France's 'monster blaze' and other environment stories you need to read this week

Firefighters have managed to halt the spread of a "monster" blaze in southwest France, allowing authorities to reopen a stretch of highway to traffic ahead of a busy travel weekend. Reinforcements from across Europe helped local firefighters tackle the blaze which has ravaged forests in France's Gironde region since 9 August and forced 10,000 people to evacuate their homes.

Several regions of China including the major southwestern city of Chongqing baked in temperatures exceeding 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) on 13 August, while the country's national observatory continued its red alert for extreme heat.

Antarctica's coastal glaciers are shedding icebergs more rapidly than nature can replenish the crumbling ice, doubling previous estimates of losses from the world's largest ice sheet over the past 25 years, a satellite analysis showed on 10 August.

Decomposing food waste is releasing thousands of tonnes of planet-warming methane gas at landfills in Buenos Aires, Delhi, Mumbai, and Lahore, new research finds.

Britain officially declared a drought in parts of England on 12 August as households faced new curbs on water usage during a prolonged period of hot and dry weather that has kindled wildfires and tested infrastructure.

The heaviest rain in Seoul in 115 years has spurred the South Korean capital to revive a $1.15 billion plan to improve drainage after floods exposed how even the affluent Gangnam district is vulnerable to climate change-driven extreme weather. At least eight people died in and around Seoul South Korean authorities said on 9 August, after torrential rain knocked out power, caused landslides and left roads and subways submerged.

US President Joe Biden on 8 August surveyed the damaged houses, uprooted trees and mud-filled roads left by severe flooding in eastern Kentucky and linked the devastation to climate change. Extreme hot weather hit the region as families struggled to recover from flooding caused by torrential rains that began in late July. At least 37 people died, and some survivors escaped the fast-rising water with little more than their lives.

India opened its first factory to produce ethanol from rice straw or stubble on 10 August as part of measures to reduce its reliance on oil imports and meet its net zero carbon goal. Prime Minister Narendra Modi said the project will help cut pollution in India's capital New Delhi, which has been blanketed by smog from stubble burning in recent winters, as well as in the northern states of Haryana and Punjab.

Two-thirds of Australia's Great Barrier Reef showed the largest amount of coral cover in 36 years, but the reef remains vulnerable to increasingly frequent mass bleaching, an official long-term monitoring programme reported on 11 August.

The head of the European Space Agency (ESA) has warned economic damage from heatwaves and drought could dwarf Europe's energy crisis as he called for urgent action to tackle climate change.

Director General Josef Aschbacher told Reuters successive heatwaves along with wildfires, shrinking rivers and rising land temperatures as measured from space left no doubt about the toll on agriculture and other industries from climate change.

"Today, we are very concerned about the energy crisis, and rightly so. But this crisis is very small compared to the impact of climate change, which is of a much bigger magnitude and really has to be tackled extremely fast," he said.

"It's pretty bad. We have seen extremes that have not been observed before," Aschbacher told Reuters, as heatwaves and floods generate concerns over extreme weather across the globe.

Aschbacher said ESA's Copernicus Sentinel-3 satellite series had measured "extreme" land surface temperatures of more than 45°C in Britain, 50°C in France and 60°C in Spain in recent weeks.

"It's really the whole ecosystem that is changing very, very fast and much faster than what scientists expected until some years ago," he said.

"It is drought, fires, intensity of storms, everything coupled together, which are the visible signs of climate change."

Carbon offsets generated from forests to counteract future climate-warming emissions from California's big polluters are rapidly being depleted as trees are ravaged by wildfire and disease, new research suggests.

One of California's key policy tools to combat climate change may be falling far short of its goals, the researchers said - raising questions about similar carbon offset programs around the world.

The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, was conducted by CarbonPlan, a San Francisco-based non-profit that researches the integrity of programmes designed to offset carbon emissions. The group's research has questioned the value of the California forest carbon offset programme in fighting climate change in the past.

“The problems we observe here aren’t unique to the California programme and raise broader concerns about the integrity of offsets’ permanence claims,” Freya Chay, one of the study's authors, said in a statement.