SÃO PAULO, Brazil — Suzano, the world’s largest pulp producer, and Kimberly-Clark announced the creation of a US$3.4 billion joint venture focused on the manufacture, marketing and distribution of consumer and professional tissue products, such as toilet paper, napkins, paper towels and facial tissues in over 70 countries. Suzano will acquire a 51% interest in the new entity, with Kimberly-Clark holding a 49% interest. Suzano will pay Kimberly-Clark US$1.734 billion in cash at the closing of the transaction. …The transaction is expected to close in mid-2026 and involves approximately 9,000 employees. The new business will be a company incorporated in the Netherlands and will include 22 manufacturing facilities located in 14 countries. Collectively, these facilities have capacity to produce 1 million tonnes of tissue a year. The assets to be included in the new joint venture generated net sales in 2024 of US$3.3 billion. Kimberly-Clark will retain its consumer tissue and professional businesses in the US.
A federal appeals court on Tuesday agreed to let many of President Trump’s sweeping tariffs on US trade partners remain in effect for now, extending a pause issued late last month after a separate court ruled the tariffs were illegal. The Federal Circuit Court of Appeals granted the Trump administration’s request for a longer pause after issuing a temporary stay of the lower court ruling last month. The court put the case on a fast track to be resolved by the end of this summer, noting that “these cases present issues of exceptional importance warranting expedited en banc consideration of the merits in the first instance.” The decision comes after the US Court of International Trade ruled on May 28 that Congress did not delegate “unbounded” tariff authority to the president in the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977. Trump appealed the ruling and, hours later, the appeals court granted the temporary stay.
LONDON — US and Chinese officials said on Tuesday they had agreed on a framework to get their trade truce back on track and remove China’s export restrictions on rare earths while offering little sign of a durable resolution to longstanding trade tensions. …Lutnick said the agreement would remove restrictions on Chinese exports of rare earth minerals and magnets and some of the recent US export restrictions “in a balanced way”, but did not provide details…. adding that both sides will now return to present the framework to their respective presidents for approvals. …The two sides left Geneva with fundamentally different views of the terms of that agreement and needed to be more specific on required actions, said Josh Lipsky. …They have until August 10 to negotiate a more comprehensive agreement, or tariff rates will snap back from about 30% to 145% on the U.S. side and from 10% to 125% on the Chinese side.
While the pulp and paper industry is inherently local—particularly in terms of production and sourcing of raw materials—trade is fundamentally cross-border and international. As a result, the sector is highly exposed to trade barriers and tensions, such as those created by the tariff policies introduced during the Trump administration. Tariffs are expected to put significant pressure on transportation and logistics—sectors that are intrinsically linked to the pulp and paper industry. This strain is partly mitigated by the fact that many pulp and paper companies have made substantial investments in overseas production capacity. Recent mergers in the industry, such as the Smurfit Kappa–WestRock merger and the International Paper–DS Smith merger, are also likely to offset some of the negative impacts of tariffs. These newly formed giants now operate production facilities in both Europe and the US. …This consolidation trend may render the pulp and paper industry more resilient. 
NEW ZEALAND — Forestry Minister Todd McClay has unveiled two-way forestry trade missions with India this year. The inbound visit – supported by industry partners – is expected to showcase New Zealand’s forestry systems and sustainable management practices. “The outbound mission will continue to open doors for deeper commercial and government partnerships,” McClay said. …McClay was speaking at the Fieldays Forestry Hub on Friday. Trade between New Zealand and India was valued at $3.14 billion in 2024. New Zealand’s exports to India last year included forestry products valued at $126 million. New Zealand’s wood exports to India have surged from $9.5 million in 2023 to an estimated $76.5 million this year. Pulp exports have more than doubled, from $20 million to $45.6 million. “India is one of the fastest-growing markets for our forestry exports – and we’re focused on turning that growth into long-term opportunity for New Zealand exporters,” McClay said.
The EU has imposed anti-dumping duties on Chinese plywood imports, just a few days after Beijing tried to ease trade tensions between the two. The provisional levies of up to 62.4% follow a surge in imports of hardwood plywood over the past three years that had damaged domestic producers, the European Commission said. The Greenwood Consortium of EU producers, which brought a complaint against Chinese competitors last year, said it welcomed the move but argued for “definitive duties to be even higher than these provisional levels” when the commission makes a final decision later this year. Brussels has also taken the unusual step of monitoring imports of softwood plywood, which is not subject to duties, after allegations that Chinese exporters were disguising hardwood products in anticipation of the levies. …“The alleged practice consisted of placing very thin outer layers of softwood veneer on top of the hardwood plywood face veneer. 
New Zealand exporters sending wood, beef and leather products to the European Union will soon have to comply with new rules that aim to reduce deforestation in the supply chain. New Zealand government officials and industry opposed the approach to anti-deforestation taken by the incoming European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR). This was due to increased compliance costs exporters would face in proving their products had not contributed to the loss of trees. …For New Zealand, this will affect the $213 million export trade. Exporters of wood products – a trade to Europe valued at around $100 million – would be required to provide traceability processes to show that their products did not contribute to deforestation, too. …The Wood Processors and Manufacturers’ Association’s Mark Ross, said a working group with forest growers, wood processors, and the Government had been set up to work through some issues, such as geolocation requirements.
At International Pulp Week, three speakers discussed businesses that connect to China’s role in the global pulp industry — including trading, port logistics and the futures market. Haidong Weng, Executive Vice President of Pulp & Paper Research at Xiamen C&D… explained that after the US implemented its third wave of tariffs, Chinese exports of paper and board to the US fell sharply, with vessel density in major Chinese ports reflecting a significant pullback in trade flows. …He also described the cascading effects on US retail markets. …The scale and resilience of China’s port logistics were front and centre in a presentation by Tian Jun, representing the Shanghai International Port Group’s Luo Jing Terminal. Tian explained that SIPG views pulp as a strategic growth cargo across its network of general cargo terminals. …Another presentation came via video from Chi-Fei Fei of the Shanghai Futures Exchange (SHFE), who provided an overview of China’s pulp futures market.
At International Pulp Week, Mathieu Wener, Senior Economist at Numera Analytics, provided a detailed overview of current trends in key end-use markets for pulp, with a particular focus on tissue and printing and writing papers. Drawing on recent data and modelling, he examined how these sectors have evolved post-pandemic, what is driving demand patterns today, and what may lie ahead. Wener began with tissue markets, where profitability has remained strong despite considerable cost pressures in recent years. “Producers passed through rising costs since 2022,” he noted, showing how eurozone parent roll and pulp prices had shifted over that period. Although price differentials between pulp and tissue had narrowed, margins remained healthy.” …Wener underscored the importance of tracking both macroeconomic forces and demographic trends in shaping pulp demand. For tissue, slowing population growth and cautious consumer behaviour would temper growth expectations. For printing and writing papers, the secular decline would continue, but at a somewhat more stable pace.
The final presenter at International Pulp Week, Emanuele Bona, VP of Europe for the Pulp and Paper Products Council (PPPC), provided a comprehensive update on global market pulp demand trends, with a particular focus on the rebound underway in 2025 and the longer-term outlook for key markets and product segments. Bona began by noting that 2024 had been a weak year for market pulp demand, with global chemical market pulp demand falling by 0.9 percent. However, the first months of 2025 showed a marked improvement. “In 2025, after four months, demand is up almost one million tonnes,” he reported. Both softwood and hardwood pulp segments contributed to this recovery. …Looking ahead, Bona projected that global market pulp demand would return to growth but at a more moderate pace. “Growth to average 1.5 percent through 2029,” he said. The long-term trend for softwood pulp was expected to remain flat at best, while hardwood demand growth was projected to slow despite ongoing substitution trends.
UK — Housing programmes delivered by Homes England resulted in 38,308 new houses starting on site and 36,872 new homes completed between 1 April 2024 and 31 March 2025. This represents an increase in both starts (by 5%) and completions (by 12%) compared to the same period the previous year. 30,087 of new starts on site were for affordable houses — a 0.6% increase on the previous year, and representing 79% of all starts. …Eamonn Boylan, Chief Executive of Homes England, said: ”The statistics demonstrate the importance of programmes like the Affordable Homes Programme (AHP) to enable the delivery of these much-needed homes — and comes hot on the heels of the government committing a further £39 billion in funding to affordable homes over a 10 year period, giving confidence and certainty to the sector.”
Japan’s government remains cautiously optimistic, sticking to its long-held conviction that the economy should be able to weather both external shocks on already sluggish growth and a cost-led surge in domestic inflation, repeating it is expected to stay on a “modest recovery” track. In its monthly report for June released Wednesday by the Cabinet Office, less than three weeks after the prior report, the government repeated that the economy is “recovering at a moderate pace but confronted by the uncertainty arising from the US trade policy.” Tokyo appears to have brought forward the release of its monthly report by about two weeks so that it could officially update the status of Japan’s economy before the leaders of the Group of Seven major nations gather for their annual summit at Kananaskis in the Canadian province of Alberta from June 15 to June 17. 
An increasing demand for timber to meet Australia’s housing targets is set to drive a change in focus for one of Australia’s largest forestry regions. The Green Triangle, situated across the southern South Australia–Victorian border, has about 334,000 hectares of plantations, representing 17 per cent of Australia’s forestry industry. The region grows a mix of softwood timber, primarily used in domestic construction, and hardwood, which is often exported as wood chips and used in paper manufacturing. But as Australia looks to meet its goal of building 1.2 million new homes by 2029, investment in softwood is growing fast. “Both the state and the federal governments have incentives in place for industry and private investors to grow radiata pine,” University of Melbourne forest ecologist Rod Keenan said.
New Forests, a global investment manager of nature-based real assets and natural capital strategies, is today announcing its Tropical Asia Forest Fund 2 (TAFF2) has made its first investment in timber processing infrastructure in Vietnam by investing in the Tavico Group (Tavico), one of the country’s leading suppliers of solid wood lumber and logs. Tavico was founded in 2005 as a log trader and sawn timber mill with annual production capacity of 12,000m3 of lumber per annum, which is equivalent to approximately 800 medium sized houses. Tavico has established a 3,200-hectare FSC certified community forestry program with small holder farmers which provides employment and revenue sharing opportunities for local communities. The investment from TAFF2 will look to expand this program for smallholder farmers in Vietnam.
The fashion industry is often seen as a voracious, thirsty villain that extracts billions of liters of water out of the environment. …These conditions are the biggest ‘WHY’ for Spinnova, a Finnish startup that works tirelessly to create technology for sustainable natural fibers to match its growing demand. …But before we delve into the details, would you believe the core idea for Spinnova was actually born from… a spiderweb? Back in 2009, Juha Salmela, a cellulose expert from Finland attended an Oxford University conference. He heard a presentation from a leading spider researcher, who explained the similarities between spiderweb’s protein and nanocellulose. And, that happened to be his Eureka moment. What if wood fiber could be spun into textile fiber in a similar manner? Fast forward to 2023, the wood-based Spinnova fiber was born. …The process at Spinnova starts with sourcing cellulose-rich raw materials such as FSC-certified wood pulp.
UK waste wood market processed over 96% of material, annual statistics published this month by the Wood Recyclers’ Association (WRA) showed. The association said that there was “strong demand” for material in 2024. According to the statistics, 4.5 million tonnes of waste wood arose in the UK last year. Of this, 4.33 million tonnes (96%) were sent for reuse, recycling or recovery, the figures showed. The organisation compiled the 2024 figures through its annual survey of members who handle approximately 90% of the market, combining the findings with latest industry data. The figures are somewhat similar to 2023 which saw 97% of the material processed.
As per a study documented in RSC Sustainability (Royal Society Of Chemistry), researchers have explored a new approach to using cellulose fibre manufacturing. The study highlighted the use of waste products from agriculture, which Sweden has in abundance. Taking a leap from commonly researched wood-based cellulose, the researchers instead focussed on products including oat husks, potato pulp, wheat straw, and sugar beet pulp to create dissolving pulp for clothes – a key ingredient in making textiles. In this regard, Diana Bernin, Assistant Professor at the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Chalmers University of Technology and senior researcher in the study, mentioned this study, which is centered on generating textile from waste products, as a significant step in creating a circular economy. She also added that these waste products are more beneficial than using cotton.
The ultimate problem for architects is that the most sustainable building is always the one that is already there. There is a huge amount written about green buildings, much of it nonsense. There is some confusion about buildings layered in vines and living walls, and buildings that actually are green. Contemporary architecture’s issue is mostly embodied in one material: concrete. …The rate at which we are still using it is astonishing: half of all the stuff manufactured by weight is concrete. From 2011 to 2013, China used more concrete than the US had in the whole of the 20th century. …There are signs, however, that architects are beginning to shake things up. The first credible alternative is, perhaps a little ironically, that oldest of building materials, timber. [A Financial Times subscription may be required to read the full story]
Although a casual observer just sees the bark on a tree, a lumber expert might envision the potential for boards inside, thinking of the bark largely as waste. In many cases, bark does turn into waste in the logging industry. That’s lots of waste, because bark can account for up to 15% of a tree’s weight, and “only a fraction of this is currently being utilized, primarily for landscaping or for energy; the rest is left at the harvest or handling site to naturally decompose,” according to Sumanth Ranganathan, Dr.-Ing, a biochemical engineer at Scion, a research institute in Rotorua, New Zealand, and his colleagues. For some trees, though, that wasted bark is a potential treasure-trove of biopharmaceuticals, from anti-inflammatories to cancer-fighting drugs. …Each year, the country’s logging industry produces about 2.5 million metric tons of bark. Ranganathan’s team envisions feeding that into a bark-based biorefinery.
IRELAND — The Government is branching out in its bid to solve the housing crisis with a new “Wood First” plan that will see timber become the main building material used to build our homes, schools and libraries. It comes as the Cabinet will today give the green light to emergency legislation to extend rent pressure zones across the country in a scramble to stop greedy landlords cashing in on the Coalition’s rental policy changes. Forestry Minister Micheal Healy-Rae said Ireland has excellent forest resources that are being underused in our construction sector
Mass timber construction is gaining traction for its sustainability and efficiency, yet it brings distinct insurance and risk management challenges that require industry collaboration and proactive strategies. Key Takeaways from this Article:
Maximising the use of bio-based products is key to meeting current sustainability targets. Yet according to sustainability consultancy Metabolic, using bio-based products for half of new housing in Europe would require production of engineered timber to increase nearly fivefold, and roundwood by four and a half times. Given the improbability of an uplift in production on that scale, as well as the current rapid growth in global demand and the UK’s own limited timber harvest, using the country’s waste timber to make ‘cross-laminated secondary timber’ – CLST – would seem to make a great deal of sense. Rather than its current fates of combustion for energy recovery, chipping for MDF, dumping in landfill, and other low-grade, non-circular activities, incorporating this plentiful material into supply chains would benefit the construction industry, as well as the country’s economy and environment. And it would also seem to be a highly achievable ambition – so why isn’t it happening?
Amid the chaos of tariffs and economic uncertainty, Chris Evans is feeling deja vu with regards to the construction supply chain. Evans, the president of Swinerton-owned mass timber firm Timberlab, has helped the company through the process of building up a domestic supply chain. Evans said the company noted a lack of domestic supply, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. That led company leaders, in 2021, to work toward helping the firm become more vertically integrated, with its own fabrication facilities and domestic supply, and a sawmill coming online in 2027. Timberlab brought its first fabrication facility online in 2020 and a second in 2022, employing computer numerical control fabrication techniques to create cross-laminated timber and glulam, critical mass timber components.
EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND — The International Sustainable Forestry Coalition (ISFC) welcomes the release by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) of its new Standard covering the way greenhouse gas accounting should be applied to wood and wood-based products. Until the publication of this Standard, there had not been an internationally agreed upon accounting approach for biogenic carbon emissions and removals – an important piece of the puzzle to support corporate climate action and reach global net zero targets. The new series is ISO 13391 Wood and wood-based products — Greenhouse gas dynamics, and covers all essential components of carbon accounting for the sector: carbon in forests, carbon in harvested wood products and potential greenhouse gas emissions avoided through the use of wood-based products instead of fossil-based products.
The legacy sewing pattern brands Simplicity, Butterick, McCalls, and Vogue, commonly referred to as the Big 4, have been sold to a liquidator. 
The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) reaffirms its support for the Green Claims Directive (GCD) and the Empowering Consumers Directive (ECD) and welcomes the European Commission’s recent decision not to withdraw the GCD proposal. These legislations are critical in the fight against greenwashing and ensuring that consumers have access to accurate, reliable, and verifiable information. FSC, together with ISEAL, has contributed concrete feedback into the GCD and ECD discussions since their onset, with the aim of raising the bar for environmental claims and ensuring the provisions will work in practice. Together, the two proposals offer a powerful framework to ensure that environmental claims and labels placed on the EU market are trustworthy and transparent. Labels rooted in robust, independent certifications like FSC, support companies to enhance accountability and consumer trust.
As a forester and now in my role at Grown in Britain, I regularly encounter a range of misconceptions about home-grown timber. …First, let’s address the elephant in the room. The UK imports a significant amount of timber, and these figures are often cited to suggest something isn’t working as it should be. However, increasing timber use in construction is a positive development, as it replaces more carbon-intensive materials. One of the key reasons Grown in Britain was set up – is we import substantial amounts of timber whilst neglecting our own forests and woodlands. Over 10 years ago, when GiB started, the government considered over 60% of our woods were not managed. Our initiative, alongside the efforts of many, has reduced this to nearer 40% today. …With global and UK timber demand increasing, it seems inappropriate to import so much when we’re not fully utilising our resources.
Seeds from two trees that survived the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima at the end of World War Two are being grown at a Staffordshire university. The seeds were collected from an oriental plane tree in the grounds of the Tenma Elementary School, which was destroyed by the bombing, and a 200-year-old ginkgo tree growing in Shukkeien Garden. Both trees were situated less than a mile from the bomb site on 6 August 1945 and miraculously survived the bombing. They will now be cared for by experts at Keele University until they become tall and sturdy enough to be planted in the ground. The university says it is part of an international project to promote peace and hope. The seeds were sent to Keele through the Green Legacy Hiroshima initiative, which aims to distribute seeds and saplings from ‘survivor trees’ worldwide.
The world’s oldest forests are facing growing pressure from all sides. Their decline isn’t just an environmental concern – it carries serious consequences for people, climate stability and global biodiversity. According to a new 
European funds to prevent forest fires have been poorly targeted and sometimes distributed in a hurry, according to a report from the EU’s spending watchdog. The number of forest fires in EU countries has increased dramatically over the last two decades as the climate crisis fuels ever bigger conflagrations. An area twice the size of Luxembourg has been consumed by flames in an average recent year, killing people, destroying homes and wildlife and sending megatonnes of planet-heating emissions into the air. The European court of auditors praised the decision to devote more money to preventing fires but said European-funded projects were not always spent where they could make the biggest difference. In Greece, authorities were using a map drawn up in 1980 to assess the risk of forest fires. In Portugal, one area selected as a priority for funds contained a zone that was underwater due to a recently built dam.
Urgent action must be taken to avoid a loss of wildlife due to the “plummeting” condition of the UK’s woodlands, according to a new report. The report, published by the Woodland Trust on Tuesday, found that the quality of woodland is on the decline, despite a slight increase in tree cover. Woodland covers 24% of Surrey, making it the most wooded county in England. Abigail Bunker, director of conservation and external affairs at the trust, said: “We are calling on the government and others to invest in the management of our woodlands.” She said investing in woodland management would mean wildlife could experience the benefits “of these precious ecosystems”. Woodlands are becoming less effective as habitats for wildlife because they lack complexity, such as having enough trees of differing ages, states and sizes.
SWEDEN — To combat the growing risks from unsustainable business practices, governments and regulators worldwide require corporates to bring greater transparency and reporting to their sustainability impact. When comes to reporting, however, arguably, not all industries are the same. Forests are key to addressing both climate change and biodiversity loss, two of the most urgent challenges for the global community. …If reporting (and other) regulations are to encourage forestry organizations, and their stakeholders, to make more sustainable choices, more needs to be done to increase understanding of the specific sustainability impacts of the industry. Three key areas should be addressed: reporting models, underlying data, and success cases. …An evolving regulatory environment with potential broad implications for forest companies combined with a fragmented reporting landscape diminishes the useability of information for stakeholders as a steering tool. 
A quarter of a Welsh city will be covered by tree canopies within 10 years due to a new plan to boost its “urban forest”. Almost 30,000 trees will be planted in Newport to supplement about 250,000 existing trees. Wales was the first country in the world to measure its urban tree coverage. The council hopes these trees and others planted by private developers and landowners will take canopy cover in Newport – which at 18% had the highest proportion of any Welsh city in 2016 – to 25%. Joanne Gossage, service manager for environment and leisure at Newport council said the city had “green oasis” parks. She said: “We feel that Newport is a very green city and we don’t think it’s too far of a stretch to get to that 25%. “People’s perception of an urban forest is something dark, perhaps menacing and dingy. It’s not. It’s about trees making attractive frameworks in limited open space.”
Replanting forests can help cool the planet even more than some scientists once believed, especially in the tropics. But even if every tree lost since the mid-19th century is replanted, the total effect won’t cancel out human-generated warming. …In a new study 
The European Commission on Wednesday proposed an EU climate target for 2040 that for the first time will allow countries to use carbon credits from developing nations to meet a limited share of their emissions goal. The European Union executive proposed a legally-binding target to cut net greenhouse gas emissions by 90% by 2040, from 1990 levels – aiming to keep the EU on course for its core climate aim to reach net zero emissions by 2050. But following pushback from governments including France, Germany, Italy, Poland and the Czech Republic, the Commission also proposed flexibilities that would soften the 90% emissions target for European industries. Reflecting Germany’s public stance, up to 3 percentage points of the 2040 target can be covered by carbon credits bought from other countries through a U.N.-backed market, reducing the effort required by domestic industries. 
In an update to the joint UNESCO-WRI-IUCN report 
When Domino’s advertised its “smokehouse” pizzas in 2023, it trumpeted that the meat was smoked over timber logged from “Aussie Mountain ash”. It also advertised that the timber was certified as sustainable. But what the advertising didn’t promote was that mountain ash forests are critically endangered, with logging listed as one of the key processes threatening them. And now the ABC can reveal the certification that assured consumers that logging was sustainable was breached in seven different ways, according to the organisation that accredits certifiers. Those breaches included potentially stealing the trees from the neighbouring state forest, ignoring protections for waterways and logging potential endangered species habitat. “I think Australians should be absolutely appalled that the world’s tallest flowering tree is chipped up to make woodchips to smoke pork bellies to put on pizzas. It’s ridiculous. What are we talking about? Endangered possum pizzas?” Professor Lindenmayer said.
Naturally-regenerating forests are often ignored by policymakers working to curb climate change even though they hold an untapped potential to rapidly absorb planet-warming carbon from the atmosphere, scientists found in a research paper published Tuesday. These so-called secondary forests, which have regenerated themselves after being razed, often for agriculture, can help bring the world closer to the net-zero emissions target needed to slow global warming, the research published in the journal shows. That is because these young forests, which are made of trees between two and four decades old, can remove carbon from the atmosphere up to eight times faster per hectare than forests that were just planted, they found. It comes as companies worldwide are raising millions of dollars to regrow forests from scratch to generate carbon credits they can sell to polluting industries seeking to offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
Judges across the world are proving sceptical of companies’ attempts to offset their greenhouse gas emissions by buying carbon credits, 
Protecting and restoring forests are essential for curbing climate change. But while efforts often focus on conserving mature forests and planting new trees (both of which are badly needed), a critical piece of the puzzle is often overlooked: managing naturally regrowing forests to increase the carbon they remove. Until now, scientists did not have a detailed picture of the carbon removal value of naturally regrowing forests. But 
While biomass production and extraction in the European Union continue to grow, its long-term viability is at risk due to declining ecosystem conditions. A new 
DS Smith has brought online a €90 million biomass boiler at its Rouen paper mill in Normandy, France – one of Europe’s largest mill energy transitions to date. The new system replaces the site’s coal-fired boiler with a low-carbon, circular solution powered by locally sourced biomass waste. The project is expected to cut CO₂ emissions by 99,000 tonnes annually – equivalent to removing 40,000 cars from the road or powering 13,000 French homes each year. The boiler will process around 94,000 tonnes of biomass fuel each year, including industrial and municipal waste wood – mainly from the Paris and Normandy regions – as well as paper production by-products. Up to 70,000 tonnes of wood waste will be diverted from landfill annually, supporting DS Smith’s 2030 zero-landfill target.
Hundreds of top environment lawyers are suing the New Zealand government over what they say is its “dangerously inadequate” plan to reduce emissions to net zero by 2050. It is the first time the country’s emissions reduction plan has faced litigation, and the lawyers believe it is the first case globally that challenges the use of forestry to offset emissions. …two groups representing more than 300 lawyers filed judicial review proceedings against the government in Wellington’s high court on Tuesday. The groups … claim … the government has abandoned dozens of tools to tackle emissions, failed to adequately consult the public, and too heavily relies on high-risk carbon capture strategies such as forestry. …They claim that the government is relying on “high risk” methods such as planting hundreds of thousands of hectares of introduced pine trees to offset emissions, and capturing carbon underground, with few alternatives to fall back on if something goes wrong.
Researchers from the University of Nottingham and CSIRO Australia have developed a pioneering combined milling and combustion performance model to improve the selection of low carbon fuels for power generation. Published in the 
The sun and sky had a much more eerie appearance to it on Saturday evening and Sunday morning. It was a sign that smoke from wildfires burning more than 4,000 miles (6,400km) away in central Canada had made it across the Atlantic to sit in the skies over the UK. BBC WeatherWatchers from all corners of the country were out capturing the spectacle. …The change in the appearance of the sun and sky is due to smoke particles in the atmosphere scattering the blue wavelengths of light more, allowing predominantly orange and red hues to reach our eyes. …The presence of wildfire smoke from North America over the UK, whilst not common, does occasionally happen during the summer months. …Here in the UK, the smoke plume is at too high an altitude to affect our air quality.
Canada’s wildfires have forced evacuations of more than 26,000 people and continue to spread with heavy smoke choking millions of Canadians and Americans and reaching as far away as Europe. Hazardous air quality alerts were issued for parts of Canada and the neighbouring United States. A water tanker air base was consumed by flames in Saskatchewan province, oil production has been disrupted in Alberta, and more communities are threatened each day. “We have some challenging days ahead of us,” said Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe, adding that the number of evacuees could rise quickly. …Heavy smoke has engulfed part of the continent, forcing residents of four Canadian provinces and the US states of Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska and Wisconsin to limit outdoor activities. …Elsewhere, extensive forest fires have been raging in Russia’s Far Eastern Federal District since early April, generating carbon emissions of around 35 million tons, Copernicus reported.
ISTANBUL/PARIS/BRUSSELS – Firefighters battled wildfires in Turkey and France on Monday and more than 50,000 people were evacuated as an early summer heatwave hit Europe. Health alerts were issued in France, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Germany. Even the Netherlands, used to a milder climate, issued a warning for high temperatures in the coming days, coupled with high humidity. “Large parts of Western Europe are experiencing extreme heat and heatwave conditions that are normally observed in July or August, rather than June,” said the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. …In Turkey, wildfires raged for a second day in the western province of Izmir, fanned by strong winds, Forestry Minister Ibrahim Yumakli said. More than 50,000 people have been evacuated from five regions, including more than 42,000 in Izmir, Turkey’s AFAD emergency management authority said.