Climate Crisis

Tuvalu’s Minister of Climate Change Maina Talia has told Al Jazeera that his country is fighting to stay above rising sea levels and needs “real commitments” from other countries that will allow Tuvaluans to “stay in Tuvalu” as the climate crisis worsens.

The low-lying nation of nine atolls and islands, which is situated between Australia and Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean, is fighting to maintain its sovereignty by exploring new avenues in international diplomacy.

But, right now, the country needs help just to stay above water.

“Coming from a country that is barely not one metre above the sea, reclaiming land and building sea walls and building our resilience is the number one priority for us,” Talia told Al Jazeera in an interview during the recent United Nations General Assembly in New York.

“We cannot delay any more. Climate finance is important for our survival,” Talia said.

“It’s not about building [over the] next two or three years to come, but right now, and we need it now, in order for us to respond to the climate crisis,” he said.

Talia, who is also Tuvalu’s minister of home affairs and the environment, said the issue of financing will be a key issue at the upcoming UN COP30 climate meeting in Belem, in the Brazilian Amazon, in November.

‘You pollute, you pay’

Tuvalu is one of many countries already pushing for a better deal on climate financing at this year’s COP, after many advocates left last year’s meeting in Azerbaijan disappointed by the unambitious $300bn target set by richer countries.

Describing the COP climate meeting as having become more like a “festival for the oil-producing countries”, Talia said Tuvalu is also exploring a range of alternative initiatives, from a push to create the world’s first fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty to seeking to add its entire cultural heritage to the UNESCO World Heritage List.

Representatives of oil-producing countries are now attending the COP climate meetings in “big numbers”, Talia said, in order to try and “really bury our voice as small developing countries”.

“They take control of the narrative. They take control of the process. They try to water down all the texts. They try to put a stop to climate finance,” Talia said.

“It’s about time that we should call out to the world that finance is important for us to survive,” he said.

“The polluter pay principle is still there. You pollute, you pay,” he added.

Talia also said that it was frustrating to see his own country struggling to survive, while other countries continue to spend billions of dollars on weapons for current and future wars.

“Whilst your country is facing this existential threat, it’s quite disappointing to see that the world is investing billions and trillions of dollars in wars, in conflicts,” he said.

A report released this week by the Global Center on Adaptation (GCA) found that 39 small island countries, which are home to some 65 million people, already need about $12bn a year to help them cope with the effects of climate change.

That figure is many times more than the roughly $2bn a year they are collectively receiving now, and which represents just 0.2 percent of the amount spent on global climate finance worldwide.

GCA, a Rotterdam-based nonprofit organisation, also found that island states are already experiencing an average $1.7bn in annual economic losses due to climate change.

Tuvalu is not only focused on its own survival – the island state is considered to be facing one of the most severe existential threats from rising sea levels – it is also continuing to find ways to fight climate change globally.

“That’s why Tuvalu is leading the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty,” Talia said.

About 16 countries have now signed on to the treaty, with Colombia offering to host the first international conference for the phase-out of fossil fuels next year.

“We see its relevance for us,” Talia said of the treaty.

“We want to grow in number in order for us to come up with a treaty, apart from the Paris Agreement,” he said.

‘We need to hold the industrialised countries accountable’

Even as Tuvalu, a country with a population of less than 10,000 people, is fighting for immediate action on climate change, it is also making preparations for its own uncertain future, including creating a digital repository of its culture so that nothing is lost to the sea.

Talia, who is also Tuvalu’s minister for culture, said that he made the formal preliminary submission to UNESCO two weeks before the UNGA meeting for “the whole of Tuvalu to be listed” on the World Heritage List.

“If we are to disappear, which is something that we don’t want to anticipate, but if worst comes to worst, at least you know our values, our culture, heritage, are well secured,” he told Al Jazeera.

Likewise, Talia said his country doesn’t see its 2023 cooperation pact with Australia, which also includes the world’s first climate change migration visa, as an indication that the island’s future is sealed.

“I don’t look at the Falepili Agreement as a way of escaping the issue of climate change, but rather a pathway,” he said.

“A pathway that we will allow our people in Tuvalu to get good education, trained, and then return home,” he said, referring to the agreement giving some Tuvaluans access to education, healthcare and unlimited travel to Australia.

The agreement text includes an acknowledgement from both parties that “the statehood and sovereignty of Tuvalu will continue, and the rights and duties inherent thereto will be maintained, notwithstanding the impact of climate change-related sea level rise”.

Talia also said that a recent ruling from the UN’s top court, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, declared that states have a responsibility to address climate change by cooperating to cut emissions, following through on climate agreements, and protecting vulnerable populations and ecosystems from harm.

The ICJ ruling “really changed the whole context of climate change debates”, Talia said.

“The highest court has spoken, the highest court has delivered the judgement,” he said of the case, which was brought before the ICJ by Tuvalu’s neighbour Vanuatu.

“So it’s just a matter of, how are we going to live that, or weave that, into our climate policies,” he said.

“We need to hold the industrialised countries accountable to their actions,” he added.

Five-plus years ago, during the early days of COVID-19, we sent the first edition of Boiling Point. I wrote then that there would “always be people who say it’s the wrong time to talk about carbon emissions, or water pollution, or the extinction crisis.” But even amid a deadly pandemic and stay-at-home orders, I argued, it was more important than ever to keep the climate crisis front and center.

The same is true now — yes, even amid the Trump administration’s escalating attacks on democracy and dissent and immigrants. Which is why, even though I’m leaving the L.A. Times, Boiling Point will continue.

Yes, you read that correctly. I’ve made the difficult decision to leave the L.A. Times. Tuesday was my last day.

But I’m not done telling stories about climate. And neither are my wonderful friends and colleagues.

I’m not quite ready to share my own plans yet. If you want to keep following my work, please send me an email at [email protected], and I promise to keep you updated. I’m excited for what comes next.

It’s a bittersweet moment, though. Working at The Times has been one of the great privileges of my life; thank you for inviting me into your inboxes, and making time to read my stories when you could have been scrolling or streaming. I’m grateful for our dialogue, our debates, our disagreements. I hope we’ll have many more.

Just as importantly, I hope you’ll continue to follow and support the L.A. Times, especially our environment team.

With no disrespect to any other news outlet, we have the best climate reporters in the business: Tyrone Beason. Tony Briscoe. Noah Haggerty. Ian James. Sandra McDonald. Melody Petersen. Corinne Purtill. Susanne Rust. Lila Seidman. Hayley Smith. Rosanna Xia. If you’re not reading them, you’re doing it wrong.

Starting next week, several of my colleagues will take turns writing Boiling Point. It’ll look a little different than it does now, with a combination of analysis and news roundup. Each edition will have a unique focus, based on the reporter’s expertise: Ian James will cover water, for instance, while Lila Seidman will tackle wildlife and Tony Briscoe will handle air quality. You’ll get a wide range of thoughtful perspectives.

The newsletter will still arrive in your inbox every Thursday. It’ll still be worth opening.

Just like climate, journalism is more important now than ever. Local journalism especially.

Thank you for everything. Onward.

ONE MORE THING

On the southern end of Del Mar, train tracks run precariously close to the edge of rapidly crumbling cliffs.

(John Gibbins / San Diego Union-Tribune)

For nostalgia’s sake, here are some of my favorite environmental stories and series the L.A. Times has produced during my seven years here — including, no shame, one of my own:

A reporter kept a diary of her plastic use. It was soul-crushing

Colorado River in Crisis: A Times series on the Southwest’s shrinking water lifeline

Fishing the L.A. River is more than a quarantine hobby. For some, it’s therapy

Is it ethical to have children in the face of climate change?

Repowering the West: Energy-hungry cities are reshaping the landscape, again

The California coast is disappearing under the rising sea. Our choices are grim

The L.A. Times investigation into extreme heat’s deadly toll

Uncovering the toxic soil lurking in L.A.’s burn zones

This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our Boiling Point podcast here.

For more climate and environment news, follow @Sammy_Roth on X and @sammyroth.bsky.social on Bluesky.

At least three people have died and several are missing after torrential rain from Typhoon Matmo caused widespread flooding across northern Vietnam.

Rescued trekkers reach China’s Qudang township while 200 others still face treacherous Everest conditions awaiting help.

Rescuers have guided more than 350 people to safety after they were stranded by blizzard-like conditions on the Tibetan side of Mount Everest, Chinese state media reported on Sunday.

In total, more than 500 people were caught by surprise when unusually heavy snow and rainfall lashed them on the way in the Tingri region of Tibet, one of the main routes to ascend the world’s tallest mountain.

Those rescued on Sunday were taken to the small township of Qudang, on the Tibetan side of the peak, CCTV reported.

Some 200 trekkers who remained stranded in treacherous conditions as of Sunday were due to arrive in Qudang in stages under the guidance and assistance of rescuers organised by the local government, CCTV reported.

The CCTV report did not indicate whether local guides and support staff accompanying the trekking parties had been accounted for. It was also unclear if trekkers near the north face of Everest, also in Tibet, had been affected or not.

Heavy snowfall in the valley, which lies at an elevation averaging 4,200 metres (13,800 feet), began on Friday evening and persisted throughout Saturday.

Ticket sales and entry to the entire Everest Scenic Area were suspended from late Saturday, according to notices on the official WeChat accounts of the local Tingri County Tourism Company.

“It was so wet and cold in the mountains, and hypothermia was a real risk,” said Chen Geshuang, who was part of an 18-strong trekking team that made it to Qudang.

“The weather this year is not normal. The guide said he had never encountered such weather in October. And it happened all too suddenly,” Chen told the Reuters news agency.

In neighbouring Nepal, Sherpa communities have been adapting to increasingly unpredictable conditions as climate change contributes to more frequent and dramatic climate shifts in the Himalayas, posing risks to climbers and the Sherpa communities who work there.

In a situation update shared on Sunday, Nepal’s Tourism Board said that search and rescue operations were ongoing after the weather “improved significantly” across Nepal, with “clear skies in Kathmandu and many other parts of Nepal”.

The update came after heavy rains triggered landslides and flash floods across Nepal, killing at least 47 people since Friday.

Thirty-five people died in separate landslides in the eastern Ilam district bordering India. Nine people were reported missing after being swept away by floodwaters, and three others were killed in lightning strikes elsewhere in the country.

The floods and landslides in the mountainous regions come as South Asian countries continue to battle ongoing floods, including in Pakistan, where some four million people have been affected.

If I didn’t know better, I might have thought Intermountain Power Plant was already dead.

When I visited last month, most of the desks had been torn from the administrative building, leaving behind scattered piles of boxes and office supplies. A whiteboard featured photos of dozens of newly retired employees. Perhaps most tellingly, the coal pile in the yard out back was tiny compared with my previous visit in 2022.

“Our target is to have no coal left on the floor,” said Kevin Peng, manager of external generation for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

Peng was my tour guide at this hulking coal-fired power plant in central Utah, over 500 miles from the city it has powered for the last 40 years. And no, it wasn’t dead yet. One of two massive steam turbines, a General Electric unit installed in 1986, was still sending small amounts of electricity to L.A. and several other Southern California cities following a required air quality test. Soon Unit 1 would shut off, probably for the final time.

Unit 2 would carry Intermountain through its final act. At the moment it was slowly preparing to generate power, releasing puffy white steam through a small vertical pipe near the main smokestack. I stood on the roof for a few minutes near the pipe, letting water droplets fall gently on my face and reporter’s notebook.

“We create our own rain,” Peng with a smile.

Come November, the rain will cease. Same goes for the planet-warming carbon emissions. Los Angeles is closing Intermountain, a watershed moment that will mark the end of coal power in California.

The 710-foot smokestack towers over the rest of Intermountain Power Plant.

(Niki Chan Wylie / For The Times)

To hear President Trump tell it, coal is needed for economic prosperity. Just this week, his administration said it would open 13 million acres of public land to coal mining and offer $625 million in handouts to coal plant owners.

Trump & Co. — including Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a former fossil fuel executive, who insisted the handouts “will be vital to keeping electricity prices low and the lights on without interruption” — are battling the free market. Coal plants generated 16.2% of U.S. electricity in 2023, down from 48.5% in 2007. The main culprit? Competition from cheaper solar, wind and natural gas.

In California, just 2.2% of electricity came from coal in 2024 — nearly all of it from Intermountain. Over 60% was generated by solar panels, wind turbines and other climate-friendly sources that don’t fuel deadly wildfires, heat waves and floods. Thanks to a surge in lithium-ion batteries, there have been no power shortages since 2020.

The L.A. Department of Water and Power, meanwhile, has been making big investments in low-cost renewables, including a record-cheap solar-plus-storage plant that opened this summer. DWP has fired up Intermountain less and less, relying on the plant for 21% of the city’s power in 2019 and just 10% in 2023.

Jason Rondou, the utility’s assistant general manager for power planning and operations, said the coal plant has supplied affordable, reliable electricity for decades. But now there are better options.

“It’s come at a pretty significant external cost — the cost of the carbon emissions,” he said. “For us to move beyond that and move to a cleaner, innovative technology, I think is very exciting.”

Indeed, Los Angeles isn’t just closing Intermountain. It’s built a first-of-its-kind power plant across the street.

The new turbines are designed to burn a mix of 70% natural gas and 30% hydrogen. Although gas is a fossil fuel that exacerbates global warming, hydrogen isn’t. That mix alone is unique for a plant of this scale. But over time, as technology improves, DWP plans to transition to 100% hydrogen — an unprecedented undertaking.

The newly built gas/hydrogen power plant known as IPP Renewed, seen from the roof of the Intermountain coal plant.

(Niki Chan Wylie / For The Times)

Even better, the hydrogen will be “green,” meaning it’s made from renewable electricity rather than fossil fuels.

At times of day when DWP has extra renewable power — such as mild spring afternoons, when the sun is shining and Angelenos aren’t blasting their air conditioners — the utility can use that energy to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen atoms. DWP and its partners have hired a private company to store the hydrogen in giant underground salt caverns just down the road from Intermountain.

Then, when DWP needs extra power — during a heat wave months later, for instance — it can pull hydrogen from the caverns and fire up the turbines. Basically, the hydrogen will function like a long-term battery.

“It’s very different from lithium-ion [batteries],” Rondou said. “For that seasonal storage, that’s where hydrogen can really provide significant benefit.”

Among environmentalists, hydrogen is controversial. Some share DWP’s view that it’s a necessary piece of the clean energy puzzle. Others consider it a distraction from cheaper, more proven technologies, and a threat to air quality, especially in low-income communities of color. They’ve slammed DWP’s goal of eventually converting four L.A.-area gas plants to hydrogen, citing nitrogen oxide pollution and potential methane leaks.

In Utah’s Millard County, conservative local officials have embraced the newfangled technology, along with solar and wind. Unlike Trump, who has slashed hydrogen funding, they have little aversion to clean energy.

“Energy development is really important in our portfolio. And we will talk to everybody. We’re open for business,” said County Commissioner Bill Wright.

Sitting in his living room, as dogs and grandkids wandered past, Wright reflected on his rural county’s long relationship with Los Angeles. The massive tax revenues, the hundreds of jobs. The lack of local control. The fact that nearly all the power goes to California.

Wright would have liked to see DWP keep the coal plant running. But the closure has been in the works for years, so he and his neighbors have had time to adjust. He’s glad L.A. isn’t leaving town entirely — even though the new plant will be smaller, with fewer jobs and a smaller tax base.

“Absolutely, this is a better solution,” he said.

Millard County Commissioner Bill Wright poses for a portrait near Intermountain Power Plant outside Delta, Utah, on Sept. 16.

(Niki Chan Wylie / For The Times)

Wright is hopeful that the Utah Legislature will find a buyer for the coal plant, possibly a data center. One of his colleagues on the county commission, Vicki Lyman, is less optimistic. She’s worked at Intermountain for a dozen years and sees major technical and economic hurdles to restarting a mothballed power plant.

“I’m kind of excited just to see how all this technology’s going to work out,” Lyman said.

It’s still not entirely clear when DWP will start combusting hydrogen. The new plant will burn 100% gas when the coal turbines power off in November, utility officials say, because there won’t be enough hydrogen banked in the salt caverns yet. DWP is targeting the second quarter of 2026 to mix in 30% hydrogen.

For employees, DWP has tried to make the transition as painless as possible. It’s limited layoffs by not replacing retiring staffers, and by offering tuition reimbursement to anyone who chooses to go back to school.

Still, change can be bittersweet. While touring Intermountain, I bumped into plant manager Jon Finlinson, who’s worked there since 1983 and would have retired already if the gas/hydrogen units weren’t running a few months behind schedule. He professed excitement for the new facility. But when I asked him how he’d commemorate the final day of coal combustion, he offered the verbal equivalent of a shrug.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “We don’t have a plan for that yet.”

Really? After 40 years, nothing?

“It’ll be a sad day for all the people that have worked here for their whole life,” he acknowledged.

Intermountain staff member Carl Watson offers a peek into the coal furnace.

(Niki Chan Wylie / For The Times)

Technically, even after Intermountain stops sending coal power to L.A. — as well as Anaheim, Burbank, Glendale, Pasadena and Riverside — there will still be tiny amounts of coal in California’s energy mix. A Riverside County electric cooperative imports coal from out of state, as does Berkshire Hathaway-owned Pacific Power in Northern California. In San Bernardino County, two small coal plants fuel a mining operation.

Together, those coal generators supplied less than 0.2% of the state’s electricity in 2024. (If you want to get really technical, an additional 1.5% came from “unspecified” out-of-state sources, most likely gas and coal.)

But why quibble when there’s cause for celebration? Change is never easy; no solution is perfect; there will always be caveats.

Next month, California is quitting coal. Raise a glass.

The coal pile at Intermountain Power Plant, seen on Sept. 17.

(Niki Chan Wylie / For The Times)

This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our Boiling Point podcast here.

For more climate and environment news, follow @Sammy_Roth on X and @sammyroth.bsky.social on Bluesky.

Correction: Last week’s edition of this newsletter referred to Revolution Wind as a floating offshore wind farm. The project’s turbines are attached directly to the sea floor.

A typhoon that ripped roofs from homes has killed dozens of people across Vietnam and the Philippines, officials from both countries said, as a weakened Storm Bualoi crossed into neighbouring Laos.

The typhoon battered small islands in central Philippines last week, toppling trees and power pylons, unleashing floods, and forcing 400,000 people to evacuate. A Philippine civil defence official on Monday said the death toll there had more than doubled to 27, with most victims either drowning or being struck by debris.

Scientists warn that storms are becoming increasingly powerful as the planet warms due to human-induced climate change.

In Vietnam, Bualoi made landfall as a typhoon late on Sunday, generating winds of up to 130 kilometres per hour (80 miles per hour). At least 13 people were killed, while a search is ongoing for 20 others, disaster authorities stated in an online update.

More than 44,200 houses were damaged, including many with roofs torn off, predominantly in the central province of Ha Tinh. At least 800 homes were flooded and nearly 6,000 hectares (15,000 acres) of crops were inundated, according to the update.

At least nine people died when a typhoon-related whirlwind swept through the northern Vietnamese province of Ninh Binh early on Monday, according to the local disaster agency. One person was killed in the province of Hue and another in Thanh Hoa, with about 20 people reported missing by local and national disaster authorities.

More than 53,000 people were evacuated to schools and medical centres converted into temporary shelters before Bualoi made landfall in Vietnam, the Ministry of Agriculture and Environment said.

Four domestic airports, as well as parts of the national highway, were closed on Monday. More than 180 flights were cancelled or delayed, according to airport authorities. Parts of Nghe An and the steel-producing central province of Ha Tinh were without power, and schools were closed in affected regions.

Since making landfall in Vietnam, Bualoi has weakened as it moved across the border into Laos. It came in the wake of Super Typhoon Ragasa, which killed 14 people across northern Philippines. The country is struck by an average of 20 storms and typhoons each year, routinely affecting disaster-prone areas where millions of people live.

In Vietnam, 175 people were killed or went missing due to natural disasters from January to August this year, according to the General Statistics Office. Total damages were estimated at $371m, almost triple the amount during the same period in 2024, it said.

Typhoon Yagi killed hundreds of people in Vietnam in September last year and caused economic losses worth $3.3bn.

For nearly a decade, President Trump has promised “energy dominance” — a vague but alluring slogan hinting at a world in which the U.S. is king. A world in which other nations depend on us for their power, ensuring economic prosperity in the form of domestic jobs, cheap gasoline and low electric bills.

The problem is, it’s a breathtaking lie.

As recent events have made abundantly clear, Trump and his allies don’t care about energy dominance. They care about killing renewable energy and helping fossil fuel companies profit. Even if it means higher power costs. Even if it means destroying American jobs. Even if it means ceding the future to China.

All of which is happening. “Energy dominance” is a terrifyingly effective propaganda campaign that demands a robust response from the renewable energy industry, which, like the Democratic Party, has largely failed to meet the moment. Solar and wind companies have instead let Trump’s messaging rule the day, pushing back weakly at best as they scramble for slices of an “energy dominance” pie that will never be theirs.

It’s time for them to start punching back.

Amid a yearlong assault on clean power — including Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which slashed federal incentives for solar farms, wind turbines and electric cars — nothing has better exemplified the MAGA Republican Party’s stance toward renewables than an unprecedented, possibly illegal effort to block several massive clean energy projects, including at least one already under construction.

Last month, the Trump administration ordered the Danish company Orsted to stop building Revolution Wind, a $4-billion floating wind farm in the waters off the Rhode Island coast that was already 80% complete. A judge ruled Monday that work can proceed — a win for New Englanders, who stand to pay half a billion dollars per year in higher utility bills and face a higher risk of blackouts if the project doesn’t come online.

Also last month, Trump’s Interior Secretary Doug Burgum reversed the Biden administration’s approval of an Idaho wind project, Lava Ridge. Earlier, he halted construction of Empire Wind off the New York coast, changing course only after Gov. Kathy Hochul reportedly agreed to approve two gas pipelines. Burgum’s agency asked judges last week to cancel approval of offshore wind farms in Maryland and Massachusetts.

Trump’s hatred for wind turbines dates back to his failed effort in the mid-2010s to derail an offshore wind farm that he said would ruin the views from his Scottish golf resort. But he and his accomplices have attacked the solar industry, too.

A worker helps build the Gemini solar project on federal lands outside Las Vegas in January 2023, during the Biden administration.

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

Trump’s appointees have issued directives making it harder for solar and wind companies to qualify for tax credits before they expire, and stalling approvals for renewable energy projects on public and private lands. The U.S. Department of Agriculture gutted a program that provides financial support for farmers who want to lower their energy bills by installing solar panels.

“The days of stupidity are over in the USA!!!” Trump wrote on social media in August.

If climate-friendly energy is stupid, then America’s biggest energy companies are pretty dumb. Solar panels, wind turbines and batteries made up 94% of the nation’s new power capacity last year — a trend driven by the fact that solar and wind are the cheapest sources of new electricity. Even in Texas, renewables are booming.

So how have Trump and friends justified their attacks on clean energy?

In large part by lying.

In that August social media post, Trump claimed that states reliant on wind and solar power “are seeing RECORD BREAKING INCREASES IN ELECTRICITY AND ENERGY COSTS.”

That’s false. Although Californians do pay high electric rates for complex reasons, states with similarly climate-friendly power supplies — such as wind-rich Iowa, Kansas and South Dakota — enjoy some of the country’s cheapest electricity.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright, meanwhile, said in a recent interview that in the absence of batteries, solar panels and wind turbines are essentially “worthless” when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing — rehashing a tired anti-renewables talking point that deliberately ignores the incredible growth of energy storage, driven by rapidly falling battery costs.

Wright — who previously ran a fossil fuel company — is also engaged in the latest climate-denial fad: acknowledging that global warming is real but insisting the consequences aren’t so bad, and that phasing out oil and gas is actually more harmful than replacing them with clean energy. Never mind the bigger wildfires, the harsher droughts, the deadlier heat waves, the rising seas, the deadly air pollution…

To support his lies, Wright handpicked five infamously contrarian researchers who produced a report questioning decades of well-established climate science. Dozens of leading experts quickly uncovered errors.

“The rise of human flourishing over the past two centuries is a story worth celebrating,” Wright said in a written statement alongside the report. “Yet we are told — relentlessly — that the very energy systems that enabled this progress now pose an existential threat.”

Oil, gas and coal did indeed help build today’s society. And now we know they pose an existential threat to society if we keep using them for too much longer.

This shouldn’t be a hard story for renewable energy companies to tell. One European power generator, at least, is doing it well.

Some of the Hywind Tampen floating offshore wind turbines in the North Sea, operated by Equinor, an international energy company based in Norway.

(Ole Jørgen Bratland / Equinor)

In a recent ad for Swedish energy company Vattenfall, actor Samuel L. Jackson stands on a bluff at the edge of a gorgeous sea. He looks out across the water, where wind turbines spin serenely in the distance.

“Mother— wind farms. Loud, ugly, harmful to nature. Who says that?” Jackson asks, shaking his head. “These giants are standing tall against fossil fuels. Rising out of the ocean like a middle finger to CO2.”

The tagline: “We’re working for fossil freedom.”

You’d be hard-pressed to find such punchy, provocative messaging from the U.S. clean energy industry.

When the Trump administration said last month it was making it harder for solar and wind projects to qualify for federal tax credits, for instance, Abigail Ross Hopper — president of the Solar Energy Industries Assn. — urged the Trump administration to “stop the political games, stop punishing businesses, and get serious about how to actually build the power we need right now to meet demand and stay competitive.”

Similarly, when federal officials halted work on Revolution Wind, American Clean Power Assn. Chief Executive Jason Grumet called it “a broken promise to the communities, workers, consumers, and businesses counting on this project.”

“Taking jobs away from American families while raising their energy bills is not leadership,” Grumet said.

Underlying both missives — and the industry’s entire playbook, so far as I’ve seen — is the assumption that clean energy companies are dealing with a normal, good-faith government. That Trump and company aren’t just trying to own the libs and line the pockets of campaign fundraisers. That they truly care about “energy dominance.”

It’s time for solar and wind executives to stop pleading with MAGA Republicans and start telling Americans the real story. That clean energy is cheaper, healthier and just as reliable as fossil fuels. That China is dominating the renewable energy arms race, and we badly need to catch up. That we don’t need coal, and we won’t always need oil and gas, and “energy dominance” is a lie meant to benefit the few at the expense of the many.

That strategy probably won’t pay off in the short term. But in the long term, nothing else will.

China’s new target for cutting greenhouse-gas emissions has been branded “disappointing” and “underwhelming” by climate experts, who warn the pledge falls far short of the action needed to avert climate catastrophe.

But the goal also raised hopes that China, which until now has only promised to stop emissions from rising, may be underpromising the level of cuts it can deliver amid a massive expansion in the country’s renewable energy capacity.

In a video address to the United Nations on Wednesday, Chinese President Xi Jinping said China would lower its emissions by 7-10 percent from their peak by 2035.

It was the first time that China, the world’s biggest polluter, outlined a goal for cutting emissions outright.

Xi, who called the shift away from carbon “the trend of our time”, also pledged to raise the share of non-fossil fuel sources in energy consumption to more than 30 percent, and increase wind and solar capacity sixfold compared with 2020.

While a significant moment in the global fight against climate change at a time when the United States is abandoning efforts to cut emissions, China’s target fails by some distance to align with the goals of the Paris Agreement, said some analysts.

“It’s unfortunately very disappointing: This target will not drive down emissions – it is below what China is likely to achieve already under its current climate policies,” Bill Hare, CEO of Berlin-based policy institute Climate Analytics, told Al Jazeera.

“China can do a lot better than this, and it hardly reflects its highest possible ambition.”

The Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) has estimated that China would need to cut emissions by about 30 percent to be consistent with the Paris accord.

The agreement, adopted by 195 countries in 2015, calls for the rise in the average global temperature to be limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.

China’s actions on climate are viewed as especially critical following the US’s exit from the Paris accord under President Donald Trump, who used his UN speech this week to call the scientific consensus on climate change the “greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”.

“China’s underwhelming headline target misses a chance to deliver real leadership,” Li Shuo, director of China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute, told Al Jazeera.

“Beijing is choosing to tiptoe forward when science calls for a full sprint. The pledge would, unfortunately, still put the world on a pathway to catastrophic climate impacts.”

Xi’s announcement left key questions about the emissions target unanswered, including how Beijing would define peak emissions.

Many climate experts believe that China’s emissions have already peaked or will do so this year, though some observers caution that the trend has been driven as much by the decline in business activity during the COVID-19 pandemic as the rollout of renewable energy.

China has had a paradoxical influence on global efforts to address climate change.

While responsible for roughly one-third of global emissions, the country is also a leader in green energy.

China produces about 80 percent of the world’s solar panels and 70 percent of its electric cars, according to the International Energy Agency.

The country also manufactures about 60 percent of wind turbines worldwide, according to London-based energy think tank Ember.

At the same time, China has continued to invest heavily in coal.

Last year, construction began on nearly 100 gigawatts (GW) of new or suspended coal power projects, the most in a decade, according to the CREA.

“China’s new pledge clearly falls short of expectations. Despite President Xi’s earlier promise to strictly control new coal power, the country has just approved more projects than at any point in nearly a decade,” Andreas Sieber, the associate director of policy and campaigns at 350.org, told Al Jazeera.

“The targets announced today, which are vague on the base year and conservative on renewables, leave ample room for continued emissions growth from coal-heavy sectors.”

Still, climate experts expressed hope that China’s target could be a signal of more transformative change to come.

While China’s announcement fell short of expectations, Beijing has a tendency to set targets that it can “confidently deliver”, said Yao Zhe, a Beijing-based policy adviser to Greenpeace East Asia.

“What’s hopeful is that the actual decarbonisation of China’s economy is likely to exceed its target on paper,” Yao said in a statement responding to the target, adding that her organisation’s latest analysis showed that emissions from China’s power sector could peak this year.

In a world “increasingly driven by self-interest”, China is in a stronger position than most to spur climate action, the Asia Society’s Li said.

“The country has emerged as a global clean tech superpower, and its dominant role in this sector could enable it to surpass current targets,” he said.

“Over time, this could push China toward a more proactive role on the international stage.”

Last year’s record heat led to prolonged droughts and extreme floods across the globe.

Climate change is making the Earth’s water cycle increasingly erratic, resulting in extreme swings between deluge and drought across the world, the United Nations has warned.

The UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said in a report released on Thursday that the global water cycle was becoming ever more unpredictable, with shrinking glaciers, droughts, unbalanced river basins and severe floods wreaking havoc.

“The world’s water resources are under growing pressure and, at the same time, more extreme water-related hazards are having an increasing impact on lives and livelihoods,” WMO chief Celeste Saulo said in a statement accompanying the release of the annual State of Global Water Resources report.

The international group of scientists assessed freshwater availability and water storage across the world, including lakes, river flow, groundwater, soil moisture, snow cover and ice melt.

Last year was the hottest on record, leading to prolonged droughts in northern parts of South America, the Amazon Basin and Southern Africa.

Parts of Central Africa, Europe and Asia, meanwhile, were dealing with wetter weather than usual, being hit with devastating floods or deadly storms, said the report.

At a global level, WMO said, 2024 was the sixth consecutive year where there had been a “clear imbalance” in the world’s river basins.

“Two-thirds have too much or too little water – reflecting the increasingly erratic hydrological cycle,” it said.

While the world has natural cycles of climate variability from year to year, long-term trends outlined in the report indicate that the water cycle, at a global scale, is accelerating.

Stefan Uhlenbrook, WMO director of hydrology in the water and cryosphere division, said scientists feel it is “increasingly difficult to predict”.

“It’s more erratic, so either too much or too low on average flow per year,” he said.

As global warming drives higher global temperatures, the atmosphere can hold more water, leading either to longer dry periods or more intense rainfall.

Uhlenbrook said: “The climate changing is everything changing, and that has an impact on the water cycle dynamics.”

The WMO also flagged how the water quality in vital lakes was declining due to warmer weather, and glaciers shrank across all regions for the third year in a row.

The meltwater had added about 1.2mm to the global sea level in a single year, contributing to flooding risk for hundreds of millions of people living in coastal zones, the report warned.

The WMO called for more monitoring and data sharing across the board.

“Understanding and quantifying water resources and hydrological extremes … is critical for managing risks,” the report said, flagging the dangers of droughts, floods and glacier loss.

Malawians are voting to elect their next president amid a deepening economic crisis in one of Africa’s poorest and most climate-vulnerable countries.

The small Southeast African nation has been hit with double-digit inflation that has caused food prices to skyrocket for several months now. It came after intense drought events last year. Earlier, in 2023, Cyclone Freddy, which struck the region, hit Malawi the hardest, killing more than 1,000 people and devastating livelihoods.

In Tuesday’s election, voters are also choosing parliamentarians and local councillors across 35 local governments.

Malawi is most known for its tourist hotspots, such as Lake Malawi, Africa’s third-largest freshwater lake, as well as nature and wildlife parks.

The country has a population of 21.6 million. Lilongwe is the capital city, and Blantyre is the commercial nerve centre.

Here’s what to know about the elections:

How does voting happen?

The elections began in the morning on Tuesday and will end by evening.

Some 7.2 million people are registered to vote across 35 local government authorities, according to the electoral commission.

To emerge as president, a candidate must gain more than 50 percent of the vote. If not, then a run-off must be held. Presidential results will be published by September 24.

A total of 299 constituency parliament members and 509 councillors will be elected. Parliamentary results will be published by September 30.

Who are the key contenders?

Seventeen presidential candidates are running for the post. However, the race is largely considered a two-horse race between incumbent President Lazarus Chakwera and former leader Peter Mutharika.

Lazarus Chakwera: The 70-year-old president and leader of the ruling Malawi Congress Party (MCP) is hoping to secure his second and — per the constitution —  final term.

The former preacher’s win in 2020 was historic, after a court ruled that there were irregularities in the 2019 election, and ordered a re-run. Chakwera’s win in that second vote marked the first time in African history that an opposition candidate won a re-run election.

However, Chakwera’s tenure has been marked by high levels of inflation and, more recently, fuel shortages. There have also been numerous allegations of corruption, particularly nepotism, against him. In 2021, the president made headlines when he appointed his daughter, Violet Chakwera Mwasinga, as a diplomat to Brussels.

In his campaigns, Chakwera has asked for more time to work on easing the country’s current economic stagnation. He and officials in his government have also blamed some of the hardships on last year’s drought, a cholera outbreak between 2022 and 2024, and the devastation of Cyclone Freddy in February 2023.

Supporters point out that Chakwera has already overseen major road construction work across Malawi and restarted train services after more than 30 years.

He previously ran in 2014, but was unsuccessful.

Peter Mutharika: The 85-year-old leader of the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is looking to make a comeback after his earlier second-term bid was defeated by Chakwera in 2020.

A former law professor, Mutharika has campaigned on the economic gains he said Malawi witnessed under him, arguing that things were better during his tenure than under the present leadership. He led Malawi from 2014 to 2020.

While he is credited with lowering inflation and kickstarting major infrastructure projects, Mutharika also faced corruption scandals in his time. In 2018, Malawians took to the streets to protest his alleged involvement in a bribery scandal that had seen a businessman pay a 200,000 kickback to his party. Mutharika was later cleared of wrongdoing.

Critics have speculated about Mutharika’s age, noting that he has not been particularly active during the campaign. Mutharika is the brother of former President Bingu wa Mutharika, who died in office in 2012.

Other notable presidential contenders include:

• Joyce Banda – Malawi’s only female president from 2012 to 2014, from the People’s Party. She was formerly vice president under Bingu wa Mutharika.
• Michael Usi – the former vice president who is from the Odya Zake Alibe Mlandu party.

What’s at stake in this election?

Struggling economy

Although Malawi exports tobacco, tea, and other agricultural products, the country is largely aid-dependent. It is also under pressure from accumulated external debt.

For Malawian voters, rising prices of food and everyday items are the most pressing issue on the ballot. Food costs have gone up by about 30 percent in the past year, but salaries have largely stayed the same. Meanwhile, the costs of fertiliser for the 80 percent of Malawians who survive on subsistence farming have risen.

Economists chalk up the stagnation crisis to a lack of foreign currency, which has limited crucial imports, including fertilisers and fuel.

Presently, the country is facing severe fuel shortages, with hundreds queuing up at fuel stations daily. Chakwera has blamed corrupt officials, who he says are deliberately sabotaging the fuel markets, for the problem.

In May, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) terminated a $175 million loan programme after it failed to give early results. Only $35 million had been disbursed. There will likely be negotiations for a new IMF programme after the elections, officials have said.

Earlier, in February, disgruntled citizens took to the streets Lilongwe and Blantyre in protest against the rising cost of living. Some voters, particularly the young people, feel that not much will change whether they vote or not.

While Mutharika has campaigned on his economic record while in office, Chakwera has pledged a cash transfer programme of 500,000 Malawi kwacha ($290) for newborns, which they can access at the age of 18.

Corruption

Corruption crises have riddled both Mutharika and Chakwera’s governments, something many Malawians say they are tired of.

While Chakwera has talked tough on fighting graft since becoming head of state in 2020, he has faced criticism for nepotism scandals and for handling corruption cases selectively.

Meanwhile, candidate Joyce Banda has also promised to fight corruption if elected. As president, Banda fired her entire cabinet in 2013, following news that some government officials were caught with large amounts of cash in their homes.

Drought and extreme weather

Malawi is one of the most climate-vulnerable countries, although it does not contribute significantly to emissions. With the majority of people relying on subsistence farming for food, extreme weather events often hit Malawi especially hard.

Climate activist Chikondi Chabvuta told Al Jazeera that governments in the past have not invested enough in building systems, such as food systems, that can absorb climate shocks. Women and girls, in particular she said, are often most affected by the double whammy of weather disasters and inflation that often follows.

“Creating a buffer for the people impacted should be a priority because science is telling us these events are going to get worse,” Chabvuta said. “Life for Malawians has to get better by policies that show seriousness,” in tackling environmental challenges, she added.

Millions of people were impacted for several months in 2024, after a severe regional drought destroyed harvests, driven by El Nino weather patterns.

According to the World Food Program, hundreds of thousands across the country were forced to rely on food assistance for survival as Malawi declared an emergency.

In February 2023, Cyclone Freddy, which was one of the deadliest storms to hit Africa in the last two decades, caused 1,216 fatalities. It also wiped out crops and caused similar food shortages.

Aerial video from the Philippines shows dozens of shanty homes burning in the Tondo area of Manila, where a fire displaced more than 1,100 families. Fire crews worked through Saturday night before declaring the blaze under control in the early hours of Sunday.

Activists from 40 countries sail from Tunisia to defy Israel’s blockade and deliver aid to Gaza.

An international convoy of boats, the Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF), has set sail from Tunisia, aiming to defy Israel’s siege on Gaza and deliver humanitarian aid.

The GSF, which departed Bizerte Port on Saturday, includes more than 40 vessels carrying between 500 and 700 activists from more than 40 countries, according to Anadolu.

Participants say they are determined to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza.

Among those joining is Franco-Palestinian lawmaker Rima Hassan, a member of the French National Assembly, who announced her participation after boarding in Tunisia.

“Our governments are responsible for the continuation of the genocide in Gaza,” Hassan wrote on X, accusing European leaders of silence in the face of Israeli attacks on aid convoys. In June, she joined another Gaza-bound boat that Israeli forces seized in international waters.

he flotilla is supported by prominent activists, including Swedish climate campaigner Greta Thunberg, who has long been vilified by Israeli officials for her solidarity with Palestinians.

The flotilla reported this week that two of its ships – the Family, which had members of the steering committee on board, and the Alma – were attacked while anchored near Tunis.

Activists suspect Israeli involvement, noting that one of the vessels was struck by a drone.

Tunisia’s Ministry of the Interior confirmed a “premeditated aggression” and said an investigation had been launched.

Despite the attacks, flotilla organisers insist they will press ahead. “Faced with this inaction, I am joining this citizens’ initiative, which is the largest humanitarian maritime convoy ever undertaken,” Hassan said.

History of intervention

This is not the first time Israel has moved to stop such missions.

In early June, Israeli naval forces intercepted the Madleen ship in international waters, seizing its aid supplies and detaining the crew of 12 activists. Another vessel, the Conscience, was struck by drones in May near Maltese waters, leaving it unable to continue its journey.

Organisers say the GSF – named after the Arabic word for resilience – represents one of the boldest challenges yet to Israel’s control of Gaza’s coastline.

The attempt comes as the United Nations warns of famine in Gaza, with more than half a million people facing catastrophic hunger.

Islamabad, Pakistan – For the second time in three years, catastrophic monsoon floods have carved a path of destruction across Pakistan’s north and central regions, particularly in its Punjab province, submerging villages, drowning farmland, displacing millions and killing hundreds.

This year, India – Pakistan’s archrival and a nuclear-armed neighbour – is also reeling. Its northern states, including Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Indian Punjab, have seen widespread flooding as heavy monsoon rains swell rivers on both sides of the border.

Pakistani authorities say that since late June, when the monsoon season began, at least 884 people have died nationally, more than 220 of them in Punjab. On the Indian side, the casualty count has crossed 100, with more than 30 dead in Indian Punjab.

Yet, shared suffering hasn’t brought the neighbours closer: In Pakistan’s Punjab, which borders India, federal minister Ahsan Iqbal has, in fact, accused New Delhi of deliberately releasing excess water from dams without timely warnings.

“India has started using water as a weapon and has caused wide-scale flooding in Punjab,” Iqbal said last month, citing releases into the Ravi, Sutlej and Chenab rivers, all of which originate in Indian territory and flow into Pakistan.

Iqbal further said that releasing flood water was the “worst example of water aggression” by India, which he said threatened lives, property and livelihoods.

“Some issues should be beyond politics, and water cooperation must be one of them,” the minister said on August 27, while he participated in rescue efforts in Narowal city, his constituency that borders India.

Those accusations come amid heightened tensions between India and Pakistan, and the breakdown of a six-decade-old pact that helped them share waters for rivers that are lifelines to both nations.

But experts argue that the evidence is thin to suggest that India might have deliberately sought to flood Pakistan – and the larger nation’s own woes point to the risks of such a strategy, even if New Delhi were to contemplate it.

Weaponising water

Relations between India and Pakistan, already at a historic low, plummeted further in April after the Pahalgam attack, in which gunmen killed 26 civilians in Indian-administered Kashmir. India blamed Pakistan for the attack and walked out of the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), the transboundary agreement that governs the Indus Basin’s six rivers.

Pakistan rejected the accusation that it was in any way behind the Pahalgam attack. But in early May, the neighbours waged a four-day conflict, targeting each other’s military bases with missiles and drones in the gravest military escalation between them in almost three decades.

Under the IWT, the two countries were required to exchange detailed water-flow data regularly. With India no longer adhering to the pact, fears have mounted in recent months that New Delhi could either try to stop the flow of water into Pakistan, or flood its western neighbour through sudden, large releases.

After New Delhi suspended its participation in the IWT, India’s Home Minister Amit Shah in June said the treaty would never be restored, a stance that prompted protests in Pakistan and accusations of “water terrorism”.

But while the Indian government has not issued a formal response to accusations that it has chosen to flood Pakistan, the Indian High Commission in Islamabad has, in the last two weeks, shared several warnings of possible cross-border flooding on “humanitarian grounds”.

And water experts say that attributing Pakistan’s floods primarily to Indian water releases from dams is an “oversimplification” of the causes of the crisis that risks obscuring the urgent, shared challenges posed by climate change and ageing infrastructure.

“The Indian decision to release water from their dam has not caused flooding in Pakistan,” said Daanish Mustafa, a professor of critical geography at King’s College London.

“India has major dams on its rivers, which eventually make their way to Pakistan. Any excess water that will be released from these rivers will significantly impact India’s own states first,” he told Al Jazeera.

Shared monsoon strain

Both Pakistan and India depend on glaciers in the Himalayan and Karakoram ranges to feed their rivers. For Pakistan, the Indus river basin is a lifeline. It supplies water to most of the country’s roughly 250 million people and underpins its agriculture.

Under the IWT, India controls the three eastern rivers – Ravi, Sutlej and Beas – while Pakistan controls the three western rivers, Jhelum, Chenab and Indus.

India is obligated to allow waters of the western rivers to flow into Pakistan with limited exceptions, and to provide timely, detailed hydrological data.

India has built dams on the eastern rivers it controls, and the flow of the Ravi and Sutlej into Pakistan has considerably reduced since then. It has also built dams on some of the western rivers – it is allowed to, under the treaty, as long as that does not affect the volume of water flowing into Pakistan.

But melting glaciers and an unusually intense summer monsoon pushed river levels on both sides of the border dangerously high this year.

In Pakistan, glacial outbursts followed by heavy rains raised levels in the western rivers, while surging flows put infrastructure on the eastern rivers in India at serious risk.

Mustafa of King’s College said that dams – like other infrastructure – are designed keeping in mind a safe capacity of water that they can hold, and are typically meant to operate for about 100 years. But climate change has dramatically altered the average rainfall that might have been taken into account while designing these projects.

“The parameters used to build the dams are now obsolete and meaningless,” he said. “When the capacity of the dams is exceeded, water must be released or it will put the entire structure at risk of destruction.”

Among the major dams upstream in Indian territory are Salal and Baglihar on the Chenab; Pong on the Beas; Bhakra on the Sutlej; and Ranjit Sagar (also known as Thein) on the Ravi.

These dams are based in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir, Indian Punjab and Himachal Pradesh, with vast areas of Indian territory between them and the border.

Blaming India for the flooding in Pakistan makes no sense, said Shiraz Memon, a former Pakistani representative on the bilateral commission tasked under the IWT to monitor the implementation of the pact.

“Instead of acknowledging that India has shared warnings, we are blaming them of water terrorism. It is [a] simple, natural flood phenomenon,” Memon said, adding that by the end of August, reservoirs across the region were full.

“With water at capacity, spillways had to be opened for downstream releases. This is a natural solution as there is no other option available,” he told Al Jazeera.

Politics of blame

According to September 3 data on India’s Central Water Commission website, at least a dozen sites face a “severe” flood situation, and another 19 are above normal flood levels.

The same day, Pakistan’s Ministry of Water Resources issued a notification, quoting a message from the Indian High Commission, warning of “high flood” on the Sutlej and Tawi rivers.

It was the fourth such notice by India after three earlier warnings last week, but none contained detailed hydrological data.

Pakistan’s Meteorological Department, in a report on September 4, said on the Pakistani side, two sites on the Sutlej and Ravi faced “extremely high” flood levels, while two other sites on the Ravi and Chenab saw “very high” levels.

The sheer volume of water during an intense monsoon often exceeds any single dam or barrage’s capacity. Controlled releases have become a necessary, if dangerous, part of flood management on both sides of the border, said experts.

They added that while the IWT obliged India to alert Pakistan to abnormal flows, Pakistan also needs better monitoring and real-time data systems rather than relying solely on diplomatic exchanges.

The blame game, analysts warn, can serve short-term political purposes on both sides, especially after May’s conflict.

For India, suspending the treaty is framed as a firm stance against what it sees as Pakistan’s state-sponsored terrorism. For Pakistan, blaming India can provide a political scapegoat that distracts from domestic failures in flood mitigation and governance.

“Rivers are living, breathing entities. This is what they do; they are always on the move. You cannot control the flood, especially a high or severe flood,” academic Mustafa said.

Blaming India won’t stop the floods. But, he added, it appears to be an “easy way out to relinquish responsibility”.

Pakistan began evacuations last month after India released water from overflowing dams into low-lying border regions.

Nearly 300,000 people have been evacuated in the past 48 hours from flood-hit areas of Pakistan’s Punjab province following the latest flood alerts by India, officials have said, bringing the total number of people displaced since last month to 1.3 million.

A new flood alert was shared with Pakistan by neighbouring India through diplomatic channels early on Wednesday, said Arfan Ali Kathia, director-general of Punjab’s Provincial Disaster Management Authority.

Floodwaters have submerged dozens of villages in Punjab’s Muzaffargarh district, after earlier inundating Narowal and Sialkot, both near the border with India.

Authorities are also struggling to divert overflowing rivers onto farmlands to protect major cities, as part of one of the largest rescue and relief operations in the history of Punjab, which straddles eastern Pakistan and northwestern India.

The flood alert on Wednesday was the second in 24 hours following heavy rains and water releases from dams in India.

Thousands of rescuers using boats are taking part in the relief and rescue operations, while the military has also been deployed to transport people and animals from inundated villages, said Kathia.

Rescuers are also using drones to find people stranded on rooftops in the flood-hit areas. Kathia said more than 3.3 million people across 33,000 villages in the province have been affected. The damage is still being assessed and all those who lost homes and crops would be compensated by the Punjab government, he said.

Landslides and flooding have killed at least 30 people in India’s Punjab state, home to more than 30 million people, and nearly 20,000 have been evacuated since August 1.

In Pakistan, tent villages are being set up and food and other essential items are being supplied to flood-affected people, said Kathia, though many survivors complained about a lack of government aid.

Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz Sharif visited flood-hit areas in Muzaffargarh on Wednesday, meeting with displaced families at the camps.

About 40,000 people are in the relief camps, according to the National Disaster Management Authority. It remains unclear where the rest are sheltering.

Malik Ramzan, a displaced resident, said he chose to stay near his inundated home rather than enter a relief camp. “There are no liveable facilities in the camps,” he said. “Food isn’t delivered on time, and we are treated like beggars.”

Facilities at the camps “are very poor,” said Al Jazeera’s Kamal Hyder, reporting from Multan in Punjab. “There’s no clean drinking water, no proper toilet facilities, plus the fact that it’s very hot and humid, so it leads to dehydration.”

While these families have fans to keep cool in the heat, “there are frequent power breakdowns, so these people now are very vulnerable when it comes to their health and, of course, the outbreak of diseases.”

Last week’s flooding mainly hit districts in Kasur, Bahawalpur and Narowal.

Pakistan began mass evacuations last month after India released water from overflowing dams into low-lying border regions.

The latest floods are the worst since 2022, when climate-induced flooding killed nearly 1,700 people in Pakistan.

When the 2025 cloudburst hit Buner, a district located in northern Pakistan, villagers described how torrents of water came down upon their dwellings with such fury as never before seen. Entire settlements vanished behind walls of mud and rock. Survivors stood amidst the rubble of their houses, blaming fate, blaming climate change, and waiting for relief from the provincial government. But the mountains behind them spoke a different tale. Its slopes, stripped of forests and scarred by marble quarries, had long been preparing for this disaster.

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is a province in northern Pakistan where the marble industry has grown very fast. By 2023, more than 6,000 marble factories were working in that province. These factories were mostly found in the Buner, Mardan, Swabi, Malakand, and Mansehra areas and also in the industrial belt on Warsak Road up to Mohmand and Bajaur. In just one city area alone, there were 350 units that Peshawar hosted. Yet alongside this economic boom came a quieter tragedy: about 1,091 units reportedly ran without environmental clearance from the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Only 133 factories held the required no-objection certificates (NOCs). The rest continued to blast mountains, dump slurry, and strip forests unchecked.

The ecological costs have been devastating. Global Forest Watch figures demonstrate that Khyber Pakhtunkhwa lost an average of 4,690 hectares in tree cover per year between 2020 and 2024. Swat’s forest cover, which at one time was 30 percent in 1947, has now decreased to just about 15 percent in 2025. Deforestation led by marble quarry expansion and firewood extraction that caters to the needs of the urbanizing population results in barren slopes replacing natural watersheds. Mountain blasting destroys soil structure, leading to erosion and reducing the water absorption capacity of the land, thereby ensuring flash floods accompanied by landslides with every spell of heavy rain. The Buner flood was not a natural calamity, but rather it was the net result of years of environmental neglect by the PTI government.

Villagers, whose words seldom reach the ears of policymakers, tell of dry streams, washed-away topsoil, and lost animal corridors that happen when the forest disappears. Farmers watch their yields decline while factory owners argue the industry brings jobs and export earnings Pakistan needs. Yet the floods that now strike with greater intensity destroy far more than they ever build.

Here, the climate debate takes a dangerous turn. Pakistan is right to point out that it happens to be among the top five most climate-vulnerable countries while contributing less than one percent to global carbon emissions. But local actions—unregulated mining, illegal riverbed construction, and deforestation—weigh heavily in magnifying the impacts of a changing climate. Extreme weather may be global, yet the scale of destruction in places like Swat and Buner reflects local choices as much as global injustice.

What makes this tragedy sharper is the economic paradox at its core. The marble industry contributes almost $1.5 billion every year to the economy of Pakistan, and it is this region that supplies a major portion of exports from the country. But this same industry depletes those very ecosystems on which agriculture, tourism, and rural livelihoods depend. When floods destroy the crops, roads, and houses, the damage is more than what profits could be made out of marble extraction, hence leaving the communities in a cycle that has economic gains disappearing with ecological losses.

The provincial government’s unwillingness to act sits at the heart of the crisis, permitting unregulated factories to function as environmental grey zones. The provincial EPA remains underfunded and politically sidelined. Deforestation bans exist on paper but are rarely enforced. Mining royalties swell provincial coffers, while watershed restoration receives scant attention. More than one thousand illegal factories are operating without NOCs, and only a few face closure orders. The trade-off between short-term revenue and long-term ecological survival remains tilted towards profit.

The paradox is striking. The provincial government continues to blame the Global North for carbon emissions yet does not want to place regulations on companies that are destroying its own watersheds. International climate finance and disaster relief from Islamabad come after every flood, but the mountains continue to be stripped, the diggings continue expanding, and the risks multiply.

This does not have to be the case. If NOCs are strictly enforced, if mining companies undertake mandatory watershed restoration, and if provincial climate adaptation plans are integrated with industrial licensing, the trajectory can be altered. When mountain quarrying was regulated in Turkey and Nepal, mining was allowed to proceed, but only under conditions of ecological stewardship, which is only possible under strong governance.

Until then, the people of Buner, Swat, and Malakand pay. With every flood deadlier than the last, every disaster is met with a cycle of blame and appeals for relief. Yes, climate change is a global issue, but in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, it’s as much about local negligence as it is about distant smokestacks. Without governance reforms, no amount of international aid can stop those mountains from crumbling when the next storm comes.

Some countries (such as Bhutan and Sri Lanka) in South Asia have recently piloted community-based watershed rehabilitation efforts wherein local bodies keep checks on mining activities, which are accompanied by financial payouts for reforestation. If applied here, it has the potential to transform the current humanitarian recovery response into an upfront investment for risk reduction. This could pressurize provincial authorities of KP to enforce stricter measures and to plan for resilience in the long run.

The provincial government sinks into its political warfare with the center, treading on anti-state rhetoric while there are crises within its own borders. As elites trade barbs and chase power across the hall, ordinary people pay the price of floods and deforestation and unregulated mining.

In Punjab province, all three major rivers overflowed simultaneously, for the first time in the country’s history.

Nearly half a million people have been displaced by flooding in eastern Pakistan after days of heavy rain swelled rivers, according to rescue officials, who have been carrying out a huge rescue operation as the country struggles with a monsoon season of devastation.

According to a statement released Saturday by the Punjab Disaster Management Authority (PDMA), 835 people have died in the monsoon since June 26, with 195 in Punjab province alone.

Three transboundary rivers that cut through Punjab, which borders India, have swollen to exceptionally high levels, affecting more than 2,300 villages.

The regional Punjab government has initiated controlled breaches of key flood bunds to divert surging waters from the Chenab, Ravi and Sutlej rivers. All three major rivers overflowed simultaneously, for the first time in the country’s history, according to local media.

Nabeel Javed, the head of the Punjab government’s relief services, said on Saturday that 481,000 people stranded by the floods have been evacuated, along with 405,000 livestock.

Overall, more than 1.5 million people have been affected by the flooding.

“This is the biggest rescue operation in Punjab’s history,” Irfan Ali Khan, the head of the province’s disaster management agency, said at a news conference.

He said more than 800 boats and 1,300 rescue personnel were involved in evacuating families from affected regions, mostly in rural areas near the banks of the three rivers.

‘No human life left unattended’

The latest spell of monsoon flooding since the start of the week has killed 30 people, Khan said, with several hundred left dead throughout the heavier-than-usual season that began in June.

“No human life is being left unattended. All kinds of rescue efforts are continuing,” Khan said.

More than 500 relief camps have been set up to provide shelter to families and their livestock.

Farmer Safdar Munir in the city of Kasur said the floods took away his crops and all his belongings.

“So, we are pulling out our cattle as there is no fodder to feed our livestock. We have received no help from the government,” he told Al Jazeera.

Abid, another farmer, said: “The water came and destroyed everything. It is with great difficulty that I could save my livestock. My farm and crops are all underwater.”

In the impoverished town of Shahdara, on the outskirts of the provincial capital of Lahore, dozens of families were gathered in a school after fleeing the rising water in their homes.

Rains continued throughout Saturday, including in Lahore, the country’s second-largest city, where an entire housing development was half submerged by water.

The Pakistan Meteorological Department (PMD) forecast new rounds of widespread rain, wind and thunderstorms across multiple regions.

In mid-August, more than 400 Pakistanis were killed in a matter of days by landslides caused by torrential rains on the other side of the country, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, close to Afghanistan and the only province held by the opposition to the federal authorities.

In 2022, unprecedented monsoon floods submerged a third of Pakistan, with the southern province of Sindh the worst-affected area.

West Sonatala, Bangladesh – An ordinary day for Andharmanik, a small community newspaper, begins in a crowded fish market.

Walking down the steps from the road to the fish landing point in Mohipur, a town in the district of Patuakhali bordering the Bay of Bengal, the smell of salt and fish hangs heavy in the air. Next to the main landing platform, colourful fishing boats, painted in faded reds, blues and greens, are moored.

At this busy market in late July, larger fishing depots and much smaller shanty-style stalls stand side by side. At one of the small, tin-roofed stalls, Hasan Parvez, 44, with black cotton trousers rolled up to his knees, shovels ice into plastic crates piled high with silvery hilsa – Bangladesh’s prized national fish – which is transported each day to cities including the capital Dhaka and Barisal.

Hasan works surrounded by plastic barrels and crates glistening with the fresh catch of the day, and there is a constant background thrum of diesel-powered trawlers humming as boats pull in and out of the dock.

“It’s a busy morning, and it is a fish market with all the chaos,” Hasan says with a smile.

He works there as a daily wage labourer sorting, weighing and packing fish into white thermocol boxes during the monsoon season. In the dry season, he works at a nearby brick kiln, and over the winter months, around December and January, he works at a market selling sun-dried fish known as “shutki”.

Hasan’s day at Mohipur market starts early – around 4am – with the fajr prayer and a cup of tea without milk, and earns him about 600 taka ($5) per day.

Today, as usual, he is impatient to finish because, besides this job, which he needs to provide for his family, Hasan has another occupation to get back to. He is the editor-in-chief of a handwritten community newspaper called Andharmanik (“jewel from the darkness” in Bengali, and also the name of the nearby river), which features stories from his village of West Sonatala. He publishes it every two months from his home in the coastal village about an hour by road from the fish market and more than eight hours from Dhaka.

Since Hasan and his team of reporters don’t own or use computers, the newspaper is handwritten and then photocopied. But they also believe writing stories by hand, in a place where newspapers weren’t available before Andharmanik began, makes the paper feel more intimate and brings their community closer together.

Finally, at around 11am, when the last boxes of fish have been loaded onto carts and the shop floor has been cleaned, Hasan prepares to head home.

He hops onto a van-gari – a battery-driven, three-wheeled bicycle with a large wooden platform at the rear of the vehicle where passengers sit – to get home.

As Hasan climbs into the vehicle, he explains that the three-room home he shares with his wife, Salma Begum, whom he married in 2013, and three daughters, is also the editorial headquarters for Andharmanik. It is where he meets with the team once or twice in each publication cycle.

‘My village’

On the bumpy, broken road to his home, past paddy fields and scattered houses, a few two-wheelers and electric rickshaws passing by in the opposite direction, Hasan explains what drove him to start a newspaper.

“I used to write a lot of poems in my childhood,” he says, speaking loudly over the noisy van-gari engine. “Reading and writing always attracted me.”

He would read works by the Indian Nobel prize-winning poet, Rabindranath Tagore, and self-help books. But despite his love of reading and learning, he wasn’t able to finish school. When he was 14, Hasan, the eldest of two brothers and two sisters, had to drop out to work as a day labourer to support his family. “I was supposed to pass my secondary school certification (SSC) exam back in 1996, but I couldn’t do it because of money problems,” he explains.

He didn’t complete his SSC examination (10th grade) until the age of 35 in 2015. Two years later, he finished high school. In 2021, he enrolled in a Bachelor of Arts degree at a college in Kalapara, about 10km (6.2 miles) away. Having to juggle supporting his family with the newspaper and his studies, he is just now in his second semester. This has been an important journey because the future of the newspaper hinges on it, he says.

Hasan wants to register the newspaper in the district as an official media organisation, as he believes this would help protect it from political volatility. “For that, the rules are that the publisher has to be a graduate,” he says.

The idea for the paper arose in June 2016 when Hasan met Rafiqul Montu, a Dhaka-based environmental journalist who was visiting the area. Montu covers the impact of the climate crisis in Bangladesh’s coastal areas and travels the region throughout the year for his work. One day, Hasan saw him taking pictures of the Andharmanik River. Curious, he went to talk to him.

As they spoke, Hasan shared some of his poems and other writings. In those, he talked about his village’s problems – like the cyclones that afflict them or worsening climate conditions for farmers. No newspaper covered these stories, and with the local government often slow to help, people felt neglected.

Montu, impressed by what he heard, encouraged him to turn these stories into a newspaper.

“He wanted to do something for his community,” Montu explains. “I told him he could publish a newspaper and cover local news. I said he should focus on spreading good faith and hope in his community.”

He suggested naming the paper after the river where they spoke and taught Hasan how to write a story, craft headlines and take photos with his mobile phone.

“Montu bhai (brother) is my ustaad (mentor),” Hasan says. “He inspired me to write stories about my village and people’s lives – both problems and solutions. I had never thought of becoming a newspaper publisher since I can’t afford to be one. But it’s been six years that Andharmanik has been coming out.”

As a tribute to the working-class community of West Sonatala, the paper’s first issue was published in 2019 on May 1, Labour Day.

Forgotten by the world

Around noon, and under a light drizzle, Hasan nears his village in the quiet countryside. Green rice fields spread out from both sides of the road, and the trees lining it are wet from the rain.

Ducks swim in a few ponds along the roadside. The van-gari bounces over the last stretch of broken road until it finally runs out altogether. This is as far as the driver can go.

From there, it is a 10-minute walk along muddy paths to reach Hasan’s house.

“Officially, the road comes up to my house,” he says, “but this is what it looks like.”

A narrow strip of slushy mud is all there is to walk on, and the monsoon has made conditions worse. Villagers have no choice but to walk barefoot, holding their shoes or sandals.

“Wearing shoes isn’t practical as they can get stuck in the mud and cause someone to slip and fall,” Hasan says as he hurries to meet his team, who will arrive for a 1pm meeting to discuss ideas for the August edition. The newspaper started with 10 contributors and has grown to a team of 17 reporters who contribute stories and photos voluntarily.

“In our meetings, we share story ideas, but also talk about our own lives and families. Most times my wife gives us tea and muri (puffed rice),” he adds.

West Sonatala is home to 618 families – mostly farmers, fishermen and daily wage labourers. Electricity only arrived a few years ago.

“There’s one community clinic in the village with no doctors. People who fall sick in the village are taken to hospitals in Kalapara, a small sub-district town which is an hour-long drive,” Hasan says.

“No national or regional newspapers come to the village, and most homes don’t have a TV. Those with smartphones watch the news there, but the internet is so patchy, even that’s difficult,” he adds, gesturing at his mobile phone, which shows no network connection.

“Our area is so remote and cut off from basic information that we feel forgotten by the mainstream world,” he says. “This feeling of being left behind was what drove me to start Andharmanik. It’s our community newspaper to tell our own stories.”

‘A collective’

In Hasan’s living room is a wall covered with framed newspaper clippings and a few bookshelves packed with Bengali books. A long, wooden table sits in the centre where Hasan’s reporters gather, arriving one by one along the muddy paths. Three have braved the heavy rain to make it there today. Abdul Latif is the first to arrive, followed by Russiah Begum, then Nazrul Islam Bilal. They enter the room with smiles on their faces, asking about each other’s wellbeing by saying, “Kemon asen?” (“How are you?” in Bengali).

The group is small, but diverse, and they all live near each other within a cluster of villages. Abdul, 42, dressed in a crisp, white checkered shirt, is an English teacher in high school. Nazrul, 31, is an electrician. Russiah, 43, is one of three women on the team, and runs a tailoring business from her home in West Sonatala.

The two other members of the core team who have been prevented by the rain from attending the meeting are Sahana Begum, 55, who walks with a limp in her right leg due to polio. Sahana, who is also a seamstress, lives in West Sonatala and writes about women’s issues. There is also 29-year-old Ashish Garami, the only Hindu member of the team. He belongs to a minority group in Bangladesh, which in recent years has reportedly faced discrimination.

Other contributors work as e-rickshaw drivers and farmers, while some are unemployed.

“We work as a collective. Our newspaper focuses on local news, community events, and what happens in West Sonatala and sometimes nearby villages,” says Abdul, who joined Andharmanik in 2021. “In this edition, I am going to write about the bad road conditions,” he adds. “I’ll show how people are suffering because of it during the monsoon.”

The school where he teaches is three kilometres (1.9 miles) from his home, and he has to cross the Andharmanik River by boat each day to reach it.

“Crisis is the reason Andharmanik is published. The way Hasan pointed out the problems of our village through his writings inspired me to join the team,” he says.

‘Something beautiful happened’

Russiah has been with Hasan’s team since the beginning. She explains that she finished 10th grade before marrying a farmer from the village. To help support her family, she started a tailoring business, which became a window into the village’s hidden struggles. “When women come to me to stitch their clothes, they open their hearts,” she says. “I hear about problems that never make it to the outside world – especially the pain that women and children carry in silence.”

One of her stories was about a woman named Abejaan Begum from Rehmatpur village, a few kilometres from West Sonatala. Abejaan had lost her house to devastating floods in 2023 and had been forced to decamp to a makeshift hut made of plastic sheets.

“My story was shared by Hasan on his Facebook page,” Begum says. “Then something beautiful happened – help started pouring in from Bangladeshis living abroad. In total, she received 60,000 taka ($420) to build a new house and buy a few goats.” Today, Abejaan is living with dignity again in a three-room house, Russiah says.

Their stories have helped others. For one edition, Hasan wrote a poem about a child in his village named Rubina who lived in a broken mud hut with her grandmother and mother, who had mental health problems and was kept in chains. Because they were so poor, Rubina was forced to beg for food. After Hasan published the poem, it was widely read and caught the attention of local government officials, who decided to give Rubina and her family some land and a house.

Hasan and his team often focus on stories about how people are affected by the climate crisis. The coastal areas of Bangladesh are particularly vulnerable to flooding, heatwaves, rising sea levels and saltwater intrusion. Bilal owns a small rice field, and he feels connected to other farmers in the area, particularly as he sees his harvest get smaller every year due to the erratic rainfall.

“In the next issue, I’ll write about the struggles of local day labourers during the monsoon,” he says.

Hasan’s reporters submit their stories on sheets from notebooks. “Our contributors send me their stories in handwritten notes. I make the final decision on what goes in the paper and edit the language,” he says. He then writes out the stories with a fountain pen on A3-size paper and has these photocopied at a copy shop in Kalapara.

Each newspaper is four pages long and bound together using colourful plastic tape. Hasan makes 300 copies – each of which costs him approximately 10 taka ($0.08) to publish. The process is labour-intensive and the final handwriting, printing and binding takes about a week.

Once published, Hasan and his team distribute the paper in West Sonatala and the nearby villages of Tungibari, Chandpara, Rehmatpur and Fatehpur. They have no newspaper stall or subscription system, relying solely on local demand. They give it away for free or, where they can, sell it at cost. “People are poor in our village, so it’s mostly given free. Honestly, I don’t make any money out of it. This is not my goal,” Hasan says.

A loyal reader

Azizur Rehman Khan, 84, a resident of West Sonatala, is one of the newspaper’s most loyal readers and Hasan’s neighbour. He has read every issue for the past two years and happily pays for each issue, which is delivered to him personally by Hasan.

“I have seen Parvez since his childhood days,” Azizur says. “I love his passion and motivation to tell stories of happiness and sadness of our villagers. When the rest of the world forgot us, it is Andharmanik that shares our story to the world.”

The former tax officer says he understands the financial insecurity that Hasan shoulders in order to publish the newspaper. However, he adds, “I pray to Allah that there will be a day when everything will fall into place and this paper will be published fortnightly.”

Khan lives a couple of kilometres from the Andharmanik River. He explains the meaning behind the name, which comes from two Bengali words – “andhar” meaning dark and “manik” meaning jewel.

Looking out at the dark, rain-heavy sky beyond the doorway of his house, he quietly adds, “Hasan is our ‘Andharmanik’ – the shining jewel in our darkness.”

Video shows the moment a building collapsed into an overflowing river in Kullu in northern India, where heavy rains have caused severe flooding and landslides. The floods have damaged roads, swept away bridges and disrupted water and power supplies in several areas.

More than 16,500 soldiers and 107,000 paramilitary personnel have been mobilised to help with the evacuation.

Tens of thousands of people have been ordered to evacuate from Vietnam’s coastline facing the South China Sea, with airports and schools shut as authorities brace for Typhoon Kajiki.

The Vietnamese government said on Monday that about 30,000 people had been evacuated from coastal areas. Authorities said on Sunday that more than half a million people would be evacuated and ordered boats to remain in port.

“This is an extremely dangerous fast-moving storm,” the government said in a statement on Sunday night, warning that Kajiki would bring heavy rains, flooding and landslides.

More than 16,500 soldiers and 107,000 paramilitary personnel have been mobilised to help with the evacuation and to stand by for search and rescue, the government said in a statement.

The typhoon with winds of up to 166km/h (103mph) at sea is due to make landfall on Monday afternoon, the country’s weather agency said. The Joint Typhoon Warning Center said conditions suggested “an approaching weakening trend as the system approaches the continental shelf of the Gulf of Tonkin where there is less ocean heat content”.

Two airports in the Thanh Hoa and Quang Binh provinces have been closed, according to the Civil Aviation Authority of Vietnam. Vietnam Airlines and Vietjet Air cancelled dozens of flights to and from the area on Sunday and Monday.

Coastal provinces have banned ships from going out to sea starting Monday and were calling in those already out, said Vietnam’s news agency.

Vietnam is prone to storms that are often deadly and trigger dangerous flooding and mudslides. More than 100 people were killed or went missing due to natural disasters in the first seven months of 2025, according to the Ministry of Agriculture.

Last year, Typhoon Yagi killed about 300 people and caused property damage of approximately $3.3bn.

‘A bit scared’

The waterfront city of Vinh was deluged overnight, its streets largely deserted by morning with most shops and restaurants closed as residents and business owners sandbagged their property entrances.

“I have never heard of a typhoon of this big scale coming to our city,” 66-year-old Le Manh Tung, in the city of Vinh, told the AFP news agency. He is sheltering alongside other evacuated families at an indoor stadium.

“I am a bit scared, but then we have to accept it because it’s nature – we cannot do anything.”

Houses run the risk of collapse from the storm, and even high-rise buildings could suffer serious damage, said Deputy Prime Minister Tran Hong Ha, the official Vietnam News Agency reported.

The storm is projected to move inland across Laos and northern Thailand.

Kajiki hit the southern coast of China’s Hainan Island on Sunday as it moved towards Vietnam. About 20,000 residents were evacuated from the Chinese province, which downgraded its typhoon and emergency response alerts on Monday morning.

But authorities warned of heavy rain and isolated storms in cities in the southern part of the province.

“A nation that destroy its soils, destroy itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people.” _ Franklin D. Roosevelt

Human activities are causing climate change, which is certainly a sad reality. Through our own hands, we are all equally responsible for destroying our motherland, like burning fossil fuels, which is causing a long-term shift in Earth’s average weather patterns. Numerous other acts are leading to a range of influences, including rising sea levels, more frequent and intense extreme weather events, and disturbances to ecosystems and human social order. Scientists predicted that global temperature will increase from human-made greenhouse gases, which will increase and intensify severe weather damage. What? Scientists predicted a long time ago we are seeing its effects already, such as sea level rise, the loss of sea ice, melting glaciers and ice sheets, and more intense heat waves. The possible future effects of worldwide climate change consist of an increase in the wind intensity and rainfall from tropical cyclones, longer periods of drought in some areas, and more frequent wildfires. The more concerning fact is that some changes, such as droughts, wildfires, and extreme rainfall, are happening quicker than what scientists have assessed previously. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations body established to assess the science associated with climate change, today’s generation has never observed changes like this in their global climate before, and some of these changes are irreversible over the next hundreds to thousands of years.

“The scientific evidence is unequivocal: climate change is a threat to human well-being and the health of the planet. Any further delay in concerted global action will miss the brief, rapidly closing window to secure a livable future.” _ (INTERGOVERNMENTAL PANEL ON CLIMATE CHANGE)

Scientists show their concern over climate; if it continues to warm, then the intensity of hurricane-associated rainfall rate will increase. We will see in upcoming years that drought and heat waves are expected to become more penetrating and cold waves less penetrating and less frequent. If the current projection holds, the Arctic Ocean will likely become essentially ice-free in late summer due to the sea ice that covers the Arctic Ocean being expected to continue decreasing. While scientific models are powerful tools for predicting future climate scenarios, uncertainties remain. Factors such as natural climate variability, solar activity, and oceanic cycles sometimes make long-term predictions challenging. These uncertainties highlight the need for continued research to refine models and improve their accuracy. Climate change threatens biodiversity at an unprecedented rate. Rising temperatures and shifting weather patterns are altering habitats, pushing many species toward extinction. The collapse of ecosystems like coral reefs and rainforests could have far-reaching consequences for food chains and human livelihoods. Despite scientific warnings, achieving global consensus on emission reductions remains difficult. Delays in policy implementation risk locking the planet into higher levels of warming, making adaptation more costly and less effective in the future.

“Climate change does not respect borders; it does not respect who you are—rich or poor, small or big. Therefore, this is what we call global challenges, which require global solidarity.” _ BAN KI-MOON

To prevent our planet from global warming and heal it, we all need to work in solidarity, as Ban Ki-moon said in his quote. We need to switch to renewable energy like solar, wind, and hydropower instead of fossil fuels. It is important to protect existing forests to maintain biodiversity and carbon sinks. Need to restore wetlands and mangroves, as they store large amounts of carbon and protect coastlines. It is better to adopt climate-smart farming practices like crop rotation and organic farming. We need to minimize single-use plastics and promote recycling. Use energy-efficient buildings with proper insulation and green rooftops. Methods such as geoengineering should be used for solar radiation management but with great caution. For a clean fuel alternative, the use of green hydrogen would be a much better option. The international agreements, like the Paris Accord, set global emission targets. To support climate research for better solutions and innovations.

CONCLUSION

The scientific concerns regarding climate change go beyond rising temperatures; they encompass melting ice sheets, biodiversity loss, extreme weather, and uncertainties in predicting future impacts. While progress has been made in understanding the crisis, the growing evidence suggests that immediate, collective, and science-driven action is essential. Climate change is not just an environmental issue—it is a global challenge demanding urgent attention from policymakers, scientists, and societies worldwide. Individual efforts to reduce global warming are that we should conserve energy by switching off lights and electronics when not in use. Also, using energy-efficient appliances, such as LEDs, solar panels, etc. We can use sustainable transport like public transport or cycle, carpool, or walk if distances are not too long. We all need to participate in afforestation or community gardening projects. Plus, eat more plant-based foods and reduce meat and dairy consumption to lower methane emissions. The most important thing that we all need to do is to spread awareness by educating others about climate change and supporting eco-friendly policies.