Aerial view from a Kyodo News helicopter on 15 August 2021 shows the flooded Saga Prefecture city of Takeo in southwestern Japan, following record-breaking rain. Photo: Kyodo News

Record rains lash wide areas of Japan, three feared dead after landslide – Japan braces for more torrential downpours – “I’ve experienced three floods like this so far, but this is the worst”

TOKYO, JAPAN (AFP) – Japan braced for further downpours on Sunday as rescuers sifted through flood and landslide damage after record rain that left at least three dead. Residents returned to check on their mud-covered homes in the southwest where nearly 2 million people were advised to urgently seek shelter on Saturday as rivers overflowed. […]

Indian National Disaster Response Force personnel rescue people from areas inundated with floodwaters on 26 July 2021 in Maharashtra state, India. Photo: National Disaster Response Force / EPA-EFE

India begins landslide, flood clean-up as deadly monsoon rains ease – “We’ve seen floods before in 1965 and 2005, but this was worse than before”

26 July 2021 (AFP) – Rescuers waded through waist-deep mud in western India Monday to reach injured residents and start a massive clean-up after heavy monsoon rains triggered landslides and floods that killed 159 people. India’s western coast was hit by severe rainstorms over several days, with a quarter of a million people evacuated from […]

Firefighters work at the scene of forest fire near Andreyevsky village outside Tyumen, western Siberia, Russia, on 16 June 2021. Wildfires in Siberia are releasing record amounts of greenhouse gases, scientists say, contributing to global warming. Photo: Maksim Slutsky / AP Photo

Siberia hit by unprecedented wildfires – 1.5 million hectares burn after driest weather in 150 years – “Everything is on fire”

By Andrew Roth 20 July 2021 MOSCOW (The Guardian) – Every morning and evening for the last few days, shifts of young villagers have headed out into the taiga forest around Teryut with a seemingly impossible task: to quell the raging fires that have burned closer and closer for a month, shrouding this remote eastern […]

Aerial view of vehicles stranded in floodwater on 20 July 2021 after record rainfall in Zhengzhou, Henan Province of China. Photo: Jiao Xiaoxiang / VCG / Getty Images

Rescue efforts launched after record floods in central China displace 1.2 million – “Worst rain in a thousand years” in Henan province, “worst in Zhengzhou history” with a year’s worth of rain falling in a single day

By Alicia Chen, Lyric Li, and Eva Dou 21 July 2021 (The Washington Post) – Wang Peng rushed to join flood rescue efforts in Zhengzhou on Wednesday, as the central Chinese city was inundated with record rain. But his group of volunteers found themselves overwhelmed, with streets turned into rivers. “Once I got to the […]

Global map showing COVID-19 vaccine doses administered per 100 people, 20 July 2021. The map shows the huge difference in vaccination rates between some wealthy nations and the rest of the world. Graphic: Max Roser / Our World In Data

Map shows striking vaccination divide between rich countries and the rest of the world – “We are making conscious choices right now not to protect those in need”

By Sinéad Baker 19 July 2021 (Business Insider) – A map shows the huge difference in vaccination rights between some rich countries and the rest of the world. The graph, produced by Max Roser of the site Our World in Data, shows the proportion of each country to receive at least one dose of a coronavirus […]

Satellite view of smoke from wildfires in the Yakutia region of Siberia, 18 July 2021. Photo: NASA / EOSDIS

Siberia permafrost ablaze with hundreds of wildfires in world’s coldest region – Half are burning unchecked due to firefighter shortage – “Siberia is dying now”

13 July 2021 (The Siberian Times) – Wildfires on permafrost are ravaging Yakutia – or the Sakha Republic, the largest and coldest entity of the Russian Federation. The scale is mesmerising. There are some separate 300 fires, now covering 12,140 square kilometres – but only around half of these are being tackled, because they pose […]

Number of undernourished people and prevalence of undernourishment globally, 2005-2020. The number of undernourished people in the world has been on the rise since 2015 and is back to levels seen during the global financial crisis in 2008–2009. Graphic: FAO

UN: World hunger continued its six-year rise in 2020 – Up to 160 million more people faced hunger in 2020 than in 2019 – “The world is at a critical juncture”

12 July 2021 (UNFAO) – The world is in a very different place to where it was six years ago when it committed to the goal of ending hunger, food insecurity and all forms of malnutrition by 2030. At the time, we were optimistic that with transformative approaches, past progress could be accelerated, at scale, […]

Total greenhouse gas emissions from China and OECD nations, 1990-2019. In 2019, China’s GHG emissions passed the 14 gigaton threshold for the first time, reaching 14,093 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent (MMt CO2e). This represents a more than tripling of 1990 levels, and a 25 percent increase over the past decade. As a result, China’s share of the 2019 global emissions total of 52 gigatons rose to 27 percent. Data: Rhodium Group / UNFCCC. Graphic: Rhodium Group

China’s greenhouse gas emissions exceeded the developed world for the first time in 2019

By Kate Larsen, Hannah Pitt, Mikhail Grant, and Trevor Houser 6 May 2021 (Rhodium Group) – Each year Rhodium Group provides the most up-to-date global and country-level greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions estimates through the ClimateDeck (a partnership with Breakthrough Energy). In addition to our preliminary US and China GHG estimates for 2020, Rhodium provides annual estimates of economy-wide emissions—including all […]

Nouriel Roubini, professor of economics at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Photo: Simon Dawson / Bloomberg / Getty Images

Nouriel Roubini: Conditions in 2021 are ripe for another global financial crisis – “The stagflation of the 1970s will soon meet the debt crises of the post-2008 period”

By Nouriel Roubini 2 July 2021 (The Guardian) – In April, I warned that today’s extremely loose monetary and fiscal policies, when combined with a number of negative supply shocks, could result in 1970s-style stagflation (high inflation alongside a recession). In fact, the risk today is even bigger than it was then. After all, debt ratios in […]

Aerial view of smoke rising from fires at Long Loch and Derrickson Lake in Central Okanagan in Canada on 30 June 2021. Photo: B.C. Wildfire Service / Reuters

Unprecedented heat, hundreds dead, and a town destroyed – Climate change is frying the Northern Hemisphere in 2021 – “This is literally the deadliest weather on record for the U.S. Pacific Northwest and far southwest Canada region”

By Angela Dewan 4 July 2021 (CNN) – The tiny town of Lytton has come to hold a grim record. On Tuesday, it experienced Canada’s highest-ever temperature, in an unprecedented heatwave that has over a week killed hundreds of people and triggered more than 240 wildfires across British Columbia, most of which are still burning. Lytton […]

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