Vladimir Putin has escalated his nuclear rhetoric, telling a group of senior officials that Russia would consider using nuclear weapons if it was attacked by any state with conventional weapons.

His remarks on Wednesday came during a meeting with Russia’s powerful security council where he also announced changes to the country’s nuclear doctrine.

The comments marked Russia’s strongest warning yet to the west against allowing Ukraine to launch deep strikes into Russian territory using long-range western missiles.

The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has been asking for months for permission to use British Storm Shadow missiles and US-made Atacms missiles to hit targets deeper inside Russia.

Putin said that Russia would consider using nuclear weapons if Moscow received “reliable information” about the start of a massive launch of missiles, aircraft or drones against it.

Putin also warned that a nuclear power supporting another country’s attack on Russia would be considered a participant in aggression, issuing a thinly veiled threat to the west as foreign leaders continue to mull whether to allow Ukraine to use long-range weapons.

Putin said the clarifications were carefully calibrated and commensurate with the modern military threats facing Russia. “We see the modern military and political situation is dynamically changing and we must take this into consideration. Including the emergence of new sources of military threats and risks for Russia and our allies,” he said.

Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, dismissed the new nuclear doctrine, saying: “Russia no longer has any instruments to intimidate the world apart from nuclear blackmail. These instruments will not work.”

Several influential foreign policy hawks have previously pressed Putin to adopt a more assertive nuclear posture towards the west, lowering its threshold for using nuclear weapons in order to deter the west against providing more direct military support to Ukraine.

The current doctrine was set out by Putin in June 2020 in a six-page decree.

In the early days of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Putin frequently invoked Moscow’s nuclear arsenal, the world’s biggest, repeatedly pledging to use all means necessary to defend Russia.

He later seemed to moderate his rhetoric, but officials close to the Russian president have recently warned Nato countries they risked provoking nuclear war if they gave the green light for Ukraine to use long-range weapons.

Earlier this month, Putin said that the west would be directly fighting with Russia if it gave such permission to Ukraine – and that Russia would be forced to make “appropriate decisions”, without spelling out what those measures could be.

Keir Starmer has defended borrowing an £18m penthouse flat from the Labour donor Waheed Alli during the election, saying he took the offer so that his son would have a place to study for his GCSEs without having to walk past journalists and protesters outside their family home.

The prime minister brought up the “human” reason for having moved his family out of his Kentish Town house in north London, saying no cash changed hands as a result of the move.

He was pressed, while attending the UN general assembly in New York, on public opposition to him taking more than £100,000 of freebies in the form of tickets, clothes and accommodation.

Asked by Sky News whether his reputation had been undermined, Starmer talked about why he moved to the flat in Covent Garden, central London, belonging to Lord Alli, a media businessman and Labour peer.

“We had a situation where the election was called. Not what we expected … My son happened to be in the middle of his GCSEs. That means there are a lot of journalists outside the front door and in the street. I’m not complaining about that. But if you’re 13, as my girl is, if you’re 16, as my boy is, that’s quite hard to navigate when you’re concentrating on GCSEs.”

He added: “So I said, we’re going to get you out of here and get you somewhere where you can just study and get to school and back without having to go through all of that. And that’s when someone said, well, in which case I can make this flat available to you. It’s safe, secure. He can get on with the job. No money exchanged hands … And I wasn’t going to let my son fail or not do well in his GCSEs because of journalists outside the front door. We also, as you know, had protesters outside the front door.”

He said he had found it “worrying” to have protesters outside and that he had promised his wife and children he would protect them. In relation to free tickets for football matches, he said it was “simply a gift from Arsenal” as it was no longer safe for him to be in the stands without very expensive security.

Pressed on whether he was in a position of privilege as a politician, when many people might want a private place to help their children revise for GCSEs away from their home environment, Starmer said: “I think that’s fair and why the rules are there to declare it … If you’re putting to me that I should have stayed in my Kentish Town home and disrupted my son’s GCSEs, that that was the right thing to do, then I think you should put that to me.”

He added that “any parent would have made the same decision” and that he could not give any better explanation. Starmer also brought up that Sky held parties costing thousands of pounds every year to which politicians were invited.

Asked whether Taylor Swift concert tickets were a “work event”, he said it was a “judgment call for each MP” and declined to answer whether he would look at changing the rules.

He stressed that in relation to clothing, he would not be accepting any more gifts, after Alli gave £16,000 for outfits and £2,400 for glasses, as well as £20,000-worth of accommodation during the election campaign.

Starmer also faced questions on Wednesday after the Guido Fawkes website reported that he appeared to have used Alli’s flat as a backdrop to a video he released during the Covid pandemic in late December 2021. At the time, employees had been advised to work from home if possible.

No 10 said Starmer was completely confident he had broken no rules when in Alli’s flat. The clip was recorded for work purposes and it is understood he was only using the flat as a one-off.

Research from YouGov published on Wednesday found that three-quarters of the public thought free tickets and gifts for politicians should be banned.

Its survey of almost 4,000 adults found 51% thought it was wrong for politicians to accept the donations even though it was within the rules, while 29% said it was OK to accept the donations but that the rules should not allow them.

France’s new rightwing interior minister has said there will be consequences after a Moroccan man suspected of murdering a 19-year-old university student and leaving her body in a forest was arrested in Switzerland.

A source close to the case said the alleged attacker was a 22-year-old man of Moroccan nationality. Prosecutors have said the suspect had been previously convicted of rape and had been the subject of an order to leave France.

The killing of the student, named only by the authorities as Philippine, is expected to further inflame political tensions in France where the new rightwing government plans to crack down on immigration.

“This is an abominable crime,” said Bruno Retailleau, the interior minister, who has promised to boost law and order, tighten immigration legislation and make it easier to deport foreigners convicted of crimes.

“It is up to us, as public leaders, to refuse to accept the inevitable and to develop our legal arsenal, to protect the French,” he added. “If we have to change the rules, let’s change them.”

On Saturday, the body of a student was discovered in the Bois de Boulogne park in western Paris, not far from the Université Paris-Dauphine, which Philippine attended.

A Moroccan national was arrested on Tuesday in the Swiss canton of Geneva and was identified as a suspect in a murder committed in Paris, a spokesperson for the Swiss justice ministry told AFP.

“The Federal Office of Justice then ordered detention for extradition purposes on the basis of an arrest request from France,” she added.

The student had last been seen at the university on Friday. Witnesses reported seeing a man with a pickaxe, said one police source.

According to the prosecutors, the man was convicted in 2021 of a rape committed in 2019, when he was a minor. He was released in June having serving his sentence, then placed in an administrative detention centre, according to the source. In early September, a judge freed him on condition he reported regularly to the authorities. But just before the murder of the student, the suspect had been placed on a wanted list because he had flouted the conditions of his release.

The killing of the student has sparked outrage in the country, with both far right and leftwing politicians urging tough measures.

“Philippine’s life was stolen from her by a Moroccan migrant who was under a removal order,” Jordan Bardella, the leader of the far right National Rally (RN), the largest single party in parliament, said on X on Tuesday. “Our justice system is lax, our state is dysfunctional and our leaders are letting the French live alongside human bombs,” he added.

“It’s time for this government to act: our compatriots are angry and will not mince words.”

The former socialist president François Hollande also chimed in, saying deportation orders had to be enforced “quickly”.

Ellen DeGeneres begins as she means to go on in her new – and supposedly final – standup special. Her journey from dressing room to stage is cast as a memory lane, past clips of her first appearance on the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, snapshots of the furore when she came out as gay in 1997, and then a recap of her more recent brush with controversy – when, four years ago, accusations of a toxic workplace culture torpedoed her daytime talkshow. For Your Approval is DeGeneres’s reckoning with that cancellation, and her being deemed “the most hated woman in America”. And, like its opening sequence, it frames that reckoning solely in terms of our host’s journey, and her victimhood. Anyone looking for apologies, or humility, must look elsewhere.

As a study in evasion, self-mythologising – and world-beating servility on the part of her audience – For Your Approval takes some beating. If, like me, you can’t bear standup that courts affirming cheers rather than laughter – well, getting to the end of this will require considerable forbearance. Clearly, the scandal that saw off her TV vehicle has not sullied the ardour of DeGeneres’s many fans, who whoop and applaud her every utterance here; not just the ones that address healing after being “kicked out of showbusiness”, but the middling jokes about butterflies and parallel parking too. It slows the gig down terribly. Quit clapping, I shouted at the screen, and let the comedy crack on.

And there is comedy here, amid all the slippery self-justification: standup of the type with which Ellen first secured her place in America’s affections. She talks about rearing chickens, a hobby with which she has filled her newly spare time. She talks about her OCD and her ADHD, and how they cancel each other out. She addresses the oncoming decrepitude of her body, and her mother’s dementia.

Most of this is fine, little of it remarkable, and all of it overshadowed by the address For Your Approval makes to DeGeneres’s fall from grace in 2020. The problem then was that a host who had made “be kind” her trademark was said to have presided over a workplace culture of bullying, discrimination and harassment. Four years on, that doesn’t seem to be DeGeneres’s version of events. “We had so much fun together on that show,” she trills here, playing tag and practical jokes on-set. Perhaps some construed this bonhomie as bullying? Or perhaps it’s a gender thing? Women aren’t used to being bosses, she says at one point – and comedians even less so. How that tallies with her later claim, that her only crime was to be “a strong woman”, is not clear.

As a feat of self-exculpation, For Your Approval is a wonder to behold. You can’t help but admire the chutzpah when the 66-year-old brackets her recent excommunication with the one she suffered when she came out as gay, 23 years earlier – as if these were analogous experiences of heroic persecution. For anyone who had a miserable time working on her TV show, no thought is spared. “I’m proud of who I’ve become,” intones DeGeneres solemnly at the show’s conclusion, to more roars of approval. But there’s not much here for her to be proud of – nor much for fans of comedy (as opposed to fans of Ellen) to savour.

Leading climate scientists are urging the government to pause plans for a billion pound investment in “green technologies” they say are unproven and would make it harder for the UK to reach its net zero targets.

Labour has promised to invest £1bn in carbon capture, usage and storage (CCUS) to produce blue hydrogen and to capture carbon dioxide from new gas-fired power stations – with a decision on the first tranche of the funding expected imminently.

However, in the letter to the energy security and net zero secretary, Ed Miliband, the scientists argue that the process relies on unproven technology and would result in huge emissions of planet-heating CO₂ and methane – gases that are driving the climate crisis.

“We strongly urge you to pause your government’s policy for CCUS-based blue hydrogen and gas power, and delay any investment decision … until all the relevant evidence concerning the whole-life emissions and safety of these technologies has been properly evaluated,” they write.

The letter, which is signed by leading climate scientists from the UK and US as well as campaigners, argues the plans would:

A recent study found a proposed multibillion-pound CCS project in Teesside would be responsible for more than 20m tonnes of planet-heating CO₂ over its lifetime.

Dr Andrew Boswell, an energy analyst who carried out the research on the Teesside project, said: “Investing now into CCUS and blue hydrogen would dangerously lock the UK into increasing imports of liquified natural gas, which carry a very-high footprint of methane emissions in its production and transport, to well past 2050.”

He said that following David Lammy’s Kew speech last week, in which the foreign secretary, said tackling the climate emergency had to be central to everything the Labour government did, it must now “walk the talk”.

A spokesperson for the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said CCUS would “play a vital role in a decarbonised power system” that would “make us less, not more, reliant on natural gas”.

“This technology will boost our energy independence, and the Climate Change Committee describe it as a necessity, not an option for reaching our climate goals.”

The spokesperson added: “Through our national wealth fund, we will support carbon capture and hydrogen to make the UK a world leader in these technologies of the future.”

However, Claire James, from the Campaign against Climate Change, a pressure group that also signed the letter, said Labour had “a great opportunity” to tackle the climate crisis and create jobs by investing in “basic things we know work” such as insulating homes, renewable energy and public transport.

She added: “When it comes to carbon capture and storage, which has a track record of repeated failure, or considering the risks of methane emissions from importing gas to make hydrogen, we can’t see this as a good use of big public subsidies.”

Another signatory, David Cebon, a professor of mechanical engineering at Cambridge University, said the government should be 100% focused on reducing carbon emissions through proven technologies.

He added: “The CCUS projects (inherited from the previous government’s cosy relationship with the fossil fuel industry) will do precisely the opposite. They will lock the UK into significantly higher gas consumption for the next 30-50 years and will increase energy costs, at taxpayers’ expense.”

Cebon said CCUS technology had “a very poor track record for reducing emissions” and came “with significant health, safety and cost risks”.

“The secretary of state should think very carefully before embarking on these projects,” he added.

Ladies, are you DEPRESSED and UNHAPPY? Do you feel POORER and LESS HEALTHY than you did four years ago? Do you pray one day your little woman brain will NO LONGER BE THINKING ABOUT ABORTION all the time? Well, don’t worry, Donald Trump is going to FIX ALL OF THAT.

So he says, anyway. At 11.42pm on Friday night Trump flexed his fingers, hit the all-caps key, and ranted on Truth Social about how UNHAPPY women are under the Biden administration. What happened at 11.41pm to prompt this, I wonder? Did he get a preview of some new polls which show him trailing Kamala Harris, partly thanks to a historic gender gap that sees Harris leading among women 58% to 37%? Did Trump decide, in his infinite wisdom, that the best way to fix this was an all-caps rant? Because I am not sure that is a winning strategy.

I know you’d probably rather bleach your own eyeballs, but I do encourage you to have a look at Trump’s incoherent post for yourself. Really take in his rambling – unedited by journalists desperately trying to make his various unhinged utterances coherent – and remind yourself that there is a very real chance that this guy might become president again. We are all so desensitised to Trump that we sometimes forget that he lacks the ability even to string a sentence together. No respectable employer would hire someone who posted the sort of stuff he does, yet he might soon land the biggest job in the world. Again. While Harris may be leading Trump in the latest polls, the numbers are still within the margin of error. The race is extremely close.

Like many people who desperately want the carnage in Gaza, and now Lebanon, to end, I have lost hope that Harris will do any meaningful work towards a ceasefire. I dread a Trump presidency, but I also have no enthusiasm for a Harris presidency. Still, the fact that, with just weeks to go to the election, we are in a situation where a highly credentialled woman is neck and neck with an extremist sexual predator and convicted felon who writes late-night rants in all-caps is an astounding indictment of US politics. GOD HELP US ALL.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

I don’t remember the exact moment my sister asked me to be her birthing partner. Perhaps it was just a natural assumption we made, having always gravitated towards one another in times of need. The thought of it thrilled and terrified me. As a flighty 21-year-old, it had never occurred to me that it would be a role I would need to fulfil.

My sister became pregnant at 16, when I was in my second year of a performing arts degree in Salford and she was living with our dad. It was 2006 and my life was operating on a cycle of nights out, hangovers and minute noodles, punctuated only by a sparse timetable and occasional bar work to keep my overdraft under control.

I had more or less broken ties with the small market town in West Yorkshire where I had grown up; my parents’ divorce a few years earlier meant there was no longer such a thing as a family home. Life felt wild and untethered and partying had become my personality. Through everything, my sister and I remained close: both a little hedonistic, both more than a little damaged by the breakdown of our family. A baby wasn’t something I had imagined for either of us.

I took time off so that I could be with her for the birth, but the date in mid-September that we had circled on the calendar came and went with no sign of labour. The next day, too. And the one after that. An entire week passed before my sister, balancing a bowl of Weetos on her belly, calmly told me that her contractions had begun.

The first few hours felt like standing in line for a rollercoaster. The giddy anticipation, the nerves. But as the labour progressed, the mood grew increasingly sombre. The doctors in the hospital offered her every drug and intervention going, but my sister refused them all, easing her contractions with nothing more than gas and air. She may have been younger than every other mother on that ward, but her belief in herself was unmatched; her strength was something close to supernatural.

When I had learned my sister was pregnant, my immediate reaction was fear. I worried about what people would say, how they would treat her. It summed me up. I had always been overly concerned with the opinions of others, changing like a chameleon to fit in. I envied my sister’s authenticity, her ability to move through the world unimpeded by what others thought. But, as I watched her pace, rock and roil through the increasing intensity of her contractions, I felt overwhelmed with pride. Throughout her pregnancy, I had seen how the world looked down on her; I seethed at the way she was spoken to, the attitudes that oscillated from patronising to dismissive. Never once did she kowtow to anyone’s judgments. Always she held her head high, rising above whatever was thrown at her.

Finally, at 10.18pm that night, I watched in awe, shock and utter incomprehension as my baby sister brought my indescribably perfect baby nephew into the world, all by herself. In the preceding months, she had taught me so much about resilience, self-reliance and strength. But witnessing the raw and bloody miracle of a new life changed my perspective in a way I couldn’t have imagined. The wonder of our existence, how utterly bonkers it is that any of us are even here, hit me like a thunderclap.

Holding my nephew in my arms a little later, I felt an immediate rush of love. How strange it was to look into his tiny face and see my sister, mum, dad, siblings. Myself. His arrival pieced us back together, albeit in a different form.

When I returned to university a week or so later, something in me had shifted. Seeing my little sister change from a carefree girl into a mother brought the fleetingness of time into sharp focus. Suddenly, every day felt valuable, the opinions of others less so. Instead of wasted ramblings with strangers at parties, I craved fulfilment in my interactions. I started to focus on my degree and took up a placement teaching creative arts in a female prison.

My sister moved into her own place, a little terrace on the same street as our primary school. Spending time with my nephew became a priority. I realised I wanted to be someone he could look up to, someone he would be proud of.

I had failed my first year of university, but I graduated the year after my nephew was born with a first-class honours degree, my sense of self stronger than it had ever been. Since then, I have experienced the same sensation of astonishment and grounding with the arrival of my own three children, with the memory of my 16-year-old sister’s transcendent strength propelling me through each of their births.

My nephew is studying for his A-levels now, a bright future ahead of him, while my sister, who has raised two incredible sons, has completed a law degree. So many times over the past 18 years, I have wondered how my life could have turned out had I not been there to watch my nephew crown into the world, where the reckless path I was following might have led me. Each time, I am reminded of what I learned that night: the mad magic of life and the importance of making our time here count.

Wild Ground by Emily Usher is out now (Serpent’s Tail, (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

A former climate chief of the World Bank has been appointed to lead the UK’s efforts to forge a global coalition on climate action, the Guardian can reveal.

Rachel Kyte, who previously served as special representative for the UN and a vice-president of the World Bank, will take up the role of climate envoy to lead the UK’s return to the front ranks of global climate diplomacy.

Her role will be vital to the pledge made last week by David Lammy, the foreign secretary, that the UK would play a central role in tackling the climate and nature crises, in contrast with the previous government, whom he described as “climate dinosaurs”.

The envoy role was axed by Rishi Sunak, to the anger of campaigners and dismay of foreign governments and allies. Sunak also snubbed international climate meetings.

Kyte, a veteran of international climate summits, and most recently a professor at Oxford’s Blavatnik school of government, is widely respected among developed and developing country governments. She worked with many of them during her stint as chief executive of the Sustainable Energy for All initiative.

Kyte told the Guardian: “This government is committed to reconnecting the UK to the world with climate action as a priority. And the world is being shaped politically and economically by climate change. This provides an opportunity to use international action to help deliver on the UK’s energy mission. And it provides challenges, not least in mobilising the financing to protect people and drive greener growth. There is no time like now for the UK to help drive action and I am excited to play my part in this new role.”

Lammy and Ed Miliband, secretary of state for energy and net zero, will announce the appointment on Wednesday at New York climate week, where they are hosting an event on building a global clean power alliance.

Miliband will hold discussions with other governments on the need for vastly increased pledges of climate finance to the developing world. Poor countries want assurances that they will receive at least $1tn a year in assistance to help them cut greenhouse gas emissions and cope with the impacts of climate breakdown.

Climate finance will be the main topic of what are expected to be fraught discussions at the next UN climate summit, Cop29, in Azerbaijan. Miliband will lead the UK’s negotiations himself, in contrast with the previous government, in which it was left to junior ministers.

The diplomatic charm offensive has already begun, as Miliband welcomed the president of Cop29, Mukhtar Babayev, to London in July, and in August made an extensive trip to Brazil, which is the current president of the G20 group and host of next year’s Cop30 climate summit.

Lammy will also, with environment secretary Steve Reed, appoint a nature envoy for the first time, to push for global action on protecting the natural environment, as the Guardian revealed last week. That appointment is not expected until next month.

Kyte, whose official title will be UK special representative for climate, will coordinate the UK’s relations with other donor countries, as well as forging alliances with the poor world, and with the economic giants of the developing world, China and India.

Her appointment was welcomed by climate experts and campaigners. Edward Davey, UK head of the World Resources Institute thinktank, said: “Rachel is a giant and a ball of fire, with a vast hinterland of knowledge and experience and a global network of friends and allies. She will be brilliant and a force to be reckoned with.”

Planet-heating pollution doubled the chance of the extreme levels of rain that hammered central Europe in September, a study has found.

Researchers found global heating aggravated the four days of heavy rainfall that led to deadly floods in countries from Austria to Romania.

The rains were made at least 7% stronger by climate change, World Weather Attribution (WWA) found, which led to towns being hit with volumes of water that would have been half as likely to occur if humans had not heated the planet.

“The trend is clear,” said Bogdan Chojnicki, a climate scientist at Poznań University of Life Sciences, and co-author of the study. “If humans keep filling the atmosphere with fossil fuel emissions, the situation will be more severe.”

Storm Boris stalled over central Europe in mid-September and unleashed record-breaking amounts of rain upon Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. The heavy rains turned calm streams into wild rivers, triggering floods that wrecked homes and killed two dozen people.

The researchers said measures to adapt had lowered the death toll compared with similar floods that hit the region in 1997 and 2002. They called for better flood defences, warning systems and disaster-response plans, and warned against continuing to rebuild in flood-prone regions.

“These floods indicate just how costly climate change is becoming,” said Maja Vahlberg, technical adviser at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, and co-author of the study. “Even with days of preparation, flood waters still devastated towns, destroyed thousands of homes and saw the European Union pledge €10bn in aid.”

Rapid attribution studies, which use established methods but are published before going through lengthy peer-review processes, examine how human influence affects extreme weather in the immediate aftermath of a disaster.

The scientists compared the rainfall recorded in central Europe over four days in September with amounts simulated for a world that is 1.3C cooler – the level of warming caused to date by burning fossil fuels and destroying nature. They attributed a “doubling in likelihood and a 7% increase in intensity” to human influence.

But the results are “conservative”, the scientists wrote, because the models do not explicitly model convection and so may underestimate rainfall. “We emphasise that the direction of change is very clear, but the rate is not.”

Physicists have shown that every degree celsius of warming allows the air to hold 7% more moisture, but whether it does so depends on the availability of water. The rains in central Europe were unleashed when cold air from the Arctic met warm, wet air from the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.

Warmer seas enhance the rainy part of the hydrological cycle, though the trend on parts of the land is towards drier conditions, said Miroslav Trnka, a climate scientist at the Global Change Research Institute, who was not involved in the study. When the conditions were right, he said, “you can have floods on steroids”.

Trnka compared the factors that result in extreme rainfall to playing the lottery. The increase in risk from global heating, he said, was like buying more lottery tickets, doing so over a longer period of time, and changing the rules so more combinations of numbers result in a win.

“If you bet long enough, you have a higher chance of a jackpot,” said Trnka.

The study found heavier four-day rainfall events would hit if the world heats 2C above preindustrial levels, with a further increase from today of about 5% in rainfall intensity and 50% in likelihood.

Other factors could increase this even more, such as the waviness of the jet stream, which some scientists suspect is increasingly trapping weather systems in one place as a result of global heating. A study published in Nature Scientific Reports on Monday projected that such blocking systems would increase under medium- and worst-case emissions scenarios.

Hayley Fowler, a climate scientist at Newcastle University, who was not involved in the study, said: “These large storms, cut off from the jet stream, are able to stagnate in one place and produce huge amounts of rainfall, fuelled by increased moisture and energy from oceans that are record-shatteringly hot.”

“These ‘blocked’ slow-moving storms are becoming more frequent and are projected to increase further with additional warming,” she added. “The question is not whether we need to adapt for more of these types of storm but can we.”

WWA described the week following Storm Boris as “hyperactive” because 12 disasters around the world triggered its criteria for analysis, more than in any week in the organisation’s history.

The study did not try to work out how much global heating had increased the destruction wreaked by the rains but the researchers said even minor increases in rainfall disproportionately increased damages.

“Almost everywhere in the world it is the case that a small increase in the rainfall leads to a similar order-of-magnitude increase in flooding,” said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute and co-author of the study. “But that leads to a much larger increase in the damages.”

Large-scale renewable energy investment and construction in Australia is rebounding this year after a slump, but will need to accelerate to reach the pace needed to meet the Albanese government’s goal for 2030.

The country could add more than 7 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity this year, up from 5.3 GW last year, according to data released by the Clean Energy Regulator.

Dylan McConnell, an energy systems researcher at the University of New South Wales, said: “There is this narrative that has developed that the transition has stalled and that’s demonstrably not true. It is happening, it just needs to speed up.”

The new capacity is split roughly equally between household rooftop solar systems, which continue to be installed at what has been a world-leading pace, and large-scale renewable energy developments.

Industry group the Clean Energy Council said the country was likely to have more than 25GW of rooftop solar by the end of the year, surpassing the total 21.3GW capacity of the national coal-fired power fleet. More than 3.7m homes and small businesses have systems.

But the bigger change has been in construction of large-scale solar and wind farms, which fell in 2023, but has increased beyond expectations this year. The regulator said it was expected between 3GW and 4GW would be added.

The climate change and energy minister, Chris Bowen, said the data showed the national grid supplying the five eastern states was expected to run on 42% renewable energy this year.

The regulator said final investment decisions were made on 1.8GW of new large renewable developments in the first half of the year. This surpassed 1.6GW in total commitments in 2023.

Investment in grid-scale renewable energy fell last year after a long-standing legislated federal renewable energy target was reached and as investors faced uncertainty over when coal-fired power plants would close.

The Albanese government chose not to expand the legislated target, but has promised to underwrite 25GW of new large-scale solar and wind as they aim to have 82% of Australia’s electricity from renewable sources by 2030.

The Australian Energy Market Operator has declared the national grid would remain reliable as it shifted from running on mostly coal to mostly renewables, but would require planned investments in new generation to be delivered “on time and in full”.

Bowen said the latest data showed the government’s renewables plan was “on track and building momentum”. He repeated his argument that the Coalition’s proposal to limit investment in large-scale renewables and eventually build nuclear plants would put the country at risk of supply shortages and blackouts.

“[Opposition leader] Peter Dutton wants to stop renewable investment, tear up contracts for new renewable and transmission projects and deliver expensive nuclear reactors in two decades’ time,” he said.

Dutton gave a speech on nuclear energy on Monday, but did not release new information about what the Coalition planned. He promised those details – including the expected cost for households and businesses and how the Coalition planned to prevent blackouts as ageing coal plants reached the end of their scheduled lives – before the next election.