Reefs, hurricanes and electric vehicles: Everything to know about the environment this week

Japan's weather bureau said on Friday the La Nina phenomenon is continuing and that there is a 60% chance it will prevail through the end of the Northern Hemisphere winter.

It followed a US government weather forecast on Thursday, that there is around a 95% chance of La Nina conditions continuing through the Northern Hemisphere winter.

Nearly a fifth of dragonflies are at threat of extinction due to habitat destruction, the latest Red List of Threatened Species showed this week. The insects play a vital role in managing diseases by eating mosquito larvae.

Poland is to receive a 250 million euro ($282.93 million) loan from the World Bank to help households replace coal heating and get their homes insulated, the Bank said on Thursday.

Colombia has launched a new initiative to tackle environmental crime, with the government citing illegal mining and animal trafficking as among the gravest threats.

Coral reefs in the western Indian Ocean are at risk of extinction by 2070 due to warming temperatures and overfishing, according to a new study.

Europe's benchmark carbon price could hit 100 euros ($113) a tonne by the end of 2021, analysts said this week, after soaring 50% since the start of November to record levels with the help of rising gas prices and the looming expiry of options.

The US government plans to end purchases of gas-powered vehicles by 2035 in a move to lower emissions and promote electric cars under an executive order signed by President Joe Biden on Wednesday.

New research suggests that the North Atlantic has experienced more frequent hurricanes over the past 150 years.

Using three different climate models, Kerry Emanuel, a meteorologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, scattered hurricane 'seeds', or conditions that could produce a storm, throughout the models to see how many seeds developed into storms.

The result? The number of Atlantic storms, particularly major hurricanes, have indeed become more frequent as global temperatures have climbed, his study published Thursday in Nature Communications reported.

The world must get to work on quickly reducing emissions to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius – a goal that remains within reach under the Glasgow Climate Pact, the UN’s climate agency chief said this week.

Deals and decisions made last month in Glasgow gave countries many tasks ahead of the next UN climate conference in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, in November 2022, said Patricia Espinosa, UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Executive Secretary.

“We have so much work to do,” she told Reuters on Tuesday in Washington. “We really have a very short time to produce results.”