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Hollywood director of climate crisis satire praised protestors for waking up ‘sleeping governments’ and will triple donations over weekend

The Hollywood director of Netflix film Don’t Look Up has pledged to triple donations to Just Stop Oil over the weekend, the group has said.

Adam McKay, who made the satire on the climate crisis as well as Step Brothers and The Big Short, said he stands with the protesters, praising them for waking up “sleeping governments”.

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Travel blog Capture the Atlas has crowned its best Milky Way photographs of the year. This year’s shots captured the galaxy glowing above dramatic landscapes in Namibia, Chile, Japan, Spain, Iran and New Zealand

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Dupont, Chemours and Corteva agree deal and 3M also reportedly considering $10bn settlement to avoid trial due to start on Monday

DuPont and two related companies said they would pay close to $1.2bn to settle liability claims brought by public water systems serving the vast majority of the US population on Friday, just days before the start of a bellwether trial in South Carolina over PFAS contamination.

PFAS maker 3M was reportedly also considering a settlement that would keep the company from having to face allegations that it was responsible for knowingly contaminating drinking water supplies around the United States.

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Flies chilled to sub-zero temperatures amputate one or more of their six limbs to protect their internal organs

Flightless snow flies in the US and Canada can amputate their legs to survive as they begin to freeze, researchers have discovered.

Lab experiments in which the flies were chilled gradually to sub-zero temperatures revealed they can detach one or more of their six legs, an apparent “last-ditch tactic” to protect their internal organs from the advancing cold.

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Carbon credit certifier Verra on Friday agreed to join an initiative to bolster development of the voluntary carbon market (VCM) in Brazil, aiming to help scale the nation’s nature-based activities.

A persistent loophole in EU ETS regulations has been artificially tightening the carbon market for years, according to observers, steepening the annual drawdown in permit supply with knock-on effects for allowances prices and costs for European industries.

A cookstove project in Malawi has been downgraded by a carbon credit rating agency to having a low chance of achieving its stated carbon avoidance because of concerns about usage and stove effectiveness, while credits from a biodigester project in India were given a very low chance of avoiding a tonne of CO2.

The European Commission's transport boss underlined this week that their institution has no intention of proposing new measures aimed at curbing private jet emissions despite a push from a group of several member states to tighten environmental measures on their use.

A bill designed to inform California's forthcoming review of its WCI-linked cap-and-trade regulation was held on Thursday, while a suite of voluntary carbon offset and climate disclosure bills in the Golden State sailed through their first floor votes this week.

Swedish steelmaker SSAB has taken a major step towards plans to convert the entire Nordic production system to fossil free by around 2030.

Investigation involving Guardian shows systematic and vast forest loss linked to cattle farming in Brazil

More than 800m trees have been cut down in the Amazon rainforest in just six years to feed the world’s appetite for Brazilian beef, according to a new investigation, despite dire warnings about the forest’s importance in fighting the climate crisis.

A data-driven investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), the Guardian, Repórter Brasil and Forbidden Stories shows systematic and vast forest loss linked to cattle farming.

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The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region's aspirations to become a global hub for decarbonisation and sustainable finance will hinge on the construction of more robust market infrastructure and improved transparency on creation and use of carbon credits, concluded a roundtable debate at a conference held in Bahrain.

EU carbon prices climbed on Friday morning after the daily auction cleared at a premium to the spot market for the fourth time in a row, reversing the previous session's slide that had seen prices fall to a four-month low, while energy markets also recovered some of yesterday's sharp decline.

With six months until UN summit in Dubai, can its oil executive president bring unwilling countries into line?

• El Niño may push heating past 1.5C but urgent action could avert catastrophe

Within the next five years, the world is likely to experience at least one year in which the global average surface temperature exceeds 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. That was the stark prediction of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) this week, in its climate forecast.

Straying beyond 1.5C could lead to potentially irreversible effects on the global climate system, scientists have warned, including the collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, the abrupt melting of permafrost, rising sea levels and bleaching coral reefs. For these reasons, the 1.5C limit is at the heart of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, which bound countries to hold global temperature rises “well below 2C” and “pursuing efforts” to 1.5C.

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The Australian government should clarify the purpose of its planned biodiversity market and rule out the use of credits for offsetting purposes for at least three years, according to an umbrella organisation for some of the nation’s biggest conservation groups.

Allowance prices in China’s national emissions market reached year-to-date high this week despite shrinking trading volumes, with analysts expecting price level to remain flat this month amid lukewarm sentiment.

Heatwave continues in southern and eastern Asia as temperatures exceed 40C in vast swathes of region

Shanghai in China has reported a record high May temperature of 36.7C, breaking the previous record by 1C. The new high temperature on 29 May comes amid the heatwave affecting southern and eastern Asia since mid-April. Vast swathes of the region have had temperatures exceeding 40C, with parts of Pakistan reaching almost 50C in mid-May.

South-east Asia has been affected particularly badly, with record high national temperatures in Laos (43.5C), Vietnam (44.2C), and Thailand (45.4C). This is due to low amounts of rainfall over the previous winter resulting in drier soils, which can heat up more quickly than moist soils, thus exacerbating the effect.

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In the context of accusations of widespread over-crediting in the voluntary carbon market (VCM), one emergent accounting approach could tackle some of the challenges with auditing of forestry projects, offering real-time and dynamic monitoring of climate impact via remote sensing technologies.

A Tokyo-listed bank has teamed up with a domestic offset provider to further integrate carbon credit purchase in its services for clients as part of its sustainability strategy.

The best of this week’s wildlife photographs, including owl chicks, a white moose calf and hungry brown bear cubs

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