Eighty-five sites on the London Underground are at high and rising risk of flooding, according to a report that says it is “only a matter of time” before serious flooding strikes.

The World Bank has made a “fundamental shift” in its role of alleviating global poverty, by refocusing its financing efforts towards tackling climate change, the group said on Thursday.

More than 250 Malaysian schools were closed on Monday due to a heatwave brought on by the El Nino weather phenomenon which is severely affecting food production and causing chronic water shortages in many countries.

France's oldest nuclear power plant, scheduled for closure in 2018, could be turned into a factory producing electric cars or batteries, the French environment minister said Sunday.

Lake Kariba on the Zambezi River border between Zimbabwe and Zambia used to be dotted with hundreds of commercial fishing rigs, while local fishermen in small makeshift boats would catch enough bream for their livelihood.

Now the fishermen are standing on shore praying for rain as drought has shrunk the water level of the world's biggest man-made lake by volume to a record low.

Global warming could make the planet far hotter than currently projected because today's scientific models do not correctly account for the influence of clouds, researchers said this week.

The study in the journal Science was led by researchers at Yale University and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

More than 120 countries have said they are ready to sign the UN's accord to fight global warming, French ecology minister Segolene Royal said Wednesday. 

Venezuelan workers will get Fridays off for the next two months as part of an emergency plan to save electricity, the president said.

Venezuela has the world's largest proven oil reserves but its economy is a mess, with rampant inflation, shortages of goods as basic as soap and toilet paper and constant blackouts.

Almost half of all natural World Heritage Sites, including the Great Barrier Reef and Machu Picchu, are threatened by industrial activities such as mining, oil exploration and illegal logging, conservation group WWF warned Wednesday.

The 114 threatened sites, virtually half the total listed by UNESCO, provide food, water, shelter and medicine to over 11 million people -- more than the population of Portugal, according to a WWF-commissioned report.

The environmental authorities in Mexico City will keep 40 percent of cars off the roads on Wednesday because of extremely high pollution levels, officials said.

"The Greater Capital Area Environmental Commission (CAME) is activating extraordinary measures due to high ozone levels in the metropolitan area of ​​the Valley of Mexico," CAME said in a statement together with city, regional and federal authorities.