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Most EU leaders expressed their support for the 90% greenhouse gas emissions reduction target by 2030 put forward by the European Commission earlier this year during an Environment Council on Monday.

Light trading volumes and a slide in carbon credit retirements continued to sap confidence in the voluntary market last week, even before the usual slowdown over the summer holiday season has started.

A group of voluntary carbon market entities have launched a coalition Monday to lobby for forestry credits as part of proposed EU removals law.

New EU reporting requirements for imports of certain goods could soon fuel a small, nascent voluntary trading market for one potent climate-warming pollutant — methane — and help to clamp down on its emissions.

In more than one image from 1900s Japan, they look hungover

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We had gone to Japan, we told our daughter, to get her a maneki-neko: the good luck or beckoning cat. She is almost three. She would stay home with my mother, her grandmother. There is a maneki-neko that lives at the till of a manicure shop near our house, and she likes to stop and greet it. Japanese folklore has cats for many things, and we were grateful for this one. Before we left, we wrote letters outlining our progress towards this goal. I put the letters in envelopes for my mother to give to her, one each day. As the week passed, we would meet a mouse in the street, travel to Kyoto to catch goldfish in the river, buy a pizza – extra cheese – for the keeper of the cats.

Why we had actually gone there was to be cats ourselves: to do precisely what we felt like doing whenever we felt like doing it. We roamed the streets, we sat in sunny cafe windows. We hung out at an onsen, which cats would probably not do. We went to an exhibition about animals in arts and crafts and learned that in the late 1800s, people in Japan would affectionately greet cats and dogs using the honorific -san, like Mr or Miss.

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Stalled talks on a new goal for global climate finance marred tentative progress made on Article 6 negotiations at the mid-year UN climate summit in Bonn last week, which also saw the historic December agreement made by countries to transition away from fossil fuels pushed into the background, observers said.

The EU’s 27 environment ministers reached a common position on the EU’s Green Claims Directive on Monday, introducing a new definition for climate-related claims that distinguishes between “contributions” to greenhouse gas reduction efforts and those relying on carbon “offsets” such as reforestation projects.

Group that runs Oasis Academy South Bank warns councils prioritise private housing over space for children to breathe

• Children facing a ‘brutal’ loss of time and space for play at state schools
• Revealed: students at top private schools have 10 times more green space than state pupils

Oasis Academy South Bank in Waterloo sits in a densely built-up corner of south London – so densely that the only space found for the school was in a recommissioned office block. There is no playground, no sports pitch, nowhere to play football at break time.

Steve Chalke is the founder of Oasis Charitable Trust, the organisation that runs the school, one of 54 in their charge across England. He admits it is a challenging environment.

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Shorter playtimes and shrinking outside space in England have serious implications for children’s wellbeing and mental health

• Revealed: students at top private schools have 10 times more green space than state pupils
• Indoors at breaktime: the school in a London office block
• Private schools in England should be made to share their green space, say campaigners

Children are facing a “brutal” loss of space and time for play in school, teachers, unions and academics have warned.

A combination of factors is eating into the time children spend outside, and will have serious implications for their wellbeing and mental health.

A Guardian analysis of the space available to state school children in England has revealed that thousands are attending schools with very little outside space, with government data showing that more than 300 schools have under 1,000 sq metres and at least 20 have no outside space. In nearly 1,000 schools, there is under 10 sq metres for each pupil.

New and unpublished research from the UCL Institute of Education seen by the Guardian showed a continued downward trend in the amount of time children have for playtime in the wake of the Covid lockdowns, with the youngest losing the most time.

The demands of the curriculum have increased, and continue to diminish time outside, while staffing shortages are reducing capacity to oversee playtime.

Across England and Wales schools face difficult financial decisions, which are having an impact on the funding to care for grounds. Headteachers in the state sector have said they are in desperate need of funding to improve basic facilities for children.

School buildings are crumbling, as many were built with Raac (reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete) that was not replaced within its usable lifetime, meaning in some cases playgrounds are being used to host temporary classrooms. This is squeezing out the little space some schools have for children to spend time outside.

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The G7 summit closed on Saturday without any significant progress on climate and energy, leaving ambitions unchanged from resolutions adopted at previous meetings.

Biodiversity is among the biggest concerns for companies grappling with corporate disclosures, with a quarter of them lacking confidence in their ability to meet the requirements set out by the EU's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), a PwC survey has revealed.

Establishing a voluntary market-based scheme that allows countries to trade ocean conservation credits could reduce the costs of marine protection by up to 98%, incentivising governments to achieve their biodiversity targets, a paper has said.

The birds have not been seen for at least a decade – some for more than 100 years – but the authors of a new list of missing species have not given up hope

The coppery thorntail and New Caledonian lorikeet are among the 126 birds “lost” to science, having not been seen for a decade or more, according to the most comprehensive list of missing species composed to date.

The new tally is based on millions of records collected by enthusiastic birders and amateur scientists documenting wildlife in some of the planet’s most remote locations. To be part of the dataset, the bird must not have a recorded sighting in at least a decade, and not be assessed as extinct or extinct in the wild by the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

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With the June options contract expiry just two days away, European carbon prices appeared to find a level with sellers' efforts to drive prices lower running in to more robust buying interest, leaving EUAs lagging behind a steeper drop in natural gas and confirming that the correlation between the two has temporarily been broken.

EU environment ministers agreed on Monday to green-light a regulation that aims to restore natural habitats, ending a year-long legislative back-and-forth in what campaigners hailed as an "historic step" in the fight against the biodiversity and climate crises.

David Littleproud claims Australia doesn’t need ‘large-scale industrial windfarms’ like the planned offshore zone south of Sydney

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David Littleproud has claimed Australia doesn’t need “large-scale industrial windfarms” like the planned offshore zone south of Sydney, adding the Coalition will “cap” federal government investment into renewable energy if elected.

The Nationals leader visited Wollongong on Monday, where he promised the opposition would instead offer a “calm” and “methodical” energy pathway to net zero by 2050.

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China and Australia have signed an updated Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to cooperate more closely on climate change and energy, the two countries announced Monday.

A radical mindset change in how companies address their dependencies on nature is key to ensuring biodiversity credits emerge as an effective solution to tackle ecosystem and species loss, the founder of Germany-based tech startup Landbanking Group told Carbon Pulse.

New Zealand market participants have all but written off any chance Wednesday’s government NZU auction will clear due to the secondary market trading at prices below the auction price floor amid ongoing regulatory uncertainty.

Telstra will no longer buy carbon credits and instead invest directly in decarbonisation, a move Andrew Macintosh says others should consider.

The post Telstra dumps offsets and “carbon neutral” claims: Whistleblower says others should do the same appeared first on RenewEconomy.