Antarctica’s ‘Doomsday Glacier’ could double sea-level rise forecasts

A startling new model reveals that Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier could cause twice as much sea level rise as previously predicted, even without additional global warming.

Atlantic current collapse risk is missing from climate plans

Ocean currents are changing, with global climate implications, yet governments remain unprepared. Of 91 national adaptation plans submitted to the UN, only two mention the key Atlantic current, and neither outlines action for a possible collapse.

Thailand: Testing Bangkok’s flood resilience under extreme rainfall

Bangkok’s September flooding exposed a gap between forecasts and action: despite advance warnings, preparedness lagged. Lack of unified command to integrate information, coordinate agencies and guide timely decisions appears to have weakened the response.

Knowing where climate hazards occur is only half the story

Climate hazards affect over half the world’s population, but vulnerability varies widely. In 2024, 1.5 billion people were both exposed to climate-related hazards and highly vulnerable to their impacts, limiting their ability to cope and recover.

As extreme heat worsens, renters are gaining a ‘right to cooling’

New laws are treating cooling as a necessity rather than a luxury, though what landlords must provide varies widely.

Tsunami Day: 9 examples of tsunami readiness

A tsunami can reach the coast within minutes of an earthquake or other sudden disturbance, sometimes before any official alert. What people already know, and what they do in those first minutes, often decides who survives.

Climate change is a growing health emergency, Lancet Countdown warns

Ahead of COP31, the latest Lancet Countdown report finds that the health impacts of climate change are accelerating, with heat-related deaths, drought and other climate-related risks increasing faster than a decade ago.

South Africa: Drought forces livestock farmers to make tough decisions

Climate change threatens livestock and livelihoods in southern Africa, worsening inequality. Combining improved weather forecasts with targeted support can help vulnerable pastoralist communities adapt and reduce these impacts.

Chile: A low-cost tool to plan evacuation routes during a tsunami

In a new study published in Seismological Research Letters, researchers Alejandra Gubler and Matías Carvajal demonstrate that the safety of evacuation routes strongly depends on how soon after an earthquake people begin to evacuate.

Japan: Rain gardens balance urban stormwater management near Tokyo

Researchers compared rain barrels, rain gardens, and their combination to assess flood control, costs, and environmental benefits in residential areas.

As flood risk rises, some communities question the idea of resilience

Resilience is often considered to be a positive idea. It suggests that people can adapt to uncertainty, to prepare for disruption, and recover quickly when floods strike. But research suggests many communities are deeply uncomfortable with this messaging.

Scientists find key to predicting some El Niño events 12 months ahead

Scientists have identified the conditions that make it possible to predict some El Niño and La Niña events up to a year in advance, potentially giving communities and decision-makers significantly more time to prepare for weather extremes.

Kenya finances resilience as El Niño looms

El Niño floods, a regional Ebola outbreak and a fuel price shock. The cost of crises increasingly falls on public budgets that also need to fund long-term development.

Jamaica: Climate disasters trap nations in a “debt-doom loop”

In a Policy Article, authors use Jamaica’s experience with 2025’s Hurricane Melissa to reveal how extreme weather and disaster spending can trap climate-vulnerable countries in a cycle of recovery borrowing and underinvestment in future climate resilience

Can AI save lives before the next flood?

Nepal–China flood exposes a missing dimension in the global AI debate. As world leaders focus on future threats, the more immediate challenge is to use AI to anticipate disasters, accelerate cross-border warnings and protect human life today.

Europe: Fossil-fueled warming drives surge in heat deaths

Heat-related deaths in Europe’s urban areas exceeded 50,000 in the summer of 2026. More than 32,000 of those deaths were attributable to human-caused global warming, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, according to studies published in Nature Health.

Countries need structures to turn climate–health goals into impact

Most national climate adaptation plans talk about health – but there are gaps in structures and investment to achieve this crucial strand of climate policy. Policy needs to be translated into action.

USA: Building wildfire-resilient homes costs less than expectations

Integrating wildfire resilience into new construction is practical and economical, according to the report’s findings.

When crises disappear from view: The growing humanitarian data drought

Compounding risks to global food system—ongoing conflicts, the most severe El Niño in decades, global trade disruptions—humanitarian data are disappearing. Budget cuts, shrinking development assistance, and competing priorities erode key streams of data.

This paper develops the Coastal Well-Being Loss Measurement Framework to capture nine domains of well-being losses from climatic hazards in Asia-Pacific coastal regions, highlighting the need for inclusive measurement beyond economic damage.

NL: Salt marshes are powerful allies to a climate-resilient coastline

An experiment found that salt marshes withstand extreme waves with minimal erosion, reducing wave energy and supporting coastal protection. Conserving and restoring marshes could strengthen dikes, cut costs and protect biodiversity amid climate change.

Engineers blow homes apart to learn how to save them

Engineers are testing manufactured homes in extreme winds to identify affordable ways to prevent hurricane and tornado damage. Stronger anchoring systems could improve safety for millions of residents if adopted in national building standards.

Measuring disaster-related crop losses

Disaster-related crop losses are often underreported, leaving smallholder farmers vulnerable. Combining household surveys, satellite data and emerging AI tools can improve loss estimates, identify affected groups and strengthen agricultural resilience.

IDDRR: Geneva students take disaster preparedness home

A hands-on experience of disaster risk reduction helps equip the next generation for a resilient future.

Hurricane graphics improve awareness, not risk perception

A study found that updated hurricane forecast graphics help people identify inland watch areas but don't improve risk perception or protective intentions, highlighting the need for clearer local impact information to support safety decisions.

Adaptation policies must be built around the local communities

Municipalities control levers like land-use planning, permitting and local infrastructure. But the adaptive capacity of municipalities is shaped by fiscal, regulatory and policy frameworks established by federal, provincial or territorial governments.

This report examines the risks facing the coastal areas of Asia and the Pacific and details how building resilience can protect development and unlock new opportunities.

Subsidence claims: after drought, ground can shrink, swell or collapse

A crack appears beside a window after weeks of scorching weather. As much as you might hope the ground beneath your house will recover with the first rain, the effects of a dry summer can continue long after temperatures fall.

Forecasting research could help millions in earthquake-prone regions

A decade-long study of earthquake activity in California has provided the strongest evidence to date that forecasting models can reliably describe patterns of earthquake activity over the following day.

Tool helps coastal communities estimate storm-protection benefits

CoSMos Adapts gives climate-resilience planners a way to compare the costs of inaction or long-term savings by adopting solutions such as restoring sand dunes or rocky reefs to guard against increasingly destructive storms.

Alaska’s monster tsunami sent water 1,580 feet up a mountain

2025 landslide-triggered mega-tsunami in Alaska shows growing risks as glaciers melt. Scientists propose a progressive alert system using weather, glacier changes and seismic activity to warn communities and vessels of potential landslides and tsunamis.

How much of a basin's drainage network should flood models capture?

As climate change is expected to increase the risks associated with extreme rainfall and flooding, managing floods requires approaches beyond conventional infrastructure such as dams and reservoirs.

Nicaragua: Strange activity beneath a volcano near 2 million people

Researchers found two new magma sources under the active volcano, highlighting the critical importance of understanding transitions in volcanic behavior and shallow magma processes, especially when they potentially pose hazards to local communities.

How policy hackathons can help accelerate climate adaptation

How do you make decisions about climate adaptation when risks are interconnected, knowledge is incomplete, and there is no obvious way forward?

3 things we need to get right ahead of bushfire risk this summer

This summer, Australia could face some of its most extreme bushfire conditions ever, due to the severity of an ever-strengthening El Niño. And for many Australians, memories of catastrophic natural disasters are still painfully fresh.

This report reviews global disaster damage and loss data systems, analyzing practices, challenges, and innovations in sixteen countries, emphasizing system design, governance, and the importance of standardized data for effective disaster risk management.

Bangladesh: Leveraging anticipatory action for disaster risk finance

Bangladesh is building flood risk insurance and a Community Protection Fund using existing anticipatory action systems. The initiative uses established triggers, beneficiary registries and delivery networks, while adapting them for post-flood payouts.

How rewilding could help atoll islands keep pace with rising seas

Healthy ecosystems may give some of the world’s most vulnerable islands a better shot at survival, new research shows.

Same-day heat wave and wildfire smoke exposure is increasing worldwide

A 20-year study found that global exposure to wildfires and heat waves occurring on the same days rose by 287 million from 2000 to 2019, with over half the world’s population experiencing these combined events.

This report analyzes how MSMEs in EMDEs adapt to climate change using WBES data, finds adaptation is more widespread than assumed yet underreported, shows finance as a key constraint, and presents an MSME Adaptation Finance Typology to inform solutions.

5 expectations for COP 31 in Antalya

As climate negotiations move from commitment to implementation, here are five expectations for COP31 in Antalya.

Rewriting the rules of disaster finance

Kenya’s new risk financing strategy funds disaster prevention as well as recovery, breaking with a model most of the field still follows.

Indonesia: Cities are sinking

As cities continue to sink, we need to examine these changes at the local scale. Averages across a whole city can tell us how big the problem is, but knowing where the land is sinking fastest – and who lives there – is essential to deciding for response.

Madagascar: Rapid financing helped recovery after cyclone

After Cyclone Gezani devastated Madagascar, pre-arranged financing programme, REPAIR, helped mobilize over US$15 million within seven days, supporting emergency assistance, cash-for-work activities and community-led recovery for more than 400,000 people.

Measuring wildfire plumes

Firefighter and researcher Marc Castellnou sends weather balloons into towering wildfire plumes to measure temperature, wind and humidity, opening a new way to anticipate when a fire turns extreme – and why some keep burning fiercely at night.

Australia: AI improves long-term flood forecasting

Researchers developed advanced deep learning models incorporating attention mechanisms to identify important patterns in rainfall and river flow data, then combined the models’ predictions using a fusion approach to improve flood forecasting accuracy.

This second report focuses on the everyday risks that touch the most lives, examining changes in reported levels of harm from sources such as road traffic to drinking water. The Poll is based on more than 143,000 interviews in 140 countries & territories

Kamal Kishore: Resilience starts at home, and travels outwards

On International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction, SRSG Kamal Kishore reflects on how everyday decisions about our homes shape disaster risk, how public policy can expand people’s capacity to act, and why recovery works best when households shape it.

IDDRR: Seven ways communities make homes more resilient

Nobody knows a home's risks better than the people who live in it. These seven examples show what happens when women, young people and residents with disabilities help plan, build and check the work.

The early warning to action gap requires building resilience at home

When disasters are imminent, timely warnings can be the difference between life and death. However, warnings are only effective when they are received, understood, and acted on.