The U.N.'s refugee agency said Friday that destruction from flooding has displaced more than 3.4 million people in west and central Africa.

UNHCR said Friday that Nigeria's worst floods in a decade have killed hundreds, displaced 1.3 million residents and affected over 2.8 million people in the West African nation of 218 million.

Search online for the little town of Shishmaref and you'll see homes perilously close to the ocean, and headlines that warn this Native community in western Alaska is on the verge of disappearing.

Climate change is partially to blame for the rising seas, flooding, erosion and loss of protective ice and land that are threatening this Inupiat village of about 600 people just a few miles from the Arctic Circle.

At least 31 people died and nine others were missing in flash floods and landslides set off by torrential rains that swamped a southern Philippine province overnight and trapped some residents on their roofs, officials said Friday.

Most of the victims were swept away by rampaging floodwaters and drowned or were hit by debris-laden mudslides in three towns in hard-hit Maguindanao province, said Naguib Sinarimbo, the interior minister for a five-province Muslim autonomous region run by former guerrillas.

The Johannes Vermeer masterpiece "Girl with a Pearl Earring" on Thursday became the latest artwork targeted by climate activists in a protest at the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague. The priceless work reportedly was not damaged.

A video posted on Twitter showed one man pouring a can of what appear to be tomatoes over another man who appeared to attempt to glue his head to the world famous painting.

The world, especially richer carbon polluting nations, remains "far behind" and is not doing nearly enough -- not even promising to do enough -- to reach any of the global goals limiting future warming, a United Nations report said.

That "highly inadequate" inaction means the window is closing, but not quite shut yet, on efforts to keep future warming to just a few more tenths of a degree from now, according to Thursday's Emissions Gap report from the United Nations Environment Program.

Spiraling energy costs caused by various economic factors and the Ukraine war could be a turning point toward cleaner energy, the International Energy Agency said in a report Thursday. It found the global demand for fossil fuels, including coal, oil, and natural gas, is set to peak or plateau in the next few decades.

The report looked at scenarios based on current policies and said that coal use will fall back within the next few years, natural gas demand will reach a plateau by the end of the decade and rising sales of electric vehicles mean that the need for oil will level off in the mid-2030s before ebbing slightly by mid-century. Total emissions are currently going up each year, but slowly.

A battle is brewing around Europe's rooftop over the planet's most precious resource.

Bountiful for centuries, the crystal-clear waters issuing from the Alps could become increasingly contested as climate change and glacier melt affect the lives of tens of millions in the coming years: Italy wants them for crop irrigation in the spring and summer. Swiss authorities want to hold up flows to ensure their hydroelectric plants can rev up when needed.

Extreme weather from climate change triggered hunger in nearly 100 million people and increased heat deaths by 68% in vulnerable populations worldwide as the world's "fossil fuel addiction" degrades public health each year, doctors reported in a new study.

Worldwide the burning of coal, oil, natural gas and biomass forms air pollution that kills 1.2 million people a year, including 11,800 in the United States, according to a report Tuesday in the prestigious medical journal Lancet.

The United Nations says current pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions put the planet on course to blow past the limit for global warming countries agreed to in the 2015 Paris climate accord.

The U.N. climate office said Wednesday that its latest estimate based on 193 national emissions targets would see temperatures rise to 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial averages by the end of the century.

A strong earthquake rocked a large swathe of the northern Philippines, injuring at least 26 people and forcing the closure of an international airport and the evacuation of patients in a hospital, officials said Wednesday.

The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology said Tuesday night's magnitude 6.4 quake, which was set off by movement in a local fault, was centered 9 kilometers (5 miles) northwest of Lagayan town in Abra province at a depth of 11 kilometers (7 miles).