The publication of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report has been “held up” by a “battle between rich and developing countries over emissions targets and financial aid to vulnerable nations”, the Associated Press reports. The last report in the IPCC’s sixth assessment cycle (AR6) is a synthesis, which brings together the findings of its August 2021 report on climate science, its February 2022 report on climate impacts and its April 2022 report on how to tackle climate change, plus earlier “special reports”. The synthesis report was due to be approved on Friday following a week-long approval session by governments, AP reports. It says: “The deadline was repeatedly extended as officials from big nations such as China, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, as well as the US and the European Union haggled through the weekend over the wording of key phrases in the text…The unusual process of having countries sign off on a scientific report is intended to ensure that governments accept its findings as authoritative advice on which to base their actions.” Carbon Brief understands that the report was approved on Sunday evening and is due to be published at 1pm GMT today. (Carbon Brief’s in-depth digest of the AR6 synthesis report will be published later this week.) Politico reports that delays to the report being published are related to a “strike” by some scientists. Ahead of the report being published, the Guardian speaks to the prime minister of Samoa, who urges the world to take action. Fiame Naomi Mata’afa tells the Guardian: “We’re all impacted, but the degree of the impact is in the particular circumstance of countries. So our low-lying atoll countries, it’s right there, we’re living with it.” The Guardian also has an explainer on what the AR6 synthesis report is and why it matters.

The UK is “off track for its net-zero targets and ministers risk further legal challenges over their record on cutting CO2 emissions”, says an analysis reported on by the Times. The analysis by the thinktank Green Alliance finds that confirmed government policies will only deliver 28% of the CO2 savings needed to meet binding carbon targets for 2028 to 2032, the Times says. It adds: “Policies under consultation accounted for an extra 36%, while policies the government has announced an ambition for another 23%. The final 13% of savings needed are not covered…The worst emissions shortfalls are in farming, industry and transport.”

Elsewhere, Bloomberg reports that the UK is poised to release an “advanced manufacturing plan”, part of its answer to the US Inflation Reduction Act. It explains: “When it comes to stimulating green investment, Treasury officials have privately conceded they can’t come close to matching Biden’s measures. And while they concede the UK doesn’t have a significant green manufacturing base to protect, they are increasingly worried potential investment may be diverted to the US. Ministers, led by business and trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch are still working through the details of the manufacturing plan, but measures are likely to centre on deregulation until funding commitments are made by chancellor of the exchequer Jeremy Hunt in his autumn statement, one person said. The new UK plan will focus on securing supplies of critical minerals, as well as battery and electric vehicle production, two people said.”

It comes as CityAM reports that energy bosses, industry bodies and thinktanks have been critical of Hunt’s recent spring statement, for focusing on carbon capture and storage over renewables such as solar. The i newspaper reports that prime minister Rishi Sunak has delayed “key announcements” on energy ahead of parliament’s easter recess. The Daily Mail has a story under the headline: “Budget branded a ‘missed opportunity’ to put the stuttering electric vehicle revolution in Britain back on track.” The Daily Telegraph reports that the government will allow lower quality gas to be pumped into UK homes in a bid to further boost North Sea production. The move will not come into force until 2025. The i newspaper reports that retrofitter shortages are prompting long waits for heat pump and solar panel installations. Another Daily Telegraph story speaks to the chief of a radiator company who is critical of heat pumps. The Times reports that a UK-based nuclear company backed by Italy’s Agnelli family plans to raise nearly £900m to advance a plan to build a fleet of small nuclear reactors in Britain. A second Times story explores why the UK has joined the “rush” for small nuclear reactors. The Guardian reports that the chief of Drax, the company behind the biomass power station in North Yorkshire, has seen his pay rocket almost 70% to more than £5m after a year when high electricity prices sent profits soaring. And the i newspaper has a “big read” on how Cornwall could have a lithium mining boom.

European solar companies say limits on Chinese imports included in the EU’s proposed Net-Zero Industry Act could make the transition to net-zero more difficult, the FT reports. The Act obliges authorities to consider marking down public tenders for renewables projects if companies source from a single country that accounts for a more than 65% of the EU market share for the product. [The rule has been interpreted as being “anti-China”, a country that currently supplies almost all of Europe’s solar PV module imports.] Dries Acke, policy director at SolarPower Europe, an industry lobby group, tells the FT: “The current proposal is asking member states to reduce support for technologies that come from dominant geographies in the supply chains, like solar…If we don’t want to risk slowing solar deployment, we need a bigger carrot, especially in terms of financing solar plants in Europe.” Bloomberg also reports on reaction to the Net-Zero Industry Act proposal, saying “critics described the approach as reminiscent of a planned economy rather than a free-market response”. A Bloomberg opinion article by David Fickling describes it as “green protectionism [that] will worsen its energy security”. DownToEarth India says the outcome for the global south is still uncertain. Politico reports that France is still pushing for all nuclear technologies to be listed as eligible for the special terms laid out in the Net-Zero Industry Act, despite losing a battle for this before the proposal was published. (See Carbon Brief’s full explainer on the Net-Zero Industry Act and how it relates to the EU’s Green Deal Industrial Plan.) Elsewhere, Reuters reports that the EU is working on a scheme to encourage companies to jointly buy gas.

The South China Morning Post continues media coverage of a new study published last Thursday focused on China’s support of overseas coal projects. The newspaper quotes the study author Christoph Nedopil: “China’s overseas coal exit seems to be based foremost on economic rather than long-term environmental considerations.” The article adds: “With more global investors reducing financing for coal, the financing cost for coal-fired power plants increased on average by 38% in the period from 2017 to 2020.” As a result, of the “51” overseas coal-fired power plants that China announced “between the second half of 2014 and the end of 2020…only one” became operational, while “25 were shelved and eight were scrapped”, the outlet adds. For China’s domestic coal exit, Nedopil says that the country’s coal power generation is “more complex because of a number of different stakeholders who are interested in keeping coal alive”. The outlet also quotes Byford Tsang, a senior policy adviser with E3G and a co-author of the report, who says: “Ending the coal plant building spree should be a priority for China’s new cabinet. Doing so will save China from a costly detour on its energy transition and position China as a front-runner on climate.”

Separately, the Diplomat has published an article by Haneea Isaad, an energy finance analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, who writes that, in a “breakthrough development” last month, the government of Pakistan took a policy decision to go ahead with the 300MW Gwadar power project, which, despite being declared a “fast track project” under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) in 2016, has not made “any substantial progress since its conception”. He adds: “While the government of Pakistan contemplated shifting the project to an alternate fuel, their Chinese counterparts were still committed to the idea of imported coal. Ultimately, the Pakistani side was ‘compelled’ to reverse its policy objectives and shift the plant back to running on imported coal.”

Meanwhile, S&P Global Commodity Insights writes that China has “relaxed some of the rules under its national compliance emissions trading scheme for coal-fired power plants to reduce their financial burden after a year of record fuel prices and global energy disruptions”.

The “relaxation” of some emissions obligations was “in line with market interventions by other countries to cushion the impact of high fuel costs and ballooning losses at power utilities in the aftermath of the Russia-Ukraine war”, the article says, adding that it also “signaled a temporary retraction from imposing carbon costs on energy companies”. Mining.com, an online news site, reports that iron ore prices “fell” on Thursday as China “reported a plan to again cut annual crude steel production this year”.

Finally, the Global Times, citing a report by the China Media Group on Sunday, writes that about “3.6% of the spring sowing across China has been completed”, about the “same pace” as last year citing data from the ministry of agricultural and rural affairs (MOA). The state-run newspaper quotes Jiao Shanwei, editor-in-chief of industry news website cngrain.com, saying “there still might be extreme weather in 2023 and abnormally high temperatures have already been recorded in some places in China”.

The German Greens are pushing parliament to bring forward the phase-out of coal from 2038 to 2030 in the east of the country, reports Stern. It adds that a draft resolution for the parliamentary group’s closed meeting next week says this is a “necessary step to achieve the climate goals”. Saxony-Anhalt’s prime minister Reiner Haseloff from the Christian Democratic Party (CDU) is quoted describing an earlier exit from coal as “completely illusory” because of the loss of Russian gas. In the coalition agreement, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), Greens and Free Democratic Party (FDP) agreed to “ideally” bring the phase-out of coal forward by eight years to 2030, which was already agreed last autumn for the Rhenish mining area in the west, notes the outlet. It adds that economics minister Robert Habeck also spoke out in favour of this, but said this would have to be agreed by consensus. Four Greens politicians explain in a guest article for Tagesschau why this step is necessary, noting that “broad acceptance requires trust in the transformation process and the perspectives of the local people”.

Meanwhile, Die Zeit reports that work has begun in the Baltic Sea to construct two more liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals on Germany’s island of Rügen. However, the German environmental NGO Deutsche Umwelthilfe has criticised the work, saying the terminals are “superfluous and…harmful to the environment”. Der Spiegel adds that the preparation works have started despite the veto of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania’s prime minister Manuela Schwesig.

Separately, Germany has avoided a gas shortage this winter, according to the president of the German federal network agency Klaus Müller, but “things could be different” next year, reports Bloomberg, referring to Müller’s interview with Rheinische Post. The outlet quotes the top energy regulator saying: “The risk factors are that the winter of 2023-24 will be very cold, that households and companies will save too little and that the LNG terminals will not work as planned.” Müller urged Germans to continue saving gas to help fill up storage facilities over the summer and said he’d be “happy” if Germany still had “well over 50%” in storage by 1 May, compared with about 64% now, notes the article.

Finally, Die Zeit reports that the German environment minister Steffi Lemke has ruled out a further extension of the lifetime of the last German nuclear power plants saying that “the nuclear phase-out in mid-April will remain”. And Der Spiegel carries an analysis on how Europe’s “car future” is being negotiated between German transport minister Volker Wissing, who is advocating for saving the combustion engines cars by using synthetic petrol and diesel substitutes (e-fuels), and EU commissioner Frans Timmermans, who wants to follows the goal of the EU Green Deal which would see, from 2035, newly registered cars no longer emitting any CO2.

An editorial in the New York Times describes the fact that poorer nations have contributed little to climate change yet are already suffering the largest impacts as “one of the great injustices of this era”. It says: “The World Bank and the donor countries that control it can do more to step up and tackle this generational challenge. To make the World Bank and other multilateral lending institutions fit for purpose in the 21st century, leaders need to figure out how to raise and leverage the massive amounts of capital that are going to be necessary in the coming years to help countries adapt to and mitigate a changing climate. For years, climate financing took a back seat to the bank’s twin goals of reducing extreme poverty and promoting shared prosperity. Today, it is integral to achieving those goals.”

In the Guardian, journalist Amy Westervelt explores why insiders are “disappointed but not surprised” that all of the Big Oil firms that publicly announced support of algae-based biofuels have now withdrawn their funding from its research. She says: “All the researchers who spoke to the Guardian agreed: what was needed to make algal fuels a success was a longer runway and funding in the billions – closer to what oil companies spend on fossil fuels.”

In the Times, associate director of Bradshaw Advisory Amy Norman says that problems with the UK power grid are “choking” green growth. She explains: “Getting new projects connected to the grid is fraught with painful waiting times of up to 15 years and perverse incentives around project viability. This is partly due to planning delays and a queuing process that is not fit for purpose. But what captures fewer headlines is the poor quality of the grid that keeps our answers to growth, net zero, and energy security waiting in line.” Elsewhere in the Daily Express, Lucas Farmer at the right-wing lobby group Institute of Economic Affairs (which has a long history of attacking climate action) praises Hunt’s decision to back new nuclear in his spring statement.

New research quantifies the impact of “anomalous precipitation events” on the loss of ice from West Antarctica’s Amundsen Sea embayment – a major ice-drainage basin of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet – over the past 25 years. The paper presents a record of the Amundsen Sea embayment “input-output mass balance” over 1996-2021, finding that the region has lost 3,331bn tonnes of ice since 1996, resulting in 9.2mm of global sea level rise. The researchers identify two anomalous precipitation events that had large, albeit short-lived, impacts on rates of mass change: over 2009-13, persistently low snowfall drove an additional 51bn tonnes of mass loss per year, while extreme precipitation in the winters of 2019 and 2020 reduced mass loss by 60bn tonnes each year.