Winds, winter drought and wildfires: Everything to know about the environment this week

Winds of up to 135 kilometres per hour (84 miles per hour) battered Madagascar early on Wednesday as Cyclone Emnati made landfall, becoming the fourth major storm to hit the Indian Ocean island in a month. Emnati struck on the southeastern side of the island, where another cyclone, Batsirai, killed scores of people just under three weeks ago. More than 30,000 people were evacuated from of Emnati's path as a precaution, the government's Office for Risk and Disaster Management said late on Tuesday.

Facing a worrying winter drought, Portugal may have to limit irrigation of green spaces and use of water for street cleaning in the most affected regions, the environment minister said on Wednesday. The southern European nation is facing its worst dry spell since 2005, with the size of the area suffering severe or extreme drought doubling in the first two weeks of February to cover 91% of the territory, threatening crops and water supplies.

Three in four people worldwide want single-use plastics to be banned as soon as possible, according to a poll released on Tuesday, as United Nations members prepare to begin talks on a global treaty to rein in soaring plastic pollution. The percentage of people calling for bans is up from 71% since 2019, while those who said they favour products with less plastic packaging rose to 82% from 75%, according to the Ipsos poll of more than 20,000 people across 28 countries.

The Bahamas is on the "front lines" of the catastrophic effects of climate change and is trying to mitigate these, but it needs more help from rich nations, Prime Minister Philip Davis said in an interview on Wednesday. "Within 15 to 20 years, what we now believe to be unusual, for example, Category 5 hurricane events, may become the usual," Davis said. "Such occurrences will have grave implications for the way we live." The archipelago nation northeast of Cuba suffered $3.4 billion in damage – nearly 25% of its GDP – from the 2019 Category 5 Hurricane Dorian. Experts say further climate shifts may cause more droughts, brush fires and high-intensity hurricanes.

Airbus said on Wednesday that it would build a demonstrator to test propulsion technology for future hydrogen airplanes in co-operation with French-US engine maker CFM International. The planemaker plans to fit a specially adapted version of a current-generation engine near the back of an A380 superjumbo test plane. Airbus delivered its last A380 in December.

Wildfires in northern Argentina are forcing local species of wildlife including capybaras, marsh deer and anteaters to attempt to flee ahead of the flames, with many animals killed or injured while trying to escape as the fires spread.

The blazes in Corrientes province, which borders Paraguay, have burned through nearly 900,000 hectares of forest and pasture land, some 12% of the region, including destroying habitats in the biodiverse Iberá Park wetlands.

"There are sectors of the Iberá where animals have been trapped," said Sofía Heinonen, Executive Director of Rewilding Argentina, a foundation that works to protect at-risk species.

"They usually have water as a refuge area, they always have the mountains, but in this case the extraordinary recent drought has caused many of the ravines, many of the lagoons and a large part of the mountains to be dry," Heinonen said.

Images show alligators, capybaras and marsh deer fleeing from the fire, with some burned. Heinonen said the foundation, which has reintroduced animals to the wild in Iberá, has found jaguars and bird species alive and brought them back to its centres.

Amid prolonged periods of drought, firefighters spent two months battling the blazes, which have caused millions of dollars of damage to ranch lands and farming business, as well as putting plant and animal life at risk.

Indonesia's peatlands, California's forests and now vast swathes of Argentine wetland have all been ravaged by extreme wildfires, heralding a fiery future and the dire need to prevent it.

With climate change triggering droughts and farmers clearing forests, the number of extreme wildfires is expected to increase by 30% within the next 28 years. And they are now scorching environments that were not prone to burning in the past, such as the Arctic's tundra and the Amazon rainforest.

"We've seen a great increase in recent fires in northern Syria, northern Siberia, the eastern side of Australia, and India," said Australian government bushfire scientist Andrew Sullivan, an editor on a report on wildfires released on Wednesday by the UN Environment Programme and GRID-Arendal environmental communications group.

At the same time, the slow disappearance of cool, damp nights that once helped to temper fires also means they are getting harder to extinguish, according to a second study published last week in the journal Nature.

With night-time temperatures rising faster than day-time ones over the past four decades, researchers found a 36% increase in the number of after-dark hours that were warm and dry enough sustain fire.