Iraqi volunteers started planting the first of thousands of trees in war-ravaged Mosul on Thursday, hoping to green the former Islamic State group stronghold.

The UK's COP26 Regional Ambassador for the Middle East and Africa, Janet Rogan, ended a two-day visit to Lebanon this week. This was her first official visit to the MENA region since the 26th U.N. Climate Change Conference concluded in Glasgow earlier this month.

At a Kabul market, coal is arriving by the ton as the winter cold sets in.

Even as prices rise, Afghans have few options but to burn it for heat, creating some of the world's most dangerous air.

India's polluted capital will reopen schools on Monday, one week after it announced a partial shutdown over dangerous air pollution levels, authorities said Wednesday.

Gopal Rai, Delhi state's environment minister, told journalists that pollution levels in the city had "improved in the last three days" and some of the restrictions would be relaxed.

After talking the climate talk at U.N. negotiations in Scotland, the Biden administration now tests whether a divided United States can walk the climate walk: push a massive investment for a new era of clean energy through the narrowest of margins in the Senate.

The House passed a roughly $2 trillion social policy and climate bill Friday, including $555 billion for cleaner energy, although the legislation is almost certain to be changed by the Senate. What ultimately emerges in the climate part of the bill will have a lasting impact on America and all its neighbors on Earth, and help determine whether the United States does its promised share to keep climate damage at a level not disastrously worse than it is now.

Lebanon's economic meltdown presents an opportunity to improve the country's environmental policies and tackle its festering waste management crisis, Environment Minister Nasser Yassin told AFP Wednesday.

Lebanon's economy has been in tailspin for two years, leading to a historic currency collapse that has sent poverty rates soaring and ravaged the country's already ailing infrastructure.

It's a ghastly sight: ticks by tens of thousands burrowed into a moose's broad body, sucking its lifeblood as the agonized host rubs against trees so vigorously that much of its fur wears away.

Winter tick infestation is common with moose across the northern U.S. — usually survivable for adults but less so for calves, and miserable either way. And climate change may make it worse, scientists have reported.

Climate change isn't what's driving some U.S. coal-fired power plants to shut down. It's the expense of stricter pollution controls on their wastewater.

Dozens of plants nationwide plan to stop burning coal this decade to comply with more stringent federal wastewater guidelines, according to state regulatory filings, as the industry continues moving away from the planet-warming fossil fuel to make electricity.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced Monday that it is proposing threatened status for the Pearl River map turtle, seeking to grant added federal protections to an at-risk species found only in Louisiana and Mississippi.

"These native freshwater map turtles are at risk and need our help," regional director Leopoldo Miranda-Castro said in a news release.

A Democratic plan to impose a fee on methane emissions from oil and gas wells has cleared a key hurdle, but it faces strong opposition from the oil and gas industry and criticism by centrist Sen. Joe Manchin.

The proposed fee on methane — a powerful pollutant that contributes to global warming — was included in a huge social and environmental policy bill passed by House Democrats last Friday.