The Middle East is the most water-scarce region in the world, but participants at an upcoming climate summit in Dubai will be ensconced in a resort with one of the world's largest water parks, complete with artificial lagoons, encounters with dolphins and a mesmerizing aquarium with sharks, sting rays and schools of fish.

It's a striking backdrop for a climate summit aimed at tackling lack of water and other pressing issues facing the region due in part to warming global temperatures from the very fossil fuels produced by Gulf Arab states and others. The Arabian Peninsula, where Dubai sits, is grappling with menacing sand storms, rising temperatures and dangerous humidity levels.

Without Russian help, climate scientists worry how they'll keep up their important work of documenting warming in the Arctic.

Europe's space agency is wrestling with how its planned Mars rover might survive freezing nights on the Red Planet without its Russian heating unit.

At first glance, the Souq Waqif clinic in the historic center of Doha, the capital of Qatar, could be any other state-of-the-art hospital.

Nurses in blue scrubs move briskly through the bright wards, conducting rounds. Radiology and operating rooms whir with the beeps and blinks of monitors. Specialists squint at X-rays and masked doctors make incisions with all the high-tech tools of modern surgery on hand.

The chief of the United Nations announced a project Wednesday to put every person on Earth in range of early weather-warning systems within five years as natural disasters have grown more powerful and frequent due to climate change.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the project with the Geneva-based World Meteorological Organization aims to make the alert systems already used by many rich countries available to the developing world.

As Morocco withers under its worst drought in 40 years, experts warn that a combination of climate change and bad resource management could trigger severe drinking water shortages.

"The country hasn't seen a situation like this since the start of the 1980s," said water policy expert Abderrahim Hendouf.

Untapped groundwater resources have "vast potential," the U.N.'s cultural agency said Monday, potentially alleviating demand for ever-scarcer water supplies across the world.

Nearly 200 nations gathered Monday to grapple with a question that will outlive Covid-19 and Russia's invasion of Ukraine: how does a world addicted to fossil fuels prevent carbon pollution from making Earth unlivable?

Residents of the northern Ukrainian town of Novoselytsya were told Monday to temporarily take shelter after an ammonia leak at a nearby chemical factory, amid intense fighting with Russian forces in the area.

California's urban water users and farmers who rely on supplies from state reservoirs will get less than planned this year as fears of a third consecutive dry year become reality, state officials said.

Water agencies that serve 27 million people and 750,000 acres (303,514 hectares) of farmland, will get just 5% of what they've requested this year from state supplies beyond what's needed for critical activities such as drinking and bathing.

It was so hot in Kuwait last summer that birds dropped dead from the sky.

Sea horses boiled to death in the bay. Dead clams coated the rocks, their shells popped open like they'd been steamed.