Global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) from fossil-fuel combustion rose by 3.2 percent last year to a record high of 31.6 gigatonnes, the IEA said in preliminary estimates released on Thursday.

China made the biggest contribution to the global rise, seeing its emissions increase by 9.3 percent, the Paris-based International Energy Agency said.

U.S. emissions fell 1.7 pct in 2011, mainly due to a switch to natural gas from coal in power plants and also a very mild winter that cut heating demand, the IEA said.

Saudi Arabia, the world's top oil exporter, may finally be getting serious about overcoming the technical and financial hurdles for tapping its other main resource: sunshine.

Thousands of solar power panels have sprung up across Europe over the past few years, thanks to generous subsidies that make the technology an attractive alternative to conventional energy.

Saudi Arabia too, wants to generate much more solar power as it lacks coal or enough natural gas output to meet rapidly rising power demand.

Scotland's University of Edinburgh on Wednesday opened a centre to research the use of carbon to retrieve oil otherwise hard to extract from reservoirs, a method which could unlock three billion barrels of trapped North Sea oil worth 190 billion pounds ($300 billion).

A number of developers of carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects have already suggested using the method, also known as enhanced oil recovery (EOR) that has been used in North America for decades, to enhance the economic viability of their plants which are expensive to finance.

Members of the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) agreed on Wednesday on cattle breeding rules, its first ever deal on livestock production.

The deal, approved by OIE's 178 members apart from South Africa, includes measures such as ensuring cattle beefs' health, breeding environment, genetic selection, Director General Bernard Vallat told reporters at the 80th General Assembly.

The Los Angeles City Council voted on Wednesday to ban the use of plastic bags in grocery stores, setting the stage to become the largest American city to date to implement such a measure.

The 13-1 vote kicks off a process that will include a four-month environmental review, a second vote to formally adopt an ordinance, and a six-month grace period for the roughly 7,500 grocers within the limits of the second-largest U.S. city.

Smaller grocers will have 12 months to phase out the bags.

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is likely to veto some controversial aspects of a forest bill passed by the Congress last month as pressure mounts against the text days before the country hosts a large UN conference on sustainable development.

The bill, a revision of Brazil's Forest Code, grants partial amnesty to landowners who had illegally cleared some of their forests until as recently as 2008, relaxing the legal requirements for reforestation of these areas.

Germany has asked for discussion on deeper EU carbon emissions cuts to be put on the agenda at a meeting of environment ministers in June, EU sources said.

If agreed, a more ambitious target could help to spur the European Union's carbon market, which has sunk to record lows.

Previous debate of bigger carbon cuts, however, has been difficult, with coal-reliant Poland objecting that they could damage its economy.

Morocco plans to speed up tender processes for the development of a 2,000-megawatt solar energy plan, starting with the award this year of a first contract for 160 megawatts to be generated using concentrated-solar technology (CSP).

Mustafa Bakkoury, who chairs the Moroccan Agency for Solar Energy (Masen), said a winning consortium for that first phase of a 500-megawatt solar power plant, in the southern region of Ouarzazate, would be announced by the start of summer.

Around 60 miners trapped underground on Tuesday after an accident and fire at Zimbabwe's Mimosa platinum mine have been brought back to the surface without injury, the company said.

"All employees have now been safely evacuated from the mine. No injuries have been reported," said a statement from Mimosa, which is a joint venture between South Africa's Impala Platinum (Implats) and London-listed Aquarius Platinum Ltd.

It said it was too early to assess the impact on output at the mine, which produced 104,000 ounces of platinum group metals in its last financial year.

Radiation doses received after the Fukushima nuclear accident last year were below international reference levels in all but two locations in Japan and below the level seen as "very small" in neighbouring countries, the World Health Organization said on Wednesday.

The preliminary report by independent experts found that, using conservative assumptions, people in two locations of relatively high exposure in Fukushima prefecture may have received a dose of 10-50 millisieverts (mSv) in the year after the accident at the power station operated by TEPCO.