Surprise trees, early flowers and green football clubs: Everything to know about the environment this week

Researchers on Monday unveiled the world's largest forest database, comprising more than 44 million individual trees at more than 100,000 sites in 90 countries - helping them to calculate that Earth boasts roughly 73,300 tree species. That figure is about 14% higher than previous estimates. Of that total, about 9,200 are estimated to exist based on statistical modeling but have not yet been identified by science, with a large proportion of these growing in South America, the researchers said.

The year 2021 ranked as the fourth-warmest year on record in the United States, with December 2021 being the warmest December ever recorded. The US was hit by 20 separate billion-dollar disasters, according to an overview of a government report published on Monday. The analysis from the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) came hours after European Union scientists said last year was the world's fifth hottest on record, adding to evidence pointing toward the globe's long-term warming trend.

The Biden administration on Monday said it would make $1.15 billion available to states to clean up abandoned oil and gas wells as part of a broad effort to reduce U.S. climate warming emissions and improve health and safety in nearby communities. The money represents a portion of the $4.7 billion for well clean-up that was included in the infrastructure law passed in Congress last year. The program is a pillar of U.S. President Joe Biden's pledge that fighting climate change will create jobs and revitalize neighborhoods harmed by aging fossil fuel infrastructure.

Germany is adding 5 billion euros ($5.63 billion) in subsidies to a plan to promote energy-saving buildings, Economy Minister Robert Habeck said on Tuesday, resuming the scheme it stopped last month after receiving a flood of costly applications.

English football club Tottenham Hotspur will join the UN Race to Zero and have committed to halve their carbon emissions by 2030, the club said after they and Liverpool were named the Premier League's greenest clubs on Wednesday. They topped Sport Positive's 2021 Green League, published by the BBC, which rates each of England's top-flight clubs in measures they are taking to combat the threat of climate change.

Rising temperatures are causing plants in the United Kingdom to flower almost a month earlier than they did over more than two centuries to the mid-1980s, potentially posing risks to wildlife, scientists said on Wednesday.

Researchers led by Ulf Buentgen, a Cambridge University geography professor, scoured more than 419,000 recordings of first flowering dates of 406 plant species between 1753 and 2019, and compared them with historical temperature records which have shown the climate getting warmer.

The biggest shift to earlier flowering - 32 days - was found among herbs which have high levels of genetic adaptation, a change that Buentgen said was "huge".

Earlier flowering could increase the risk of frost damage and also threaten insects, birds and other wildlife that depend on the flowering of certain plants at specific times of the growing season, Buentgen said.

Progressive reduction of fossil fuel-based plastics is crucial to tackling climate change, the EU's top environmental official said, ahead of a United Nations meeting to launch talks on a world-first treaty to combat plastic pollution.

Plastics production is becoming a key growth area for the oil industry as countries seek to shift away from polluting energy sources, but plastic waste is piling up in the world's oceans and urban waterways and choking its wildlife.

Last month, a study of ice cores revealed traces of nanoplastics in both polar regions for the first time.

"The biggest topic is, at the end of the day, oil use for plastic production," said EU Environment Commissioner Virginijus Sinkevicius amid preparations for the U.N. Environment Assembly summit starting in Nairobi on Feb. 28.

"If we want to reach our decarbonisation goals for 2050, clearly we have to decrease steadily the use of fossil fuels, and one of the areas here as well is plastics," he told Reuters in an interview.