Hundreds of people were ordered to evacuate their homes on Monday after flooding inundated parts of Victoria state, as wild weather continues to batter Australia's southeast.

The issue was ordered for badly hit areas in the small towns of Seymour and Yea, about 70 miles north of Melbourne. Authorities told residents and tourists to leave immediately as floodwaters rose to dangerous levels.

Carbon dioxide emissions in Germany, Europe's biggest economy, dropped to their lowest level in seven decades as the use of coal declined unexpectedly sharply in 2023 and economic pressures weighed down production by energy-intensive industry, according to a study released Thursday.

Germany aims to cut its emissions to net zero by 2045 and is working to ramp up the use of solar and wind power and other renewable sources.

On a warm summer afternoon, Tina Taniguchi was on her hands and knees scraping dirt off an oblong depression in the ground. Thick brown hair peeked out from her coconut leaf hat. Splotches of mud stuck to her T-shirt and speckled her smiling face.

Taniguchi smiles a lot when she's working in her corner of the Hanapepe salt patch on the west side of Kauai — a terracotta plot of land about the size of a football field — dappled with elliptical pools of brine, crystallizing in clay beds.

Temperatures fell below minus 40 degrees Celsius (minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit) in the Nordic region for a second day in a row Wednesday, with the coldest January temperature recorded in Sweden in 25 years.

In Kvikkjokk-Årrenjarka in Swedish Lapland, the mercury dropped to minus 43.6 C (minus 46.5 F), the coldest temperature in the country in January since 1999, Sweden's TT news agency reported.

China's average temperature in 2023 was its hottest since records began, state media said citing officials Tuesday, capping a year of extreme weather events for the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

Parts of northern and central Europe continued to grapple with flooding on Thursday after heavy rain. A barrier near the German city of Magdeburg was opened for the first time in a decade to ease pressure from the Elbe River, and some animals were removed from their enclosures at a safari park in northern Germany.

This week's floods have prompted evacuations of dozens or hundreds of people in parts of northern and central Germany, but largely dry weather was forecast on Thursday. Still, water levels on some rivers caused concern, and they have continued to rise in parts of Lower Saxony state in the northwest.

An avalanche on Mont Blanc swept two skiers to their deaths and left another injured, while a hiker was killed on another slope in the French Alps, according to local authorities.

The avalanche Thursday swept through an off-piste area of the Saint-Gervais-les-Bains ski resort at an altitude of 2,300 meters (7,545 feet), the administration for the Haute-Savoie region said in a statement.

As the deadliest year this century for forest fires comes to a close, attention is turning to how to prevent such infernos happening again.

In 2023 forest fires destroyed nearly 400 million hectares (988 million acres) of land around the world, killed more than 250 people and emitted 6.5 billion tons of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.

An oil spill is sloshing tarry ooze onto beaches in the state of Carabobo along Venezuela's western coastline, several environmental groups said on Wednesday.

The spill was first detected on Tuesday, Yohan Flores, a regional director of the Azul Ambientalistas NGO, told AFP.

In northeast Colombia, police guard warehouses stacked high with confiscated timber with a noble new destiny: transformation into homes for bees beleaguered by pesticides and climate change.