Catherine Bashiama runs her fingers along the branches of the coffee tree she's raised from a seedling, searching anxiously for its first fruit buds since she planted it three years ago. When she grasps the small cherries, Bashiama beams.

The farmer had never grown coffee in her village in western South Sudan, but now hopes a rare, climate-resistant species will help pull her family from poverty. "I want to send my children to school so they can be the future generation," said Bashiama, a mother of 12.

Matt Ries has lived in Florida only three years, but everyone told him last summer was unusually hot. That was followed by three hurricanes in close succession. Then temperatures dropped below freezing for days this winter, and snow blanketed part of the state.

To Ries, 29, an Ohio native now in Tampa, the extreme weather — including the bitter cold — bore all the hallmarks of climate change.

More than half a million people in Afghanistan were displaced due to climate disasters in 2024, the International Organization for Migration said in a country report published on Tuesday.

The European Union executive on Wednesday announced plans for a major revamp of its economic strategy to meet demands of the bloc's captains of industry who have long complained about excessive taxation, sky high energy prices and an overbearing bureaucracy that makes the bloc unattractive.

At the same time, environmental groups say that far-reaching deregulation and the boosting of conditions for energy-intensive companies will come at the cost to the EU's ambitious climate targets.

For centuries, poets, scholars and theologians have flocked to Chinguetti, a trans-Saharan trading post home to more than a dozen libraries containing thousands of manuscripts.

But it now stands on the brink of oblivion. Shifting sands have long covered the ancient city's 8th-century core and are encroaching on neighborhoods at its current edge. Residents say the desert is their destiny.

Three tropical cyclones are spinning in the South Pacific, an occurrence that scientists say is unusual.

Tropical cyclones Rae, Seru and Alfred are all churning as the region is in the peak of a season that starts in November and ends in April.

An annual United Nations conference on biodiversity that ran out of time last year will resume its work Tuesday in Rome with money at the top of the agenda.

That is, how to spend what's been pledged so far — and how to raise a lot more to help preserve plant and animal life on Earth.

The termination letters that ended the careers of thousands of U.S. Forest Service employees mean fewer people and less resources will be available to help prevent and fight wildfires, raising the specter of even more destructive blazes across the American West, fired workers and officials said.

The Forest Service firings — on the heels of deadly blazes that ripped through Los Angeles last month — are part of a wave of federal worker layoffs, as President Donald Trump's cost-cutting measures reverberate nationwide.

Climate change is accelerating the melting of the world's mountain glaciers, according to a massive new study that found them shrinking more than twice as fast as in the early 2000s.

The world's glaciers lost ice at the rate of about 255 billion tons (231 billion metric tons) annual from 2000 to 2011, but that quickened to about 346 billion tons (314 billion metric tons) annually over about the next decade, according to the study in this week's journal Nature.

The polar vortex hit its peak across much of America on Wednesday, with an icy grip that made Arctic Greenland seem like a toasty vacation spot in comparison. Even Mars has been warmer than North Dakota this week.

But there's hope. Some of the coldest parts of the United States are forecast to see as much as a 90-degree warmup early next week, before the expected return of yet another polar plunge of freezing air the first week in March, meteorologists said.