The Paris Olympics says it was far less polluting than recent Games but is not claiming to have been "carbon neutral" despite funding projects to compensate for its emissions.

Organizers said Wednesday that this summer's Olympics and Paralympics generated 1.59 million tons of climate-warming carbon dioxide, from the food athletes ate and construction of their rooms to flights that spectators took and energy that powered events.

Environmental groups are asking the U.S. government to do more to protect Rocky Mountain grizzly bears before the next Trump administration decides the big bruins' future.

The groups petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Wednesday to take steps to connect the bears' separate populations. They want federal wildlife officials to encourage grizzlies to roam from the Yellowstone ecosystem in Wyoming across parts of Idaho and Montana to the area in and around Glacier National Park.

U.S. wildlife officials announced a decision Tuesday to extend federal protections to monarch butterflies after years of warnings from environmentalists that populations are shrinking and the beloved pollinator may not survive climate change.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plans to add the butterfly to the threatened species list by the end of next year following an extensive public comment period.

As winter descends on Gaza's tent cities, emergency housing made from mushrooms could keep out the cold -- just one of several sustainable, home-grown innovations put forward by Arab designers at an expo in Dubai.

When Sara first arrived at her rescuers' home, she was sick, tired, and was covered in ringworms and signs of abuse all over her little furry body.

After spending two months in a small Beirut apartment with an animal rights group, the four-and-half-month-old lion cub arrived Friday at a wildlife sanctuary in South Africa after a long journey on a yacht and planes, escaping both Israeli airstrikes and abusive owners.

For the third straight year, efforts to fight climate change haven't lowered projections for how hot the world is likely to get — even as countries gather for another round of talks to curb warming, according to an analysis Thursday.

At the United Nations climate talks, hosted in Baku, Azerbaijan, nations are trying to set new targets to cut emissions of heat-trapping gases and figure out how much rich nations will pay to help the world with that task.

For the second year in a row, Earth will almost certainly be the hottest it's ever been. And for the first time, the globe this year reached more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming compared to the pre-industrial average, the European climate agency Copernicus said Thursday.

"It's this relentless nature of the warming that I think is is worrying," said Carlo Buontempo, director of Copernicus.

Cuba was left reeling Thursday after a fierce Category 3 hurricane ripped across the island and knocked out the country's power grid.

The magnitude of the impact remained unclear through the early hours of the day, but forecasters warned that Hurricane Rafael could bring "life-threatening" storm surges, winds and flash floods to Cuba after ravaging parts of the Cayman Islands and Jamaica.

A crowd of enraged survivors hurled clots of mud left by storm-spawned flooding at the Spanish royal couple during their first visit to the center of their nation's deadliest natural disaster in living memory.

Spain's national broadcaster reported that the barrage included a few rocks and other objects and that two bodyguards were treated for injuries. One could be seen with a bloody wound on his forehead.

The recurrent storms in eastern Spain that led to massive flooding last week and killed at least 217 people, mostly near Valencia, dumped rain on Barcelona on Monday, prompting authorities to suspend commuter rail service.

Spanish Transport Minister Óscar Puente said he was suspending all commuter trains in northeast Catalonia, a region with 8 million people, on request from civil protection officials.