondent of The Nation, and Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of Columbia Journalism Review, who are the co-founders of Covering Climate Now. “Last month, we asked the world’s press to commit to treating climate change as the emergency that scientists say it is; their response was dispiriting,” they explain. They say they created Covering Climate Now in April 2019 to “help break the media’s climate silence” and that the climate coverage across the media as a whole has “noticeably improved”. But they add: “that coverage is still not going nearly far enough. To convey to audiences that civilisation is literally under attack, news outlets should play the climate story much bigger, running more stories – especially about how climate change is increasingly affecting weather, economics, politics and other spheres of life – and running those stories at the top, not the bottom, of a homepage or broadcast. News reports should also speak much more plainly, presenting climate change as an imminent, deadly threat…More than 30 newsrooms have now signed [our] statement [committing to recognise that the ‘climate emergency is here’], but some major outlets told us privately they won’t sign. The phrase ‘climate emergency’ sounded like activism, they said; endorsing it might make them look biased. Instead, they added, they would let their climate coverage speak for itself. But that’s the problem: their coverage does speak for itself, and it is simply not reflecting the facts of the story.”

Meanwhile, the Independent‘s economic editor Ben Chu asks: “Does defunding fossil fuel companies make economic and environmental sense?” Chu concludes: “It’s not unreasonable to believe, despite what the sceptics say, that this financial pressure can drive corporate change. In recent years the market valuations of more climate progressive energy companies such as Denmark’s Orsted (which transformed itself from a fossil fuels company to a renewables) have been outperforming Shell or BP and others. Research from Imperial College London has shown that the shares price of fossil fuels companies are up by 57% over the past decade, versus 423% growth for renewables firms.”

Finally, the New York Times carries a feature by Matt Apuzzo and Sarah Hurtes looking at the “obscure but powerful International Maritime Organization”, which sits under the headline: “Tasked to fight climate change, a secretive UN agency does the opposite.” The article ends: “At a climate meeting last winter, recordings show that the mere suggestion that shipping should become sustainable sparked an angry response…And just last week, delegates met in secret to debate what should constitute a passing grade under the new rating system. Under pressure from China, Brazil and others, the delegates set the bar so low that emissions can continue to rise – at roughly the same pace as if there had been no regulation at all. Delegates agreed to revisit the issue in five years.”

New research finds that the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets are potential starting points for a “domino effect” of climate tipping points. The study uses 3m simulations of the interactions between the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) and the Amazon rainforest. In one third of the simulations, a domino effect is triggered even when temperature rise is limited to 2C, the study finds. The authors add that interactions between different components of the climate system “tend to destabilise the network of tipping elements”.

A new study finds that between 1785-95 and 1996-2013, “lakes with high thermal habitat change coincided with those having numerous endemic species”. The authors analyse 32m temperature measurements from 139 lakes around the world, and define changes in thermal habitat as the “non-overlapped area” between recent (1996-2013) and baseline (1978-95) temperature distributions. The study finds a 6.2% non-overlap in thermal habitats between the baseline and recent time periods. They add that the non-overlap increases to 19.4% when habitats are restricted by season and depth.

Sea ice thickness in four of the seven “marginal seas” could be declining between 60-100% faster than previously thought, new research suggests. The study calculates sea ice thickness over 2002-18 using new snow data with “more realistic variability and trends” than “conventional climatology”. The authors find a 76% increase in interannual variability in sea ice thickness using the new method. Using the new data, the authors find that sea ice thickness in the marginal seas is “in statistically significant decline for 6 of 7 winter months”.