There is widespread reporting of the torrential rain in eastern, central and southern Spain, which has brought what the Guardian describes as “the country’s deadliest floods in three decades”. At least 95 people have died “amid warnings that the severe weather was not over and that the number of deaths could still rise”, the outlet says. The article quotes Ricardo Gabaldón, the mayor of Utiel, a town in Valencia, who says: “Yesterday was the worst day of my life…We were trapped like rats. Cars and rubbish containers were flowing down the streets. The water was rising to 3 metres [10ft].” The intense rain has been attributed to a phenomenon known as the gota fría, or “cold drop”, which occurs when cold air moves over the warm waters of the Mediterranean, the newspaper explains: “This creates atmospheric instability, causing warm, saturated air to rise rapidly, leading to heavy rain and thunderstorms.” It notes that “scientists say extreme weather events…are becoming more intense because of the climate crisis”, adding that “warmer air can hold more water vapour”. 

BBC News says that the “blame game has already begun, with disaster relief services accused of being slow to react”. It notes that “the civil protection agency, which is deployed during natural disasters, did not issue an alert until 20:15 local time on Tuesday, when the flooding had already caused a great deal of damage”. Recriminations “have been flying on social media as people ask why local governments and politicians were not better prepared”, it adds. Politico says the intensity of the rainfall “exposed the country’s unreadiness and led the Socialist-led national government to slam the centre-right regional authorities for failing to pass on early warnings to people in danger”. The outlet quotes European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, who warns that “this is the dramatic reality of climate change. And we must prepare to deal with it.” The Guardian quotes Prof Liz Stephens, a professor in climate risks and resilience at the University of Reading, who says: “People shouldn’t be dying from these kinds of forecasted weather events in countries where they have the resources to do better.” 

Reacting to the floods, an editorial in Spanish newspaper El Pais says that “this tragedy has been a painful reminder that Spain is on one of the front lines of the climate crisis and that… it must be prepared for consequences that are already irreversible”. An El Pais comment piece by writer Daniel Bernabé says that “this damage is an ideological problem…climate-change deniers have political surnames”. And Guardian’s Europe environment correspondent Ajit Niranjan notes: “Scientists say the violent weather battering Spain and its neighbours is a harbinger of what the rest of Europe can soon expect.”

There is further coverage in the Financial Times, i newspaper, Daily Telegraph, Associated Press and New York Times, while Reuters and the Daily Mail report that numerous La Liga football matches have been postponed because of the flooding. The Associated Press also has a photo collection revealing the devastation caused by the floods.

UK chancellor Rachel Reeves used her first budget to “beef up Labour’s investment plans in support of its clean energy mission”, reports BusinessGreen, “confirming the government will adjust its fiscal rules to allow increased public investment in green infrastructure, schools and hospitals”. In her address to parliament yesterday, Reeves “confirmed plans to invest in battery gigafactories, carbon capture and storage projects, electric vehicle supply chains, domestic energy efficiency upgrades, and new green hydrogen production plants, as she promised to deliver on Labour’s pledge to turn the UK into a ‘clean-energy superpower’”, the outlet explains. The investment plans “were enabled by a record-breaking £40bn increase in taxes”, the article says, including higher taxes on private jets and oil and gas industry profits. 

Among the measures in the budget, drivers of new petrol, diesel and hybrid vehicles are set to face higher first-year tax rates, the Independent reports. It says: “In an attempt to drive consumers towards electric vehicles while widening the gap between ‘higher polluting’ vehicles and EVs, the government will be increasing the first-year Vehicle Excise Duty (VED) for many new cars.” The rate will be frozen for EVs, but most are “doubling” for other vehicles, it adds. Reeves also maintained tax incentives for businesses offering EVs through company car schemes or running them in vehicle fleets, the Daily Telegraph notes.

Reeves also announced that a temporary 5p cut in fuel duty would remain in place, “saying it would be wrong to raise it amid a time of global uncertainty and a high cost of living”, reports Reuters. Caroline Lucas, the former leader of the Green party, said the government’s decision to keep the freeze while raising the nationwide bus fare cap by 50% was “utterly nonsensical”, reports Sky News. In the BBC News budget live blog, climate editor Justin Rowlatt quotes Carbon Brief analysis showing that “the failure to raise fuel duty in line with inflation could have increased UK CO2 emissions by up to 7%”. 

In other reporting, BusinessGreen reports that the budget documents confirm that the government “will move ahead with plans for a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), which will introduce a levy on carbon intensive imports from countries without a comparable carbon price from the start of 2027”. BBC News reports that the budget included £25m for coal-tip safety work in Wales. BusinessGreen also rounds up the reaction to the budget from green business leaders, campaigners and industry experts. And Carbon Brief has analysed all the key climate and energy announcements.

The Chinese government has told its automakers to “halt big investment” in European countries that support additional tariffs on Chinese-made electric vehicles (EVs), Reuters reports in an “exclusive”, adding that the manufacturers were also told they “should avoid separate investment discussions with European governments and instead work together to hold collective talks”. State news agency Xinhua quoted a spokesperson from China’s Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) saying that China has “repeatedly pointed out” that the EU’s anti-subsidy investigation into Chinese-made EVs is “unreasonable and non-compliant”, adding that the country “does not agree with or accept the ruling”. MOFCOM has also “filed a complaint” with the World Trade Organisation (WTO), business news outlet Yicai reports. Reuters says that China’s state-owned company SAIC Motor “intends to file a lawsuit at the European Union’s Court of Justice to protect its rights and interests”. An editorial in the state-run newspaper China Daily says it is “disappointing” that the EU has “ignored the efforts on the part of China” to maintain “healthy and stable” trade relations, and instead is undertaking “unreasonable” and “protectionist” practices. Xinhua publishes another article stating that European stakeholders, including German government officials and trade body representatives and the Slovakian prime minister, are “strongly opposed” to the tariff decision. The Financial Times reports that BYD, China’s biggest EV maker, has posted higher quarterly revenues than US rival Tesla for the first time, but a “bruising price war in its domestic market dragged on its profitability”.

Meanwhile, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China’s top economic planner, along with five other departments, have issued guidance for “renewable energy substitution”, calling for the “integration” of renewable energy with “various sectors including industry, transportation, construction and agriculture”, business news outlet Jiemian reports, adding that it also specifies the renewable energy consumption target for the 15th Five-Year Plan for the first time, with renewable energy consumption reaching 1.5bn tonnes of standard coal by 2030. Industry news outlet BJX News also covers the story, adding that the guidance also proposes “establishing and improving the pricing mechanism for energy storage” and encourages “the orderly participation of distributed renewable energy in market-based transactions”. China issued a notice on enhancing the “grid-connection safety capabilities” of “new energy and emerging grid participants”, the NEA-run news outlet CPNN reports.

Elsewhere, Bloomberg reports that the China Three Gorges Corporation is looking to build a power base “mixing wind, solar, coal and batteries”, which will include “8.5 gigawatts of solar panels, 4 gigawatts of wind turbines, six 660-megawatt coal power generators and 5 gigawatt-hours of battery storage”. Jiemian says that China’s major solar companies are now “collectively planning to raise prices” for their products, although one business analyst tells the economic news outlet that incremental price increases are more likely than large jumps.

Finally, Chinese companies will “struggle to expand globally” if they do not align with green standards from the EU and other international markets and “comprehensively” disclose carbon emission data, Li Zhiqing, director of the Center for Environmental Economics Research at Fudan University, tells Shanghai-based news outlet the Paper. The Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post says “gross ecosystem product” (GEP), a concept which “incorporates the economic contributions of various ecosystem services”, could serve as a “natural counterpart to GDP”.

The UN, scientists and governments “made an urgent call” yesterday at the COP16 biodiversity summit for increased funding to protect coral reefs under threat of extinction, reports the Associated Press. It continues: “Research this year shows that 77% of the world’s reefs are affected by bleaching, mainly due to warming ocean waters amid human-caused climate change. It’s the largest and fourth mass global bleaching on record and is impacting both hemispheres…The findings prompted a UN special emergency session – typically called to address escalating conflicts or natural disasters – on corals to be convened on [the] sidelines of the UN biodiversity summit.” After the session, the governments of New Zealand, the UK, Germany and France “made new pledges totaling around $30m to the UN fund for coral reefs established in 2020”, the newswire says, adding: “By 2030, the fund seeks to leverage up to $3bn in public and private finance to support coral reef conservation efforts. Around $225m has been raised to date.” The article quotes Peter Thomson, the UN secretary general’s special envoy for the ocean, who warns: “With the window to protect these ecosystems closing rapidly, world leaders must act now.”

Meanwhile, Guardian reports that “alarm is growing at the lack of concrete progress” at COP16 on major targets. It says that “weak progress on funding for nature and almost no progress on subsidy reform” have “frustrated observers”. Quoting Carbon Brief’s interactive tracker, the outlet notes that “at the time of publication, 158 countries are yet to submit formal plans on how they are going to meet the targets”. Reuters reports that countries are unlikely to reach a major new funding agreement for nature conservation at COP16, with delegates yesterday discussing “pushing their negotiations beyond the summit’s end”. The newswire explains that this year’s summit “had aimed to ramp up sources of conservation financing, but reached an impasse over whether to create yet another fund for nature”. It quotes David Ainsworth, a spokesperson for the UN Convention on Biological Diversity secretariat, who says: “It’s obvious that the discussions here will not be a full conclusion.” He adds that delegates have already “discussed what is going to be the way forward in the intersessional period”. For the latest on the COP16 negotiations, read the special edition of Carbon Brief’s Cropped newsletter, published yesterday.

Responding to the Labour party’s budget, Helena Horton and Jillian Ambrose – the Guardian’s environment reporter and energy correspondent, respectively – write that “reactions were mixed” to chancellor Rachel Reeves’s ambition to be the “green chancellor”. The decision to freeze fuel duty and keep the 5p cut made by the Conservatives in 2022 “attracted some fury”, they say, quoting Carbon Brief’s analysis showing “the tax relief is estimated to have raised UK greenhouse gas emissions by 7% since 2010”. Reeves “has been accused of doing ‘completely the wrong thing’ for the climate by making this decision at the same time as raising the bus fare cap from £2 to £3 and rail fares by 4.6%”, they write. Ed Miliband’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero “came out of things well”, the pair write, “with a 35% capital uplift and a new investment rule that will allow money to pour into renewable energy projects”. Horton and Ambrose note that shares in many North Sea oil companies “all bounded higher after the budget statement revealed that the windfall tax, which will increase the headline tax rate on oil and gas profits to 78%, has a loophole”. They write: “Oil and gas developers will still have access to 100% first-year capital allowances within the windfall tax regime.” The budget “also confirmed that Defra was reviewing and would possibly cut flood-resilience funding and farming payments”, the pair explain. They quote Ami McCarthy, the head of politics at Greenpeace UK, who says: “Further cuts would be completely unconscionable when…homes and livelihoods face growing risks from flooding, and our wildlife is suffering so much.”   

In further reaction, an editorial in the Sun praises Reeves’s “smart decision” to maintain the fuel duty freeze – a topic on which it has been campaigning for years. It says: “To her credit, the chancellor accepted our case that hiking a litre by 7p would fleece the very working people she vowed to protect.” Paul Johnson – director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies and Times columnist – is less impressed with the move, noting that it was one of several decisions that had him “literally banging my head on the table”. He writes: “If you are not going to raise fuel duties in line with inflation and reinstate the ‘temporary’ 5p a litre cut in your first budget, then surely you never will. Yet just like her predecessors, Reeves is still working to public finance assumptions that say she will do just that.” An editorial in the Daily Express says that “increasing the windfall tax on oil and gas profits while removing the investment allowance is a high-risk move”. It adds: “Everyone should be concerned about climate change, but with the Middle East in turmoil and war raging in Ukraine, we must make the most of our own energy reserves.”

Finally, in other UK comment, a Financial Times editorial reflects on “Japan’s unfortunate political limbo” after last weekend’s snap election. It says that if the opposition Constitutional Democratic party (CDP) wants to win next time, “it needs to show it is serious”. The FT notes that, among the policies the CDP championed at the recent election, “it has ambitious carbon reduction goals, but wants to shut down nuclear power completely”.

A global area of forest bigger than Mexico has the potential to be naturally regrown, a new study finds. Naturally regenerating identified forest areas could sequester more than 23bn tonnes of carbon over the course of three decades, the researchers estimate. Analysing pantropical natural forests around the world over 2000-16, their model finds that five countries – Brazil, Indonesia, China, Mexico and Colombia – account for just over half of the regrowth potential, which totals 215m hectares. Forest restoration often focuses on tree planting, but these findings show the “need for targeting restoration initiatives that leverage natural regeneration potential”, according to the researchers.