A crowd of people watch the setting sun from a hill in Ealing, west London
THE International Red Cross and the United Nations are urging people and governments to prepare better for heat waves like recent ones from Sacramento, California, to Somalia to Sichuan, China, that could take many lives in the future.
UN humanitarian aid agency OCHA and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies issued their first joint report today, chronicling the devastation of past scorchers and laying out ways to prepare for and limit the damage of future ones.
The report said 38 heat waves accounted for the deaths of more than 70,000 people worldwide from 2010 to 2019 — a likely underestimate — on top of the fallout on lives and livelihoods.
One of the major criticisms of China’s breakneck development in recent decades has been the impact on nature — returning after 15 years away, BEN CHACKO assessed whether the government’s recent turn to environmentalism has yielded results
When it comes to extreme weather events, from wildfires to flash floods, it’s firefighters who are on the front line of defence, but services have been cut to the bone, and government is not taking seriously its responsibility for the environment, says STEVE WRIGHT