Climate change

Asia was the world's most disaster-hit region from climate and weather hazards in 2023, the United Nations said Tuesday, with floods and storms the chief cause of casualties and economic losses.

Global temperatures hit record highs last year, and the U.N.'s weather and climate agency said Asia was warming at a particularly rapid pace.

Europe is increasingly facing bouts of heat so intense that the human body cannot cope, as climate change continues to raise temperatures, the EU's Copernicus climate monitoring service and the World Meteorological Organization said on Monday.

Europe endured a record number of "extreme heat stress" days in 2023, two leading climate monitors said Monday, underscoring the threat of increasingly deadly summers across the continent.

In a year of contrasting extremes, Europe witnessed scorching heatwaves but also catastrophic flooding, withering droughts, violent storms and its largest wildfire.

Climate change caused by CO2 emissions already in the atmosphere will shrink global GDP in 2050 by about $38 trillion, or almost a fifth, no matter how aggressively humanity cuts carbon pollution, researchers have said in the journal Nature.

A recent report by the non-profit think tank InfluenceMap has unveiled startling insights into the world's carbon dioxide emissions landscape. According to the Carbon Majors report released on Thursday, a mere 57 fossil fuel and cement producers have been accountable for a staggering 80% of global CO2 emissions from 2016 to 2022.

The world is getting hotter and humanity will have to shield itself against the new conditions in the coming years, according to Spyros Pandis, professor at the Department of Chemical Engineering of the University of Patras and researcher at the Institute of Chemical Engineering Sciences of the Technology and Research Foundation in Greece (FORTH).

The European Union, Canada, Japan and climate-vulnerable Pacific Island states are among 47 countries rallying support for a charge on the international shipping sector's greenhouse gas emissions, documents reviewed by Reuters showed.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on Sunday stressed the need to fight global warming, and called climate change a "crisis multiplier" with implications for global security.

He made the remarks during a press conference in Baku along with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, whose energy-rich country is set to host the COP29 U.N. Climate Change Conference in November.

The problems posed by climate change are being experienced first-hand in Greece, with scientists raising the alarm that the central region of Thessaly is at risk of desertification.

The European Union must step up preparations for climate change risks, as a hotter planet threatens everything from farming to financial stability, the European Commission has said.

The Commission was responding to a stark report published on Monday by the European Environment Agency (EEA), which urged EU countries to prepare for "catastrophic" risks from worsening climate change.