The World Bank said coal was no cure for global poverty on Wednesday, rejecting a main industry argument for building new fossil fuel projects in developing countries.

In a rebuff to coal, oil and gas companies, Rachel Kyte, the World Bank climate change envoy, said continued use of coal was exacting a heavy cost on some of the world’s poorest countries, in local health impacts as well as climate change, which is imposing even graver consequences on the developing world.

An urgent attempt to study the rate at which Greenland’s mighty ice sheets are melting has been launched by Nasa. The aim of the six-year project, called Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG), is to understand how fast the world’s warming seas are now eroding the edges of the island’s vast icecaps. Warming air temperatures are already causing considerable glacier loss there, but the factors involving the sea that laps the bases of its great ice masses, and which is also heating up, are less well understood.

Greenland contains vast reservoirs of ice which, if completely melted, would raise world sea levels by more than six meters. However, some influences on its current dramatic melting are poorly understood. Hence the decision to launch OMG, an acronym that the project leader, Joshua Willis, admits he “barely squeezed past the censors”.

India has retained its forecast for this year's monsoon rains at 88 percent of the long-period average as a strengthening El Nino weather pattern is likely to trim rainfall in August-September to 84 percent, raising fears of the first drought in six years.

In a country where nearly half of farmland lacks irrigation, poor rainfall in the second half of the June-September monsoon season may stoke food inflation and limit ability of India's central bank to cut lending rates.

A historic fort threatened by melting permafrost in one of the most remote locations on Earth might be preserved thanks to 3D technology.

Fort Conger on Ellesmere Island was established in 1875 by British explorers looking for the North Pole.

The UAE has been named as one of the top 10 markets for green building space by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC).

The USGBC, a not-for profit organisation, oversees the Leed (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) green building rating system.

The creation of Europe’s largest man-made nature reserve, which will transform farmland into coastal marshland using material excavated during the Crossrail project, is one significant step nearer completion.

Wallasea Island Wild Coast project is using more than 3m tonnes of material excavated from London to raise part of the Essex island by an average of 1.5m, to create lagoons across 670 hectares of farmland – an area more than twice the size of the City of London – and restore the marshland it once was 400 years ago.

Some of the biggest U.S. corporate names lately offered their support - and billions of dollars in green financing pledges - to buttress the Obama administration's quest for a global agreement on combating climate change.

Google, Apple, Goldman Sachs and 10 other well-known companies joined the White House in launching the American Business Act on Climate Pledge, a campaign that the White House said would inject $140 billion in low-carbon investments into the global economy.

Panama's government has declared a state of emergency as it faces a drought that has prompted water restrictions, depleted reservoirs and affected shipping through its bustling canal. 

The government blamed the El Nino weather phenomenon for the major drought. The state of emergency declared Tuesday also sets up a government board tasked with rushing to deliver a water security plan in under four months.

Environmental scientists tested a key U.S. river Tuesday for signs of a toxic waste spill from a botched Colorado mine clean-up that prompted a state of emergency in the desert Southwest.

What started as a three-million-gallon (11.4 million liter) orange-hued plume last Wednesday in the swift-moving Animas River dissolved from view as it made its way down the slower San Juan River in New Mexico.

Kenya has pledged to cut its carbon emissions 30% below business-as-usual levels by 2030, ahead of a landmark UN climate summit in Paris later this year.

The East African country is a very small carbon emitter in global rankings, on a par with Singapore and Mongolia, but the move was hailed by campaigners as evidence that developing countries could develop without fossil fuels.