The next UK government should make the transition to a “green economy” its top priority to boost economic growth and avoid falling behind other countries, the president of the British Chambers of Commerce tells the Guardian. Martha Lane Fox, the entrepreneur who heads “one of the country’s most powerful business groups”, tells the newspaper that neither Labour nor the Conservatives can afford to backtrack on climate commitments in the run up to the general election. She tells the Guardian: “This is beyond your electability. This is the fundamental plank to build a robust economy. [And] the climate is too important to denigrate in the list of political priorities.”

It comes as the Financial Times carries a frontpage story covering a warning from the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to chancellor Jeremy Hunt, urging him to avoid tax cuts in his spring budget and instead “prioritise spending in areas such as health, education and climate change”. Chief economist Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas is quoted saying that the UK’s focus should be on “the path towards a fiscal consolidation” and that Hunt should be “trying to rebuild fiscal buffers… in the context in which there are important spending needs”. Hunt rejected the IMF’s recommendations on tax policy on Tuesday, the FT says. Nethertheless, a frontpage story in the Times says that Hunt has warned the cabinet that tax cuts in the spring budget may be smaller than expected because of “major structural weaknesses” in the economy. ITV News and the Daily Mail are among publications reporting on the IMF warning to prioritise spending in areas including climate change. The Daily Telegraph also covers the warning, but omits that the IMF urged the government to prioritise spending on climate change.

Elsewhere, the Times reports that the Conservatives have been accused of complacency after delaying an international summit on energy security.

China’s installed wind and solar capacity is expected to overtake coal for the first time this year, an industry body said on Tuesday, according to Reuters. An annual report from the China Electricity Council says that grid-connected wind and solar could make up around 40% of installed power generation capacity by the end of 2024, compared with 37% from coal, Reuters says. By comparison, wind and solar together were around 36% of capacity at the end of 2023 and coal was just under 40%, it adds.

Elsewhere, China’s Science and Technology Daily reports that the country’s ministry of industry and information technology (MIIT) has issued “interim measures” to promote “green” factories for the manufacturing sector, reports Science and Technology Daily. The measures will “further lead the benchmark of green manufacturing”, promoting the “green and low-carbon transformation and upgrading of industries”, the outlet adds. Communist party-affiliated newspaper People’s Daily says that “the greening process of traditional industries is speeding up” and that “green” factories “have blossomed everywhere” in recent years. The state-run industry newspaper China Energy News reports that China will “promote the innovative development of future industries”, including in nuclear energy, nuclear fusion, hydrogen energy and biomass energy. The Financial Times quotes commerce minister Wang Wentao saying that “rising trade protectionism” around China’s exports of clean-energy technologies is one of the main challenges of world trade in 2024. China Energy News reports that the “production crisis” facing the European solar manufacturing industry is prompting the EU to “consider taking action against Chinese enterprises”, adding that “European manufacturers do not have a clear technological advantage [over China]”, making Chinese manufacturing important to maintaining supply. 

Meanwhile, another Reuters article reports that on Monday oil prices dropped “more than a dollar a barrel”, as China’s “ailing property sector sparked demand worries”. The Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post says that China has found an oilfield that could produce “107m tonnes of crude oil”, which is comparable to “more than half” of the country’s production in 2023 – a discovery that comes as China intensifies efforts to enhance energy security. China Energy Net reports that, according to the national bureau of statistics (NBS), the total profits of the coal mining and washing industry in 2023 “amounted to nearly 763bn yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 25.3%”, while by contrast, the power industry achieved a total profit of 549bn yuan in 2023, a year-on-year increase of 71.9%. The different trends are probably due to a “continuous decline” in coal prices and a “dual increase” in power prices and consumption, the newspaper adds. 

Separately, China Energy Net reports that the national energy administration (NEA), the country’s top energy regulator, called for the power sector “to vigorously carry out work on safety production” and to “ensure…reliable power supply” at its 2024 work conference. China Electricity News carries an article written by Li Chuangjun, director of the new energy and renewable energy department of the NEA. He writes that “in the new year, in accordance with [China’s] overall tone of seeking progress while maintaining stability, promoting stability alongside progress and establishing [new energy capacity] before destroying [traditional energy capacity]”, China will “continue to promote the development of renewable energy”.

The state-run newspaper China Daily publishes an editorial saying that “if Chinese power batteries are excluded from the supply chains of the US electric vehicle makers, that will markedly push up the price of electric vehicles for US consumers”. Finally, Heatmap says that China’s “huge [clean-energy] investments represent a breakthrough that allows all of us to envision a clean, abundant future”.

Saudi Arabia has dropped a plan to boost daily oil production capacity, “in a major policy reversal by the world’s largest oil exporter”, the Financial Times reports. On Tuesday, the state run oil company Saudi Aramco said it had been instructed by the government to abandon a plan to increase its maximum sustainable production capacity from 12m barrels a day to 13m b/d by 2027, the FT says. It adds: “The multibillion-dollar investment programme had set the company apart from much of the industry, where spending on oil production is generally falling because of concerns about climate targets and future demand.” An unnamed source tells the FT that the decision was taken by the ministry of energy and was not driven by any technical or operational issue at the company, which remains in a position to boost oil production capacity if it chooses to. The ministry of energy has not issued a statement or provided any explanation for the move, the FT adds. Reuters adds that, for decades, Saudi Arabia has been the main holder of the world’s only significant spare oil capacity, “providing a safety cushion for global supplies in case of major disruptions”. A source with “direct knowledge” tells Reuters that Aramco currently has spare capacity of 3m b/d and “could always boost its capacity target later” if it is instructed to. “If the government decides to go the other way, the company is ready,” the source tells Reuters.

The Daily Telegraph describes the move as a “blow for [US president] Joe Biden’s efforts to hold down petrol prices”. A Bloomberg piece by energy and commodities columnist Javier Blas says Saudi Arabia’s decision “says nothing about the shift away from fossil fuels”. He says: “By scrapping the expansion plan, Riyadh has conceded what was already an open secret: There’s insufficient demand for so much extra Saudi oil in the foreseeable future. That, however, is very different from saying that global appetite for additional crude is diminishing.” Elsewhere, a Lex editorial in the FT says the “days of $100 oil prices are over”. It comes as Reuters reports that a minister from Japan, the world’s second-biggest buyer of liquefied natural gas (LNG), has said the country has “concerns” over Biden’s decision to pause new LNG export terminals. Elsewhere, a second Reuters story says that the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), which is headed by COP28 president Sultan Al Jaber, has signed a 10-year LNG supply agreement with India. 

An “unusual heatwave” with temperatures of up to 40C affected northern Patagonia last week and prompted brigades to fight fires in two national parks, according to Argentina’s La Nación. In a second La Nación article, an expert from the National Meteorological Service tells the newspaper that high temperatures will persist throughout this week but decrease during the weekend, due to expected rainfall in the country’s central provinces, such as Buenos Aires and La Pampa. The outlet reports that farmers fear negative impacts on their yields. Elsewhere, climatologists and meteorologists forecast that Santiago is likely to reach 40C for the first time “soon”, if not this year, Chile’s La Tercera reports. The newspaper says the current heatwave is hitting the country’s capital and central area, with temperatures soaring to 37.6C, with climate change meaning that historical records are being broken more frequently.

Meanwhile, in Peru, an interactive piece by El Comercio lays out how El Niño has affected women’s health in the northern part of the country. The newspaper says that intense rains and floods derived from the cyclone Yaku in early 2023 exacerbated maternal deaths. The outlet also reports that violence against women increases during extreme events.  

Elsewhere, a group of Mexican legislators travelled to the UK to strengthen their capacities and exchange experiences on climate legislation, Excélsior reports. The week-long meeting with various countries saw agreements on priority areas to address climate change, it adds. 

In Brazil, the government has started to ask its more than 50 electricity utilities for their contingency plans for extreme weather events, O Globo reports. Finally, Colombia’s some 1,240 megawatts (MW) of new renewable energy capacity is close to starting to operate, El Espectador reports, adding that another 1,800MW could enter construction this year.

The Guardian reports on a DeSmog investigation finding that the fossil fuel industry funded some of the world’s most foundational climate science as early as 1954, according to unearthed documents. This includes the early research of Charles Keeling, famous for the so-called “Keeling curve” that has charted the upward march of CO2 levels, the Guardian says. It adds: “Experts say the documents show the fossil fuel industry had intimate involvement in the inception of modern climate science, along with its warnings of the severe harm climate change will wreak, only to then publicly deny this science for decades and fund ongoing efforts to delay action on the climate crisis.” The investigation for DeSmog, covered by the Guardian, was conducted by Rebecca John, a research fellow at the Climate Investigations Center.

For the Financial Times, British economist Lord Nicholas Stern argues that the UK can grow its economy by pursuing a “programme of investment in the activities and technologies of the 21st century to tackle climate change, biodiversity loss and environmental degradation, including air and water pollution”. He says that the UK should also focus on moving away from fossil fuels, with fuel price rises creating “uncertainty and a drag on the economy”. He continues: “The government has a misguided obsession with further unsustainable development of oil and gas fields in the North Sea, where operating costs remain relatively high compared with other hydrocarbon basins. North Sea oil and gas is only really profitable if consumers in the UK and the rest of Europe continue to pay high prices for energy. But those prices will come down as the costs of renewables and electricity storage continue to fall.”

For Climate Home News, Evans Njewa, chair of the Least Developed Countries group and an official in Malawi’s environment ministry, says that, despite the COP29 climate summit being months away, it is the coming weeks that will determine whether it is a success. He says: “The COP29 summit in Baku in November will focus on climate finance. Government negotiators in the global north always tell us that their ambition on finance depends on their parliaments. This has been highlighted by developed countries in so many negotiations. They stress that they have no mandate, or possibility to scale up funds, as parliaments will not approve. So, as parliamentarian debates about budgets and allocations begin early in the year, they need to act now. ”

For the scientific journal Nature Medicine, climate and disease researcher Dr Colin Carlson argues that climate change must be treated as a health emergency. He says: “climate change is annually killing nearly as many people as the population of Geneva. The cumulative death toll from climate change since 2000 will pass 4 million in 2024, more than the population of Los Angeles or Berlin. Vanishingly few of these deaths will have been recognized by the victims’ families, or acknowledged by national governments, as the consequence of climate change. More than half of those deaths will have been due to either malaria in sub-Saharan Africa, or malnutrition and diarrheal disease in south Asia, and most of the dead are therefore presumed to have been young children.”

It comes as South Africa’s Mail and Guardian carries an article from Dr Lia Tadesse Gebremedhin, Ethiopia’s health minister, Nassar Al Mubarak, the chief executive of Reaching the Last Mile and Dr Ibrahima Socé Fall, the director of the Global Neglected Tropical Diseases Programme at the World Health Organization, warning that climate change poses a threat to gains made in the fight against neglected tropical diseases.

New research quantifies the impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on global agricultural production, trade flows, market prices, food security, land use and greenhouse gas emissions. It finds that “agricultural production and area expansion in parts of the world other than Ukraine and Russia could pose a risk to biodiversity and lead to higher greenhouse gas emissions related to land”. However, the study suggests that total greenhouse gas emissions could decrease as “lower emissions from less use of fossil energy due to higher energy and fertiliser prices in the whole economy dominate additional emissions resulting from land use change”.