A rapid-spreading wildfire has carved a path of destruction across British Columbia, leaving officials scrambling to assess the full scope of residential damage even as the blaze continues to burn unchecked. Eyewitness accounts highlight the terrifying speed of the inferno, with one resident describing the disaster by saying, “That fire came so fast.” As of Monday, emergency management teams have not yet finalized a full count of homes destroyed or damaged by the uncontrolled wildfire, which has upended communities across the region and stretched local response resources thin. Provincial wildfire services have deployed additional crews and aerial support to contain the blaze, but challenging terrain and dry, windy conditions have hampered containment efforts, leaving the fire still listed as out of control. Authorities have urged residents in evacuation zones to follow emergency orders immediately, as shifting fire behavior can lead to sudden changes in risk levels across affected areas.
分类： environment
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‘Total incinerated destruction’: Canada wildfire evacuees wonder if they still have homes
On a Friday in early August, a new wildfire sparked to life in British Columbia’s beloved Okanagan region, a scenic stretch of Western Canada famous for its crystal blue lake and award-winning wine estates. Named the Bald Range Fire, what began as a small ignition exploded across parched landscape over the following weekend, expanding rapidly to cover 136 square kilometers (53 square miles) in mere hours and triggering urgent evacuation orders for thousands of local residents.
For long-term locals like Earl Kurz, who has called the lakeside town of Peachland home for 30 years, wildfire scares have become an all-too-familiar part of life over the past decade. But the Bald Range Fire marks the first time he has been forced to abandon his property—and the aftermath he witnessed after the blaze passed has been gut-wrenching. “It’s total incinerated destruction,” Kurz described of the charred landscape. “The hot spots are just barren areas of nothing except 12 inches of ash.”
As of Monday, the inferno remains completely out of control, and provincial officials are still working to count the full number of homes destroyed by the flames. More than 12,000 residents across the region remain under mandatory evacuation orders, and local police confirmed Sunday that one 80-year-old woman died while attempting to flee the rapidly advancing fire.
The Okanagan region has been grappling with severe, long-term drought for years, a crisis that has left vegetation tinder-dry and primed for combustion. Data from the Okanagan Basin Water Board shows that as of July, Okanagan Lake’s water levels dropped to their lowest point since 1992, creating ideal conditions for wildfires to spread at breakneck speed.
The Bald Range Fire is far from an isolated incident: as of Monday, more than 100 active wildfires are burning across British Columbia, 70 of which ignited just in the last seven days. In response to the escalating crisis, provincial premier David Eby declared a provincial state of emergency over the weekend, urging all residents in at-risk areas to follow evacuation orders immediately and warning that the blazes continue to advance “incredibly quickly”.
Keegan Radomski, an 18-year-old resident of Summerland— a lakeside town just south of Peachland— is one of thousands of displaced residents, having fled her family home in the middle of Friday evening’s dinner. The property, built by Radomski’s grandmother in 1996, was one the family had held for three decades, and like many long-term Okanagan locals, they had weathered multiple wildfire scares in the past. But nothing prepared them for how fast the Bald Range Fire would move. After spotting distant smoke over dinner, less than four hours passed before Radomski watched a hill on her family’s property catch fire. She barely escaped with only her mother’s ashes before the fire crossed onto the property line, and she still has no confirmation on whether the family home has survived, or when she will be able to return to assess the damage. “We’ve had a lot of close calls before, but it’s never been like this,” Radomski said. “You always think it’s not going to be you, and then it’s you.”
The Bald Range Fire follows closely on the heels of the nearby Bradley Creek Fire, another major Okanagan blaze that is estimated to have destroyed more than 200 homes. After days of “tireless work” by firefighting crews, officials announced that the Bradley Creek Fire is now contained. But the crisis stretching across Western North America is far from over. Just south of British Columbia, the U.S. state of Washington is also facing extreme drought-fueled fires that have forced more than 65,000 people to evacuate their homes. Across the Atlantic, Southern Europe is grappling with its own devastating summer fire season, fueled by record-breaking heat and prolonged drought. France is currently facing its worst wildfire season in 20 years, while regional officials in Madrid, Spain describe the current blazes as the most destructive the region has ever seen.
While wildfires are a natural part of the ecological cycle in Canada’s extensive boreal forests, climate experts agree that human-caused climate change has dramatically amplified the risk: rising temperatures and prolonged dry conditions have made wildfires across Canada more frequent and far more intense over the past decade. In 2023, Canada recorded its most destructive wildfire season in recorded history, measured by total area burned. This summer’s outbreak in British Columbia is the latest example of the growing threat climate change poses to communities across the globe.
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Europe braces for another summer heatwave
As human-caused climate change continues to drive accelerated warming across the European continent, much of the region is gearing up to face yet another extreme heatwave, following a summer already marked by record-low river levels, devastating historic wildfires and thousands of heat-related deaths.
Extreme heat warnings were already in effect for parts of Britain and France on Monday, with forecasters projecting peak temperatures will climb into the mid-30s Celsius in many affected areas. Unusually high temperatures are also on track to hit a broad swathe of central European nations unaccustomed to sustained extreme heat, including Switzerland, Austria and Hungary, in the coming days. According to Europe’s regional weather alert system MeteoAlarm, sweltering conditions have already settled across most of Italy and coastal Croatia as of Monday.
The United Kingdom’s Met Office issued alerts over the weekend warning that the country’s fifth distinct heatwave of the summer would spread northward across most of the nation. Unlike many warmer climates, the UK’s built infrastructure is designed for the country’s historic temperate, cool conditions, leaving it particularly vulnerable to sustained heat. “Yet another spell of extremely hot weather is set to spread north across much of the UK with temperatures reaching the mid-30s Celsius in places,” the agency announced on social media platform X on Sunday.
Already, half of England and the entirety of Wales are officially classified as being in drought, triggering hosepipe bans that impact roughly 23 million people. Additional English regions are expected to be added to the drought classification later on Monday, with no meaningful rainfall forecast for impacted areas through the coming week.
In France, national weather service Meteo-France warned Monday that temperatures would climb as high as 35 degrees Celsius in the country’s southeast, before spreading across nearly the entire country between Wednesday and Friday. The agency also cautioned that under ongoing climate change, “future summers will generally be hotter than those experienced to date.” Both France and the UK have already recorded thousands of excess deaths during earlier heatwaves this summer.
The combination of prolonged heat and parched conditions has already created tinder-dry fuel across much of southern Europe, spurring a series of large wildfires. On Monday, Greece reported its second major wildfire of the season near the capital Athens, and dispatched hundreds of firefighters and pieces of equipment to contain the blaze. A separate wildfire that broke out 10 days ago northwest of Athens has already burned more than 10,000 hectares of pine forest to ash. France and Spain have already faced unprecedented, historic wildfire seasons this summer, driven by record-breaking drought conditions across the Iberian Peninsula and western Europe.
Beyond wildfire risk, the ongoing heat and drought have pushed river levels across the continent to historic lows, disrupting critical transportation and energy infrastructure. German industry groups warned Monday that water levels on the Rhine River, which cuts through the industrial heartland of Europe’s largest economy, could drop low enough to halt commercial shipping entirely. While cargo vessels have continued moving goods along the river so far, they have been forced to operate with sharply reduced loads, driving up transportation costs for key industrial materials.
In Poland, officials confirmed Monday that water levels on the Vistula, the country’s longest river, matched the all-time record low recorded in the capital of Warsaw – a record that was first set just three days prior on Friday. In central and eastern Europe, extremely low levels on the Danube River have forced nuclear power plants in both Hungary and Romania to suspend operations since late July, as the facilities rely on Danube water for cooling reactor systems.
An AFP analysis of data from national weather agencies and the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service found that nearly 120 million Europeans currently reside in regions where July 2022 marked the hottest July ever recorded, with the most extreme record warming concentrated in southern Britain, western France, and northern and eastern Spain. A separate analysis published last month by AFP found that at least 12,000 excess deaths occurred across nine European nations during a single major June heatwave, a toll that is expected to rise as additional mortality data is finalized.
Even amid the widespread heat emergency, a rare astronomical event is drawing attention across the continent: a partial total solar eclipse will cross parts of Europe on Wednesday, and skygazers are still planning to view the event despite the extreme heat. The European Space Agency’s observatory in Teruel, Spain, is hosting a full day of public events leading up to the eclipse, which will begin at 1733 GMT and reach totality at 1823 GMT local time. Temperatures in Teruel already climbed above 30 degrees Celsius on Monday, and the eclipse’s path will cross regions that were devastated by major Spanish wildfires just last month.
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World’s oceans hit record-high July temperatures
New data from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service has confirmed that July 2026 brought the hottest ocean temperatures ever recorded globally, a climate milestone amplified by the developing El Niño pattern in the tropical Pacific that scientists warn will strengthen in the coming months.
Across ocean waters between 60 degrees north and 60 degrees south — excluding polar regions — the average sea surface temperature hit 20.96°C last month, breaking the previous all-time high of 20.89°C set just three years prior in 2023. Globally, July 2026 ranked as the joint second-warmest July ever documented, with average temperatures sitting 1.47°C above pre-industrial baselines. The record ocean warmth extended to European waters, with unprecedented highs measured along the Atlantic coast and western Mediterranean, triggering widespread severe marine heatwaves across the region.
El Niño, a naturally occurring Pacific weather pattern that warms surface waters, is interacting with human-caused global warming to amplify these temperature spikes, researchers explain. Oceans act as Earth’s critical climate buffer, absorbing more than 90% of excess heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions and producing half of the planet’s oxygen supply. But as waters warm, their capacity to absorb carbon dioxide drops, leaving more heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere and creating a dangerous feedback loop that accelerates climate change. Warmer oceans also disrupt marine ecosystems, forcing species to migrate in search of cooler habitats and upending entire ocean food chains.
The same warming trends that pushed ocean temperatures to new highs have triggered an unprecedented sequence of extreme weather across Western Europe. The region recorded its hottest combined June and July on record in 2026, with an average temperature of 21.62°C — 2.79°C above the long-term average. This marked the third consecutive month of exceptional heat for the area, with persistent high-pressure systems trapping heat over the continent and parched soils eliminating natural evaporative cooling effects. Samantha Burgess, strategic lead for climate at the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, noted that this extreme event is a clear illustration of how climate change is intensifying heat extremes, with heat and drought creating a self-reinforcing cycle that worsens conditions over time.
The prolonged hot, dry spell has stripped the region of moisture, leaving soil moisture levels across much of Western Europe far lower than those recorded during the severe 2022 European drought. Major waterways including the Seine, Rhine, and Danube have seen far lower-than-average flows, with some stretches hitting historic lows. These low water levels have put massive pressure on public water supplies, agricultural irrigation, fragile aquatic ecosystems, commercial river navigation, and hydropower generation across the continent.
Dry conditions have also created prime fuel for extreme wildfire activity, with large blazes raging across Western Europe through July 2026. Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service director Laurence Rouil noted that this summer’s burned area, smoke output, and fire intensity have been exceptional, noting that climate change is expanding the conditions that spawn large, high-intensity wildfires in southern Europe while extending the wildfire season further north than ever before. Larger wildfires inject smoke higher into the atmosphere, allowing it to travel thousands of kilometers, meaning even countries with low historical wildfire risk face growing exposure to hazardous smoke pollution.
In the United Kingdom, the extreme dry conditions have pushed water systems to breaking point. The UK Met Office confirmed that England and Wales saw their driest July in 190 years of record-keeping, with large swathes of England and all of Wales already officially designated as being in drought. The Environment Agency has warned that additional areas of England could be added to drought declarations if dry conditions continue through August. The UK’s Met Office has emphasized that weather once classified as extreme is now becoming the “new normal”, with its latest climate assessment finding that the average hottest annual temperature in southern England is now 4.5°C warmer than it was between 1961 and 1990. “We are right now living in a time of historic and unprecedented change,” said Mike Kendon, a Met Office climate information scientist. “Evidence shows the climate of the 20th century has now gone.”
Scientists stress that the current extreme conditions are being driven by long-term anthropogenic warming, primarily from the burning of fossil fuels, with El Niño acting as a temporary additional push that pushes global temperatures even higher. Today, the global average temperature is already roughly 1.4°C higher than pre-industrial levels at the end of the 19th century, matching the threshold scientists have long warned carries severe, irreversible risks to natural and human systems.
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Record July heat in regions home to 900 mn people: AFP analysis
A new independent analysis conducted by Agence France-Presse (AFP) using data from Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service has delivered a stark warning about accelerating global warming: regions inhabited by nearly 900 million people around the world experienced their hottest July on record in 2026. The analysis, which drew on billions of data points from Copernicus’s widely respected ERA5 climate model, identified 33 nations that broke all previous historical temperature records for the seventh month of the year.
Unlike many low- and middle-income nations that lack the infrastructure to publish regular, detailed climate data, major European countries including France and Spain were able to independently verify the record-breaking conditions through their national meteorological agencies: Meteo-France and Spain’s AEMET. To fill gaps in global reporting, AFP carried out its own independent assessment of the Copernicus dataset, which combines satellite observations from multiple countries, readings from land, sea and airborne weather stations, and advanced climate modelling to deliver consistent hourly global climate data dating back to 1950.
The most heavily impacted region by population was Africa, where close to 400 million people lived through the unprecedented heat. The Sahel, a semi-arid belt stretching across the continent from west to east, was hit particularly hard, with 10 nations breaking July heat records. While temperature anomalies near the equator are typically smaller than those in temperate zones, multiple Sahel nations including Chad and Sudan saw average July temperatures climb more than 2 degrees Celsius above the 1981-2010 baseline. Long warned as one of the most vulnerable regions to climate change, many Sahel countries are already battling overlapping crises: armed conflict, widespread food insecurity, and entrenched poverty that leaves communities with little capacity to adapt to extreme heat. This trend aligns with warnings from the World Weather Attribution network, which noted in January that extreme heat events have become nearly 10 times more frequent since 2015, a shift directly tied to human-caused climate change.
In the Americas, the ongoing naturally occurring El Niño pattern, which emerged in June 2026 and is projected to peak later in the year, amplified already soaring temperatures across Central America and northern South America. Around 110 million people from Mexico down to northern Brazil, stretching from the Pacific coast to the Guiana Highlands, recorded their hottest July on record. Three nations in Central America’s climate-vulnerable “Dry Corridor” — El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Honduras — broke monthly heat records in both June and July, worsening already dire fears of widespread famine. The United Nations World Food Programme recently identified Central America, including the Caribbean, as the region expected to face the steepest relative increase in food insecurity, projecting that an additional 16 million people could slip into food insecurity by the end of 2027.
In Europe, nearly 120 million people across southern Britain, western France, and northern and eastern Spain lived through the region’s hottest July ever recorded. In France, average temperatures hit a staggering 3.8 degrees Celsius above the 1991-2020 baseline — a reference period that is already significantly warmer than the pre-industrial climate of 1850-1900. Along with record heat, both France and Spain saw exceptional drought conditions that created tinder-dry fuel for catastrophic wildfires. In late July, a megafire in France’s Gironde department burned nearly 42,000 hectares of land and forced the evacuation of more than 220,000 residents. Around the same time, Spain faced its largest wildfire in modern history, which scorched almost 44,000 hectares in Avila province near the Spanish capital Madrid.
Beyond these major concentrated regions, scattered areas across the globe home to more than 250 million additional people also saw unprecedented July heat. These included China’s Sichuan province, the U.S. states of Wyoming and Colorado, and the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Borneo, underscoring the widespread reach of the 2026 record heat event.
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Flood death toll in India’s Assam reaches 100
GUWAHATI, India — The catastrophic flood emergency gripping India’s northeastern Assam state remained at a critical juncture on Monday, after disaster officials confirmed the overall death toll had climbed to 100, with two additional fatalities recorded overnight.
According to the Assam State Disaster Management Authority, multiple major rivers across the region are still hovering above official danger levels, leaving low-lying and high-risk communities exposed to the threat of new, devastating inundation. Days of intense, unrelenting monsoon rainfall have pushed major waterways, including the iconic Brahmaputra River, far beyond their banks, swallowing entire settlements, upending daily life for millions and inflicting widespread damage to critical public infrastructure.
Stretching 900 kilometers (560 miles) through the heart of Assam after originating in China’s Tibet Autonomous Region, the Brahmaputra is counted among Asia’s largest river systems. In this latest flood event, it has inundated hundreds of rural villages, swept thousands of homes off their foundations, and forced close to 300,000 displaced residents to seek shelter in government-operated relief camps, state officials confirmed.
The ongoing flood disaster, which first began to unfold last month, has forced more than 700,000 people to abandon their homes and property. Vast swathes of agricultural farmland, the primary livelihood for millions of rural Assam residents, now sit submerged, while roads, bridges and other core local infrastructure have been damaged or destroyed. While receding floodwaters have allowed many displaced residents to begin returning to their home regions in recent days, at least 49,000 people remain housed across 125 active relief camps and aid distribution centers, per state data.
Beyond damage to human settlements and infrastructure, the floods have also taken a devastating toll on local livestock, with large numbers of cattle killed or lost. This blow to rural household assets has compounded economic hardship for already vulnerable communities, while also raising public health warnings over potential post-flood disease outbreaks. For families returning to recovered areas, the cleanup process brings an added layer of difficulty: many properties are left completely buried under thick layers of river silt, requiring extensive work to make homes and land usable again.
State authorities have maintained a continuous presence in affected regions, leading relief operations, monitoring river levels and working to map the full scale of damage to identify unmet needs among impacted populations. Following a high-level review meeting on the crisis, Assam’s Agriculture and Irrigation Minister Pijush Hazarika announced that officials have been ordered to speed up damage assessments to unlock government financial support for long-term recovery and rehabilitation. Hazarika confirmed that interim monetary compensation has already been disbursed to roughly 500,000 flood-affected residents across the state.
Flooding during the annual monsoon season is a recurring hazard for Assam, where swollen rivers routinely inundate large swathes of the state and displace thousands of people every year. But climate scientists warn that human-caused climate change is intensifying monsoon patterns across South Asia, where the rainy season traditionally falls in two periods: from June to September, and again from October to December. What were once largely predictable seasonal rains now arrive in erratic, extreme bursts, dumping catastrophic volumes of water over just a few days before giving way to extended dry spells, increasing the risk of both severe flooding and prolonged drought across the region.
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From Uniqlo to Zara, clothing brands try to win over Gen Z with a needle and thread
Against a backdrop of growing global alarm over textile waste and the fashion industry’s massive carbon footprint, a surprising new retail trend is taking hold: major clothing brands are now encouraging customers to repair their worn garments instead of replacing them with new purchases. What once might have seemed like a counterintuitive approach to boosting sales has become a core strategy to win over Generation Z shoppers, who prioritize both environmental sustainability and budget-friendly consumption.
While long-standing outdoor brands like Patagonia and L.L.Bean, along with high-end luxury fashion houses, have offered product repair services for decades, the concept has recently moved mainstream. Today, industry leaders ranging from denim giant Levi Strauss & Co. to global casual wear chain Uniqlo and value retailer Primark are leaning into needle-and-thread initiatives to connect with younger consumers.
Levi Strauss, based in San Francisco, has expanded its hands-on sustainability effort called the Wear Longer program across the United States, building on the repair and customization services it already offers at hundreds of locations worldwide. After identifying that many Gen Z consumers share a strong interest in thrifting and eco-friendly habits but lack basic sewing skills, the brand launched introductory handstitching courses for high school students. Over 90-minute sessions, Levi’s employees teach four foundational mending skills: attaching a loose button, hemming garments, patching holes, and fixing tears. “We think it’s important to empower the people who buy our clothes with the skill sets to maintain them, to get them to that second life,” explained Paul Dillinger, Levi’s head of global design innovation.
For many consumers like Chloe Halprin, a 25-year-old Detroit nonprofit grant writer, these programs fill a critical gap. Halprin fits exactly the profile of the shopper brands are targeting with the “fix it, don’t ditch it” movement. As a teenager, she shopped at low-cost fast fashion outlets like Forever 21, and when a garment ripped beyond what her limited sewing skills could fix, she simply threw it away. Today, she buys almost all of her clothing secondhand, has recently learned to hem garments with a sewing machine, and is working her way up to more advanced projects like repurposing an old skirt into a new top. “I try to be conscientious of my carbon footprint,” Halprin said. “I really don’t like waste. I’m trying to save money as well.”
The shift to mending services comes as the global fashion industry faces mounting pressure to address its outsized contribution to environmental degradation and climate change. Textile waste—including manufacturing offcuts, unsold inventory, and discarded clothing and household linens—ranks among the sector’s most urgent challenges. The United Nations Environment Program estimates that the world generates enough fabric waste to fill a garbage truck, which is then dumped or incinerated, every single second. Industry researchers broadly confirm that extending a garment’s lifespan through repair and resale directly reduces its overall environmental impact, especially when it delays or eliminates the need to buy a new item.
Data from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a leading sustainability nonprofit, underscores the scale of the problem: global clothing production nearly doubled between 2000 and 2015, while the average number of times a garment is worn before being discarded dropped by 36%. The organization also found that less than 1% of all discarded clothing material is ever recycled into new apparel.
Generation Z—consumers born between 1997 and 2012—has been a key driver of the growing demand for repair and resale options. This cohort came of age surrounded by fast fashion and e-commerce, but their teenage and young adult years were shaped by the economic uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic and post-pandemic inflation. A joint report from independent market intelligence firm GlobalData and leading resale platform ThredUp found that Gen Z’s preferences, driven by both tight budgets and a rejection of excessive consumerism, have helped the preowned clothing market grow far faster than overall retail apparel sales in the U.S.
For new clothing brands, mending programs and educational workshops address shifting core consumer priorities while boosting brand reputation, explained Neil Saunders, a retail analyst at GlobalData. “It puts a halo on the brand,” he said.
As mass-market and fast-fashion retailers from Zara to H&M join the movement, the trend has drawn both interest and skepticism from sustainability experts. Spain-based Zara launched a digital platform in 2022 that allows customers to resell preowned Zara garments and request basic alterations and repairs, with the program currently active in 17 of the nearly 100 countries where the retailer operates.
Ireland-headquartered Primark has centered its approach on consumer education, hosting free “Love It For Longer” workshops that teach attendees practical skills like replacing zippers and buttons. To date, the value retailer has held more than 730 workshops across nine of the 17 countries where it operates, including the U.S., and has tested in-store repair services at three U.K. locations this year. “Learning how to repair and care for clothing is probably one of the most simplest but absolutely totally effective ways that we can reduce waste and also extend the lifetime of whatever we buy,” said Vicki Swain, Primark’s product longevity & partnership lead. Swain added that affordable fast fashion items are just as durable and repairable as higher-priced garments, noting that half of the items Primark sells annually are wardrobe staples like socks, underwear, T-shirts, and jeans: “There is nothing throw away about our products.”
Uniqlo, the Japanese mass-market retailer focused on timeless basic apparel, offers a full suite of aftercare services at 75 of its roughly 2,500 global stores, including basic repairs, decorative traditional Japanese sashiko mending, embroidery, and creative restyling. The company frames these services as a way to extend the product lifecycle and strengthen customer relationships, according to Jean-Emmanuel Shein, director of global corporate responsibility at Uniqlo USA.
However, some sustainability experts argue that these well-meaning initiatives will have limited impact on the fashion industry’s overall environmental footprint. “The fashion sector’s primary source of impact is due to the overproduction of pieces and growing volumes of garments created,” said Kate Fletcher, a professor of sustainability, design and fashion systems at Manchester Metropolitan University in England. “Repairing a garment in store happens in addition to these growing production volumes, not instead of them.”
A core open question remains: can repair services grow from a niche marketing offering to a commercially viable part of mainstream fashion retail? Sweden-based H&M Group, one of the world’s largest apparel retailers with more than 4,000 stores in over 80 countries, has been open about the biggest barrier: cost. The company notes that while repair and resale are important sustainability goals, manufacturing brand new garments is currently far cheaper for businesses than extending the lifespan of existing ones. H&M has tested mending and redesign studios in several European flagship locations over the past decade and is the majority owner of secondhand clothing platform Sellpy.
In May 2024, H&M joined Primark, ThredUp, and dozens of other fashion and textile companies in signing an open letter urging governments across North America and the European Union to adopt tax incentives that would make repair and resale of clothing more profitable for businesses.
Saunders of GlobalData noted that making in-store mending work economically is challenging, because the service is labor-intensive but must be priced low to attract customers. Consumer signals are also mixed, he added: while younger shoppers embrace the idea of repair and resale, they still continue to shop for affordable fast fashion, since it remains one of the most accessible options for budget-conscious consumers. “But what they’re doing as well, though, is they’re buying into alternative channels like resale. And they’re having things repaired,” Saunders said.
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Tropical storm causes some flooding in eastern China
A series of weather disturbances are rippling through East Asia this week, with former Typhoon Dolphin leaving a trail of disrupted daily life after making landfall along China’s eastern coast over the weekend.
The storm first slammed into the coastal city of Taizhou, located in China’s Zhejiang Province, Sunday evening, packing maximum sustained winds of 151 kilometers per hour (93 mph) as it came ashore. Before hitting the Chinese mainland, Dolphin already drenched northern Taiwan with heavy downpours over the weekend, laying the groundwork for widespread flooding once it moved inland. After landfall, the system weakened to a tropical storm, bringing sustained torrential rain to eastern China on Monday that quickly overwhelmed local drainage systems and triggered flash flooding in multiple low-lying areas.
As of Monday morning, Taiwan’s Central Weather Administration recorded maximum sustained winds of just 65 kph (40 mph) within the storm system, confirming a steady weakening trend. China’s national meteorological service added that Dolphin is tracking northwest at a speed of 15 to 20 km per hour (9 to 12 mph), and is projected to continue losing intensity until it fully dissipates over inland China. Even in its weakened state, however, the storm poses serious hazards: national and local authorities have issued urgent warnings for elevated risks of catastrophic river flooding and destructive landslides across mountainous and low-lying regions of eastern China.
Local response teams have already been deployed to address storm damage. State broadcaster CCTV reported that emergency crews in Yueqing, a coastal city within Zhejiang, launched search and rescue operations to extract residents trapped in water-submerged homes, while also working to clear storm debris including fallen broken tree branches from public streets to restore access for emergency vehicles.
The proactive steps taken by Chinese authorities ahead of the storm’s arrival mitigated potential casualties: more than 300,000 residents in high-risk areas were preemptively relocated to emergency shelters before Dolphin made landfall. Major transportation hubs also pre-emptively suspended services, with both of Shanghai’s major international airports canceling more than 1,300 incoming and outgoing flights to avoid putting passengers and crew at risk.
The impacts of Dolphin have not been limited to China and Taiwan. The storm system also amplified seasonal monsoon rainfall across the Philippines, worsening already wet conditions and sparking flash floods and deadly landslides in vulnerable areas across the archipelago.
Meanwhile, a second tropical system is gearing up to impact East Asia this week. Tropical Storm Chan-hom is currently tracking toward Japan’s Pacific coastline, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency. As of Monday morning, the storm carried maximum sustained winds of 83 kph (51 mph), and forecasters project it will intensify slightly before making landfall sometime between Tuesday and Wednesday.
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Typhoon Dolphin weakens but disrupts travel in east China
Just two weeks after another powerful storm battered southern China, Typhoon Dolphin has swept through the country’s eastern coastal regions, leaving a trail of transportation chaos and persistent flood threats even as its wind speeds drop after making landfall.
The storm came ashore twice along Zhejiang Province’s coastline on Sunday, August 9 2026, and had steadily lost intensity by the following day, according to China’s National Meteorological Centre (NMC). By Monday morning, the agency had downgraded the typhoon alert to its lowest severity level, but issued a urgent advisory that heavy downpours would continue to drench large swathes of eastern and central China for another 24 hours.
The elevated risks from lingering rainfall prompted state broadcaster CCTV to report that authorities had activated the highest possible flash flood warning for multiple areas in eastern and southern Zhejiang. Northern parts of the country are also bracing for extreme weather this week: five Beijing districts activated red heavy rain alerts on Monday, with official warnings highlighting elevated risks of landslides and urban flooding.
In Shanghai, China’s leading financial hub, the storm’s impact on travel has been severe. The city’s two major commercial airports reported that a total of 943 scheduled flights were scrapped on Monday, while most local public transit services including regional train lines were temporarily suspended. Adjacent Zhejiang has seen a uneven recovery: Hangzhou, the provincial capital, restored suspended subway services by Monday morning, while Ningbo International Airport only cleared for a resumption of flight operations starting at midday local time. Airport officials cautioned that many services would remain disrupted, as residual storm damage and unstable weather conditions have not fully abated.
Over the weekend, when Typhoon Dolphin was at its peak strength, it triggered a top-tier national emergency alert, forced more than 1,000 flight cancellations across the region and pushed authorities to evacuate tens of thousands of residents from high-risk coastal and low-lying areas.
This storm marks the latest in a string of extreme weather events to hit China in 2026. It comes just 14 days after Typhoon Noul made landfall in southern Guangdong Province, which officials labeled the strongest storm to hit the country so far this year. Last month, Typhoon Maysak caused catastrophic damage across southern and central China: devastating floods triggered by the storm killed 39 people in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, while thunderstorms and gale-force winds in central Hubei Province left 11 more dead and 331 injured.
Climate scientists have repeatedly warned that the rising frequency and intensity of such extreme weather events is a direct consequence of global warming driven by greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel combustion. As the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, China has also positioned itself as a global leader in renewable energy development, with a formal national policy target to achieve carbon neutrality across its entire economy by 2060.
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Western Europe experienced hottest June-July on record: EU monitor
Europe, the continent warming faster than any other on Earth, is facing an unprecedented summer of climate-driven disasters, after the European Union’s official climate monitoring service confirmed Monday that Western Europe has just endured the hottest combined June and July ever recorded.
Successive back-to-back heatwaves have baked the region, leaving parched landscapes and severe water shortages that have created near-perfect conditions for out-of-control wildfires to spread. Data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the EU’s leading climate monitoring body, shows that the average temperature across Western Europe for the first two months of summer 2025 hit 21.62 degrees Celsius, breaking the previous record set just three years ago in 2022.
This new record is a direct reflection of the extraordinary, unrelenting heat that has gripped the region since the start of summer, Copernicus officials noted. Beyond air temperatures, soil moisture levels across Western Europe are already significantly lower than they were during the crippling 2022 drought, one of the most severe water shortages the region has seen in modern history.
Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts which manages the Copernicus program, emphasized that these conditions offer a clear, stark example of how human-caused climate change is supercharging extreme heat events. “Heat and drought increasingly reinforce one another, creating a feedback loop that makes these events more severe and longer-lasting,” Burgess explained.
Exceptionally dry conditions have been recorded across much of Western and Central Europe in July, stretching from southern Europe’s Spain and France through Central Europe’s Austria and Hungary, and reaching as far north as the United Kingdom, Ireland and parts of Iceland. Major European waterways including the Seine, Rhine and Danube have seen water levels drop to far below normal seasonal averages, disrupting commercial shipping, cutting off water supplies for agricultural irrigation and reducing hydropower output across multiple countries.
The combination of extreme heat and dry vegetation has also created prime wildfire conditions. Climate scientists have long warned that the frequency of extreme fire-prone weather across Europe is rising steadily as global temperatures climb. This summer, France and Spain have already fought the most destructive wildfires the two nations have seen in living memory, with dangerous blazes also spreading across other European nations, as well as western North America, where the U.S. Northwest and Canada have faced severe fire seasons of their own.
Beyond land-based extremes, Copernicus also announced that global ocean surface temperatures hit a new record high in July, marking the second consecutive month that this benchmark has been broken. The record warmth is being driven by widespread marine heatwaves around European coastlines and a rapidly strengthening El Niño event developing across the tropical Pacific Ocean.
The global average sea surface temperature for July hit 20.96 degrees Celsius, surpassing the previous record set in 2023. Carlo Buontempo, director of Copernicus, told reporters on August 5 that while parts of the Mediterranean and North Atlantic are running far above average temperatures, the developing El Niño is the primary driver of the new global ocean heat record. “We are now facing a very large El Niño — possibly unprecedented in terms of its amplitude,” Buontempo said. “It is clear that the contribution coming from the tropical Pacific becomes quite important.”
El Niño is the warm phase of a natural Pacific climate cycle that temporarily raises tropical ocean temperatures and alters global weather patterns, increasing the risk of extreme drought and flooding across many regions. It also adds extra heat to a planet already warmed by centuries of fossil fuel burning that has pumped greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
El Niño events typically reach their peak strength at the end of the calendar year, before stored ocean heat is released into the atmosphere, pushing up global average temperatures. The previous major El Niño event helped make 2023 the second-hottest year on record globally, and 2024 the hottest. Buontempo said climate researchers now expect a new global average temperature record to be set either later this year or by early 2027.
On a global scale, July 2025 tied for the second-warmest July ever recorded, with an average surface air temperature 1.47 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial baseline from 1850 to 1900, the benchmark used to measure progress toward global climate targets. The last 11 consecutive years are already the 11 hottest years ever recorded, and Buontempo noted that current temperatures are outside the range that modern human civilization has ever experienced. “We have not seen a climate that warm during our lifetime, and very possibly our civilisation,” he said, adding that the primary driver of this ongoing warming remains the rising concentration of greenhouse gases from human activity.
Oceans absorb more than 90 percent of the excess heat generated by humanity’s carbon emissions, making them the planet’s primary natural climate regulator. But rising ocean temperatures come with severe cascading risks: hotter oceans fuel more intense tropical storms, increase extreme rainfall events, and cause widespread coral bleaching that destroys critical marine ecosystems.
Copernicus generates its climate data using billions of measurements from satellites, land-based weather stations and ocean monitoring sensors, with a consistent temperature record extending back to 1940, making it one of the most trusted regional and global climate monitoring sources in the world.