Thursday, 9 July 2026

Nigerian environment minister Balarabe Abbas Lawal said the loss and damage fund currently looks like a mirage, according to Climate Home News. His criticism comes as the fund's board prepares to decide which projects to finance from a pool of bids worth $250 million.

A call for funding requests launched at COP30 closed on June 15, with projects bidding for a combined $250 million, Climate Home News reported. The fund's board will decide which projects to fund at its next board meeting in the Philippines, starting on July 8.

Wealthy nations have promised the fund $822 million and delivered just $449 million, according to Climate Home News. A briefing paper prepared by the fund's secretariat warned that, unless fresh contributions are secured, the fund could run out of resources by the end of 2027.

The fund was agreed at COP27 in 2022 and officially set up the following year. Ibrahima Cheikh Diong, a banker from Senegal, was appointed CEO in 2024.

More Americans than ever are cooling their homes with heat pumps, according to Canary Media.

The shift marks a change from a decade ago, when two conventional air-conditioning systems were sold in the US for every one heat pump, according to Canary Media.

A rapid-response attribution study named climate change as a primary driver of Europe's late-June heatwave, finding that temperatures at this level would have been "virtually impossible" 50 years ago, according to Carbon Brief.

The same research put this week's overnight temperatures at 100 times more likely now than in 2003, the year of a deadly European summer heatwave, Carbon Brief reported.

France broke its national temperature record on two consecutive days. Its national heat index, an average of day- and night-time highs from 30 weather stations, hit 30C on 24 June, according to Le Monde. A day later, Meteo-France placed 72 of the country's 96 mainland administrative districts under a red heatwave alert.

More than 845 French schools stayed shut on Monday 22 June, and another 1,800 rescheduled classes, Le Parisien reported.

The United Kingdom passed its June temperature record three times. The mark reached 36.1C at Gosport on 24 June, 36.7C at Merryfield on 25 June, and 37.3C at Santon Downham in Suffolk on 26 June, according to Carbon Brief.

Switzerland's national weather agency said temperatures topped 38C in June for the first time, ending a record that had stood since 1947, according to RTS.

World Weather Attribution scientists measured wet-bulb globe temperature in 854 cities across 30 European countries. They found 45% had broken, or were on track to break, their June heat-stress record since 18 June, Carbon Brief reported.

Dozens of governments, led by the EU and the UK, committed to backing a rapid electrification of the world's economy at London climate action week, according to Carbon Brief.

A high-level summit at London's Mansion House brought together energy ministers and business leaders, joined by António Guterres, calling for faster action to curb demand for oil, coal and gas by powering homes, industry and transport with clean electricity, Carbon Brief reported.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres called on artificial intelligence companies to reveal their environmental impact and source their power solely from renewables by 2030, according to Carbon Brief.

The COP31 presidency is calling for countries to back a global goal for 35% of final energy to come from electricity by 2035, Carbon Brief reported.

The UK Climate Change Committee's latest progress report emphasises that faster electrification is the best way to secure lower energy bills and stronger energy security, according to Carbon Brief.

The UK parliament has approved its seventh carbon budget, aimed at cutting emissions 87% below 1990 levels by 2040, Carbon Brief reported.

Paris temperatures topped 103 degrees Fahrenheit during the recent heat wave, and average temperatures across France reached their highest level ever last week, according to Grist.

More than 40 people drowned while swimming in France while seeking respite from the heat, many of them teenagers, Grist reported. A Spanish local monitoring agency estimated that more than 200 deaths in the past week could be attributed to high temperatures.

The toll follows a far larger disaster earlier this century. In 2003, more than 14,800 people died in France as summer temperatures hovered above 95 degrees Fahrenheit for two weeks, according to Grist.

Adaptation remains limited. Only about 25 percent of French households have air conditioning. On its current trajectory, temperatures in Europe are expected to rise by 5.6 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century, according to Grist.

Some jurisdictions have moved to formalize heat response. In 2021, Florida's Miami-Dade County hired the world's first-ever dedicated chief heat officer.

Land and environmental defenders made up nearly a quarter of activists killed last year, according to Grist, which counted 84 people slain over their work, much of it unpaid, defending land and the natural world.

Separately from that count, Grist reported that Front Line Defenders logged Indigenous-rights defenders at 17 percent of the killings it documented.

Beyond the deaths, the report tallied close to 4,000 nonlethal attacks on human rights defenders spread across 119 countries in the same period, according to Grist, a total that sometimes counts more than one violation against the same person.

One of those killed was Efraín Fueres, a 46-year-old community leader from Ecuador who had joined nationwide protests the previous fall, Grist reported. In Ecuador, the report found most criminalisation cases arose in socio-environmental disputes over mining projects pushed onto communities without their free, prior and informed consent.

More than 165 countries have now recognized the human right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment, which Grist described as giving communities firmer ground to challenge environmental harm.