Sanam Mahoozi

LONDON - After a year when extreme heat triggered severe droughts from southern Africa to South America, world leaders are meeting in the desert city of Riyadh in Saudi Arabia this month to thrash out ways of tackling desertification and water scarcity.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has called the summit - the 16th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD COP16) - a "moonshot moment" to accelerate action on land and drought resilience as some estimates predicted trillions of dollars would be needed to tackle the problem.

The alarming decline of the Caspian Sea is at the top of the agenda at this year's U.N. climate summit in Baku, with host nation Azerbaijan hoping to forge a regional plan to tackle the problem, which would rely on Iran to take action.

The Caspian Sea has lost 1.5 m (5 feet) of water in the past 25 years, scientists say, a significant drop that increases salinity levels and threatens plants and animals. At this rate, experts say it could lose another 14 m this century.

One year after young Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini died in police custody while under arrest for improper hijab, Iran has stepped up internet restrictions to stop a resurgence of the widespread mass protests that swept the Islamic Republic last year.

Ahead of the Sept. 16 anniversary of Amini's death, days before her 22nd birthday, government opponents say Iran is conducting a wide-ranging crackdown to stifle possible dissent.

In Iran this winter, hospital emergency rooms have been full, schools regularly closed, and many people unable to work or even leave their homes due to toxic smog, which a leading United Nations expert is calling an "air pollution catastrophe".

Dirty air is a chronic problem in Iran. Many of its cities including Tehran regularly rank among the world's most polluted, due to emissions from millions of older vehicles on the roads, and from refineries, power plants, and factories.

Days before the monsoon swept into Indonesia this year, 25 million people from across the country uploaded geotagged selfies on Twitter - their way of reporting for duty in a project to build a crowdsourced map of the impending floods.

The initiative by Indonesia's Yayasan Peta Bencana - or Disaster Map Foundation - highlights Twitter's role in disaster response around the world, from helping Indians access COVID-19 vaccines to sharing warnings about mass shootings in the United States.

Lima and her friends in Tehran fear arrest, beatings and even death by joining mass protests demanding more rights and a new leadership in Iran. But a yearning for change and a kit bag of tech, from mobile apps to encrypted chat, have kept them going.

Struggling to suppress the biggest show of dissent in years, Iran's authorities have also turned to technology, using delivery apps, Twitter and facial recognition to track protesters, eavesdrop on opponents and harass women who defy their strict dress code, rights campaigners said.

Saeed Souzangar, who runs a technology company in Tehran, is adept at navigating frequent internet disruptions to ensure his business can keep operating, but even he has been thrown by nationwide communications outages this month.

The death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who died in custody after being arrested by the country's morality police, has triggered the biggest street protests in years, prompting a sweeping security crackdown and curbs on internet and phones.

In just over a year, Iran has endured deadly flash floods, crop-ruining drought, punishing dust storms and heatwaves that have pushed temperatures as high as 48 degrees Celsius (118 degrees Fahrenheit) - all crises likely fuelled by climate change.

But for those hit by the impacts, finding help is proving very difficult.

Protests have broken out across Iran over the death of a woman held by morality police for "unsuitable attire", with activists warning of worse to come as the state deploys facial recognition technology to control its citizens.

Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old from Iran's Kurdistan province, fell into a coma and died following her arrest in Tehran last week over the country's strict new hijab policy, sparking demonstrations in multiple areas, the capital included.

Over the past two months, Iraqis have been living, working and breathing in thick clouds of dust, as at least nine sandstorms - lasting up to several days each - have hit the country, blanketing everything in grit.

Hospitals have reported a surge in admissions, with thousands of patients coming in with severe respiratory illnesses, while schools and offices have had to close and flights have been grounded for days at a time.