French officials warned Thursday that a record pre-summer heatwave was spreading north from Spain, where authorities were fighting several forest fires as the country sizzles under a sixth day of sweltering temperatures.

The Meteo France weather service said it was the earliest hot spell to hit the country since at least 2005, worsening a drought caused by an unusually dry winter and spring and raising the risk of forest fires.

From crop-wilting drought to the creeping devastation of rising seas, climate change is already bringing death, destruction and hefty costs to vulnerable nations, spurring growing calls for richer countries to help them cope in a warming world.    

Microscopic air pollution caused mostly by burning fossil fuels shortens lives worldwide by more than two years, researchers reported Tuesday. 

The French government announced 500 million euros on Tuesday to encourage urban vegetation projects to tackle high temperatures in towns and cities as a heatwave began to strike in the south and southwest.

The Western U.S. has marked another day of hot, dry and windy weather as crews from California to New Mexico battled wildfires that had forced hundreds of people to leave their homes.

Roughly 2,500 homes have been evacuated because of two wildfires burning on the outskirts of Flagstaff in northern Arizona, officials said at an afternoon briefing.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres warned Tuesday of a "dangerous disconnect" between what scientists and citizens are demanding to curb climate change, and what governments are actually doing about it.

Guterres said global greenhouse gas emissions need to drop by 45% this decade, but are currently forecast to increase by 14%.

Iraq temporarily closed Baghdad airport Monday as choking clouds of dust blanketed the capital, the latest crippling sandstorm in a country that has warned climate change poses an "existential threat".

It was the tenth duststorm since mid-April to hit Iraq, which has been battered by intense droughts, soil degradation, high temperatures and low rainfall linked to climate change.

Hussam al-Aqouli remembers the exact spot along southern Iraq's Lake Sawa where his two daughters once dipped their feet into clear waters. Now he stands there two years on and the barren earth cracks beneath him.

This year, for the first time in its centuries-long history, the lake dried up. A combination of mismanagement by local investors, government neglect and climate change has ground down its azure shores to chunks of salt.

Strong rain, winds and flash floods are expected in northern and central Turkey on Monday, after a weekend of flooding that reportedly killed at least four people.

Bad weather warnings were in place in 42 towns and cities in the north and center, including the capital, Ankara.

A Paris judge has ordered a mediation process to settle a legal dispute pitting environmental groups and representatives of Brazil's Indigenous community against a major French retailer accused of selling beef linked to deforestation and land grabs in the Amazon rainforest.

Several leading Indigenous representatives, including some wearing traditional headdresses, traveled from Brazil to the main Paris courthouse, where they held a demonstration to denounce international threats to their territories and attract public attention to cattle farming practices in the Amazon.