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The past few months have been another stark reminder that the climate crisis is getting worse.

The Caribbean island of Barbuda still bears the battle scars of its most brutal encounter with climate change. In 2017, Hurricane Irma, a Category 5 leviathan of unprecedented power, roared across its pristine turquoise waters.

The island’s only storm shelter collapsed, with 300 people hiding inside. Around 95 per cent of Barbuda’s buildings were wrecked, including homes, schools and critical infrastructure.

It was something many in the village of Wada’a, Sudan, had never seen before.

A couple of months ago, workers began channeling water from a small dam-like structure into the parched farmland surrounding the community of 17,000, which is in the state of North Darfur.

In another place or at another time, this simple act of irrigation might not have seemed remarkable.

A few dozen kilometres inland from northern Panama’s coast is the Hato Chami school.

Set amid winding roads, green trees and stunning mountains, it has more than 1,000 pupils, most of whom hail from one of Panama’s largest indigenous groups, the Ngäbe.

Each morning in Addis Ababa, the bustling capital of Ethiopia, the same scene plays out.

As the sun rises, thousands of commuters jostle for space on public minibuses. Others hop on the city’s light rail line, the first network of its kind in Africa. Notably absent are bicycles; cyclists are not something seen regularly on these streets.

African leaders will gather in Nairobi, Kenya next week for Africa Climate Week, an annual get-together where they are expected to discuss ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while adapting to the mounting fallout from the climate crisis.

The rhythmic sound of voices singing in harmony floats across Mozambique’s Limpopo River as several women stand ankle deep in the sticky mud along its banks.

In a well-rehearsed routine, one woman scoops up sediment with a hoe while another buries a fragile mangrove sapling in the void.

The joyous songs of the women obscure the difficulty of their job.

The monsoon season, which runs from June through September, has become a nervous time for the people of Nepal.

The climate crisis has supercharged the fallout from the annual rains, which are triggering an increasing number of floods and landslides, disasters that are especially devastating in a nation defined by its vertigo-inducing slopes.

Timor-Leste has a rich ecosystem of marine biodiversity coral reefs and mangroves. But this island nation in South East Asia is also one of the most vulnerable to extreme weather and slow-onset climatic events, like sea level rise. 

The territory of the Wet’suwet’en Indigenous Peoples sits in the shadows of Canada’s snow-capped western Coast Mountains. Dotted by pine trees and laced with glacier-fed lakes, much of it is a vast wilderness that has supported the Wet’suwet’en for centuries.

But the climate crisis is threatening to change that.

It was an ecological time bomb.

In mid-2022, a toxic algal bloom began to quickly spread through the Oder River, which in part straddles the border between Germany and Poland.

A United Nations summit on the state of the world’s food systems opens today in Rome, Italy, a gathering that comes amid mounting concerns about the planet’s long-term ability to feed a fast-growing human population.

In recent weeks, temperatures have soared around the globe, with a string of heatwaves baking cities from the United States to China.

When it came time to water her rice fields, farmer Im Heng used to have to lug a diesel-powered water pump across her property in Cambodia’s southern Takeo province.

Along with being heavy, the machine was expensive to operate and spewed climate-altering greenhouse gases.

But the generator is now a thing of the past.

While summer in the northern hemisphere is just a few days old, it is already proving to be a scorcher, with heat waves blanketing countries from China to the United States.

Near the Issyk-Kul Lake in the eastern mountains of the Kyrgyz Republic lies Jyrgalan, a village of 1,000 inhabitants. The scenic village was once a hidden gem but is quickly gaining traction as a tourist destination, with biking and hiking trails having multiplied. But this is posing challenges such as increased waste generation, including plastics.

Every day in the town of Baroueli in south-central Mali, Radio Soumpou crackles with the weather for the coming days.

But this is no ordinary forecast. Along with predictions for temperature, humidity and precipitation, broadcasters discuss historic rainfall patterns and the risk of the spread of a millet-wasting disease known as mildew.

Belgium has provided a 3-million-euro grant to help the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) address the climate crisis. The funding will in part support UNEP’s efforts to help countries adapt to droughts, rising seas and the other ripple effects of climate change.

Farmer Nima Elmassad noticed the weather changing around seven years ago. In Sudan’s southern White Nile State, the rains began coming later and falling inconsistently. During the long, harsh dry season, her children had to travel three hours per day to collect water, and all but one dropped out of school. The family donkey that towed their water wagon became progressively weaker.

On World Wetlands Day, we look at how communities in Indonesia are turning to mangroves to buffer themselves against rising seas and more intense storms.

Armenia, a mountainous, landlocked country in the South Caucasus, is one of the most vulnerable countries in Europe and Central Asia to climate change. The nation’s average temperature has risen by more than 1.2°C since 1929, and changing climatic patterns have caused the degradation of important landscapes, including watersheds and wetlands.

The establishment of a Loss and Damage Fund was, for many, the highlight of the United Nations Climate Conference (COP 27) and the culmination of decades of pressure from climate-vulnerable developing countries.

In negotiations that went down to the wire over the weekend, countries reached a historic decision to establish and operationalize a loss and damage fund, particularly for nations most vulnerable to the climate crisis.