Latest report on U.S. jobless claims expected to show another 1.8 million filings.

The U.S. government is expected to report Thursday morning that 1.8 million people filed new claims for state unemployment benefits last week, continuing the decline in new claims from the more than six million who submitted applications in a single week in March.

But even as the pace of layoffs has eased, the ranks of people continuing to join the rolls — more than 40 million filings since mid-March — underscore the continuing strain on the economy caused by the pandemic.

The overall number collecting state benefits — known as continuing claims — fell by roughly 3.8 million to 21.1 million in the week that ended May 16, and is expected to decline again in the latest report, partly signaling that laid-off workers are being recalled as businesses reopen.

Some people out of work have gone months without government assistance because states have grappled with technical glitches and a flood of claims. Payments have evaporated for some workers, who have struggled to reach overwhelmed unemployment administrators for an explanation.

Diane Swonk, chief economist at the accounting firm Grant Thornton, said the recent looting and vandalism in many cities further clouded the employment outlook. “The unrest adds insult to injury in an economy already struggling to reopen,” she said. “It could delay workers being called back or cause people to be laid off again.”

Global markets indicate a drop after days-long rally.

European markets fell slightly early on Thursday after a muted trading day in Asia, as a slew of bad news finally caught up with investors who had sent shares higher in recent days.

Market indicators broadly showed investors taking a pause. Prices for U.S. Treasury bonds rose, a sign of market skepticism. Oil prices were down more than 1 percent on futures markets. Stock market futures indicated Wall Street would open mildly lower as well.

Investors were holding their breath ahead of weekly employment data from the United States, which has shown declining but still heavy amount of jobless claims. They were also awaiting word on the next move by the European Central Bank on how it will address pandemic-driven troubles.

Until early Thursday, stocks had been buoyed by recovery hopes. The S&P 500 was within 10 percent of its pre-pandemic highs, while stocks in Europe are back to where they stood in early March. Investors have been inspired by signs of a quick return of normal activity — even if not to levels seen before government-imposed shutdowns and social-distancing orders. Companies, from automakers to restaurants, have reported that sales beginning to pick up.

Still, the bad news has been relentless, from unrest in the United States to continuing tensions between Washington and Beijing. Market watchers had been expecting investors to take a break.

The European Central Bank is meeting to decide its next stimulus moves.

The European Central Bank is expected to administer another dose of economic stimulus to the eurozone economy when it meets later on Thursday.

The central bank will probably step up its purchases of government and corporate bonds, analysts say, a way of driving down market interest rates and making credit cheaper. The bank could also buy bonds with lower credit ratings, in effect removing risk from the financial system.

Christine Lagarde, the central bank’s president, raised expectations that the bank will do more when she said last week that the economic effects of the pandemic could fulfill worst case scenarios. Members of the bank’s governing council expressed concern about deflation, a ruinous downward spiral of prices.

The latest data on joblessness in the eurozone, released Wednesday, showed the unemployment rate in April was 7.3 percent, a number that reflects the government-backed furlough programs designed to curb mass unemployment. But many national financial support programs are set to begin scaling back soon, making it likely that joblessness will grow higher over the coming months, economists said.

Germany approves €130 billion in stimulus to restart economy.

Germans will receive 300 euros, or about $336, per child, and pay a reduced value added tax on daily items and less for electricity, under a €130 billion stimulus plan announced by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government.

Ms. Merkel called the package, which was agreed to late Wednesday, a “bold response” to the pandemic downturn.

The plan also includes €5.3 billion for the social security system, €10 billion to help municipalities cover housing and other costs and €1.9 billion for cultural institutions and nonprofits. It includes incentives to purchase electric vehicles, but none for gas- or diesel-fired engines, which Germany’s powerful automakers had sought.

The plan requires new borrowing. Ms. Merkel’s government abandoned its adherence to a balanced budget in March, when it passed a €750 billion rescue package that included taking on more than €150 billion of fresh debt. The latest package will also be financed by new borrowing, reflecting government concerns that millions of employees still need incentives to encourage spending.

“We need to get out of this crisis with an oomph,” the finance minister, Olaf Scholz said.

Senate sends changes to Paycheck Protection Program to the president.

The Senate gave final approval on Wednesday to a measure that would relax the terms of the Paycheck Protection Program, a federal loan program for small businesses struggling during the pandemic.

The bill, approved overwhelmingly by the House last week, would extend to 24 weeks from eight weeks the time that small businesses would have to spend the loan money. The eight-week period to spend the loan money was set to lapse within days for some businesses, leaving the Senate limited time to consider alternatives. The measure now heads to President Trump’s desk.

The bill also would give companies greater flexibility to use the loan money on other business expenses, like utilities and rent, by lowering the amount required to be spent on payroll to 60 percent, from 75 percent.

Republicans said that they generally favored revamping the program, which was created by the $2.2 trillion stimulus bill enacted in March. But an attempt to pass the bill by unanimous consent was delayed by Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, who wanted a letter clarifying that the extension applied to the time frame to spend the loan money, not to the application period. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, submitted the letter just after 7 p.m.

The Paycheck Protection Program aims to help small businesses continue paying their workers by giving them access to government-backed loans that will be forgiven entirely if most of the money is spent on payroll costs.

Catch up: Here’s what else is happening.

• Senior executives at Quibi will take a 10 percent pay cut, with the company’s leaders calling it “the right thing to do.” Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman raised $1.75 billion to start the short-form video service, but it has gotten off to a rocky start, which Mr. Katzenberg has blamed on the coronavirus.

• The Federal Reserve announced on Wednesday that it will expand its municipal bond-buying program, allowing two cities or counties in each state to sell their debt to the central bank, regardless of their population. The change will affect sparsely populated states like Wyoming, and will also extend to bond issuers like New York’s subway system.

• Sales of e-bikes jumped 85 percent in March from a year earlier, according to the NPD Group, a research firm. Amazon, Walmart and Specialized are sold out of most models. If you are contemplating an e-bike purchase, there are trade-offs to consider, writes Brian Chen.

• Canada Goose, the seller of $1,000 down-filled jackets, reported on Wednesday a fourth quarter sales decline of 10 percent, after cutting about 20 percent of its corporate work force last month amid the pandemic. While the company said publicly that it cut just 2.5 percent of its global work force when it laid off 125 people last month, it said in internal communications obtained by The New York Times that the figure represented roughly 20 percent of corporate employees.

Reporting was contributed by Melissa Eddy, Jack Ewing, Tiffany Hsu, Nelson D. Schwartz, Matt Phillips, Jeanna Smialek, Patricia Cohen, Mohammed Hadi and William Davis.

As we now know, the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown has been a silver lining for another global crisis: climate change. Sharp decreases in traffic and better air quality have been reported around the world, and hundreds of jurisdictions from Berlin to Bogotá are reallocating space to make it easier for walkers and cyclists with permanent and emergency solutions, like “pop-up” bike routes.

“We are at a moment of change that we have not seen since World War II when cities needed to reinvent themselves,” said Claudia Adriazola-Steil, global director for the health and road safety program at the World Resources Institute’s Ross Center for Sustainable Cities. “The longtime goals of reducing the number of cars on the roads and unacceptable levels of air pollution was achieved in a few weeks. You can see the Himalayan blue skies for the first time in 25 years.”

But speed is a serious “invisible threat, a hidden enabler” undermining those efforts, Ms. Adriazola-Steil said. “If you have more people able to walk and bike, it will be a huge gain in terms of climate change, but if we want cities to be more sustainable, you have to reduce the speed of cars.”

Driving at lower speed means less fuel use, which lowers carbon emissions. It also means less crash risk. Global efforts, from lowering speed and regulating the export of “dirty” and unsafe cars to adopting smart street design, aim to reduce death on the world’s roads and improve the environment.

“Humans have a developed sense of altitude, but not speed,” Ms. Adriazola-Steil said. “It’s a perception that’s difficult to change.” For example, most people fear jumping out a second-floor window, but the injury risk is about the same as getting hit by a car at 25 m.p.h.

Globally, speed is one of the biggest causes of traffic crash deaths and serious injury, contributing to about one third of fatalities in high-income countries and up to one half in low- and middle-income countries. In the United States, speed limits have been rising since the mid-1990s.

“People just do not understand that there are huge benefits from reducing speed,” said Véronique Feypell, manager of the Road Safety Program at the International Transport Forum, a Paris-based intergovernmental organization with 60 member countries within the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Nearly all countries have reported a sharp decrease in traffic, around 70 percent. But average speeds — including very excessive speeding — have increased during the shelter-in-place period, including in the United States. “The individual benefit of going just a little slower may appear to have a small impact, but the collective benefit has a huge impact on the reduction in the number of crashes, serious injuries and deaths,” she said, adding that a 10 percent increase in speed would, on average, lead to an increase of about 40 percent in fatal crashes.

Speed reduction as an important international issue for both safety and CO2 emissions was recognized at the Global Ministerial Conference on Road Safety in February in Stockholm by the Stockholm Declaration, which called for a maximum road travel speed of 30 kilometers per hour (18 to 19 m.p.h.) in most urban areas around the world, to “have a beneficial impact on air quality and climate change as well as being vital to reduce road traffic deaths and injuries.”

“This is the most hopeful of all moments,” said Claes Tingvall, a professor at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden and former director of traffic safety at the Swedish Transport Administration, who with colleagues wrote the recommendations that formed the basis of the Stockholm Declaration. “It puts it all together into a more holistic way of thinking.”

The Vision Zero or Safe System approach to roadway design, based largely on the understanding that humans are human and make mistakes, has been widely acknowledged and implemented in recent years for its success toward eliminating road deaths and serious injuries, but the new declaration goes several steps further, said Dr. Tingvall, known as the father and chief architect of Vision Zero.

The declaration’s recommendations, supported by the vast majority of the nearly 120 governments in attendance, also acknowledge that businesses, especially multinational corporations, “are agreeing to take responsibility for their ‘safety footprint’: how their supply chain links to traffic safety, the environment and its impact on the community, ”Dr. Tingvall said. “It’s a commitment that really hasn’t been there before.”

He and other experts say among other changes underway that show promise for improving safety and air quality, are geofencing, a kind of virtual fence that controls speed in a zone, and Intelligent Speed Assistance, which inhibits speed automatically in accordance with local limits.

Skye Duncan is director of the Global Designing Cities Initiative, a program of the National Association of City Transportation Officials. The program has worked in dozens of cities in four continents. “Current practice dedicates an outsize amount of road space to private vehicles, while other modes of transportation are often an afterthought,” she said. “Streets that are designed to make it convenient and comfortable to walk, cycle, and take transport not only make our cities safer, they make them healthier, and less polluting, too.”

“Transportation is one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the world and is the fastest-growing,” Ms. Duncan said. “By redesigning streets, cities can quickly tackle the urgent crises of climate change and road safety at the same time. The best global solutions have immediate local impacts.”

Janette Sadik-Khan, a former commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation and now transportation principal at Bloomberg Associates, which advises mayors around the world, noted that cities were undergoing “a street design” revolution. “There is a straight line between what happens on city roads and global climate change.”

“There are 1.3 million traffic deaths annually and another 4.2 million deaths attributed to pollution,” said Ms. Sadik-Khan, who is also chair of the Global Designing Cities Initiative. “Streets that are safe for people also support the health of the planet.”

“If your goal is to save the planet, you can start by building a bike lane,” Ms. Sadik-Khan said.

Bloomberg Associates and the Global Designing Cities Initiative work, separately and in collaboration, with cities to encourage smart street design using a mix of strategies: reducing speed limits, increasing traffic enforcement and education, constructing pedestrian plazas and traffic calming measures, investing in infrastructure and public transit (including cleaner public transit vehicles), and building and expanding protected bike lanes and bike share programs.

In Fortaleza, Brazil, fatalities dropped by 50 percent from 2010 to 2019, one of the few cities in the world to experience such a steep decline during that period, said Ms. Duncan, whose organization produced the Global Street Design Guide and often works with local artists and schoolchildren to brightly paint roadways and pedestrian areas with markings and signage. “We find the use of color helps people see their streets in an entirely different light, while building a new sense of ownership of the space,” she said. “Every time we paint a street and give people a safe place to walk, it saves lives and fights the climate crisis.”

After work in Mexico City from 2014 to 2016 on 106 intersections on 10 main corridors, some of the city’s most dangerous, pedestrian deaths dropped 24 percent and cyclist deaths dropped 77 percent. In Bogotá, Colombia, traffic deaths fell 17 percent from 2014 to 2019, reaching its lowest point in 20 years.

“If we make the roads safer, people will be able to walk and cycle, without risk,” said Etienne Krug, director of the World Health Organization’s Department of Social Determinants of Health. “If we make public transport more accessible and safe, people will use it more. Governments have to make sure we have safe sidewalks and crosswalks and bicycle lanes, and driving more slowly is something we can do as individuals.”

HULL, England — At first glance, the workers appeared to be practicing for a circus act. In a cavernous space, they took turns gingerly climbing a ladder to a narrow platform about 30 feet above the concrete floor. Then they stepped off — suspended by harnesses, and were slowly lowered back down.

“This is part of the interview process,” said Dan Lead, the administrator of the training center.

The climbers were potential recruits for jobs in the offshore wind business, which employs about 13,000 people in Britain. Part of the goal at the center, which is run by Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy, is to quickly winnow out those who are anxious about heights. Those who make the grade are likely to find themselves working hundreds of feet above the North Sea, atop swaying wind turbines.

Fly above coastal Britain, and chances are you will see these turbines — rows of white pinwheels turning slowly just offshore. Britain tops the world in electricity generated by offshore wind farms, and their output accounts for about 11 percent of the country’s electricity.

The turbines helped Britain pass a milestone: In 2019, more electricity was generated from sources like wind and solar and nuclear power that produce no carbon-dioxide emissions than from carbon-emitting fuels like natural gas and coal.

In fact, over the last three decades, according to figures collected by the World Resources Institute, a Washington-based nonprofit group that tracks climate change, Britain has reduced carbon dioxide generated in the country by about 40 percent, more than any other major industrialized country. (Emissions in the United States rose by about 3 percent over that period; in China, which saw huge economic expansion, emissions grew nearly 400 percent.)

All of that happened before the coronavirus slammed Britain and the rest of the world. In the short run, the economic contraction caused by the virus and efforts to contain it will push emissions down sharply, analysts say. In April, for instance, demand in Britain for electric power, still a large emitter, had dipped 15 percent, according to Ember, a nonprofit that advocates the phaseout of coal. For much of this time, the use of coal, a major source of emissions, has dropped to zero, crowded out by clean energy like wind and solar. Road traffic, another major source of emissions, has also fallen sharply.

Analysts say one crucial question is whether a public battered by the fallout from the pandemic will retain its enthusiasm for tackling climate change. In the longer run, the British government may put further funds into renewable technologies as part of an effort to spark an economic recovery once the pandemic fades. Rishi Sunak, the chancellor of the Exchequer, said at a news conference on May 29 that offshore wind was one of the areas he might favor for such a program.

The boom in turbines can largely be traced to the Climate Change Act of 2008, a piece of legislation adopted in Parliament with broad political support. It set in motion a series of regulatory guideposts that the country would be legally required to follow over the coming decades to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change.

To say the legislation helped change the British economic landscape would be an understatement, and more than a decade later there are clearly defined winners and losers. The wind turbine industry is in the first category; the industry has been rapidly hiring and building new machines, and the British government expects offshore wind capacity to triple over the next 10 years.

Among the losers, the steel-making industry has been crippled, and Britain’s coal miners are all but out of business.

“Many countries could learn a lot from the U.K.,” said Kelly Levin, a senior associate at the World Resources Institute. Britain has managed to make significant cuts in its greenhouse gas output while still maintaining a relatively strong economy, she said.

Few climate-change activists, however, are ready to hand Britain a gold medal. In a world torn by fires, flooding and rising temperatures, a growing chorus says the improvements are not coming fast enough. An aging economy, where finance and the service industry long ago replaced manufacturing and mining as fundamental drivers, has helped the statistics. Indeed, Britain’s share of the world economic growth has fallen over this period.

Doug Parr, chief scientist of Greenpeace UK, gave the government credit for closing down coal and kick-starting offshore wind, but said it was doing too little to promote public transportation and make houses and buildings more efficient. Britain, he said, “has done more than other countries but nowhere near enough.”

The Climate Change Act initially required emissions to be slashed by 80 percent by 2050, using 1990 as a baseline. Last summer, the goal was raised: zero net emissions by midcentury. The climate law also created a watchdog panel called the Committee on Climate Change, a group of experts that advises the government on targets and barks when it thinks politicians are not doing enough to meet them.

The law has also inspired a spending spree — estimated at 50 billion pounds, or about $61 billion, according to Jonathan Marshall, head of analysis at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, a research organization — that has helped bring down the costs of clean-energy technologies like offshore wind so they can now largely stand on their own. The funding, in the form of guaranteed prices for the power generated, has encouraged developers like Orsted, the Danish renewable-energy company, to make investments that can run into billions of dollars for offshore wind farms.

The biggest steps to reduce emissions have come from the electric power industry, which now accounts for around 16 percent of total carbon dioxide emissions. In 1990, 75 percent of Britain’s electricity was generated by burning the dirtiest fuels: coal, oil and diesel. Change came quickly. Within the next decade, technological advances and regulatory shifts encouraged utilities to build a fleet of cleaner, natural gas-fired plants.

On the other side of the ledger, Britain’s steel-making capacity has declined by more than half over the last two decades, with jobs in the industry falling by more than 40 percent.

Steel mills use a great deal of energy, and while there are many reasons for their decline, manufacturers say they are hurt by having to buy electricity at substantially higher rates than their competitors in Europe, partly because of taxes designed curb emissions.

The government has also made war on coal through taxes on carbon and other measures. By last year, only about 2 percent of Britain’s power came from coal, which seems headed for extinction. The government plans to phase coal out completely by late 2024.

The benefits of these changes are seen in Hull, a venerable North Sea port in northeast England that had taken a battering from the decline of fishing and other industries. City officials said the Siemens wind facilities had served as a foundation for an emerging cluster of environment- and climate-related businesses.

“The growth of the green economy has been able to replace a lot of that,” said Martin Budd, environment and climate change strategic adviser to the City Council. Unemployment in the city of 260,000 had fallen by about half over the last six years to about 6 percentas of last fall.

Looking ahead, cutting emissions from power plants is likely to prove the easy part of the progression toward a cleaner economy, because changing the source of electricity usually does not force residents to change their lifestyles.

The next stage “will be much deeper and more complicated than the first stage,” said Nick Mabey, a former government adviser and chief executive of E3G, an environmental group.

The Committee on Climate Change has published a list of steps it wants the government to take that may be more disruptive. The group scored a win on Feb. 4 when the government of Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that it would advance the planned ban on sales of new gasoline- and diesel-powered cars to 2035, from 2040.

The committee also aims to largely wean Britain off natural gas, which heats most of its homes, replacing it with electric-powered heating or, perhaps, hydrogen.

Having requirements to cut emissions on the books helps focus minds, policymakers say. “That legal framework enabled me to develop other policies that then delivered on the climate change targets,” said Edward Davey, who backed offshore wind and other renewable energy as Britain’s secretary of state for energy and climate change.

Mr. Davey, who is now the acting leader of the Liberal Democrat party, helped bring in investors like Siemens Gamesa, the world’s largest offshore turbine maker. Siemens has already invested £310 million with a partner, Associated British Ports, in the training center, a factory for making blades and docks for the boats that take the components out to the wind farms.

Britain has been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic, but these facilities have largely remained open with numerous changes including thermal imaging checks at entrances and markings on the floor to establish what are deemed safer distances between workers.

Clark MacFarlane, the Siemens Gamesa managing director for Britain, said that when the company was hiring 800 people for the new blade factory it received more than 20,000 applications. Their skills were high, he said, but their “enthusiasm was even higher.”

One of those who joined in the last few years was Nick Aram, a former aircraft technician, who now clambers down from helicopters to fix turbines that have stopped.

He likes to think that the repairs he makes cut the need for coal.

“The more we have these things running, the less coal they are burning,” he said.