Out of control bushfires forced residents in eastern Australia to flee their homes on Saturday, as other parts of the country braced for a heatwave due next week.

Thousands of activists from around the globe will simultaneously hit the streets of Madrid and Santiago on Friday to demand urgent action on the climate crisis from world leaders attending the COP25 summit.

The radical environmental activist group Extinction Rebellion on Thursday claimed the sabotage of 3,600 electric scooters in Paris and other French cities, saying the green image of the fashionable gadgets hid an "ecologically catastrophic" reality.

Japan, the Philippines and Germany top a list of countries worst hit by climate-enhanced extreme weather last year, with Madagascar and India close behind, researchers said Wednesday.

This decade is set to be the hottest in history, the United Nations said Tuesday in an annual assessment outlining the ways in which climate change is outpacing humanity's ability to adapt to it.

The chair of a two-week climate summit attended by nearly 200 countries warned at its opening Monday that those refusing to adjust to the planet's rising temperatures "will be on the wrong side of history."

Tens of thousands of people were sheltering in evacuation centres as powerful Typhoon Kammuri barreled towards the Philippines, threatening plans for the Southeast Asian Games events near the capital Manila.

Devastating impacts of global warming that threaten humanity are a pushback from Nature under assault, UN chief Antonio Guterres warned Sunday ahead of a key climate conference.

Air pollution forced the closure of schools and universities in parts of Iran on Saturday, including Tehran, which was cloaked by a cloud of toxic smog, state media reported.

The decision to shut schools and universities in the capital was announced late Friday by deputy governor Mohammad Taghizadeh, after a meeting of an emergency committee for air pollution.

Campaigners were preparing to occupy a vast opencast coal mine in eastern Germany on Saturday to put pressure on the government to phase out the fossil fuel -- a divisive issue in the country's rust belt.