Firefighters in Spain and Germany have struggled to contain wildfires amid an unusual heat wave in Western Europe for this time of year.

The worst damage in Spain has been in the northwest province of Zamora, where over 30,000 hectares (74,000 acres) have been consumed, regional authorities said, while German officials said that residents of three villages near Berlin were ordered to leave their homes because of an approaching wildfire Sunday.

Floods in Bangladesh continued to wreak havoc Monday with authorities struggling to ferry drinking water and dry food to flood shelters across the country's vast northern and northeastern regions, officials and local media said.

More than a dozen people died across the country since the monsoon began last week, authorities said. The government called in soldiers Friday to help evacuate people.

Monsoon storms in Bangladesh and India have killed at least 41 people and unleashed devastating floods that left millions of others stranded, officials said Saturday.

President Joe Biden, who has recently been focused on boosting oil production to reduce rising gas costs, will turn his attention to climate change on Friday when he convenes a virtual meeting of some of the world's biggest economies.

Among the participants will be China, Germany, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom and the European Union. Also present will be Egypt, which is hosting the next United Nations summit on climate change, and the U.N. secretary general, António Guterres.

With the polar bear species in a fight for survival because of disappearing Arctic sea ice, a new distinct group of Greenland bears seem to have stumbled on an icy oasis that might allow a small remote population to "hang on."

But it's far from "a life raft" for the endangered species that has long been a symbol of climate change, scientists said.

Floating fences in India. Whimsical water- and solar-driven conveyor belts with googly eyes in Baltimore. Rechargeable aquatic drones and a bubble barrier in The Netherlands.

These are some of the sophisticated and at times low-tech inventions being deployed to capture plastic trash in rivers and streams before it can pollute the world's oceans.

Rich countries including the European Union and the United States have pushed back against efforts to put financial help for poor nations suffering the devastating effects of global warming firmly on the agenda for this year's U.N. climate summit.

Observers and campaigners attending a ten-day preparatory meeting in Bonn, Germany, that's wrapping up Thursday expressed frustration at the resistance shown by developed nations to formally discussing how poor countries can get more aid when they're hit by climate disasters.

A private company that uses satellites to spot sources of methane emissions around the globe has said that it detected one of the largest artificial releases of the potent greenhouse gas ever seen, coming from a coal mine in Russia earlier this year.

Montreal-based GHGSat said one of its satellites, known as 'Hugo,' observed 13 methane plumes at the Raspadskaya mine in Siberia on Jan. 14. The incident likely resulted in about 90 metric tons of methane being belched into the atmosphere in the space of an hour, the company calculated.

Australia's new government on Thursday formally committed to a more ambitious greenhouse gas reduction target of 43% by the end of the decade in fulfillment of a key election pledge.

The previous conservative government was dumped by voters at the May 21 election after it stuck to a seven-year-old pledge to reduce Australia's emissions by only 26% to 28% below 2005 levels by 2030.

Damaging floodwaters that tore through Yellowstone National Park menaced communities downstream where residents cleaned up from the mess and kept an eye on rising river levels while others braced for the economic fallout while the park remains closed.

After wiping out miles of roads and untold number of bridges in the park and swamping hundreds of homes in surrounding communities, the roiling waters threatened to cut off fresh drinking water supplies to Montana's largest city.