Greenpeace chief's new role, glaciers and housing retrofits: Everything to know about the environment this week

Germany on Wednesday introduced its "dream" international climate envoy - Greenpeace chief, American Jennifer Morgan, in a bold sign it is willing to spearhead more ambitious action to tackle the global climate crisis. With the appointment of Morgan, a veteran climate campaigner as experienced at addressing political and business elites as she is at joining protesters in blockades, Germany joins a small group of countries with designated envoys to handle international climate change diplomacy.

Italian politicians and activists praised a new law building protection of the environment into the constitution, but said action needed to be taken to ensure that the country benefitted. Italy is famed for its natural beauty but environmentalists say it does too little to protect jewels such as the Venice Lagoon or thousands of kilometres of Mediterranean coastline. The constitutional law, approved by parliament on Tuesday, says the state must safeguard the environment, biodiversity and the ecosystem "also in the interest of future generations".

China's new renewable energy plans will focus on the Gobi and other desert regions, as it speeds up the construction of huge new wind and solar power bases and boosts its transmission capabilities, regulators said in a new policy document.

In an experiment a decade in the making, biologists are releasing hatchery salmon onto flooded Northern California rice fields, seeking to replenish endangered fish species while simultaneously benefitting the farmers' business model.

Britain will hold yearly auctions to support new renewable projects from 2023, the government said on Wednesday, as it seeks to boost low carbon power production to meet its climate goals. Britain has a target to reach net zero emissions by 2050 and plans to generate 40 gigawatts (GW) of electricity from offshore wind by 2030 - up from around 10GW currently. It comes amid spiralling energy costs, with a cap on prices for around 22 million British households due to rise 54% from April because of record wholesale gas prices.

The US Army released its first climate strategy on Tuesday designed to help protect bases against damage from global warming and improve readiness by training soldiers to deal with a world with more killer heat waves, droughts and floods. Driven by executive orders by President Joe Biden to tackle climate change, the Army's climate strategy calls for the service to halve greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels by 2030 and bring them to net zero by 2050, in line with his wider goals for the country.

There is a 77% chance of La Nina conditions continuing during the Northern Hemisphere spring from March through May, a US government weather forecaster said on Thursday. The La Nina pattern is characterized by unusually low temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean and is linked to floods and drought.

Advances in satellite technology have revealed that the world's glaciers contain significantly less ice than previously thought, according to a study published in Nature Geoscience on Monday.

The revised estimate reduces global sea level rise by 3 inches if all glaciers were to melt. But it raises concern for some communities that rely on seasonal melt from glaciers to feed rivers and irrigate crops. If glaciers contain less ice, water will run out sooner than expected.

While some ice naturally melts throughout the year, rising temperatures due to climate change are speeding up glacier retreat. Between 2000 and 2019, these rivers of ice lost roughly 5.4 trillion tonnes.

Countries are already struggling with disappearing glaciers. Peru is investing in desalination to make up for declining freshwater. And Chile hopes to create artificial glaciers in its mountains.

But, "we've had quite a poor understanding of how much ice is actually stored in glaciers," said lead study author Romain Millan, a glaciologist at Université Grenoble Alpes. Past analyses, for example, double-counted glaciers along the peripheries of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, overestimating ice volume.

Ireland will seek to retrofit one-third of the country's housing stock by 2030, a key part of the government's plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions that will require a big increase in construction workers.

Ireland estimated last year that binding climate targets for key sectors of the economy to cut emissions by 51% over the next decade would require around 125 billion euros ($143 billion) of private and public investment.

Eight billion euros has been set aside to fund up to 50% of the cost of better insulating poorly heated homes and install more energy efficient alternatives such as heat pumps, up from the current level of 30 to 35%, the government said on Tuesday.

More than half of the funding will come from carbon tax revenues - which are set to increase year-on-year - while the government plans to use part of its EU COVID-19 recovery funding to launch a loan guarantee scheme to help cover the balance.

To hit the target of upgrading 500,000 homes and installing 400,000 heat pumps by 2030, the number of annual retrofits will need to increase to an average of 76,000 per year by the second half of the decade from 15,500 completed amid COVID-19 curbs last year.