Climate, in brief

Bolivia's president, Rodrigo Paz, declared a national state of emergency on Saturday because of El Nino. [1]

Drought already hits 78,000 families in Bolivia, a government report says. [1][2]

The country has lost more than 75,000 cattle to the drought. [1][2]

The decree sends extra rescue teams and brings in the army and police. [2]

Researchers estimate this El Nino's heat could cause about 451,000 extra deaths worldwide by February 2027. [2]

Scientists say the poorest countries will be hit worst. [1]

Emergency managers call this stage preparedness: moving people and money before the worst arrives. [2]

Bolivia's decree is meant to mobilise resources as the country braces for drought and floods. [2]

Families already hit by drought now also face the flood risk the rains bring. [1][2]

Al Jazeera says drought hits 6 of Bolivia's 9 regions; Germany's DW says 7. [1][2]

The UN's weather agency put the chance it lasts to February 2027 at nearly 100%. [1]

It is expected to peak in December, with effects that could last into 2027. [1][2]

Why rebuilding after a disaster takes years longer than the rescue

Emergency managers split a disaster into four stages: prevent, prepare, respond, recover

A declared emergency sends rescue teams, soldiers and money fast

The rescue is over in days or weeks

Rebuilding homes, pipes and schools waits on ordinary budgets, permits and appeals

Families with less to fall back on wait longest, so the poorest lose most

Most of a disaster happens after the rescue: rebuilding takes years, because it waits on ordinary budgets, permits and appeals.

A year after Typhoon Halong, Alaska has put in 75 million dollars. Its emergency chief expects the recovery to cost more than 400 million.

Bolivia is at the preparing stage: the decree lines up rescue teams, the army and police before the floods arrive.

The recovery stage stalled: no repair crews worked for about six weeks while they waited for federal money, and Alaska is preparing to appeal a refused housing grant.

Low-income countries needed 92% longer to recover, and the poorest people carried a third of the losses.

Oil booms went on the pond quickly, but the park stays shut until the pond is fully clean, and no date is given.

Slow recovery is sometimes the right choice: rebuilding houses on ground the sea keeps flooding can set up the next disaster, which is why Kwigillingok voted to move.

Behind one emergency decree are years of grant forms, building permits and appeals.

How far Bolivia's drought has spread.

Al Jazeera reports Bolivia's government count as six of nine regions and DW as seven, and neither publishes the report itself. [1][2]

How strong this El Nino will be at its peak.

It is expected to peak in December; until then 'strongest on record' is a possibility reported, not a measurement. [1][2]

Britain's finance minister, John Healey, will veto new offshore wind farms that do not lower bills. [3]

Wind farms bidding for subsidies will pass only if the grid can carry all their power. [3]

He wrote in the Times: "There's no sense building power that can't connect." [3]

Britain's grid operator pays wind farms to switch off when cables cannot carry their power. [3]

A September audit put the possible cost at 7.8 billion pounds a year by 2030. [3]

Healey's Budget on Wednesday also cut more than 3 billion pounds from the energy department. [3]

Healey said: "This is not a retreat from clean power." [3]

The move looks like a further step away from Labour's goal of clean power by 2030. [3]

Healey says cheaper electricity will make it easier for homes and firms to go electric. [3]

Grid engineers call this a grid constraint: the wires, not the wind, limit the power. [3]

Households pay for those switch-offs, because the grid operator is funded through energy bills. [3]

Healey has not said how ministers will measure whether a project lowers bills. [3]

He will apply the new test in the next auction for renewable power contracts. [3]

A new veto can block subsidy deals for farms the grid cannot carry, on a test not yet explained. [3]

Bills already fund payments to switch off wind farms the cables cannot carry, a cost that could reach 7.8 billion pounds a year by 2030. [3]

How British ministers will judge whether a wind farm lowers bills.

Healey announced the test but gave no method or threshold for it. [3]

A year after a storm hit Kwigillingok, Alaska, most of its people still cannot go home. [4]

Kwigillingok is a Yup'ik village a quarter mile from the Bering Sea. [4]

On 12 October 2025, the remains of Typhoon Halong drove the sea into the village. [4]

The surge lifted 46 of the village's 99 houses and carried them for miles. [4]

Three people died. [4]

About 30 people are back, out of 361 who lived there before the storm. [4]

Repair crews stopped from early September to mid-October, waiting for federal money. [4]

Across the storm zone, Alaska has committed 75 million dollars; recovery may top 400 million. [4]

Families wait in Bethel and Anchorage, and leaders fear city life will harm Yup'ik culture. [4]

Emergency managers call this the recovery phase, and here it will take years. [4]

US disaster money is built for rebuilding, not for moving a village to higher ground. [4]

A resident says crews fixed long-empty houses; the state says it worked with village leaders. [4]

Alaska plans to appeal after a request for federal housing money was refused. [4]

The recovery stage stalled: no repair crews worked for about six weeks while they waited for federal money, and Alaska is preparing to appeal a refused housing grant.

When Kwigillingok's families can go home.

The village is still under a no-go-home order, and its tribal resilience coordinator says she does not know when people can return. [4]

Whether Alaska wins more federal money for housing.

Its request was refused after eight months and the state is only preparing its appeal. [4]

A new study in Nature Sustainability measured how disasters hurt people, not only buildings. [5]

Across 132 countries, 1 dollar of damage cost people about 2 dollars of lost well-being. [5]

Lost well-being here means people having to spend less on daily living. [5]

The poorest people suffer only 9% of the damage but 33% of the well-being losses. [5]

Low-income countries need 92% longer to recover than high-income countries. [5]

Their well-being losses per dollar of damage are 72% bigger. [5]

Most disaster studies count damaged property and often miss who is hurt most, the authors say. [5]

Researchers call the power to take damage without going short socio-economic resilience. [5]

A country 10% richer per person is about 1 point more resilient, the study finds. [5]

Aiming help at the poorest usually buys the most well-being per dollar, the authors find. [5]

Low-income countries needed 92% longer to recover, and the poorest people carried a third of the losses.

A year after a storm in Alaska, most people from the village of Kwigillingok still cannot go home, and a study of 132 countries finds low-income countries take 92% longer to recover from disasters. [4][5]

They suffer 9% of the damage but 33% of the well-being losses, the study of 132 countries finds. [5]

Heating oil from a vandalised tank has killed 13 birds at Broughshane Waterfowl Park. [6]

The park is in County Antrim, Northern Ireland, and keeps 120 collection birds. [6]

A volunteer smelled kerosene one Thursday morning and found the black swans covered in oil. [6]

Northern Ireland's environment agency was alerted on 22 October and laid booms that soak up oil. [6]

More than 20 birds went to the USPCA, an animal welfare charity, for specialist care. [6]

The park is closed while the oil is removed, and police want witnesses. [6]

Most of the birds are not native and cannot return until the pond is fully clean. [6]

Carers gave the birds charcoal to help fight the poisons they had swallowed. [6]

Birds hide illness well, so carers cannot yet say whether more will die. [6]

Oil booms went on the pond quickly, but the park stays shut until the pond is fully clean, and no date is given.

Whether more of the oiled birds at Broughshane will die.

Carers say birds hide illness, so symptoms can show only when it is too late. [6]

The US Environmental Protection Agency plans to shut its online web archive on 31 December. [7]

The EPA writes US rules on pollution, from power plants to methane leaks. [7]

The archive holds tens of thousands of EPA documents going back to the 1990s. [7]

It kept climate pages that the first Trump administration deleted open to the public. [7]

In 2022, the Biden administration's EPA also planned to close it, then backed down. [7]

Keeping the archive online cost about 2 million dollars a year, a 2022 records request showed. [7]

Residents near Camp Lejeune, a Marine base, used its records to judge chemical exposures. [7]

Record-keepers see a public archive as a tool for oversight: anyone can check past rules. [7]

Without it, researchers must file freedom-of-information requests for once-public records, a secrecy expert says. [7]

The EPA did not reply when Grist asked for comment. [7]

The EPA says some history can still be found in its snapshot collections. [7]

How much of the EPA archive will survive.

The agency points to its snapshot collections but did not answer questions, and the co-founder of a group that tracks federal environmental data says three snapshots will not suffice. [7]

Climate campaigners protested outside Bute House, the Scottish first minister's official home in Edinburgh. [8]

They oppose the Scottish government's approval of a new gas-fired power station at Peterhead. [8]

Peterhead is a town in Aberdeenshire, in Scotland. [8]

The protest came after the UK government also allowed the Jackdaw gas field near Aberdeen. [8]

Kate Whitaker of Friends of the Earth Scotland called it "a catastrophic failure". [8]

The Scottish government says it remains committed to net zero by 2045. [8]

Campaigners say the plant fails to protect people from rising household energy bills. [8]

Planners call it cumulative effects: judging a project together with others nearby. [8]

The BBC report gives no size, cost or opening date for the Peterhead plant. [8]

Mergers and takeovers involving UK oil and gas firms reached 19.6 billion dollars this year. [9]

That beats 16.5 billion dollars for the whole of 2025. [9]

Oil and gas prices hit multiyear highs after the US-Israeli war with Iran. [9]

UK oil and gas profits face a headline tax rate of 78%. [9]

BP, the last big oil firm focused on the North Sea, plans to sell those fields. [9]

Fewer, bigger firms will run Britain's ageing oil and gas fields. [9]

Bankers call this consolidation: small firms merge to share costs and use tax credits. [9]

The war's high prices have filled oil companies' accounts with cash. [9]

Those price rises have also pushed up living costs for everyone else. [9]

Analysts think the sale could raise 2 billion dollars; the next bids are due in December. [9]

War-high prices give them cash, and BP's fields go up for sale with bids due in December. [9]

An analyst at Cavendish, an investment bank, names them as possible buyers of BP's North Sea fields; merging lets a firm use tax credits. [9]

Electric scooters and motorbikes made up about 32% of two-wheeler sales in Vietnam this year. [10]

Electric sales rose 90.5% to 973,247 in the first nine months of 2026. [10]

All motorbike and scooter sales passed 3 million, up 25.9%. [10]

Honda, the Japanese company, has led Vietnam's motorbike market for decades. [10]

VinFast, a Vietnamese electric vehicle maker, is now second, behind Honda. [10]

VinFast's sales rose 152.1% this year; Honda's grew 8.4%. [10]

Vietnam's government wants to cut air pollution in its cities. [10]

Market analysts watch share: Honda still sells most, but its share is shrinking. [10]

Honda still gains: its sales are growing, just more slowly than the electric makers'. [10]

Nearly a million electric two-wheelers were sold in Vietnam in nine months. [10]

Vietnam plans to restrict petrol motorbikes in parts of Hanoi, its capital. [10]

Its sales in Vietnam rose 152.1% as Vietnam's government plans limits on petrol motorbikes in Hanoi. [10]

The short-necked oil beetle has been found in Pembrokeshire after 60 years missing from Wales. [11]

The beetle depends on solitary bees to complete its life cycle. [11]

It was not reported anywhere in the UK for almost 60 years after 1948. [11]

It was rediscovered in Devon in 2006, after habitat loss pushed it near extinction. [11]

Last year's survey at Castlemartin, in Pembrokeshire, found only dead adults. [11]

This year, after three years of searching, experts found larvae there. [11]

Castlemartin is now the only place in Wales where the beetle lives. [11]

It is listed as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List of threatened species. [11]

Conservationists say it needs thick plants for shelter and plenty of flowers. [11]

Natural Resources Wales says only a handful of UK sites suit it. [11]

The larvae show the beetle is breeding in Wales again. [11]

The scarce blue-tailed damselfly was seen beside the River Ash, near Hertford, England. [12]

It is one of the world's earliest flying insect species. [12]

A wildlife trust restored this stretch of the river and made new wetlands beside it. [12]

The River Ash is one of about 260 chalk rivers in the world. [12]

Mayflies and stoneflies increased after the work, monitoring found. [12]

A new British Red List moved this damselfly from Near Threatened to Endangered. [12]

Eight British dragonfly and damselfly species are now endangered, twice the number in 2008. [12]

A river restorer says connected floodplains can help protect against both flooding and drought. [12]

The damselfly was seen at only two monitoring sites, close together, in late summer. [12]

Brown trout already spawn on the restored river's new gravel beds. [12]

Scientists traced why South China had record-breaking rain in April and May 2024. [13]

The team is based at Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, in China. [13]

Warm seas usually get the blame for South China's extreme rain. [13]

Two areas of high pressure, over the tropical Pacific and north-east Asia, trapped moist air there. [13]

The north-eastern one grew inside a wave pattern steered by the jet stream, a fast wind. [13]

Europe's main forecast model caught the warm seas but missed how much rain fell. [13]

Forecasting South China's floods may need the jet stream right, not only the oceans. [13]

Meteorologists call these chains of highs and lows Rossby waves, which carry weather across continents. [13]

The study looks at one record spring, 2024; how often this pattern repeats is untested here. [13]

Scientists found 107 sudden, fast-rising heatwaves in North China in summers from 1940 to 2024. [14]

These heatwaves arrive abruptly, leaving little time to prepare. [14]

The team sorted them into four types by where the heat struck. [14]

Warm air blowing in, and sinking air that warms as it is squeezed, drove the heat. [14]

Heatwaves driven from the tropics were the easiest to forecast weeks ahead. [14]

Those driven by two wave patterns in northern winds were the hardest. [14]

Sudden heat hits public health, farming and the economy hardest, the authors say. [14]

Forecasters call the weeks-ahead range subseasonal prediction, between weather forecasts and seasonal outlooks. [14]

Some types remain hard to see coming, even with today's best forecast systems. [14]

Experts warn climate change threatens decades of progress against malaria across the Asia Pacific. [15]

Malaria spreads through mosquitoes, and the authors call for mosquito control that moves with displaced people. [15]

Cases rose sharply in parts of Pakistan after its 2022 floods. [15]

The policymakers and researchers wrote in Nature Medicine, a medical journal. [15]

They say climate shocks disrupt health services and force people from their homes. [15]

They want malaria control built into disaster response, and early warnings tied to action. [15]

Countries near the end of malaria need plans for sudden shocks, not only slow warming. [15]

Public health planners call acting on a warning before disaster strikes anticipatory action. [15]

Most research and plans so far focus on gradual warming, not sudden shocks, the authors say. [15]

Up to 4 inches of rain was forecast for the US Southwest from Saturday to Monday. [16]

The ground is already soaked after an autumn of deadly rain. [16]

Flood watches cover nearly all of Arizona and parts of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada. [16]

Phoenix firefighters rescued people from four vehicles on flooded streets on Friday night. [16]

In Henderson, near Las Vegas, a person pulled from a flooded wash later died. [16]

A forecaster said it is "not going to take much rainfall to be impactful". [16]

Soaked ground cannot take in more water, so even small storms now cause floods. [16]

Hydrologists call it saturation: once soil is full, new rain runs straight off. [16]

Most of Friday's rescues were of people in cars on flooded streets. [16]

A US judge kept alive a lawsuit over gas turbines powering Elon Musk's AI data centres. [17]

The NAACP, a US civil rights group, sued under the Clean Air Act, a pollution law. [17]

The AI firm, xAI, is now owned by SpaceX, Musk's rocket company. [17]

The suit says xAI ran 27 gas turbines without an air permit in Southaven, Mississippi. [17]

It says the turbines give off smog-forming gases and fine dust. [17]

The company argued the turbines were "mobile" and so needed no permit. [17]

Two weeks earlier, the same court refused a US Justice Department request to end the case. [17]

The Colossus data centres and a new power plant have faced local anger for years. [17]

Lawyers call this a citizen suit: the Clean Air Act lets groups sue polluters directly. [17]