Droughts, flooding and a shrinking Lake Chad caused in part by climate change is fueling conflict and migration in the region and needs to be better addressed, a report said Thursday.

Human rights group Refugees International called for the issue to be central to a high-level international conference on the Lake Chad basin next week in Niamey, Niger's capital.

As Californians tally the damage from recent storms, some are taking stock of the rainwater captured by cisterns, catches, wells and underground basins — many built in recent years to provide relief to a state locked in decades of drought.

The banked rainwater is a rare bright spot from downpours that killed at least 20 people, crumbled hillsides and damaged thousands of homes.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres skewered oil firms on Wednesday for having "peddled the big lie" about their role in global warming, telling the World Economic Forum that they should be held accountable.

A tiger which escaped from a farm and roamed the countryside outside of Johannesburg for four days, attacking a man and killing several animals, was euthanized on Wednesday.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen met Wednesday with her Chinese counterpart and pledged an effort to manage differences and "prevent competition from becoming anything ever near conflict" as the two nations try to thaw relations.

Yellen's first face-to-face meeting with Vice Premier Liu He in Zurich is the highest-ranking contact between the two countries since their presidents agreed last November to look for areas of potential cooperation.

A polar bear has attacked and killed two people in a remote village in western Alaska, according to state troopers.

Alaska State Troopers said they received the report of the attack at 2:30 p.m. Tuesday in Wales, on the western tip of the Seward Peninsula, KTUU reported.

The rising cost of purchasing or leasing a vessel that can hold more than 1 million barrels of crude oil now in a rusting old tanker off the coast of war-torn Yemen is the latest obstacle to resolving the grave threat of massive environmental damage from a possible oil spill or explosion, the U.N. said Tuesday.

U.N. deputy spokesman Farhan Haq said the availability of very large crude oil tankers "has decreased in the past six months, basically due to events having to do with the war in Ukraine."

Eating one freshwater fish caught in a river or lake in the United States is the equivalent of drinking a month's worth of water contaminated with toxic "forever chemicals", new research said on Tuesday.

Despite joining industry groups committed to reaching carbon neutrality the world's top banks are continuing to finance new oil and gas projects incompatible with that objective, environmental activist groups warned Tuesday.

U.S. President Joe Biden will travel to flood-hit areas of California on Thursday, the White House said, as the country's most populous state cleans up from a devastating and lethal series of storms.