As the UK's innovation agency, The Technology Strategy Board endeavours to stimulate and support business-led innovation in order to accelerate economic growth.

The latest Delivery Plan is built on the foundation of the 2011-2015 strategy, Concept to Commercialisation, and explains the activities planned during this year, up to March 2014, to support the achievement of their goals and contribute to the drive for growth. The overall budget for this financial year is approximately £440m.

Under the Energy Theme the TSB will commit up to £35m to business-led projects and Missions, and up to £10m to the Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult, with a focus on new energy technologies that help solve the challenges of sustainability, security, and affordability of supply and supporting the implementation of the Government’s industrial strategies for nuclear, oil and gas, and offshore wind.

To support innovation in the Built Environment they will commit up to £16m to business-led projects and up to £10m to the Future Cities Catapult, with a focus on systems integration, users, delivering designed performance, and supporting the implementation of the Government’s Construction Industrial Strategy.

For more information please go here.

The Final Report of The UK Carbon Capture And Storage Cost Reduction Task Force presents to Government what it has identified as next steps to achieve cost reductions and develop the CCS industry in the UK. This Final Report builds on the Interim Report of November 2012 which focused on identifying the opportunities for cost reduction across the CCS chain to achieve cost competitive CCS in the 2020s and the key conclusion of the Interim Report is unchanged

UK gas and coal power stations equipped with carbon capture, transport and storage have clear potential to be cost competitive with other forms of low-carbon power generation, delivering electricity at a levelised cost approaching £100/MWh by the early 2020s, and at a cost significantly below £100/MWh soon thereafter.

The work of the CRTF over the last four months, and this Final Report, have built on the Interim Report findings by: converting the Interim Report Candidate Actions into Agreed Actions; and laying out the Next Steps which should be followed to develop the CCS industry in the UK, to enable the roll-out of follow-on projects after the DECC Commercialisation Programme projects and ultimately to deliver cost-effective CCS in the UK

For more information please go here.

A survey of thousands of peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals has found that 97.1% agreed that climate change is caused by human activity.

Authors of the survey, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, said the finding of near unanimity provided a powerful rebuttal to climate contrarians who insist the science of climate change remains unsettled.

The survey considered the work of some 29,000 scientists published in 11,994 academic papers. Of the 4,000-plus papers that took a position on the causes of climate change only 0.7% or 83 of those thousands of academic articles, disputed the scientific consensus that climate change is the result of human activity, with the view of the remaining 2.2% unclear.

The study described the dissent as a "vanishingly small proportion" of published research.

For more information please go here.

The UK was today named by KPMG International as one of the six most active countries in using tax as a tool to drive sustainable corporate behaviour and achieve green policy goals.  Other countries on the list include the US, Japan, France, South Korea and China.

The finding is contained in the first KPMG Green Tax Index, launched today at the 2013 KPMG Asia Pacific Tax Summit in Shanghai. The KPMG Green Tax Index explores how governments are using their tax systems to respond to global challenges including energy security, waste and recycling, water and resource scarcity, pollution and climate change.It analyses green tax incentives and penalties in 21 major economies, focusing on key policy areas such as energy efficiency, water efficiency, carbon emissions, green innovation and green buildings.

The KPMG Green Tax Index is intended to raise corporate awareness of the rapidly evolving and complex global landscape of green tax incentives and penalties, and to encourage tax directors and sustainability chiefs to work together to factor green tax considerations into investment decisions.

For more information please go here.

According to reports in the Guardian The World Bank is making a major push to develop large-scale hydropower, something it had all but abandoned a decade ago but now sees as crucial to resolving the tension between economic development and the drive to tame carbon use.

Major hydropower projects in Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zambia, Nepal and elsewhere – all of a scale dubbed "transformational" to the regions involved – are part of the bank's fundraising drive among wealthy nations. Bank lending for hydropower has scaled up in recent years, and officials expect the trend to continue.

Such projects were shunned in the 1990s, in part because they can be disruptive to communities and ecosystems. But the World Bank is opening the taps for dams and related infrastructure as its president, Jim Yong Kim, tries to resolve a quandary at the bank's core: how to eliminate poverty while adding as little as possible to carbon emissions.

For more information please go here.

The introduction of energy efficient smart meters in 30 million UK homes will be delayed for over a year, the government has announced.

The project is being rescheduled to start in the Autumn of 2015 rather than the summer of next year, Energy and Climate Change secretary Ed Davey said in a Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) statement.

‘The consistent message was that more time was needed if the mass roll-out was to get off to the best possible start and ensure a quality experience for consumers,’ Davey said, noting that more time was needed to design, build, and test the systems.

‘To this end, and reflecting the extended period to build and test the systems required by industry, the Government has decided to move the completion date for the mass roll-out from end 2019 to end 2020 – although I expect the vast majority of smart meters to be in place against the original 2019 deadline,’ he added.

Energy and Climate Change Minister Baroness Verma said, ‘The Coalition is committed to making smart meters available to everyone as soon as possible.'

For more information please go here.