The UK newspapers have extensive election-related coverage of climate-change pledges by the parties. The Independent’s frontpage carries the news that “voters are more concerned about the environment ahead of this election than at any time in the past, according to a poll, ranking it above the economy, education and immigration”. It adds: “The findings will put pressure on political parties to toughen their policies on pollution and climate change as the issue ranks only behind Brexit, health and crime on the public’s list of priorities, according to the Ipsos Mori survey.” BBC News highlights how the main parties have been trying to out-pledge each other when it comes to tree-planting commitments: “The Conservative Party has said it will plant 30m trees a year by 2025 if it wins the general election – as the Liberal Democrats pledged to plant twice as many trees in the same period. The Tories’ £640m fund would be used to plant trees and restore peatland. Labour dismissed the scheme and said the prime minister had an ‘atrocious environmental record’. The Lib Dems would plant 60m trees a year across the UK by 2025, leader Jo Swinson said.” David Shukman, the BBC’s science editor, takes a look at the claims for BBC News: “Experts in forestry say a huge programme of tree planting is needed if the UK is to have any chance of reducing its carbon emissions to effectively zero. They also say that the aim, though difficult, is feasible but will depend on careful planning – ‘to get the right trees in the right places’, as one specialist put it to me. Finding enough land may be one of the toughest challenges.”

Meanwhile, the Labour party has, reports the Times, “stepped back from a plan for Britain to produce net-zero carbon emissions by 2030”. It adds: “Yesterday Jeremy Corbyn’s Instagram page posted an image of the slogan ‘carbon neutral by 2030 — only with Labour’. The policy would be 20 years ahead of the target set during Theresa May’s time as prime minister. After the Times asked Labour whether this meant that a firm 2030 commitment had been written into the election manifesto, the post was quickly deleted.” The Press Association reports that “Labour has promised to create a climate apprenticeship programme which will train an average of 80,000 people a year”. It adds: “The party said it will also bring in reforms to the apprenticeship levy in a bid to better meet the needs of workers and employers, as well as tackling the climate emergency. Under the plans, Labour said they will deliver 320,000 apprenticeships in England during their first term in government, with the programme creating 886,000 by 2030. Climate apprenticeships will ‘upskill’ the UK workforce so that UK companies can compete and succeed in the green economy, the party said.” The Daily Telegraph quotes Sir Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrats deputy leader, who says that stopping climate change is probably more important than stopping Brexit. The Guardian carries a couple of articles looking more closely at the Conservative’s climate policies. The first says that the “Conservative party’s record on tackling the climate crisis has been condemned by leading scientists and former government advisers”: “Leading scientist David King, a key government adviser on the climate crisis until 2017, questioned whether Johnson could be trusted on the environment. He said he would give the Conservatives no more than three or four out of 10 for their record on tackling the climate crisis.” The second article asks: “Are the Tories’ green commitments all talk and little action?” The Guardian has also published an article looking at all the parties in the round and assessing how they each “propose to tackle the climate crisis”.

Separately, the heads of the UK’s leading green NGOs have written a joint letter to the Times calling for “all party leaders to participate in a televised debate on climate change and nature”. And the Financial Times has a story about how the UK government is “hanging back” on green bonds, in contrast to other European countries: “UK investors are hungry for environmentally focused sovereign debt…Despite this, the Treasury’s position remains unchanged and it continues to monitor the case for a sovereign green bond.”

Reuters reports that on Friday the German lower house of parliament approved a “major climate protection package which aims to ensure Germany will meet its 2030 target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions”. It adds: “The package, agreed after months of haggling between the chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives and her Social Democrat coalition partners, has already been criticised as inadequate in view of the urgent challenges posed by climate change. Environment minister Svenja Schulze said the measures, which compel ministries to take additional steps to cut emissions if Germany falls behind on its climate goals, plugged a major gap in Germany’s legislative framework. Germany, Europe’s largest economy, means to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 55% of its 1990 level by 2030. Merkel in September acknowledged her coalition’s credibility on climate policy had been hurt by abandoning an earlier 2020 emissions cut target.”

Meanwhile, EurActiv reports that MPs from Germany’s Socialist Democratic Party have called on the EU to take on a leadership role at the COP25 climate conference in Madrid next month. And the Financial Times has a news feature about how Germans are falling “out of love” with onshore wind: “In the first nine months of 2019, developers put up 150 new wind turbines across the country with a total capacity of 514MW — more than 80% below the average build rate in the past five years and the lowest increase in capacity for two decades. The sharp decline has raised alarm among political leaders, industry executives and climate campaigners.”

Several newspapers carry the news that a single wildfire on peatland may have released carbon equivalent to six days’ of Scotland’s total greenhouse gas emissions. The Times says: “Analysis for the WWF charity assessed the impact of a blaze on the scale of the one that burnt on part of the Flow Country in the far north of Scotland for almost a week in May. The Flow Country is estimated to store 400m tonnes of carbon and is under consideration to be made a World Heritage Site because of the rarity of its type of blanket bog.” BBC News quotes WWF Scotland’s head of policy Gina Hanrahan: “This analysis puts into stark figures the importance of our peatlands and the huge cost to climate and nature when something goes wrong.” The Scotsman also covers the story.

DeSmog UK has published a series of articles to mark the 10th anniversary of the “Climategate” theft and online distribution of emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit. Topics include: “Where are the ringleaders of the manufactured scandal now?”; “Here are 3 Climategate myths that have not aged well”; and “How the Climategate email hack laid the foundations for the fake news era”. The Eastern Daily Press, the university’s local newspaper, has published a feature in which several UEA climate scientists are interviewed about the episode. RealClimate, which was directly caught up in the theft via a server hack, has a post by Nasa’s Dr Gavin Schmidt: “The nominally serious ‘issues’ touched on by the email theft – how robust are estimates of global temperature over the instrumental period, what does the proxy record show etc. – have all been settled in favour of the mainstream by scientists plodding along in normal science mode, incrementally improving the analyses, and yet they are still the most repeated denier talking points…The ‘facts on the ground’ have shifted dramatically. The warmest years on record, increasing influences of climate change on wildfires, hurricane intensity, heat waves, coastal flooding, coral bleaching, etc. have meant that outright denial of science isn’t as marketable any more as the wider conversation has moved to solutions.”

An editorial in the FT says that “our climate is in crisis yet the world’s thirst for fossil fuels, a prime cause of the predicament, shows no signs of slackening”. It adds: “Experts from the International Energy Agency last week presented a sobering assessment of the state of play. [The IEA report was covered in detail by Carbon Brief.] The world’s reliance on fossil fuels, it warned, remains “stubbornly high”. Carbon emissions are set to rise up until 2040, even if governments manage to meet their environmental targets…Today’s energy system relies heavily on fossil fuels. This will not change imminently but if gas wants to retain a role it needs to clean up its act. More needs to be done to encourage the adoption of carbon-capture schemes, where gas is burnt but the CO2 produced is not allowed to enter the atmosphere.”

An editorial in the Washington Post remarks on flood-stricken Venice: “As the water continues to advance, Venice’s lagoon may have to be more or less permanently closed off from the Adriatic, which would radically alter its ecosystem and pose problems for disposing municipal waste. Saving Venice will take money, time and compromise. In substantial ways, the place will not be the same. Humanity must ask how many Venices it wants in the decades to come. For centuries, humans have built their civilization around water, under a certain set of climatic conditions, in anticipation of only the rare catastrophe. Unless humans make easier changes now to reduce global warming’s risks, they will have harder choices in the future, in places ancient and new, in ways predictable and unexpected.””

Meanwhile, BBC News has a feature by Matt McGrath on whether recent flooding and wildfire extremes can be linked to human-caused climate change: “Climate scientists…see a clear relation between rising temperatures and the inundation. ‘Sea level rise is rising globally and it is also rising in the Adriatic,’ said Prof Gabi Hegerl, from the University of Edinburgh. ‘Venice is also subsiding a bit, so you have a bit of a double whammy.’”

There is continuing reaction to Australia’s wildfires. Writing for iNews, James Dyke says: “The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has acknowledged that human-caused climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of dangerous bushfire conditions in Australia. Unfortunately, the Australian government continues to downplay the importance of climate change on these fires…Keeping Australian coal in the ground will not, by itself, ensure that we avoid dangerous climate change. But it would significantly reduce the risk. First, it would limit the supply of coal to global markets, therefore making it more expensive and help promote renewable electricity generation. Second, it would increase pressure on other governments who are failing to play their part.” Greg Jericho in the Guardian asks: “If you can’t talk about climate when the country is burning, when can you?” The Economist has a feature on why “the [Australian] government thinks only stuck-up urbanites would suggest a connection between the [climate change and the wildfires”. Meanwhile, the climate sceptic Australian newspaper tries to argue that there is no such connection.

Reporting from Terra do Meio in Brazil, Jonathan Watts looks ahead to the release today of the latest Brazilian government deforestation data: “Manmade fires continue to ravage swathes of Brazilian land. Scientists say the forest must be protected if the world is to avoid dangerous levels of global heating, yet the government of the far-right president Jair Bolsonaro has given the green light to farmers, miners and loggers to enter the region and cut down trees.” In the Independent, Phoebe Weston reports a new study which shows that there is strong evidence this year’s [Amazon] wildfires were linked to an increase in deforestation”. Meanwhile, the Sunday Times carries an interview with nature and science TV presenter Liz Bonnin. She explains why seeing deforestation makes her so tearful: “I don’t want to be a silly westerner romanticising about the Amazon. I’m here to get the facts. But seeing that and understanding the scale just sets me off.” She also explains why Greta Thunberg gives her hope.

Building roads through peatlands could increase their emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, a new study finds. The research was conducted in two peatland environments in Canada, a bog and a fen, which had been impacted by the construction of resource access roads. “However, our study showed that aligning roads parallel to water flow when and where possible…can help to minimise induced methane emissions,” the authors add.