Former US president Barack Obama launched a veiled barb at his successor Donald Trump on Friday, saying there is "a pause in American leadership" on climate change.

The open burning of waste in Lebanon poses serious health risks, Human Rights Watch warned in a report released on Friday, blaming decades-old, across the board government failure.

The New York-based watchdog said the crisis, which escalated in 2015 when waste management largely collapsed across Lebanon, was a particular threat for children and old people, and constituted a rights violation.

Burkina Faso and France on Wednesday launched West Africa's biggest solar farm, a 33-megawatt facility designed to power tens of thousands of households and ease dependence on imported energy.

Evacuation centres and hotels in Bali filled up Tuesday with tens of thousands seeking refuge as a volcano on the Indonesian resort island threatened to erupt, forcing the closure of the main airport for a second day. 

Stranded tourists hunted for accommodation while frightened villagers living in Mount Agung's shadow made their way to more than 200 evacuation centres as the mountain gushed smoke and ash.

A Vietnamese court on Monday jailed a blogger for seven years for disseminating anti-state "propaganda" including articles which supported protests against a Taiwanese firm responsible for a toxic leak.

Coral bred in one part of the Great Barrier Reef was successfully transplanted into another area, Australian scientists said Sunday, in a project they hope could restore damaged ecosystems around the world.

A boatload of tourists in the far eastern Russian Arctic thought they were seeing clumps of ice on the shore, before the jaw-dropping realisation that some 200 polar bears were roaming on the mountain slope.

"It was a completely unique situation," said Alexander Gruzdev, director of the Wrangel Island nature reserve where the encounter in September happened. "We were all gobsmacked, to be honest."

Endangered Amazon hardwood trafficked by a Brazilian exporter allegedly behind the massacre of nine farmers this year is being sold unimpeded around the world, according to environmental pressure group Greenpeace.

The group said Tuesday that the purchase of products by importers from as far apart as Japan and the United States illustrates lack of control over a logging industry ravaging the world's greatest rainforest.

Regulators in the U.S. state of Nebraska on Monday granted a key approval needed for construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, the source of a nearly decade-long feud between environmental activists and the energy industry.

Officials in Nebraska granted TransCanada the final major permit it needs to begin construction of the 1,180-mile (1,900 kilometer) pipeline, days after a leak in the existing Keystone line spilled around 5,000 barrels of oil in South Dakota.

Negotiations to bolster the climate-saving Paris Agreement, crafted over two decades, closed in Bonn Saturday, deflated but not derailed by Donald Trump's rejection of the treaty and defence of fossil fuels.