A British watchdog Wednesday hit out at HSBC for adverts promoting its green initiatives that failed to highlight the bank's contributions to greenhouse gas emissions.

After losing four relatives to respiratory illness, Zeina Matar fled her hometown north of Lebanon's capital where she says a decaying power plant generates little electricity but very deadly pollution.

Around 34,000 homes could be inundated or isolated in Victoria state as a flood emergency continues across parts of Australia's southeast, an official said Monday.

Victoria is the worst-affected state with some towns experiencing the highest river peaks in decades. The states of New South Wales and Tasmania were also experiencing flooding in an emergency that began last week.

The chair of an influential negotiating bloc in the upcoming United Nations climate summit in Egypt has called for compensation for poorer countries suffering from climate change to be high up on the agenda.

Madeleine Diouf Sarr, who chairs the Least Developed Countries group, told The Associated Press that the November conference — known as COP27 — should "capture the voice and needs of the most climate-vulnerable nations and deliver climate justice."

Homes were flooded in Melbourne and other cities in Australia's southeast on Friday with rivers forecast to remain dangerously high for days.

About 70 residents were told to leave the suburb of Maribyrnong in Melbourne's northwest, along with hundreds in the Victoria state cities of Benalla and Wedderburn, authorities said. Melbourne is Australia's second-most populous city with 5 million people.

India's renewables sector is booming, with the country projected to add 35 to 40 gigawatts of renewable energy annually until 2030, enough to power up to 30 million more homes each year, a report said Thursday.

The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis estimated that India, the third largest energy-consuming country in the world, will reach 405 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity by 2030. It's expected to surpass the government's target of producing 50% of its electricity from non-fossil fuel sources by the end of the decade.

A senior German state official announced his resignation Wednesday amid questions over his management of deadly floods that hit his region last year.

Roger Lewentz, the interior minister of the western state of Rhineland-Palatinate for the past 11 years, said he was "taking the political responsibility for mistakes that were made in my area of responsibility."

Some 477 pilot whales have died after stranding themselves on two remote New Zealand beaches over recent days, officials say.

None of the stranded whales could be refloated and all either died naturally or were euthanized in a "heartbreaking" loss, said Daren Grover, the general manager of Project Jonah, a nonprofit group which helps rescue whales.

Gopher tortoises — burrowers whose extensive homes shelter many other animals — are generally doing well and need federal protection only in the small area where they were declared threatened 35 years ago, the government said Tuesday.

Thanks to extensive conservation work and recently discovered populations, Georgia's state reptile is no longer a candidate for protection in the bulk of its range: Florida, south Georgia, most of coastal Alabama and a sliver of South Carolina, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said.

New Zealand's government on Tuesday proposed taxing the greenhouse gasses that farm animals make from burping and peeing as part of a plan to tackle climate change.

The government said the farm levy would be a world first, and that farmers should be able to recoup the cost by charging more for climate-friendly products.