Australia should “tell the story of the Pacific to the world” when global leaders sit down to climate change talks in Paris at the end of this month, Labor has said.

The impact of climate change on the nations of the Pacific is a focus for both the government and opposition ahead of COP21, where governments of more than 190 nations will gather to discuss a possible new global climate accord.

Insects should become a staple of people’s diets around the world as an environmentally friendly alternative to meat, according to a report by the UK government’s waste agency.

But persuading consumers to overcome “the yuck factor” will be a key issue, says the report by the Waste and Resources Action Program (Wrap) which assesses challenges to the development of the food system in the next 10 years.

New scientific analysis shows the fingerprints of man-made climate change on 14 extreme weather events in 2014, including an apparent higher-than-normal number of hurricanes near Hawaii last year.

Dozens of scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and across the world examined 28 strange weather conditions last year to see if global warming partly increased their likelihood or their strength. In a series of papers in a 180-page, peer-reviewed report, the scientists spotted some effects of climate change in half of them.

Deforestation may have triggered the recent Ebola outbreak in west Africa, France’s environment minister Ségolène Royal told a London summit hosted by the Prince of Wales ahead of next month’s Cop21 conference.

Addressing the British energy and climate change secretary, Amber Rudd, representatives from forest nation governments and global companies, Royal said researchers believe the destruction of forest habitat brought bats, known to carry the virus, into greater contact with humans.

At least it’s over.

President Obama rejected the Keystone XL oil pipeline on Friday, ending an unseemly political dispute marked by activist hysteria, GOP hyperbole, presidential weakness and a general incapability of various sides to see the policy question for what it was: a mundane infrastructure approval that didn’t pose a high threat to the environment but also didn’t promise much economic development. The politicization of this regulatory decision, and the consequent warping of the issue to the point that it was described in existential terms, was a national embarrassment, reflecting poorly on the United States’ capability to treat parties equitably under law and regulation.

The University of California (UC) renewed its commitment to fight climate change at the UC Carbon and Climate Neutrality Summit at UC San Diego Tuesday. University president Janet Napolitano assured California Gov. Jerry Brown and other summit participants that the university’s 10 campuses will continue to act as “living laboratories” for climate change solutions.

“Addressing these challenges, and reducing our carbon footprint, is a moral imperative,” Ms. Napolitano, a former governor of Arizona and Homeland Security secretary, said at the summit.

Concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere hit a new high in 2014, the UN said Monday, warning the resulting climate change was moving the world into "unchartered territory".

In its annual report on Earth-warming greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the World Meteorological Organization said concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane and nitrous oxide once again broke records last year.

France's top diplomat, who will preside over a year-end Paris summit tasked with inking a climate rescue pact, warned Sunday of looming planetary "catastrophe" if negotiations fail.

Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius's remarks came as separate reports warned of the devastating effects of global warming on the poor and those living in megacities around the world.

A swathe of China was blanketed with dangerous acrid smog Monday after levels of the most dangerous particulates reached almost 50 times World Health Organization maximums.

Levels of PM2.5, the tiny airborne particles considered most harmful to health, reached 860 micrograms per cubic metre in Changchun, the capital of Jilin province in the northeast, on Monday.

Global warming could elevate disease, ravage crops and push 100 million more people into poverty without action to prevent it, the World Bank warned in a disturbing new report Sunday.

The problem of climate change is already hampering efforts to reduce poverty, the Bank said, and the poorest people are already suffering more than others from lower rainfall and extreme weather tied to warming.