Australia will invest Aus$1 billion in clean energy technologies, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said Wednesday, in a stark shift away from his predecessor's climate change policies as an election looms.

Turnbull, long known as a supporter of action on climate change, said the Clean Energy Innovation Fund would be run by two agencies slated for the chopping board under former prime minister Tony Abbott.

Coal plants are draining an already dwindling global water supply, Greenpeace warned Tuesday, consuming enough to meet the basic needs of one billion people and deepening a worldwide crisis.

Announcing its first global plant-by-plant study, Greenpeace said coal power use will increase with newly built plants, causing "huge stress" on the world's major river basins and threatening communities. 

January and February 2016 smashed temperature records, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Monday as it warned climate change was advancing at an "unprecedented" rate.

The mayor of Miami Beach, one of the US cities most vulnerable to sea level rise, has criticized Marco Rubio after the presidential hopeful said that it’s not possible to “change the weather” or the rising oceans through government regulation.

Asked if he accepted the reality of human-induced climate change, Rubio, a US senator for Florida and running for his party’s presidential nomination, said: “If the climate is changing, one of the reasons is because the climate has always been changing.”

Australia's iconic Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge went dark on Saturday night, as the Earth Hour campaign to switch off lights to call for action on climate change began rolling out across the planet, organizers said.

Millions of people from 178 countries and territories are expected to take part in WWF's Earth Hour this year, with monuments and buildings such as the Eiffel Tower, Taipei 101 and the Empire State Building plunging into darkness for 60 minutes from 8:30pm local time.

A joint US-Canadian declaration to help spur the transition to a low carbon economy passed the baton of global climate action from Barack Obama to Justin Trudeau on Thursday – and brightened prospects for the Paris agreement.

The initiative, which roams from Arctic protection to plugging methane emissions from oil wells and pipelines to decarbonisation of the US and Canadian economies in the second half of this century, cements a new climate change partnership between neighbors after 15 years of pulling in opposite directions.

Fracking is set to lead to a sharp rise in emissions of climate changing greenhouse gases, newly undermining industry and government claims that shale gas is a relatively clean fuel that can help combat global warming, an authoritative new study reveals.

On Thursday, the United States and Canada agreed to cut methane emissions from the oil and gas industry by almost half.

Temperatures across the planet soared again last month, setting a new heat record with the warmest February since modern records began, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Thursday.

"The globally averaged temperature over land and ocean surfaces for February 2016 was the highest for the month of February in the NOAA global temperature dataset record, which dates back to 1880," said a NOAA statement.

European Union renewable energy targets may have increased greenhouse gas emissions because the dirtiest biofuels produce three times the emissions of diesel oil, according to the most complete EU analysis yet carried out.

Simply implementing its Paris climate conference commitments on reducing greenhouse gas emissions could save the US billions of dollars – and save hundreds of thousands of lives.

LONDON,  13 March, 2015 − Scientists have worked out how the US could save as many as 300,000 lives by 2030, and get a tenfold return on its investments at the same time.