UK businesses will have to prove that their products and supply chains are free from illegal deforestation under a planned new law, reports BBC News and others. The proposed law would require larger companies operating in the UK to show where commodities such as cocoa, soy, rubber and palm oil have originated from, BBC News says. It comes as there has been “growing dissatisfaction among consumers about products that are connected to illegal deforestation, especially in the Amazon”, BBC News adds. UK ministers on Monday launched a six-week consultation on the new measures to curb illegal deforestation, the Financial Times reports. It adds: “Deforestation, which releases large stores of carbon into the air and warms the atmosphere, has made its way further into mainstream politics over the past year, with both the UK and the EU considering rules to outlaw the importing of products from illegally cleared land.” The proposed law, from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, would be the first of its kind in the world, the FT says. However, it would target “a relatively small number of businesses”, adds to the FT and, according to the proposals, employee or turnover thresholds would be set out in the secondary legislation. International environment minister Zac Goldsmith tells Reuters: “There is a hugely important connection between the products we buy and their wider environmental footprint, which is why the government is consulting today on new measures.” BusinessGreen also has the story.

Meanwhile, a story trailed on the frontpage of the FT reports on how the UK’s inefficient homes are a major contributor to the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. The FT says: “Homes accounted for just under a fifth of total carbon dioxide emissions in 2019, behind energy supply and transport, and that figure has remained stubbornly high in recent years.”

The Guardian reports that Senate Democrats in the US are set to release a 200-page plan arguing that significant climate action will require stripping the fossil fuel industry of its influence over the government and the public’s understanding of climate change. The report says that “giant fossil fuel corporations have spent billions – much of it anonymised through scores of front groups – during a decades-long campaign to attack climate science and obstruct climate action”, according to the Guardian. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Senate Democrat from Rhode Island, tells the Guardian: “It’s important for the public to understand that this is not a failure of American democracy that’s causing this. It is a very specific and successful attack on American democracy by an industry with truly massive financial motivation to corrupt democratic institutions.” The Independent reports, meanwhile, that Republicans plan on recycling their 2016 rhetoric for climate change in this year’s election, which states that “climate change is far from this nation’s most pressing national security issue”. The Independent says: “The party’s platform – seen as a roadmap on how they will face the country’s challenges over the next four years – is unchanged from 2016, even down to references of Obama-era policies. It states that the climate crisis will be best solved by the market and tech solutions.” By readopting their 2016 stance on climate change, Republicans “risk alienating young voters and leaving the the party without climate goals or solutions for another four years”, adds the Hill.

The news comes as the New York Times reports that climate change is taking on a growing role for voters, according to a survey. “The number of Americans who feel passionately about climate change is rising sharply, and the issue appears likely to play a more important role in this year’s election than ever before,” the New York Times says. It adds that despite the turmoil caused by the pandemic, support for action to curb climate change has remained at 68% from 2016 to 2020.

A major investment firm worth more than $90bn is ending its stock holdings in some of the world’s biggest oil companies and miners, the Guardian says. Storebrand, a Norwegian asset manager, has divested from miner Rio Tinto as well as US oil giants ExxonMobil and Chevron “as part of a new climate policy targeting companies that use their political clout to block green policies”. Jan Erik Saugestad, the chief executive of Storebrand, tells the Guardian: “We need to accelerate away from oil and gas without deflecting attention on to carbon offsetting and carbon capture and storage. Renewable energy sources like solar and wind power are readily available alternatives…The Exxons and Chevrons of the world are holding us back.”

Meanwhile, CBS News reports that ExxonMobil has been dropped from the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average stock market index after nearly a century.

The Guardian reports that Australia’s 2019-20 bushfires were on a scale never recorded before in the country, according to the final conclusion from the New South Wales bushfire inquiry. The inquiry found climate change and rising greenhouse gas emissions “clearly played a role in the conditions that led up to the fires and in the unrelenting conditions that supported the fires to spread” but climate change alone “does not explain everything that happened”, the Guardian says. The New South Wales government pledged to adopt all of the report’s 76 recommendations, which include “the establishment of a major new centre for bushfire research and technology, new training to increase the capacity of fire authorities to deal with disasters of the scale seen in 2019-20 and examination of existing preparedness strategies to determine the best approach to increasingly frequent, extreme fire seasons”, the Guardian says.

Meanwhile, Scientific American reports on how California’s fast-moving fires have been boosted by climate change. Carbon Brief recently published an explainer examining how climate change is linked to wildfires across the world.

BBC News reports on a new study finding that some technologies that can remove CO2 from the air could have implications for future food prices. The study finds that one technology that could have implications food prices is “BECCS” – bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, BBC News says. This technology involves growing crops that soak up CO2, then burning them for electricity while capturing and burying the carbon that is produced. “Critics say this idea would need the deployment of huge amounts of land which would reduce the amount of land for agriculture at a time of increasing global population,” BBC News says. Another technology for CO2 removal is called Direct Air Capture (DAC), which involves machines pulling CO2 directly from the atmosphere, BBC News adds. The new study, published in Nature Climate Change, finds that “the energy and water resources needed to drive these machines will be on a very large scale”, BBC News says.

In the Daily Telegraph, former Conservative leader and peer William Hague writes it is in the UK’s national interest that US Democrat Joe Biden is elected president, given that current president Donald Trump is “uninterested in…and even hostile to addressing” climate change. He writes: “Next year, the UK will host the COP26, the world conference on climate change. It will be the most crucial such meeting since Paris in 2015, and a decisive moment in seeking agreement from all countries to take necessary action. The Trump administration is uninterested in such issues and even hostile to addressing them. Within the US, it is pushing ahead with the obscenity of drilling for oil and gas in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Internationally, it is unwilling to give the lead that would bring a global agreement within reach.”

In the FT, chief features writer Henry Mance argues that taking action on climate change is “as Tory as it gets”. He writes: “Unhelpfully, just 5% of Tory voters think climate change should be among the government’s top three priorities, compared with one-quarter of Labour and Liberal Democrat voters. More prioritise reducing the fiscal deficit. What is needed is a rightwing case for climate action. The late philosopher Roger Scruton placed environmentalism within a localist, small-state agenda. But fighting climate change requires more state planning, not less.”

The levels of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) in emissions pathways for 1.5C of warming are possible, a new study says, however, “its potentially very large land requirements” mean its deployment should be “substantially limited and earlier”. Undertaking a global analysis of life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions for “lignocellulosic crop-based BECCS”, the researchers show that “negative emissions greatly depend on biomass cultivation location, treatment of original vegetation, the final energy carrier produced and the evaluation period considered”. BECCS has the potential to sequester “2.5 Gt [gigatonnes] of CO2 per year when accounting emissions over 30 years”, the study says, which increases to “40 GtCO2 per year over 80 years”. A second study, also in Nature Climate Change, explores the potential use of direct air capture (DAC) in achieving the 1.5C limit. It finds that DAC “could exacerbate demand for energy and water, yet it would avoid the most severe market-mediated effects of land-use competition from BECCS and afforestation”.

In a Perspective article, a group of researchers warn that current policies for reducing CO2 emissions from road transport “are not nearly stringent enough” in most countries. The authors summarise available evidence for the effectiveness of climate policies and policy mixes for road transport relative to 2030 and 2050 mitigation goals implied by the Paris Agreement. They argue that “most regions need a stronger, more integrated policy mix led by stringent regulations and complemented by pricing mechanisms as well as other efforts to reduce vehicle travel”.

Waterbirds are shifting towards higher latitudes as global temperatures rise, a new study suggests. Using more than a million count records of 390 waterbird species since 1990, the researchers find that “the abundance of species and populations decreased at lower latitudes, particularly in the tropics, but increased at higher latitudes”. The negative responses to temperature increase in tropical species are of “conservation concern”, the authors say, as “they are often also threatened by other anthropogenic factors”. A second Nature Climate Change study finds that “tropical songbirds in the New and Old Worlds reduced reproduction during drought, with greater reductions in species with higher average long-term survival”.