Mariejo Ramos

From adding finance to making sure loss and damage funds reach vulnerable populations, climate adaptation is an increasingly crucial topic as extreme weather events disrupt daily life.

Around the world, local adaptation models are redesigning how communities respond to a harsher climate, such as coastal cities turning to mangrove restoration and resilient agriculture.

A major industry spill that spewed toxic waste into a protected strait off the Philippines has raised concerns about governance of the nation's rich waterways and what can be done to safeguard dwindling biodiversity.

Conservationists said October's spill at a private ethanol distillery in Negros Island - an area prized for its abundant coral - resulted in 255,000 cubic metres of industrial waste polluting the Tañon Strait Protected Seascape.

In Asia’s most climate-vulnerable countries, global warming is also threatening people’s sexual and reproductive health, studies show, with fires, floods and pollution all posing extra hazards to the most vulnerable.

Experts say that aside from devastating the natural environment, extreme weather can also endanger the health of pregnant women, adolescent girls, new-borns and LGBTQ+ people.

After the body of 25-year-old Filipino fisherman Sam Dela Cruz was returned to his shipmates after his sudden death in Somalia, they carried his body, wrapped in a blanket, into the ship's freezer to take him home to his family.

One fisherman "got water and a cloth to clean Sam's face," said Gilbert, another Filipino on the ship who used a pseudonym due to concerns for his safety. "Then we all just cried."

From staffing to screening and treatment, the sharp decline in donor funding marked by the swift dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) this year has led to severe disruptions in tuberculosis services in high-burden countries, a new report shows.

According to the Global Tuberculosis Report 2025 published this month by the World Health Organization, the funding cuts affected many national TB programmes in low- and middle-income countries that were dependent upon both USAID bilateral support and grants from the Geneva-based Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

When a Chinese tourist in Pattaya murdered a trans woman in April, the LGBTQ+ community in Thailand called the incident a hate crime.

But Thai law doesn't include the designation hate crime, leaving accountability for bias-motivated violence elusive in the Southeast Asian country.

Record numbers of women use modern contraception worldwide, but experts at the world's largest family planning conference warned aid cuts could reverse gains in reproductive health and restrict access to birth control in low and middle-income countries.

Family Planning 2030, a global partnership for advancing access to reproductive health services, said in a report this week that a decade of hard-won gains in reproductive health could be undone after the United States, which once covered 41% of global family planning budgets, largely stopped its funding.

Living in the riverside village of Sipat in the Philippines, Josephine Dela Cruz watches the soil erode with every storm, haunted by the fear that one day the ground will wash away completely and take her family with it.

One night this summer, heavy rains toppled trees and knocked down a bamboo stilt house in their settlement in Bulacan, a densely populated province north of Manila, she said.

Melissa thought her financial troubles would disappear with just a few clicks in a Philippines online lending app that promised "fast cash".

Without access to loans from traditional banks to pay her bills, the working student tried an app last month and received money in a number of loans that were instantly approved.

The Philippines is a global leader in nickel mining - crucial if the world is ever to switch to clean energy - but it's an industry that comes with a heavy environmental cost.

Scientists say extracting minerals poses a grave threat to vast swathes of forests and the Filipinos who depend on them, raising questions about the land's long-term survival and how to restore all the felled trees.