China will press ahead with its multi-billion-dollar financing of coal plants in developing countries, a top climate official said Tuesday, despite Beijing's stated aim of slashing carbon emissions.

President Joe Biden on Thursday sharply ramped up US ambitions on slashing greenhouse gas emissions, leading Japan and Canada in raising commitments at a summit whose promises bring the world closer to limiting the worst climate change.

Europe endured record heat and rainfall last year while temperatures in Arctic Siberia soared off the charts, the European Union's climate monitoring service reported Thursday.

President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday vowed that Russia, one of the world's oil and gas producing giants, would do its part to fight climate change and develop carbon recycling. 

The European Parliament and EU member states have agreed a target to cut carbon emissions by "at least" 55 percent by 2030, the EU Commission said in a statement released early Wednesday.

When President Joe Biden convenes a virtual climate summit on Thursday, he faces a vexing task: how to put forward a nonbinding but symbolic goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that will have a tangible impact not only on climate change efforts in the U.S. but throughout the world.

The emissions target, eagerly awaited by all sides of the climate debate, will signal how aggressively Biden wants to move on climate change, a divisive and expensive issue that has riled Republicans to complain about job-killing government overreach even as some on the left worry Biden has not gone far enough to address a profound threat to the planet.

US climate envoy John Kerry met with his Chinese counterparts in Shanghai on Thursday, in the first visit to China by an official from a Biden administration seeking to re-establish America's leadership on the environment.

Roshni Thakor left school to harvest salt from a sun-baked Indian desert, a backbreaking trade practised by her ancestors for centuries but now threatened by climate change.

Noise pollution poses a long-term risk to tree populations and plant diversity that may persist even after the sources of excess noise are removed, according to research published Wednesday.

Japan will release more than a million tons of treated water from the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant into the ocean, the government said Tuesday, triggering a furious regional reaction and fierce opposition from local fishing communities.