Worries over a Trump victory in the US elections are set to dominate the first few days of the global climate talks, the BBC reports, which begin today in Marrakech. Donald Trump has vowed to “cancel” the deal, which came into force last week, referring to climate change as a “hoax”. The Paris Agreement was signed by 193 countries last December and is now international law, having been ratified by at least 55 countries representing over 55% of emissions. Now that it is operational, the US would not be able to withdraw easily: “The Paris agreement prohibits any exit for a period of three years, plus a year-long notice period, so there will be four stable years,” said Segolene Royal, the French environment minister. But there are other factors aside from the US election which might slow the talks, the BBC notes, such as the fact that so far only 100 have ratified the Paris agreement. Some worry that it would be unfair if these early adopters had the chance to set the future rules that will apply to all. Elsewhere, Guardian asks if the “unprecedented involvement of corporate interests who have fought climate action” at the talks, who will be called upon for advice and will be holding private discussions with countries, have a conflict of interest. The Guardian Australia also covers the talks, while Carbon Brief has published a preview of the event.

Some of the world’s largest oil companies, including Saudi Aramco, Shell, and BP, have joined together to spend $1bn over the next 10 years to help fight climate change, the Financial Times writes. The money will be targeted at developing carbon capture technology, rather than invested in technologies that pose a direct competitive threat to their businesses, including renewable power or energy storage. The move underlines growing concerns in the energy industry that the Paris climate deal will spur governments to force the sector to capture or pay more for its carbon emissions. However the size of this investment was described as “a drop in the ocean”, by Jonathan Marshall of the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit think-tank, who notes that “Shell’s capex budget for 2016 alone is $25bn-$29bn”. The companies have been “pilloried” by campaigners for their “pathetic” investment fund, the Telegraph reports, who point out that their annual contributions would be less than BP chief Bob Dudley earned last year. Climate Home also has the story.

A swarm of tiny robots that resemble barnacles have been deployed to coastal waters around the world, to help scientists understand the effects of climate change on coastal wildlife. The data is considered important because coastal creatures rely on external sources such as sun exposure and air temperature for their body heat in order to thrive, making them ‘barometers’ of climate change. Professor Michael Burrows, from the Scottish Association for Marine Science, tells the Times: “Connecting the large-scale picture of the climate with the small scale of animal physiology should help researchers understand the effects of climate change on animals and plants living on rocky seashores”.

China has announced a plan to curb greenhouse gas emissions, cap coal consumption at 4.2bn tonnes, and expand non-fossil energy generation to 15% of its capacity. Under the plan, announced on the State Council website on Friday, China’s emissions in 2020 per unit of GDP will be 18% lower than in 2015. China has already guaranteed that its emissions will peak no later than 2030 under the Paris climate deal.

Smarter power grid technology, that could wipe £90 off household energy bills and curb carbon emissions, is being ‘stymied by current policy’, says the thinktank Policy Exchange. Their report also claims that government policy offers too many incentives to build polluting diesel generator farms at the expense of cleaner technology. “The government needs to level the playing field to encourage the use of cleaner technologies such as demand response and storage”, said the report’s author, Richard Howard.

An Australian company has won EU backing for a £60m commercial wave energy project, the first to be connected to the grid in England. Carnegie Wave Energy will receive £9.6m from the EU – showing how Britain is continuing to receive EU regional development funds even after its vote to leave the bloc, the Financial Times notes.

Environmental disasters are creating a “lonely world” for our children, writes author and social activist Naomi Klein, who’s made a short film with the Guardian about the Great Barrier Reef. “It’s too late for most of the world’s coral reefs but it’s not too late for all of them. And it’s not too late to keep temperatures below levels that would save millions of lives and livelihoods”, she writes.

It’s been ten years since Nicholas Stern published a landmark review of the economic dangers posed by climate change, and this feature in the Observer takes stock of what’s happened in the interim. While the outlook of the planet looks grim, Stern still believes there are ground for modest optimism. “We have been too slow in acting on climate change”, Stern tells the Observer, “in particular, we have delayed the curbing of greenhouse gas emissions for far too long…with hindsight, I now realise that I underestimated the risks”. Yet the success of the Paris climate talks gives the economist hope: “It has taken only 11 months to get the Paris agreement ratified. It took eight years to get its predecessor, the Kyoto protocol, into force”.

As the 25,000 delegates of the annual UN climate conference are ferried around in a fleet of electric cars, we need to consider what really constitutes zero-emissions motoring, says Spanish businessman Ignacio Galan: “an electric car can only truly be said to emit no CO2 from its tailpipe if the battery that powers it is charged by renewable electricity”. Galan summarises our progress on this process known as “electrification”.

Journalist Tom Bawden runs through what the results of the US election could mean for climate change: while Clinton “could be better, but she’s not too bad”, she’s “certainly an awful lot better than the climate sceptic Donald Trump”. Clinton voted in a a pro-environment manner 82% of the time during her time as a senator, he notes, yet many green campaigners do not entirely trust her on environmental matters, although she is at least regarded as “reasonably environmentally-minded”. In contrast, “it would be extremely difficult to find a single campaigner with anything good to say about Donald Trump on the environment”.

The Least Developed Countries Fund is a scheme by which industrialised countries support less developed countries to implement national adaptation programmes. A study of projects in Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, the Maldives, and Vanuatu finds that while the fund has helped build adaptive capacity, the scheme suffers from uncertainty, a convoluted management structure and an inability to fully respond to climate risks, however. The paper suggests ways for LDCF activities to promote more radical or systematic transformations.

The record-breaking global temperature in 2015 will be the “new normal” by 2040 in all emissions scenarios, according to new research. The authors examined when recent extremes will become statistically normal in future model simulations, adding that while the term “new normal” can be useful for understanding and communicating climate change, it should be explicitly defined in order to avoid confusion. The paper adds that a new normal can be delayed at the regional level through aggressive greenhouse gas emissions reductions.