The 25th UN Climate Change Conference and the 25th session of the Conference of the Parties - COP25 climate talks - opened in Madrid on Monday 2 December and continues for two weeks. This is the summit that was scheduled to be held in Brazil but was then moved to Chile and, with the political unrest in Santiago, the venue was moved again to Madrid.

A report on the world's "carbon budget" revealed that governments are far from meeting the goals of the Paris climate agreement - greenhouse gas emissions are still rising though by smaller amounts that in previous years - and there are still problems over carbon markets and disputes over carbon credits.

Serious work begins this week with the arrival of senior politicians including environment ministers and finance ministers and the EU is due to reveal its new green deal to halve Europe's greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and set a legally binding target to reach net-zero carbon by 2050 although that appears to be overshadowed by the retention of what is called the Energy Charter Treaty - or ECT that still allows fossil fuel companies to take governments to court about any green policies that they feel threaten their business or, more important, their profits.

One interesting development was the release yesterday (9 December) of a communique from the fashion industry inviting governments to collaborate on Climate Action. It can only be hoped that this is rather more than green washing and any developments to control waste and monitor sustainability and recycling in the fashion industry should be tracked and echoed by the broader industries in design and in construction.

In more general news about climate change, it was announced yesterday that Denmark has risen up the rankings of the Climate Change Performance Index (CCPI) from the New Climate Institute in Germany and, of the 57 countries assessed, Denmark is now second with Sweden ranked first. This is significant because the rankings were made before the new Danish Climate Act that was voted through on Friday so actually too late to be taken into consideration.