Alister Doyle

Fearing "horrific" risks from a rising ocean that could swamp low-lying islands, the Pacific nation of Tuvalu aims to reinforce its coasts in a novel partnership with Australia aimed at helping the developing island state adapt to climate change.

The project will test a new U.N. blueprint under which one rich nation takes responsibility for raising funds to enable a climate-vulnerable country to roll out measures to cope better with heatwaves, floods, storms, droughts and rising seas.

As the world swelters through record temperatures, scientists say an unusual culprit may be partly to blame: an underwater volcanic eruption off Tonga in the South Pacific last year.

While most big blasts cool the planet with a sun-dimming haze, the eruption of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai in January 2022 blew the equivalent of 60,000 Olympic swimming pools of water into the stratosphere, high above the planet.

African leaders sought a stronger role in solving climate change at a summit this week - akin to the continent being a chessboard queen rather than a pawn - yet failed to confront the growing risks of global warming, a top African scientist warned.

The Nairobi Declaration issued after Africa's first climate summit on Sept. 4-6 portrayed the world's poorest continent as a potential clean energy superpower and a source of solutions based on rich natural resources, from forests to sunshine.

Turn on the news during scorching summer heatwaves and wildfires and you'll likely hear warnings that average global temperatures are rising towards a key limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times, intended to avoid the worst of climate change.

What you probably won't hear is that billions of people worldwide are already experiencing local warming of higher than 1.5C (2.7 Fahrenheit) - the most ambitious global goal set in the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

Rising global temperatures are on track to far exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming - but governments still have an unopened "toolbox" of policies that can keep that goal alive, the new chair of the U.N.'s panel of climate scientists said.

Jim Skea, a Scottish scientist elected on Wednesday to lead the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in coming years, said existing government plans would lead to warming "closer to 3 degrees than 1.5" above pre-industrial times.

Amid scorching heatwaves from Europe to China and the United States, governments will this week pick a new leader for the U.N.'s flagship science panel on climate change - with pressure to name a woman for the first time in its 35-year history.

The new chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), set up in 1988, will oversee mammoth reports in the next few years by hundreds of scientists, meant to guide a shift from fossil fuels to limit worsening global warming.

Oslo's 2016 goal to combat climate change was as radical as it was unprecedented: to halve greenhouse gas emissions within four years.

Having called its plan "demanding yet achievable", Oslo won global plaudits as a model for bold urban action and went on to be crowned the European Green Capital of 2019, a prestigious annual award from the European Commission.

Here's what experts say on how close we are to missing the 1.5 degrees Celsius target on global warming, and what happens if so

Climate scientists on Monday appealed directly to everyone on the planet to seize a dwindling chance to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) or risk harming people living today and their descendants for thousands of years.

With graphics showing individuals - from babies to pensioners - set to suffer ever more from rising heat, the report by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) gives a more personal twist to findings about looming threats than its past studies directed at governments.

Stepping into a "minefield" about how to slow global warming, scientists in developing nations have won new funds to study whether dimming sunshine by mimicking volcanic eruptions can be a sufficiently safe way to temporarily cool a hotter planet.

Research into "solar geoengineering", perhaps using planes or balloons to spray sun-reflecting sulphur into the stratosphere, has made scant progress despite alarm over rising temperatures and a sluggish global shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy.