Italy's largest river is already as low as it was last summer, with the winter snow fields that normally save it from drying up over the warmer months having receded by 75%, according to the Bolzano climate and environment agency.

It's already causing some reliant on the Po to course correct.

Charred, drained or swamped, built up, dug out or taken apart, blue or green or turned to dust: this is the Earth as seen from above.

As the world commemorated Earth Day on Saturday, the footprints of human activity are visible across the planet's surface. The relationship between people and the natural world will have consequences for years to come.

When Alessandra Korap was born in the mid-1980s, her Indigenous village nestled in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil was a haven of seclusion. But as she grew up, the nearby city of Itaituba, with its bustling streets and commercial activity, crept closer and closer.

It wasn't just her village feeling the encroachment of non-Indigenous outsiders. Two major federal highways paved the way for tens of thousands of settlers, illegal gold miners and loggers into the region's vast Indigenous territories, which cover a forested area roughly the size of Belgium.

Looking back at 2022's weather with months of analysis, the World Meteorological Organization said last year really was as bad as it seemed when people were muddling through it.

And about as bad as it gets — until more warming kicks in.

Lebanon is becoming increasingly engaged in augmenting investment in clean and renewable energy. Such an endeavor presents a range of high-impact co-benefits. Socially, it will grant the Lebanese population access to reliable energy; economically, it will drive new commerce and create new job opportunities, reduce prices in the case of exceeding supply hence boosting growth; while environmentally, it will improve air quality and reduce emissions. Countries from the MENA region, such as Syria and Iraq also face similar challenges as power outages prompt the population and institutions to search for clean and renewable energy solutions to cover their electricity needs, thus creating promising business prospects in this sector. 

As demand has weighed heavily on Lebanon, due to its budget deficit, the country seeks to have 30% of its electricity mix generated from renewable energy sources by 2030. However, this ambitious objective is faced with a number of obstacles such as the country's power sector which suffers from a significant supply-demand imbalance, simply depicted as high generation costs and a substantial lack of financial sustainability. Electricité du Liban's (EDL) available installed capacity is 1,616 MW, which contrasts with a peak demand of up to 3,000 MW compensated by high private generator subscriptions, the deterioration of buying power, and the skyrocketing fuel prices. 

A Dutch salvage company has reached agreement with the United Nations to pump oil from a rusting tanker off the coast of war-ravaged Yemen in a move hailed as a "critical milestone" in moves to avert a possible environmental disaster, its parent company announced Thursday.

Boskalis said that its Smit Salvage subsidiary has reached agreement with the U.N. Development Program to transfer more than one million barrels of oil from the decaying tanker FSO Safer. A specialist support ship, the Ndeavor, is setting sail Friday to the east African nation of Djibouti to prepare for the mission, the company said.

Spain's prime minister has warned lawmakers that the acute drought afflicting the southern European country has become one of its leading long-term concerns.

"The government of Spain and I are aware that the debate surrounding drought is going to be one of the central political and territorial debates of our country over the coming years," Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez told the Madrid-based Parliament.

The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are now losing more than three times as much ice a year as they were 30 years ago, according to a new comprehensive international study.

Using 50 different satellite estimates, researchers found that Greenland's melt has gone into hyperdrive in the last few years. Greenland's average annual melt from 2017 to 2020 was 20% more a year than at the beginning of the decade and more than seven times higher than its annual shrinkage in the early 1990s.

European Union lawmakers have adopted key pieces of a package designed to achieve the EU's climate goals of cutting emissions of the gases that cause global warming by 55% over this decade.

European Parliament members approved deals to reform the 27-nation bloc's emissions trading system, introduce a so-called carbon border adjustment mechanism and to create a new hardship fund for vulnerable households and small businesses affected by higher fuel costs arising from the new measures.

Battered by three intense cyclones in the space of a year, southeast Madagascar is experiencing the knock-on effect of those climatic disasters: "catastrophic" hunger in remote, inaccessible areas that is gaining little international attention, humanitarian groups say.

Cyclone Batsirai hit in February 2022, followed two weeks later by Cyclone Emnati. Then, Cyclone Freddy made landfall on the Indian Ocean island in February of this year. The combined impact left 60%-90% of farming areas in the southeast badly damaged and food crops largely destroyed, according to a report by UNICEF and Madagascar's National Office for Nutrition.