Brazilian environmental and Indigenous organizations, together with some companies, are urging the United States to come through with promised funding for forest protection and deal directly with people who live in the forest, have protected it and, they say, "are directly affected by the escalating deforestation."

More than 330 organizations and companies signed a letter released late Monday ahead of a hearing scheduled for Thursday in the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee to discuss a bill introduced in November by House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer. The bill, known as Amazon21, would create a $9 billion fund administered by the U.S. State Department to finance forest conservation and natural carbon absorption in developing countries.

Schoolchildren in a northern New Mexico community that had been threatened by a wildfire were expected to resume in-person classes Tuesday while residents on the fire's northern edges remained under evacuation orders.

The West Las Vegas School District said exceptions would be made for students still displaced by what's the largest wildfire burning in the U.S. or those whose health has been affected by the smoke.

The world is creeping closer to the warming threshold international agreements are trying to prevent, with nearly a 50-50 chance that Earth will temporarily hit that temperature mark within the next five years, teams of meteorologists across the globe predicted.

With human-made climate change continuing, there's a 48% chance that the globe will reach a yearly average of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels of the late 1800s at least once between now and 2026, a bright red signal in climate change negotiations and science, a team of 11 different forecast centers predicted for the World Meteorological Organization late Monday.

Deforestation detected in the Brazilian Amazon broke all records for the month of April, and that followed similar new records set in January and February, reflecting a worrisome uptick in destruction in a state deep within the rainforest.

Satellite alerts of deforestation for April corresponded to more than 1,000 square kilometers (nearly 400 square miles), the highest figure for that month in seven years of record-keeping and 74% more than the same month in 2021, which was the prior record.

In the course of a single year, University of Maine climate scientist Jacquelyn Gill lost both her mother and her stepfather. She struggled with infertility, then during research in the Arctic, she developed embolisms in both lungs, was transferred to an intensive care unit in Siberia and nearly died. She was airlifted back home and later had a hysterectomy. Then the pandemic hit.

Her trials and her perseverance, she said, seemed to make her a magnet for emails and direct messages on Twitter "asking me how to be hopeful, asking me, like, what keeps me going?"

Dangerous, gusty winds were expected to continue Monday across northeast New Mexico, complicating the fight against wildfires that threaten thousands of homes in mountainous rural communities.

The region's largest city — Las Vegas, New Mexico, home to 13,000 people — was largely safe from danger after firefighters mostly stopped a blaze there from moving east. But the northern and southern flanks of the wildfire proved trickier to contain as wind gusts topped 50 mph (80 kph).

Humans don't know what they're missing under the surface of a busy shipping channel in the "cruise capital of the world." Just below the keels of massive ships, an underwater camera provides a live feed from another world, showing marine life that's trying its best to resist global warming.

That camera in Miami's Government Cut is just one of the many ventures of a marine biologist and a musician who've been on a 15-year mission to raise awareness about dying coral reefs by combining science and art to bring undersea life into pop culture.

Weather conditions described as potentially historic were on tap for New Mexico on Saturday and for the next several days as hundreds of firefighters and a fleet of airplanes and helicopters worked feverishly to bolster lines around the largest fire burning in the U.S.

Many families already have been left homeless and thousands of residents have evacuated due to flames that have charred large swaths of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in northeastern New Mexico.

Firefighters in New Mexico took advantage of diminished winds to build more fire lines and clear combustible brush near homes close to the fringes of the largest wildfire burning in the U.S. They did so ahead of what is expected to be several consecutive days of intense hot, dry and extremely windy weather that could fan the blaze.

"Today, the conditions were kind of moderated," Dan Pearson, a fire behavior analyst, said during a largely hopeful evening update by the U.S. Forest Service and law enforcement officials. "And tomorrow is going to be another good day."

Jacqueline Vázquez was sitting on the couch when her phone rang.

She had just returned from a government office where she filed a complaint about illegal construction in an ecological reserve. The reserve is dedicated to one of the island's largest mangrove forests near her neighborhood in southern Puerto Rico.