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Labor has improved Australia’s emissions pledge on the one Scott Morrison took to Glasgow, but observers say it will still have questions to answer

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The Australian government will use the UN climate conference in Egypt to launch a bid with Pacific nations to host the 2026 summit and pledge its support for greater action, including measures that the country’s previous government rejected a year ago in Glasgow.

The Cop27 conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, a small resort city on the Sinai peninsula, is the first since the Labor government led by Anthony Albanese was elected in May. It arrives for the fortnight-long talks as one of few national governments to have followed through on a commitment made in Glasgow that all countries would re-examine their plans with a view to increasing their commitments this year.

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When it comes to industrial relations reform, there is no interest like self interest

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All governments have seasons. In just under six months, the seasons of the Albanese government have been victory, transition, honeymoon, events.

The latest Guardian Essential poll tells us voter reception of the prime minister remains broadly where Labor would want it to be – 73% of respondents are either positive (45%) or neutral (28%). So, for now, the tolerance and goodwill persists. But there’s been a noticeable transition in atmosphere over the past fortnight. The shift suggests the government is bearing down on its next season: the summer of rent seekers.

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More tree conservation projects could be potentially created in the savannas and shrub lands of sub-Saharan Africa than from the rich rainforests around the continent’s equator, according to one of the founders of a soon-to-be launched free-to-access digital platform that promises to calculate the carbon content of every tree on the planet.

At least 10% of revenues from EU ETS auctions should be allocated to finance climate action in poorer nations, senior MEP Peter Liese said in a briefing on Friday, signalling that the bloc's parliament will push the issue at the upcoming COP27 UN climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh.

A Brussels proposal for carbon removal labelling is due out by month-end, though NGOs have already raised concerns about a leaked draft, questioning its effectiveness and whether it risks undermining EU climate ambition.

Norway, the largest oil producer in Europe, has raised its emission reduction target to at least 55% of 1990 levels by the end of this decade, keeping step with the EU’s goal as it looks to increasingly link its climate policy with the 27-nation bloc.

EU finance ministers will next week discuss a Brussels idea to fund the early running costs of the bloc's carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) with ETS auction revenue, though they are not expected to reach agreement as they are too divided on the issue, an EU source said on Friday.

The world’s biggest carbon offset developer EKI Energy Services saw its revenue and profit decline in the second quarter, though they still remained above year-ago levels over the first half of the financial term, according to results published Friday.

South African president Cyril Ramaphosa has said that his country's transition from coal to clean energy and wider transition will require 1.5 trillion rand, or around $83 billion, over the next five years, in an online address Friday.

The King will not be attending the UN climate summit COP27 which starts on Sunday.

European carbon recovered solidly on Friday morning and flirted with a key technical level after a second successive strong auction result triggered buying, while energy markets were left unimpressed by a cut in nuclear output forecasts in France.

A Republican takeover in the US Congress on Nov. 8 could create barriers to implementing Democrats’ climate-focused Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), and a strong GOP showing at the state level could scuttle North Carolina’s planned RGGI linkage and Arizona’s clean energy plans, experts told Carbon Pulse.

Egypt has expressed frustration at leaders making positive statements that are abandoned in negotiations

Governments meeting for vital climate talks have been accused of making positive commitments in public but denying them later in the privacy of the negotiating rooms by the Egyptian hosts of the summit.

Wael Aboulmagd, the Egyptian diplomat in charge of running the negotiations at the Cop27 UN climate summit, said: “Political statements and pledges are made in front of the cameras, but in the negotiating rooms it’s back to the adversarial approach. These [publicly positive positions] will not be of value until translated into the negotiating rooms, and that has not been the case so far.”

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About 70 people seized in protest at environmental damage from crude oil spillage into Cuninico River

Indigenous people in the Amazon in Peru have detained a group of Peruvian and foreign tourists, including UK and US citizens, in protest at a lack of government aid following an oil spill in the area.

“[We want] to call the government’s attention with this action, There are foreigners and Peruvians, there are about 70 people,” Watson Trujillo, the leader of the Cuninico community, told RPP radio.

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We environmentalists must avoid sending the message that the situation is hopeless. Let’s focus on solutions

My dear fellow environmentalists,

With the Cop27 summit about to be begin, can we please think about how we talk about the climate crisis? The scale of it is there to see – it can’t be missed – but haven’t we read enough books and attended enough events where we are told, once again, about the historic causes of the problem, the intransigent complexity of the problem and the inevitable worsening of the problem? Given a little more time, I swear that most speakers would detail the length, depth and height of the problem. It is depressing. It doesn’t help. Please stop.

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Hurricane Fiona and Hurricane Ian were the only storms to strengthen enough to become major events

The Atlantic hurricane season runs from 1 June to 20 November, with activity peaking between August and October. The past seven years have seen above average activity – the 2021 season was the third-most active on record – and the trend looked set to continue.

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Debris from the Chinese rocket is expected to pass over Catalonia and land in the Atlantic.

German utility RWE announced a 16% increase in coal, lignite, and gas generation covered by the EU ETS over the first nine months of 2022, it said in preliminary data.

Africa is the continent most vulnerable to the climate crisis, but with the right support at Cop27 it can build a stronger, greener future

• Emmanuel Macron is the president of France; Macky Sall is the president of Senegal and chair of the African Union; Mark Rutte is the prime minister of the Netherlands

This year, we have witnessed devastating hurricanes, typhoons and floods. The US and Australia burned. Europe sweltered under a prolonged heatwave. Drought and flooding in east Africa has left many facing food shortages. One-third of Pakistan was underwater after torrential monsoon rains, and half a million people there are homeless.

Though no corner of the globe is safe, Africa is more vulnerable than any other continent to this planetary crisis. There, it’s as if all the negative effects of global warming are amplified: Africa loses up to 15% of GDP growth a year to the destructive forces of climate change; extreme and erratic weather threatens human life, food, water security and the very foundations of economic development; and living off the land is increasingly untenable for a quarter of a billion people on the continent.

Emmanuel Macron is the president of France; Macky Sall is the president of Senegal and chair of the African Union; Mark Rutte is the prime minister of the Netherlands

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Australian carbon projects delivered some 1.6 million Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs) to the government between July and October, as officials confirmed the approval of 18 fossil fuel projects would be reassessed.