Ghana is close to issuing forest carbon credits under its large-scale forest conservation programme, a minister announced in London this week.

An American research team has found that roughly 650 million tonnes of carbon were stored in the top layers of seagrass sediment between 2019-20 as part of the construction of a global blue carbon map.

European carbon permits posted marginal daily and weekly declines on Friday as allowance prices moved in their narrowest range for more than two weeks, with traders anticipating the end of the financial half-year and the approaching ETS reform package, while energy commodities were mixed after headlines sparked afternoon rallies.

A group of 17 EU member states has asked that the EU Methane Regulation (EUMR) be postponed by three years, citing ongoing oil and gas supply constraints linked to the war in the Middle East.

EU27 energy ministers on Friday approved a grids and permitting package aimed at accelerating the expansion of infrastructure seen as essential for electrification and the bloc's decarbonisation goals.

Scaling sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) production, rather than competing over technologies, is now the industry's biggest challenge, experts said on Thursday.

The coming overhaul of the EU’s Emissions Trading System (ETS) is shaping up as one of the toughest political tests for the bloc’s climate policy, with a tight timetable that looks almost as daunting as the substance of the reform itself.

EU energy storage boost – The European Commission on Friday signed the EU’s first-ever tripartite agreement on energy storage, aiming to rapidly scale capacity and ease price volatility across the bloc’s power system. The accord, concluded on the margins of the Energy Council in Luxembourg, brings together ministers, project developers, manufacturers, energy-intensive industry and financial institutions to accelerate deployment in the short term and strengthen EU storage manufacturing. Twenty-two member states have pledged 30-35 GW of new storage over the next two years, with national and EU funding, including under the Innovation Fund, expected to support rollout and cut system operating costs.

Scorching heat dominated this year’s London Climate Action Week – even amid talk of new challenges and ideas, ranging from the hopes and fears posed by AI, to the need and opportunity to quickly stem ultra-potent superpollutants. 

EU environment ministers meeting on Thursday said protecting and restoring nature is now a competitiveness issue as much as an environmental one, with several countries branding nature-based solutions “strategic infrastructure” and backing new market tools such as nature credits.

France’s decade-old BBCA low carbon building label has provided the “laboratory” and much of the methodology now underpinning Europe’s push to create a single low carbon label and certification scheme for biogenic CO2 stored in buildings, its president Stanislas Pottier told Carbon Pulse in an interview.

A nature-based (NbS) project developer in the Netherlands has completed a feasibility study for a proposed land restoration initiative in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), it said Friday.

The Architecture for REDD+ Transactions (ART) has released version 3.0 of its jurisdictional REDD+ standard, adding a pathway for World Bank forest carbon programme participants to transition into the standard, it announced Thursday.

Just transition funds – The European Commission has awarded €351 mln in grants to seven projects under the Just Transition Mechanism’s Public Sector Loan Facility (PSLF), it announced on Thursday. The selected investments in Cyprus, Czechia, France, Greece and Spain target higher education infrastructure, hospital modernisation, low-carbon transport, urban greening, water resilience and a high-voltage submarine interconnector for the Dodecanese islands. The Public Sector Loan Facility (PSLF) was established by the European Union as one of the three pillars of the Just Transition Mechanism (JTM) to ensure that the transition towards climate neutrality leaves no region behind.