Surveying the hills covered with near bone-dry pines stretching to the Pyrenees in the distance, Asier Larrañaga has reason to be on guard.

This part of northeast Spain is, like large swaths of the Mediterranean country, braced for wildfires due to the lethal combination of a prolonged drought, record-high temperatures and increasingly dense woods unable to adapt to a fast-changing climate.

The U.S. Department of Transportation is awarding almost $1.7 billion in grants for buying zero- and low-emission buses, with the money going to transit projects in 46 states and territories.

The grants will enable transit agencies and state and local governments to buy 1,700 U.S.-built buses, nearly half of which will have zero carbon emissions. Funding for the grants comes from the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure bill signed into law by President Joe Biden. The Democratic president has made it a priority to put more electric vehicles on the road — especially for schools and public transit — in an effort to contain the damage from climate change.

A new oil spill at a Shell facility in Nigeria has contaminated farmland and a river, upending livelihoods in the fishing and farming communities in part of the Niger Delta, which has long endured environmental pollution caused by the oil industry.

The National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency, or NOSDRA, told The Associated Press that the spill came from the Trans-Niger Pipeline operated by Shell that crosses through communities in the Eleme area of Ogoniland, a region where the London-based energy giant has faced decadeslong local pushback to its oil exploration.

Plumes of heat-trapping pollutants last billowed from the giant stacks of Komati Power Station in October, when the coal-fired plant that fed South Africa's hungry electrical grid for more than half a century was shut down to make way for a solar, wind and battery storage plant.

Converting Komati to be part of the clean energy revolution is seen as an important test case for coal-reliant South Africa, the world's 16th-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and developing nations elsewhere. It's supported by $497 million, most of it from the World Bank.

America's honeybee hives just staggered through the second highest death rate on record, with beekeepers losing nearly half of their managed colonies, an annual bee survey found.

But using costly and Herculean measures to create new colonies, beekeepers are somehow keeping afloat. Thursday's University of Maryland and Auburn University survey found that even though 48% of colonies were lost in the year that ended April 1, the number of United States honeybee colonies "remained relatively stable."

Environmentalists, ranchers and others have fought for years against lithium mining ventures in Nevada. Yet opposition to mining one particular desert tract for the silvery white metal used in electric car batteries is coming from unusual quarters: space.

An ancient Nevada lakebed beckons as a vast source of the coveted metal needed to produce cleaner electric energy and fight global warming. But NASA says the same site — flat as a tabletop and undisturbed like none other in the Western Hemisphere — is indispensable for calibrating the razor-sharp measurements of hundreds of satellites orbiting overhead.

Last summer's flooding in Pakistan killed at least 1,700 people, destroyed millions of homes, wiped out swaths of farmland, and caused billions of dollars in economic losses. All in a matter of months. At one point, a third of the country was underwater. Pakistani leaders and many scientists worldwide blame climate change for the unusually early and heavy monsoon rains.

A year on, the country hasn't fully recovered. The aftermath runs the length of the country; survivors living in makeshift huts where their homes used to be, millions of children out of school, damaged infrastructure waiting to be repaired.

It is a sight in decline across Switzerland: glaciers sprawled across the Alps, formed over centuries of snow and sediment packed into a crystalline mass.

With the glaciers now dwindling at an alarming rate because of human-caused climate change, team members of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology monitor what's left in an attempt to slow their demise.

Just a dot on the horizon at first, the bug-like and surprisingly quiet electrically-powered craft buzzes over Paris and its traffic snarls, treating its doubtless awestruck passenger to privileged vistas of the Eiffel Tower and the city's signature zinc-grey rooftops before landing him or her with a gentle downward hover. And thus, if all goes to plan, could a new page in aviation history be written.

After years of dreamy and not always credible talk of skies filled with flying, non-polluting electric taxis, the aviation industry is preparing to deliver a future that it says is now just around the corner.

A line of severe storms has produced multiple tornadoes on the Rolling Plains in Texas, killing at least three people and causing significant damage around the northern town of Matador.

The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal reported that the storms also produced softball-size hail and wind gusts topping 100 mph (161 kph) in other communities including Jayton, which also was under a tornado warning as the line moved southeast Wednesday night, according to the National Weather Service in Lubbock.