Extreme heat accelerated disappearance of Triglav glacier from mountain revered as a symbol of Slovenian identity

The final ice patch has vanished from Slovenia’s Triglav glacier, the latest Alpine casualty of Europe’s scorching summer.

The once mighty ice mass lost 93% of its surface area between 1983 and 2003, shrinking to cover less than a hectare of overheated rock, but went on to surprise researchers who feared its imminent demise, clinging on to the mountain for two more decades.

UK allies have long urged people to stockpile supplies for a crisis. How are people from France to Australia being advised to prepare?

The UK has told people to fill their pantries with food for three days in case of catastrophe, joining a host of countries urging citizens to ready themselves for core systems failing.

Such advice, once dismissed as the preserve of preppers, has become more common in government circles as climate breakdown worsens weather extremes and geopolitical tensions turn cyber-attacks and sabotage into a regular occurrence.

People succumbed to heat at highest rates in Malta, Italy and Hungary, with health issues, loneliness and poverty exacerbating toll

Heat killed a record 50,000 people in European cities this summer, new research suggests, with scientists blaming climate breakdown for two in every three of the deaths.

Morgues and funeral homes filled with bodies from June to August as the heat added by planet-baking pollution cut short an extra 32,000 lives in urban areas, the researchers found. Hot days pushed vulnerable bodies into overdrive and warm nights prevented them from recovering.

As Cop17 kicks off, records since 1921 show more bee species declining than increasing in all parts of Europe except the Alps

Most of Europe’s wild bee species and about half of its hover fly species have declined over the last century, a study has found, as a UN biodiversity summit begins in Armenia.

Records since 1921 show more bee species are declining than increasing in all parts of Europe except the Alpine region. The richness of bee and hover fly species suffered a persistent drop in the Atlantic and Continental regions, the study found, though trends in other regions were mixed or even positive.

Mines in supply chains of western carmakers linked to widespread deforestation of primary rainforest in nickel-rich lands inhabited by Tolaki people in Indonesia

Volkswagen, Ford and Tesla are among the electric carmakers whose batteries may contain nickel mined in indigenous woodlands plagued by deforestation, an analysis has found, highlighting the struggle to make vehicles that are free from environmental destruction.

Corporate disclosures and trade flows from the last two years show mines in the battery supply chains of automotive giants are linked to the loss of trees in Sulawesi, a wildlife hotspot in Indonesia that houses the world’s largest nickel deposits. The metal is widely used in cathodes in car batteries because it boosts energy density and increases range.

Peak of French mountain now 4,807 metres high and fluctuates year by year due to changes in Alpine climate

Western Europe’s highest mountain shrank by more than a metre last year. The peak of Mont Blanc in France now stands 4,807.47 metres above sea level, a team of surveyors said on Wednesday, putting “the roof of Europe” 1.29 metres lower than in 2025.

The mountain is about 4,792 metres tall but the summit constantly shifts as heat, wind and precipitation change the thickness of snow and ice on top. The height scientists recorded during an expedition last month was 1.88 metres greater than it was in 2023, when it reached the lowest levels in recent memory.

With 40 dead and a disaster declared across all 50 city districts, experts warn extreme flooding will only worsen across south-east Asia

Bangkok is used to absorbing the sudden afternoon downpours that inundate the city during the rainy season. Even streets in many central high-rise districts can briefly turn into rivers, with rats and cockroaches racing out of sewers and taking temporary refuge on trees and buildings as the subterranean world is flushed out.

But every city has a breaking point, and this year rain fell so fast and so hard that whole neighbourhoods of the Thai capital have been transformed, not into rivers, but stagnant lakes. In parts of the city, roughly 300mm of rain – the equivalent of half a year of average rainfall in London – fell in about two days.

EU Copernicus report shows surface air temperatures from June to August were 2.5C above decadal average

The scorching heat that persistently baked western Europe this summer was the worst on record, a report has found, with more than half the continent seared by “very strong” heat stress that felt hotter than 38C.

Surface air temperatures in western Europe from June to August were 2.5C above the recent decadal average, according to an update from the EU’s Copernicus climate monitoring service on Friday, while milder but still deadly heat across the rest of the continent made the summer Europe’s third hottest on record.

Alpine regions in Europe experiencing extreme glacier collapse due to heat-trapping effects of fossil fuel pollution

Switzerland has lost almost one-fifth of its ice in just five years, research has found, in a dramatic reshaping of the Alpine country whose big white glaciers have been reduced to moonlike rock deserts, scientists say.

Swiss glaciers shrank by 5.5% in the first eight months of 2026, according to an annual monitoring report, after a summer of scorching heatwaves that followed a winter with little snow. The reduction in ice volume falls just shy of the record set in 2022 and brings the total loss of glacier ice since 2021 to 19.4%.

The injection of thermal energy comes amid an increasing rise in sea levels and continuing acidification

A record-breaking 23 zettajoules of heat was sunk into the world’s seas last year, leaving ocean waters hotter, higher and less hospitable, a report has found.

The explosive addition of thermal energy, which was almost 40 times greater than all the energy humanity used that year, comes amid far-reaching changes to the deep water bodies fundamental to life on Earth.

Children born after 2025 will experience three more years of brutally fire-conducive weather as global heating intensifies

European babies will face almost twice as much extreme fire weather as their great-grandparents if climate action does not ramp up quickly, a study has found.

Global heating under current policies will expose a child born in Europe in 2025 to three more years of brutally fire-conducive weather over their lifetime than someone born in 1950, the researchers found.

An 1857 decree to drain swamps and plant a monoculture, detritus from the trees and global heating combined to produce the conditions for the Gironde inferno

The ruinous fires that overran parts of France this summer have burned more land than ever recorded, forced more people from their homes than at any point since the second world war and caused what scientists suspect is the country’s first firestorm thundercloud. The smoke from France’s biggest inferno in nearly 80 years choked Limoges, a city 125 miles (200km) from the flames, with more toxic dust than Delhi residents inhaled on the city’s worst day of smog last year.

The blaze that tore through forests outside Bordeaux in late July took just a few weeks to reforge France’s relationship with fire, but the conditions behind it were centuries in the making.

Improvements in fire management however could mitigate increases by more than 70%, study shows

Wildfires are projected to burn 39% more of Europe by the end of the century even in the best-case scenario for stopping the planet from heating, a study has found, unless action is taken to manage them better.

The increase in hot, dry and windy weather that leads to small fires turning into raging infernos is to engulf more of Europe as carbon pollution pushes temperatures higher. In the worst-case scenario the researchers modelled, which would see global heating reach 3.6C above preindustrial levels, the burnt area would almost triple.

Hottest periods this year in most sea regions would have been ‘virtually impossible’ in a preindustrial climate

Carbon pollution has fuelled a “massive expansion” of marine heatwaves in Europe this summer, research has found, with some waters recording temperatures 6C higher than normal.

The hottest fortnights of this year would have been “virtually impossible” in a preindustrial climate in three of the four sea regions studied, according to analysis by World Weather Attribution, while in the Celtic region, which covers much of the water around the British Isles, heat hit levels that used to strike just once a century.

Kew Gardens in London hits 38.1C and 40C-plus recorded in parts of Europe with continent trapped under heat dome

• Europe heatwave – latest updates

The UK has recorded its hottest day of the year so far with a provisional temperature of 38.1C in southern England as Europe sweltered under a major heat dome.

As temperatures on the continent surpassed 40C at the peak of the summer’s fifth heatwave, the thermometer at Kew Gardens in west London on Thursday surpassed the previous high of 38C on 28 June, the Met Office said.

Modelling finds AI-driven productivity gains in coal, oil and gas enable more emissions than applications in renewables avoid

AI-driven productivity gains enable more planet-heating pollution from fossil fuels than they avoid from renewables, a study has found.

Researchers modelled the technical potential for AI to boost clean power generation along with projections for how it can help produce coal, oil and gas. Across 64 scenarios, they found net yearly carbon pollution rose by 0.47-1.8 gigatonnes, or about 1-5% of the energy sector’s annual emissions.

Average sea surface temperature outside polar regions was highest on record for July, beating previous high in 2023

The world’s seas were hotter last month than in any July on record, scientists have said, as devastating heat struck western Europe.

Sea surface temperatures hit record highs for July on the Atlantic coast and western Mediterranean, the EU’s Copernicus climate change service found, with severe marine heatwaves roiling Europe’s seas. Globally, the average sea surface temperature outside the cold polar regions was the highest on record for the month, beating the previous July record set in 2023.

Scientists race to untangle complex links between exposure and mortality as fire weather grows more prevalent

A thousand kilometres from the infernos gorging on northern Ontario’s boreal forests, Erin O’Connor watched the sky above Canada’s biggest city turn an “almost post-apocalyptic” orange as it filled with light-scattering particles of soot and ash. Stepping outside the halls of Toronto General hospital, where air filters were keeping patients safe from the worst of the fumes, she was struck by a smell so strong it felt like standing by a campfire.

“It really hit you in the face as soon as you walked outside,” said O’Connor, who runs University Health Network’s emergency department and saw a rise in patients presenting with allergies and shortness of breath. “As the days progressed, it was like that everywhere. It seemed even inside you could smell that burning.”

Slovakia reaches new high of 42C as authorities in Poland forced to shut down Kozienice and Połaniec power plants

• Europe’s dry riverbeds and scorched earth – in pictures

Temperature records have been broken in several countries across central and eastern Europe as the extreme weather that has caused wildfires and droughts across the continent continues.

Countries including Slovakia, Austria and Hungary registered record temperatures. On Thursday, the Slovakian hydrometeorological agency said a new high of 42C (108F) had been reached in Dolné Plachtince.

From Europe’s deadly heat to floods in Asia, it’s been a terrifying summer. Environment writers Jonathan Watts and Ajit Niranjan answered Reddit users’ questions about their work – and their sources of hope

Extreme weather supercharged by the climate crisis is fuelling an explosive wildfire season in Europe and extreme rainfall across Asia this summer.

Global heating made hot, dry and windy weather stoking wildfires at least 20 times more likely in Spain and twice as likely in France. EU officials have said wildfires could still be burning until early November in what threatens to be a record-breaking year for the area of land burned.