Bruno Colmant

The floods displaced more than 80,000 people, led to over 150,000 being injured and, on the 29th of May, to 169 fatalities with 44 people still missing (Governo do Estado de Rio Grande do Sul, 2024). Essential services were also disrupted, leaving 418,200 households without electricity and over a million consumer units without water. Dozens of municipalities lost telephone and internet services.

Winter temperatures have neared 40 degrees Celsius in parts of South America, which is up to 20C higher than normal for this time of year and the equivalent of Sydney hitting 35C in the first week of August.

It’s the middle of winter in South America, but that hasn’t kept the heat away in Chile, Argentina and surrounding locations. Multiple spells of oddly hot weather have roasted the region in recent weeks. The latest spell early this week has become the most intense, pushing the mercury above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, while setting an August record for Chile.

Avian flu has decimated the marine creatures on the country’s Pacific coastline and scientists fear it could be jumping from mammal to mammal

The climate crisis has begun to disrupt human societies by severely affecting the very foundations of human livelihood and social organisation. Climate impacts are not equally distributed across the world: on average, low- and middle-income countries suffer greater impacts than their richer counterparts. At the same time, the climate crisis is also marked by significant inequalities within countries. Recent research reveals a high concentration of global greenhouse gas emissions among a relatively small fraction of the population, living in emerging and rich countries. In addition, vulnerability to numerous climate impacts is strongly linked to income and wealth, not just between countries but also within them.

This Southern Ocean warming and its associated impacts are effectively irreversible on human time scales, because it takes millennia for heat trapped deep in the ocean to be released back into the atmosphere. This means changes happening now will be felt for generations to come – and those changes are only set to get worse, unless we can stop carbon dioxide emissions and achieve net zero.

In the past 50 years, the oceans have absorbed more than 90% of the excess heat caused by our carbon dioxide emissions, with one ocean absorbing the vast majority.

After all, Western economies – and their economic growth – depend utterly on labour and resources from the South...

Models indicate that there could be between 25 and 30 extreme events a year by mid-century

The melt is among the earliest in the last 30 years

Many are still missing after this month’s floods. Extreme weather is becoming more frequent, and it can be devastating

Lithium extraction fields in South America have been captured by an aerial photographer in stunning high definition. But while the images may be breathtaking to look at, they represent the dark side of our swiftly electrifying world.

On Sunday, Kodiak Island in southern Alaska hit 67 degrees. That's warmer than it was in Southern California that same day. This set a record for the warmest December day in Alaska, according to the National Weather Service in Anchorage. Statewide temperature records in Alaska date back to 1953.

Intensive agriculture’s insatiable thirst for water is turning wetland to wasteland, draining rivers and polluting groundwater

Global weather is constantly in motion. The Southern Hemisphere is currently in Winter, and strong weather patterns will start a warming event in its Stratosphere. These events are rare, but powerful, having historically been strong enough to affect the entire globe.

A fierce cold snap brought rare snow, icy rain, and strong winds to parts of southern Brazil on July 29 and 30, 2021. The event comes after several waves of destructive frost since mid-June.

Rapid filling of a giant dam at the headwaters of the Nile River—the world's biggest waterway that supports millions of people—could reduce water supplies to downstream Egypt by more than one-third, new USC research shows.

From the Heart of the World - The Elder Brothers Warning is a documentary about the Kogi people who inhabit the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountain in northern Colombia. Direct descendants of the Tayrona people they survived Spanish Conquistadors - a feat no other tribe can claim. Long thought extinct, they reappeared from their mountain home to warn the world about the harmful damage it was causing.