Schoolchildren in the Iranian capital Tehran were told to stay home on Wednesday because of a spike in air pollution levels in the metropolis of more than nine million people.

Teenage climate activists in Nigeria's largest city are recycling trash into runway outfits for a "Trashion Show."

Chinedu Mogbo, founder of Greenfingers Wildlife Initiative, a conservation group working with the activists, said the show was designed to raise awareness about environmental pollution.

An impassioned plea for climate justice and compensation for vulnerable nations from a 10-year-old Ghanaian activist moved staid and stalled diplomats to their feet Friday.

Nakeeyat Dramani Sam scolded delegates at this year's U.N. climate talks, saying they would act faster to rein in global warming if they were her age.

Next year, the water will come. The pipes have been laid to Ata Yigit's sprawling farm in Turkey's southeast connecting it to a dam on the Euphrates River. A dream, soon to become a reality, he says.

He's already grown a small corn patch on some of the water. The golden stalks are tall and abundant. "The kernels are big," he says, proudly. Soon he'll be able to water all his fields.

Israel and Jordan signed a declaration of intent on Thursday at the U.N. climate conference to conserve and protect their shared Jordan River — a sacred waterway nearly running dry because of climate change, pollution and other threats.

The agreement, struck at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, where world leaders are discussing how to mitigate the escalating impact from a changing climate, marks an important, albeit initial, step in cooperation.

As international climate talks in the Egyptian desert go into their final days, negotiators are trying to move key countries' lines in the sand on multiple issues, including compensation for climate disasters, phasing down all fossil fuel use and additional financial help for poor nations.

The final document from the annual U.N. climate gathering, known as COP27, is required to be unanimous. There are at least half a dozen instances where nations are "taking negotiations hostage" by taking hardline, seemingly inflexible stances, said Alden Meyer, a long-time negotiations observer at the think tank E3G.

After Typhoon Haiyan's towering waves flattened scores of Philippines villages, Jeremy Garing spent days helping with recovery from the historic storm that left more than 7,300 people dead or missing and inflicted billions of dollars in damage.

"I keep helping other people, but then at the end, you find out that all of your family is gone," Garing said, recalling those terrible times in 2013. "It's so painful."

Below the turquoise waters off the coast of Australia is one of the world's natural wonders, an underwater rainbow jungle teeming with life that scientists say is showing some of the clearest signs yet of climate change.

The Great Barrier Reef, battered but not broken by climate change impacts, is inspiring hope and worry alike as researchers race to understand how it can survive a warming world. Authorities are trying to buy the reef time by combining ancient knowledge with new technology. They are studying coral reproduction in hopes to accelerate regrowth and adapt it to handle hotter and rougher seas.

Men usually outnumber and outrank women negotiators in climate talks, except when it comes to global warming's thorniest diplomatic issue this year — reparations for climate disasters.

The issue of polluting nations paying vulnerable countries is handed over to women, who got the issue on the agenda after 30 years. Whether this year's United Nations climate talks in Egypt succeed or fail mostly will come down to the issue called loss and damage in international negotiations, officials and experts say. It's an issue that intertwines equity and economics, balancing the needs of those hurt and those who would pay.

On the Greek island of Naxos, two divers reeled in not the catch of the day but a jumble of cable, rope, fishing nets and old clothes from the seafloor.