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With How to Change Everything, the activist has written her first book for young people. She explains how she has been inspired by a new, very young generation of protesters

When Naomi Klein toured North America with her 2019 book about the Green New Deal, she and her assistant liaised with local campaigners from the Sunrise Movement. This youthful climate action group was organised to set up a table at each event, with petitions and actions, so audiences could become activists, right there. When they reached Palo Alto, they discovered that the Sunrise Movement contact they’d been “bossing about” was a 13-year-old, who was organising the whole thing between her classes.

This shock inspired Klein, who began her activism in her 20s with the anti-corporate bible No Logo, to write her first book specifically for young people. How to Change Everything joins a burgeoning library of new books seeking to mobilise a new generation: alongside the iconoclastic Jay Griffiths’ Why Rebel, and youthful activist Hendrikus van Hensbergen’s How You Can Save the Planet, an excellent down-to-earth handbook for teens and pre-teens.

The fact that they are sacrificing so much of their childhood doing what they shouldn’t have to do is all the more reason for older generations to do more

How to Change Everything by Naomi Klein is published by Penguin Random House.

Food discarded in homes is 74kg per person each year, with problem affecting rich and poor countries

People waste almost a billion tonnes of food a year, a UN report has revealed. It is the most comprehensive assessment to date and found waste was about double the previous best estimate.

The food discarded in homes alone was 74kg per person each year on average around the world, the UN found. In the UK, which has some of the best data, the edible waste represents about eight meals per household each week.

Related: Reality bites: how the pandemic changed the way we eat

Imminent economic blueprint has implications for planet – and whether Paris agreement likely to be met

China is to publish a new blueprint for its economy on Friday, with vast implications for the future of the planet – including whether the goals of the Paris climate agreement are likely to be met.

The five-year plan, of which this will be the 14th since 1953, forms the cornerstone of economic governance for the one-party state, and sets out social and environmental aspirations as well as GDP and industrial targets.

Net zero emissions springs from the Paris agreement, though the goal was not made explicit in the treaty’s text. World leaders set the 2C limit, and the aspirational limit of 1.5C, at Paris based on advice from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the leading body of the world’s climate scientists, which has over years worked out that 2C was the threshold of safety, beyond which the ravages of climate breakdown were likely to become catastrophic and irreversible. Even at 1.5C, many low-lying areas could flood from sea level rises and storm surges.

Related: World needs to kick its coal habit to start green recovery, says IEA head

Companies such as Google and Facebook appear to be aiding and abetting a vicious government campaign against Indian environmental campaigners

The bank of cameras camped outside Delhi’s sprawling Tihar jail was the sort of media frenzy you would expect to await a prime minister caught in an embezzlement scandal, or a Bollywood star caught in the wrong bed. Instead, the cameras were waiting for Disha Ravi, a nature-loving 22-year-old vegan climate activist who against all odds has found herself ensnared in an Orwellian legal saga that includes accusations of sedition, incitement and involvement in an international conspiracy whose elements include (but are not limited to): Indian farmers in revolt, the global pop star Rihanna, supposed plots against yoga and chai, Sikh separatism and Greta Thunberg.

If you think that sounds far-fetched, well, so did the judge who released Ravi after nine days in jail under police interrogation. Judge Dharmender Rana was supposed to rule on whether Ravi, one of the founders of the Indian chapter of Fridays for Future, the youth climate group started by Thunberg, should continue to be denied bail. He ruled that there was no reason for bail to be denied, which cleared the way for Ravi’s return to her home in Bengaluru that night.

Related: How Hindu supremacists are tearing India apart