The government will look at banning disposable barbecues as wildfires continue to rage across the country, prime minister Andy Burnham has said. Disposable barbecues have been the cause of a number of serious fires over the last few years, but campaigners were critical of the PM’s failure to link those fires more broadly to the climate crisis. Read the full story here.

Andy Burnham will chair an emergency Cobra meeting in response to the extreme heat, which has caused wildfires and plunged many parts of Britain into drought. The prime minister will meet ministers, officials and agencies as high temperatures continue across the UK, with 33C forecast on Wednesday and up to 38C on Thursday. Andrew Saprrow will be covering any news coming out of this on the UK politics blog here.

The Met Office has issued an amber weather warning for extreme heat across parts of England tomorrow, in place from 9am until midnight. In an update on X, it said: “Temperatures will rise quickly tomorrow, with many areas reaching 35C+ and highs of 36-37C possible, especially across the Midlands, east and south-east.”

Yvette Cooper, the health secretary, has said that she has told NHS England to start planning ahead for summer heatwaves, just as it prepares every year for a crisis in the winter. In an article published in the Mirror, Cooper says global heating means Britain will face heatwaves like the one we are going through now “with increasing frequency and increasing intensity”.

Repeated debilitating heatwaves this summer are likely to have cost the UK economy more than £4bn in lost economic output by the end of July, new analysis shows. Green thinktank Verdant had suggested June’s unseasonally hot weather had an economic cost of £2.36bn. Updating its assessment to include last month’s high temperatures, it finds a £4.4bn hit to output.

Just 20 staff are working on climate adaptation within a key government department tasked with protecting the environment and maintaining food security, a freedom of information request has revealed. The officials make up 0.3% of staff within the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

The conservation group WWF has issued a statement on the government’s emergency Cobra meeting taking place today to discuss the extreme heat. The WWF’s head of climate policy, Rick Parfett, argued that the government should not approve the North Sea drilling projects because they would worsen climate change without reducing household energy bills.

The Scottish Fire and Rescue Service (SFRS) has issued a warning for a very high risk of wildfire across the eastern Highlands, eastern and southern Scotland from today until Thursday. In a statement, SFRS said it was acting in conjuction with the Scottish Wildfire Forum (SWF).

Firefighters have worked through the night and are continuing to tackle the heathland fire in the New Forest in Hampshire, the local authority said. The A31 that runs through the New Forest is closed in both directions, with road closures expected to remain in place for at least the next 48 hours while emergency services continue to respond to the fire.

People have been urged to avoid Dunwich Heath in Suffolk as authorities assess wildfire damage and deal with an unexploded second world war bomb uncovered by the blaze. The wildfire at the nature reserve has scorched more than 100 hectares (247 acres) of heathland since it took hold almost two weeks ago, the National Trust said.