World Bank: Access to emergency funds and other nature and climate stories you need to read this week

The World Bank will offer member countries hit by natural disasters and other crises access to emergency funds from existing loan programmes, as part of the bank's Crisis Preparedness and Response Toolkit.

The initiative will enable countries to receive up to 10% of undisbursed funds from an ongoing loan programme to support emergency response efforts.

For example, a country with $3 billion undisbursed from a $5 billion loan portfolio could receive instant access to $300 million in liquidity to tackle a natural disaster, Anna Bjerde, World Bank Managing Director for Operations told Reuters.

Access to larger pre-arranged emergency funding will also be increased as part of future loan programmes to build resilience.

In addtion, the World Bank has approved a bigger role for catastrophe insurance programmes in protecting against major disasters.

The moves are part of wider reforms at the international financial institution to help address the climate crisis and other global challenges and increase its lending capacity, Reuters reports.

Donations worth $640 million were pledged to Brazil's Amazon Fund for sustainable rainforests by developed nations in 2023, according to Tereza Campello, Environmental Director of fund manager the Brazilian Development Bank.

The bulk of these funds have been committed by the Biden Administration over five years, which still requires the approval of US Congress. Other leading new donors include the UK, Denmark and the European Union.

Norway and Germany, the first and second countries to support the fund with donations, have increased their original commitments.

Deforestation rates have fallen to their lowest level since 2018. In 2023, 5,153 square kilometres (1,989.6 square miles) of the Brazilian Amazon were cleared, a 49.9% decrease from 2022, according to government data.

A lethal bird-flu virus has been discovered in gentoo penguins in Antarctica for the first time, which could spread to other large penguin colonies, says the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research.

Ocean trawling may stir up organic matter on the ocean floor that releases stored CO2 back into the water column, new research published in Frontiers in Marine Science shows.

Low rainfall due to climate change, unchecked urban growth and dated infrastructure have left Mexico City residents facing "unprecedented" water shortages, warn officials from the city's water utility SACMEX.

The EU requires trillions of investment to reach its 2050 climate target, most of which could be secured by redirecting existing spending, according to research backed by Green EU lawmakers.

Climate crisis-driven sea level rises could leave wetlands producing more methane emissions than previously thought, biologists from Berkeley have found.

Drought-induced hunger has killed at least 372 people in Ethiopia in the past six months, government officials have announced, with the famine compounded by conflict in recent years.

A geoengineering technique called stratospheric aerosol injection could slow the loss of Greenland's ice sheets, research published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface shows.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and Earth observation can together generate and decipher vital data for climate action and sustainable growth to help life on our planet. Here's how.

What can we learn from indigenous people about stewarding the planet? At the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting in Davos, indigenous leaders shared their perspectives on building an economy in harmony with nature.

Remote sensing technologies, AI-driven models and IoT devices are some of the emerging climate technologies helping to harvest better data to inform strategies to combat the climate crisis.