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Small islands like ours face an uncertain future. We can adapt – but climate finance that we badly need must be unlocked

• Mohamed Muizzu is the president of the Maldives

For the Maldives, the existential threat of the climate crisis, particularly sea level rise, has been a reality we have grappled with for decades. In 1989, recognising the urgency of our situation, with our islands standing just one metre above sea level, we brought this issue to the global stage for the first time.

This early recognition of our vulnerability sparked a national transformation as we embarked on proactive climate resilience and adaptation measures. Thirty-five years later, has the rest of the world truly been listening? If you look at how the world’s reaction to the climate crisis is funded, the answer is clearly “no”.

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Online payments firm Stripe is launching a fellowship programme aimed at accelerating global demand for carbon removals.

Demonstrators gathered outside Paris meetings of energy giant and Amundi, with some forcing their way into fund manager’s tower block

The head of TotalEnergies has told shareholders that new oilfields have to be developed to meet global demand, as the annual meetings of the French energy giant and one of its biggest shareholders were picketed by climate activists.

Police said they detained 173 people among hundreds who gathered outside the Paris headquarters of Amundi, one of the world’s biggest investment managers and a major TotalEnergies shareholder.

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A partial repeal of climate-related tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), alongside a carbon fee, brings the US closer to achieving its Paris Agreement targets than an expansion of IRA measures alone, and could additionally generate over $2 trillion, according to a working paper modelling climate policy reform to follow the November US elections.

The carbon sequestration capabilities of saltmarshes in the UK and northwest Europe may have been significantly overestimated compared to global averages, according to new research.

A Canadian tech firm has launched an initiative to develop a voluntary carbon credit protocol specifically for grid-scale battery storage.

A plant picked for its beautiful flowers then wiped out in the UK mainland makes a dramatic return.

The province of British Columbia and the Kwiakah First Nation on Friday announced the creation of the Macinuxw Special Forest Management Area, a new conservation and regenerative forestry zone within the southern Great Bear Rainforest.

Both emitters and speculators added to their net holdings of California Carbon Allowances (CCAs) and RGGI Allowances (RGAs), while the latter group continued to shorten their net position in Washington Carbon Allowances (WCAs), according to weekly data from the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).

A private Calgary-based developer and a global integrated trading company agreed on Friday to develop a carbon capture and storage hub in Alberta with the potential to store up to 10 million tonnes of CO2 per year.

Voluntary carbon market (VCM) participants expect a substantial demand return, but this could still be years away, with stakeholders at an industry event this week highlighting that investors in the market are now looking more closely at project origination and becoming increasingly selective about the activities they finance.

Voluntary carbon market (VCM) buyers and developers largely remain committed to investing in both nature-based and engineered carbon removals (CDR), according to a range of experts speaking at the Carbon Unbound conference in New York this week.

Kevin Rudd ran a successful scare ad against John Howard in 2007. While costs and attitudes have changed a little since then, some messages still resonate

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During the 2007 federal election campaign, Labor ran a TV scare ad in Queensland about the then prime minister’s plan to introduce nuclear power.

“John Howard says a nuclear industry is a solution to climate change but he won’t say where the reactors should go,” the voiceover says, to golden waterfront scenes and a lazily twanging guitar. “He refuses to talk about a list of possible sites for reactors that includes Rockhampton, Bundaberg, Mackay, Townsville, the Sunshine Coast – even Bribie Island.”

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WWF has announced it will take the Norwegian government to court over its decision to open up areas in the Arctic region for commercial seabed mineral activities.

Smaller secondary systems that create hailstorms and tornadoes pack a punch that is causing billions of dollars in damages

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration

The rising cost of homeowner’s insurance is now one of the most prominent symptoms of the climate crisis in the US. Major carriers such as State Farm and Allstate have pulled back from offering fire insurance in California, dropping thousands of homeowners from their books, and dozens of small insurance companies have collapsed or fled from Florida and Louisiana following recent large hurricanes.

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The High Integrity Forest (HIFOR) investment initiative backed by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) released on Thursday its methodology to identify and issue units that could fit the nascent biodiversity credit market.

Nature tech solutions have the potential to reduce costs of biodiversity conservation and support the development of financing mechanisms such as voluntary biodiversity credits, though greater collaboration between private and public sectors is needed to scale the market, a report has said.

The High Court ruled that the Environment Agency and the UK government were implementing the law properly.

Imports have risen since Brexit despite brick producers saying UK can make enough for its own use

The UK is importing more of its bricks than ever and the carbon cost of each brick is rising, research has shown.

The UK is the number one country in the world for brick importation, according to data from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Observatory of Economic Complexity.

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A Nigerian government agency has invested in a domestic cookstoves manufacturing firm and a carbon offset project developer to increase production of cookstoves and to leverage the credit proceeds, the agency announced Thursday.