Germany's main industry lobby group warned Tuesday that factories may have to throttle production or halt it completely because plunging water levels on the Rhine River are making it harder to transport cargo.

Water levels on the Rhine at Emmerich, near the Dutch border, dropped by a further four centimeters (1.6 inches) in 24 hours, hitting zero on the depth gauge.

German officials expressed mounting anger Monday at the slow flow of information from Poland about a polluted border river as experts raced to discover what killed tens of thousands of fish.

German Environment Minister Steffi Lemke demanded a transparent and full investigation into the cause for the massive fish die-off in the Oder River after having met her Polish counterpart in Szczecin on Sunday evening.

EDUCITY & Beirut Expo have announced that Middle East Clean Energy, the premiere renewable and sustainable energy trade fair and conference in Lebanon and the wider Levant, will be held in Beirut on September 7-9, 2022.

Middle East Clean Energy 2022 is organized in response to an unprecedented rise in demand for modern equipment and technologies that leverage renewable energy in Lebanon and the region. In 2021 alone in Lebanon, despite its crisis, customers spent $800 million on clean energy solutions. 

Poland has deployed soldiers to help clean up the Oder River, which runs along the border with Germany, after 10 tons of dead fish surfaced from the waterway in what one official described as an "ecological catastrophe."

An association of fishers in Zielona Gora, a city in Western Poland, said Friday that it was suspending fishing in the river due to still-unconfirmed reports in the German media saying the river could be contaminated with mercury.

Blazes that have torched tens of thousands of hectares of forest in France, Spain and Portugal have made 2022 a record year for wildfire activity in southwestern Europe, the EU's satellite monitoring service said Friday. 

Amid a prolonged heatwave that saw temperature records tumble, the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) said that France had in the last three months reached the highest levels of carbon pollution from wildfires since records began in 2003.

Forced to start picking grapes much earlier than normal because of torrid temperatures, winemakers across France are worrying that grape quality will suffer from the climate-induced stress.

The exceptionally dry conditions spread from the rugged hills of Herault along the Mediterranean, where picking is already underway, to the normally verdant Alsace in the northeast.

Once, a river ran through it. Now, white dust and thousands of dead fish cover the wide trench that winds amid rows of trees in France's Burgundy region in what was the Tille River in the village of Lux.

From dry and cracked reservoirs in Spain to falling water levels on major arteries like the Danube, the Rhine and the Po, an unprecedented drought is afflicting nearly half of the European continent. It is damaging farm economies, forcing water restrictions, causing wildfires and threatening aquatic species.

Firefighting teams and equipment from six EU nations started to arrive in France on Thursday to help battle a spate of wildfires, including a fierce blaze in the parched southwest that has forced thousands to evacuate.

Torrential rains across southwestern Yemen and the country's capital of Sanaa have triggered flashfloods and collapsed homes, killing at least 38 people over the past two days, officials said Thursday.

Scores of homes in Sanaa and the provinces of Dhamar and Ibb have completely collapsed or have been significantly damaged, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media.

Landfills are releasing a significant amount of planet-warming methane into the atmosphere from the decomposition of waste, a study suggests.

Scientists used satellite data from four major cities worldwide — Delhi and Mumbai in India, Lahore in Pakistan and Buenos Aires in Argentina — and found that city-level emissions in 2018 and 2019 were 1.4 to 2.6 times higher than earlier estimates.