News and announcements

Sweltering temperatures are shattering records across Europe, as the continent battles a deadly heatwave.

It is only June, and Europe is already baking through its second extreme heatwave in two months. Temperatures have topped 44 degrees Celsius in parts of the continent.

Just weeks after a severe heatwave that broke all-time May records, Europe is experiencing another major heatwave that is breaking June and annual records.

The aim was to assess whether there is an inequality in the distribution of populations living in areas at flood risk in each IMD decile, nationally in England and within subsamples

When it’s hot outside, birds struggle to learn, dogs bite more often, goat-like chamois pick fights.

This essay explores a novel approach to reducing the impacts of extreme weather through small, strategically timed atmospheric interventions guided by advanced forecasting.

When disruption strikes a modern enterprise, the greatest damage often comes not from the initial event but from how failures spread through connected systems.

This study explores how surface water flood risk affects developers’ financial exposure during construction and sales, and whether cost-effective property-level resilience measures can reduce these impacts across different housing development scenarios.

This paper outlines commonalities across domains & a phased roadmap (governance, platform, operations, scaling), with KPIs & measures e.g legal mandates, integration units, CAP interoperability, blended finance & PPPs to embed early warning in eGovernance

Statement on Venezuela earthquakes by Kamal Kishore, Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction

This report reveals that extreme heat is emerging as one of the most underestimated threats to economic development worldwide, hammering city economies, overwhelming health systems, and falling hardest on women working on the frontlines of a hotter world.

A landmark global economic analysis, paired with a state-of-the-art heat solution cost-benefit calculator covering 11,408 cities worldwide, shows that investing in heat action saves billions in losses.

The number of people exposed to dangerous heat stress worldwide has risen sharply over the past half-century, propelled by climate change, according to a study released Monday as Europe sweltered through a punishing heat wave.

This handbook provides guidance for designing and implementing technical assistance on macroeconomic modelling to support climate resilient economic development in partner countries.

This report draws on best practice from across the anticipatory action community and beyond to identify how systems and practices can be strengthened to remain effective as risks change, including under climate change.

This study seeks to understand how UHI risks are perceived, prioritised, and addressed in Sri Lankan cities, identify barriers and enablers influencing local government action.

This study aims to synthesise existing knowledge on urban heat island mechanisms, patterns, and impacts; review strategies for reducing UHI and heat risks; and develop a conceptual framework to support urban heat resilience and sustainable city planning.

This study investigates how disaster and emergency management professionals prioritize the factors that shape disaster risk and resilience across different contexts.

The doublets in Venezuela occurred along the diffuse onshore boundary between the Caribbean and South American tectonic plates.

Policy paper proposing an animal-inclusive approach to the Sendai Framework by integrating animal welfare, biodiversity and sentient beings into disaster risk reduction.

Rising temperatures can affect our power supply, including nuclear and natural-gas power plants

The study aims to assess Delhi's increasing heat stress and looks into propose roadmap that combines year-round city-wide heat resilience measures with targeted interventions for vulnerable groups.

The BFI, Arts Council England, LIVE Green, and Julie’s Bicycle have partnered to roll out Cool Off in Culture, a UK-wide campaign signposting the public to cultural venues during increasingly frequent heatwaves.

This scoping note examines how intensifying heat-waves threaten every link of India’s power-sector value chain and outlines a roadmap for climate-ready electricity systems.

Heat Smart Schools is a guidance framework by CDRI to help schools adapt to rising extreme heat risks. With over two billion children projected to face frequent heatwaves by 2050, the document emphasizes that heat threatens health, learning, and equity.

Forest fires now burn ten times more acreage annually than in 1985, while wildfire severity has gotten even worse. In California, 30 times more acreage burned from high-severity, forest-killing fires, according to new UCLA research.

Older people in Austria widely perceive an increase in extreme weather since their childhood. Yet how strongly they notice these changes depends on their social position, where they live and how they relate to environmental issues.

In Somaliland, recurrent drought and climate shocks have severely disrupted livelihoods, leaving agro-pastoral communities struggling to sustain their income and food security. The women of Burao had watched the drought take almost everything.

Machine learning methods have for some time been successfully applied to unravel the complexity of earthquake interactions and to identify distinct patterns in existing earthquake data catalogues.

As India grapples with record heat and a delayed monsoon, the research paints a sobering picture: climate change is creating a deadly "dual threat" of extreme humid heat and catastrophic rainfall.

England is sweltering under an red heat health alert and could see its hottest June day on record. In North America, football fans and players are suffering, with a quarter of this summer’s World Cup matches forecast to be played in dangerous heat.

A few hundred feet from a McDonald’s and a strip mall, sandwiched between busy and polluted roads, a lush urban wetland is being built by an unusual and furry group of city residents: beavers.

Today’s post takes advantage of a quiet tropics to explain what ridge riding thunderstorms are, as you may be hearing a bit about those in addition to heat next week across a swath of the Central and Eastern U.S.

Install mobile flood barriers to keep flood waters out. Apply waterproof coatings to protect exteriors from water damage. Build raised entrances to increase thresholds above flood levels.

A senior Indian bureaucrat shared a copy of India’s Disaster Management Act with a Pakistani bureaucrat. What happened next was a cut,copy, paste job which made history in Pakistan’s policy circles.

Europeans are experiencing their second heat wave this summer. One climate scientist called the weather event a “sad inevitability.”

Fishing boats equipped with sensors are gathering data on ocean depth and temperature.

In remote communities, many homes trap heat. This is because houses are not typically designed for local climate conditions. Frequent power shortages and a lack of repair services leave these communities even more exposed.

FAO experts map where crops and pasturelands are most vulnerable to drought.

This report provides a global overview Heat Early Warning Systems, examining where they exist, how they are designed and operated, and their challenges and opportunities.

HERA and its partners launched HERA Materna, the world’s first ever heat-pregnancy insurance program. Extreme heat is threatening pregnant women on the frontlines of the climate crisis, and until now no financial protection has existed to shield them.

Smog from wildfires is getting worse across much of the U.S., according to a NASA-funded study.

Most people know that heat waves can be dangerous. What they may not realize is that the heat indoors can be much worse than outdoors.

For the first time, the World Risk Poll has measured not just how people around the world view the threat of climate change, but also whether they believe their fellow citizens feel the same.

This strategy aims to strengthen national and county governments’ financial capacity to manage disaster risks across the DRM continuum, protect vulnerable groups, safeguard development gains, build resilience, and maintain fiscal stability.

Even as global rates of workplace injury are declining, action is still needed to reduce harm amongst the most vulnerable. There are also signs of complacency in the face of rising harm from food, drinking water and poor air quality.