Global heat, greenhouse gases and sea levels all climbed to record highs last year, making 2015 the worst in modern times across a range of key environmental indicators, international scientists said Tuesday.

A dire picture of the Earth's health is painted in the State of the Climate report, a peer-reviewed 300-page tome that comes out once a year and is compiled by 450 scientists from around the world.

Dutch environmentalists said Tuesday they are suing the government over poor air quality, saying people's "fundamental" rights to good health were being infringed.

There's not a lot of green in the urban jungle of Sao Paulo, but thanks to Fernanda Danelon, restaurants in the Brazilian mega-city are turning their waste back into food at innovative gardens tucked amid the skyscrapers.

Danelon, a 43-year-old journalist by training, quit her day job two years ago to launch the Guandu Institute, which recycles restaurants' food waste and helps them set up gardens to put all that compost to good use.

A planned multi-billion-dollar new city near Singapore is attracting interest from investors with promises of luxury living but there are questions over its future owing to China's economic woes and warnings of environmental catastrophe.

Global warming will cost the world economy more than £1.5 trillion a year in lost productivity by 2030 as it becomes too hot to work in many jobs, according to a major new report.

In just 14 years' time in India, where some jobs are already shared by two people to allow regular breaks from the heat, the bill will be £340bn a year.

In even the bleakest climate change scenarios for the end of this century, science has offered hope that global warming would eventually slow down. But a new study published Monday snuffs out such hope, projecting temperatures that rise lockstep with carbon emissions until the last drops of oil and lumps of coal are used up.

Global temperatures will increase on average by 8 degrees Celsius (14.4 degrees F) over preindustrial levels by 2300 if all of Earth’s fossil fuel resources are burned, adding five trillion metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere, according to the research by Canadian scientists published in Nature Climate Change. In the Arctic, average temperatures would rise by 17 degrees C (30.6 degrees F).

In the Pamir Mountains of Central Asia, time has stopped working.

Communities in the region traditionally kept time by pegging it to environmental markers, such as melting snow or the first appearance of a migratory bird. But these “ecological calendars” have ceased to function properly due to the effects of climate change.

Solar Impulse 2 was on Monday approaching the end of its epic bid to become the first sun-powered airplane to circle the globe without a drop of fuel to promote renewable energy.

The first solar-powered plane to circle the world took off from Cairo on Sunday for Abu Dhabi, in the final leg of its journey.

Earlier this year media outlets around the world announced that February had broken global temperature records by a shocking amount. March broke all the records, too. In June our screens were covered with surreal images of Paris flooding, the Seine bursting its banks and flowing into the streets. In London, the floods sent water pouring into the tube system right in the heart of Covent Garden. Roads in south-east London became rivers two metres deep.

With such extreme events becoming more commonplace, few deny climate change any longer. Finally, a consensus is crystallising around one all-important fact: fossil fuels are killing us. We need to switch to clean energy, and fast.