Jack Graham

The number of people working in renewable energy has nearly doubled in 10 years as the world begins its transition away from polluting fossil fuels like oil and gas, new research showed.

Jobs in renewables hit 13.7 million in 2022, including in solar, bioenergy, hydropower and wind, the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) and the International Labour Organization (ILO) said on Thursday.

From record-breaking temperatures to devastating storms and floods, 2023's extreme weather has highlighted the urgency of tackling climate change.

"Humanity has opened the gates of hell," said U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres at a Climate Ambition Summit in New York.

At Africa's first-ever climate summit in Nairobi this week, government and U.N. leaders sought to promote the continent as a source of solutions to the world's global warming challenge, rooted in its rich natural resources from sunshine to forests.

But they identified one big snag: a lack of finance to turn that potential into the reality of a green and fair transition.

Heatwaves have been breaking records around the world, with China enduring its highest-ever temperature, heat advisories being issued across vast swathes of the United States, and fierce heatwaves in southern Europe endangering lives.

Sweltering heat in Europe this summer has presented severe threats to people's health in Italy, Spain and Greece, where wildfires on the islands of Rhodes and Corfu have led to thousands of residents and tourists being evacuated.

The world reached 'Plastic Overshoot Day' on July 28, when plastic production in 2023 exceeded global capacity to manage plastic waste effectively - a point marked by researchers for the first time.

As a result, more than 68 million tonnes of short-life plastics will pollute the environment this year as they are not recycled or properly disposed of, according to the report by Swiss-based research consultancy Earth Action.

As people across Europe set out on their summer holidays, a growing number of eco-conscious travellers are looking to swap plane journeys for greener options such as trains or boats.

A number of new long-distance and overnight train routes are due to launch in the coming months and years as awareness rises about the planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions caused by hopping on a plane.

In the depths of the Pacific Ocean between Mexico and Hawaii, trillions of potato-shaped rocks are scattered across the seabed - containing minerals such as nickel, cobalt and manganese vital for new green technologies in the global energy transition.

In this ocean region - the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) - an abundance of the rocks, known as polymetallic nodules, is increasingly fuelling debate about the mining of metals needed to produce technology such as batteries for electric vehicles.

While record wildfires rage in Canada and southern European hotspots such as Spain brace for the worst, a rather unexpected location is also preparing for the ever-growing threat: London.

Britain's capital was rocked last July when hundreds of fires broke out on a single day following record temperatures of 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) - in what London's fire service called its busiest day since the Second World War.

World leaders and heads of development finance institutions meet in Paris this week for a summit hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron that aims to create a new pact between rich and poor countries to ease crippling debt and fund climate action.

Developing nations are struggling to find the finance they need to adapt to worsening climate change impacts and transition to greener economies, partly because they are grappling with high levels of debt exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Governments are increasingly focusing on health risks fuelled by global warming, with most nations now considering concerns from malaria to heart disease in their climate plans, according to data shared exclusively by the World Health Organization (WHO).

More than 90% of countries have included health hazards in their commitments to tackle climate change, known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), up from 70% in 2020, according to new WHO data, set to be released in a forthcoming report.