'Woefully inadequate' climate pledges and other climate change stories you need to read this week

Rising temperatures risk stunting the growth of the Italian economy over the coming decades, with sectors such as agriculture and tourism forecasted to be among the hardest hit, a Bank of Italy research project says. The study highlights the broader impact of climate change, saying that businesses in parts of the country prone to landslides and flooding are more likely to fail than those in other areas.

The world's largest financial institutions increased their backing of companies in the agriculture, forestry and land use sectors most responsible for deforestation in 2021, a new study shows. The report, issued by the Forests & Finance Coalition of NGOs, found that finance to those companies rose by over 60% to $47 billion between 2020 and 2021.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan has slammed global policy-makers for "dragging their feet" on environmental policy amid fears that momentum to tackle climate change has stalled in the face of economic turmoil. He was speaking at a climate summit in Argentina.

Wildfires in Oregon and Washington were blanketing much of America's Pacific Northwest with smoke on 20 October, choking residents in Seattle, Portland and other parts of the two states with the worst air in the United States, according to government data. In the Seattle area, home to 4 million people, the sky was brown, and the air was difficult to breathe.

The pipeline for projects to capture and store carbon emissions has grown by around 44% in the past 12 months to 244 million tonnes a year, think-tank the Global CCS Institute says.

One such development, Project Bison, is underway in the US state of Wyoming. It is a partnership between CarbonCapture in California and Frontier Carbon Solutions. By 2030, the facility hopes to remove 5 million tonnes of atmospheric carbon dioxide annually.

Australia has joined the Global Methane Pledge as part of efforts to reduce global methane emissions. "By joining the Pledge, Australia will join the rest of the world's major agricultural commodity exporters, including the United States, Brazil and Indonesia, in identifying opportunities to reduce emissions in this hard-to-abate sector," climate change minister Chris Bowen said.

The latest pledges by countries to tackle global warming under the Paris Agreement are "woefully inadequate" to avert a rise in global temperatures that scientists say will worsen droughts, storms and floods, according to a report released on 19 October.

The 2015 Paris Agreement requires 194 countries to detail their plans to fight climate change in what are known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs).

In pledges made to the end of September, the NDCs would reduce global emissions of greenhouse gases by only 7% from 2019 levels by 2030, says The State of NDCs: 2022 report. It was written by global nonprofit research group the World Resources Institute.

Companies worth half of the total global market capitalization are now disclosing environmental data after a 42% year-on-year rise in the number of firms reporting, new data shows.

Nonprofit environmental disclosure platform CDP says more than 18,700 companies – the highest yet since CDP launched in 2000 – worth a combined $60.8 trillion disclosed data on climate change, deforestation and water security in 2022.

However, three in five firms – more than 29,500 companies – failed to respond to requests for disclosure this year.

Climate change disclosures are vital for money managers wanting to pick the winners and losers from a shift to a lower-carbon economy, and CDP's standardized data gives investors information to let them compare corporate performance.

The data is also crucial for climate negotiators, including at next month's United Nations climate summit, COP27, to help them assess progress and spot laggards.

The Breakthrough Agenda Report 2022 sets out 25 recommendations for how to get to net zero in 5 industries: power, hydrogen, road transport, steel and agriculture. We've written them up in one article.

The head of the WWF called for the world to adopt a goal of being “nature positive” by 2030 in the conservation charity's Living Planet Report 2022, which finds wildlife populations have declined by an average of 69% in the past 50 years.

The "space economy" covers the goods and services produced in space for use in space, but satellites and other space infrastructure are helping in the fight against climate change. There are concerns, however, about the amount of space debris in Earth’s orbit.