When the decades-long civil war that forced Samantha Pushpakumara from his village in north-central Sri Lanka ended, he was finally able to return home to a life of farming that he thought would give his family a stable future. That was until the rains didn't come.

Sri Lanka has been mired in drought for months, leading to severe water shortages that have left reservoirs dry and strained farming communities that depend on seasonal monsoons. Making matters worse, temperatures in many parts of the country have been higher than usual and high humidity has exacerbated the heat stress.

The International Monetary Fund is preparing to offer support to countries exposed to the effects of El Nino, the organization's director Kristalina Georgieva told AFP on Wednesday, expressing concern about food security.

COP31 opens in the Turkish city of Antalya on November 9 as countries grapple with record global temperatures, mounting climate damage and growing pressure to accelerate the shift away from planet-heating fossil fuels.

The Plan International charity said Monday that global warming has increased the risk of child marriages, teenage pregnancies and violence against girls.

World powers are flying delegates to the Pacific to haggle over the fight against global warming, and to see the plight of island nations surrounded by a rising ocean.

A wind turbine described by its developer as the world's tallest now rises 365 meters (1,197 feet) above the sparsely populated landscape of eastern Germany, surpassing the height of the Eiffel Tower.

The colossal turbine has been built at an existing wind farm in Lusatia, southeast of Berlin. Once a major center of lignite mining, the region has increasingly turned to renewable energy in recent years. The prototype reached its full height this week and is due to be inaugurated in mid-November.

Spring has finally arrived in the Southern Hemisphere and, in Chile, even the desert is blossoming.

Known as the driest nonpolar desert on Earth, a massive portion of the Atacama Desert has been covered in flowers after the El Niño weather pattern brought heavy rains to the region earlier this year. The unusually large amount of water allowed millions of seeds and bulbs to sprout and bloom, many of them after remaining dormant for decades.

It is the flood Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh City has learned to expect.

Forecasters warned on Sept. 27 that high tides could combine with heavy rain to increase the risk of flooding in Ho Chi Minh City, one of the world's most climate-vulnerable cities. As heavy rain combined with the tide on the evening of Sept. 30, the Saigon river and smaller waterways spilled onto the roads of Vietnam's commercial capital.

Tropical weather that surged onshore from the Pacific soaked more of the U.S. on Wednesday while forecasters announced yet another hurricane off the coast of Mexico.

The new hurricane, Rachel, is expected to develop rapidly and could become a major one with sustained winds topping 111 mph (178 kph). The storm was far offshore, however, and posed no threat to land.

Glaciers in Switzerland – the home to the most in the Alps – lost 5.5% of their ice volume this year, the second-biggest percentage drop on record due to heat waves and low winter snowfall, experts report.

"Alpine glaciers have no chance of surviving in the long term under such conditions," the GLAMOS Swiss glacier monitoring service and Swiss Academy of Sciences said in a statement released Thursday.