An atmospheric phenomenon occurring over much of California was unmistakable in satellite imagery in late autumn 2025. Fog stretching some 400 miles (640 kilometers) across the state's Central Valley appeared day after day for more than two weeks in late November and early December. Known as tule (TOO-lee) fog, named after a sedge that grows in the area's marshes, these low clouds tend to form in the valley in colder months when winds are light and soils are moist.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/46910756

Archived

The world’s biggest carbon polluter is expected to keep total emissions flat in 2025 despite rising energy demand – a sign that clean power may, for the first time, fully offset the growth in electricity consumption, the analysis by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) showed.

The country’s emissions only rose by 0.6% in 2024, a significantly slower pace of growth than the previous year, according to official Chinese government data published on Thursday.

But the Finland-based research group cautioned that a “concerning” policy environment for the next few years increased the risk of an emissions rebound. It added that China was also set to miss its key target for cutting carbon intensity – CO2 emissions per unit of gross domestic product – this year, meaning steeper reductions will be needed to hit its headline 2030 climate goal of slashing carbon intensity by 65%.

[...]

Record solar energy installations and strong growth in wind power capacity have increased the share of non-fossil fuel electricity this year, with emissions from the power sector set to decline for the first time since 2016, the report said. But that progress has been partially countered by the rapidly growing use of coal for the production of plastics and other chemical products, meaning overall emissions are expected to remain stable.

At the same time, experts have warned that China’s new pricing system for solar and wind projects risks slowing the clean energy boom. Under the new policy introduced last June, developers of new solar and wind power plants need to secure contracts with provincial authorities through competitive auctions, instead of being guaranteed a fixed price.

[...]

Coal power plants, on the other hand, are protected from this market-based system, relying instead on long-term power purchase agreements that lock in prices, Schäpe said, describing it as “unfair competition”.

China’s rapidly expanding coal power fleet is adding to the concerns. In 2025, the country has added the largest amount of coal-fired capacity since 2015, while progress on retiring older plants remains very slow, CREA’s report highlighted.

This runs contrary to a pledge made by President Xi Jinping in 2021 to “strictly control” new coal power projects. That commitment was omitted from Beijing’s updated national climate plan (NDC) submitted in late October ahead of COP30.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/46910935

Archived

[...]

China’s dominance in the renewable energy supply chain—especially in rare earth minerals, copper and lithium processing—has led to massive industrial expansion in Tibet. While promoted internationally as sustainable climate action, many projects have instead resulted in water contamination, ecosystem collapse, cultural displacement, and intensified political repression.

“Under the guise of green energy development, Tibet is being reshaped to fuel China’s economic and geopolitical ambitions,” said Tempa Gyaltsen Zamlha, Deputy Director of the Tibet Policy Institute, in his welcome address. “These mines and mega-dams are marketed as climate-friendly, but they have devastated Tibet’s rivers, grasslands, wildlife habitats, and traditional communities.”

The Tibetan Plateau, often called the Third Pole, contains the world’s largest reserve of freshwater outside the polar regions. Its rivers support nearly 1.9 billion people across Asia. Yet, scientists have warned that the plateau is warming at nearly twice the global average, accelerating glacial melt and causing irreversible environmental instability.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/43026095

Web archive link

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The carbon border tax, which comes into force from January, was behind an attempt by the big exporters to scupper wider negotiations on climate action at the latest UN summit in Brazil.

Speaking in the aftermath at COP30, Wopke Hoekstra told the Financial Times that the petrostates had also been “more assertive” across the board in a bid to thwart climate agreements as the shift to cleaner energy systems accelerates.

“Some of those making money out of [fossil fuels] are seeking to prolong that process. We have seen this quite explicitly,” he said. “Some of the petrostates are seeking to at least slow down rather than speed up [the energy transition].”

He added: “I have sensed a certain sense of assertiveness that might not have been there five or 10 years ago.”

...

During public and closed-door meetings at the two-week talks, some of the developing countries argued the tax, or carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM), was a unilateral measure that would drive up costs, restrict trade and hinder their ability to grow their economies.

The tax will initially apply to products such as steel, cement and fertilisers, and aims to ensure imported goods meet similar green standards to those produced inside the EU or face an additional charge.

...

Hoekstra said the criticism was “clearly not very credible”, adding that in one-on-one conversations many countries “acknowledge it is clearly a climate tool” rather than a trade measure.

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More than 80 countries had rallied around a proposal at COP30 for a so-called road map to help countries wean their economies off fossil fuels. But the plan failed to appear in the final agreement after objection from more than 30 other countries [particularly China, Russia, and petro-states in the Middle East].

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China's efforts to slow land degradation and climate change by planting trees and restoring grasslands have shifted water around the country in huge, unforeseen ways, new research shows.

Prof. Nick Zentner (Geology) at Washington State showing an accurate representation of the ice age floods that shaped a lot of the canyons we see today in NA.

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/42456384

Unpaywalled (Web archive)

The strange number lighting up Tawanda Majoni’s phone again and again felt like a warning.

Majoni, one of the Zimbabwe’s most respected journalists, soon learned where the calls were coming from: a federal police unit called Law and Order, notorious for abductions, torture and killings.

When unmarked cars rolled through his neighborhood after a relative was pressed for his location, Majoni packed a bag, tossed his cell phone’s SIM card so he couldn’t be tracked and fled the city, haunted by memories of slain colleagues. One was hurled from a moving vehicle in broad daylight. Another was beaten to death.

He knew he couldn’t run forever. After two weeks, he returned and answered one of the calls. An officer told him to come in: We have a case related to you.

...

A few days later, Majoni sat in a small, airless room at Law and Order offices, his lawyer ordered to wait outside. For three hours, officers grilled Majoni about his work, at one point sliding a printout across the desk—a tweet about a speech he’d given on World Press Freedom Day. They accused him of “inciting rebellion,” a treasonous offense.

The questioning made no sense until Majoni noticed a file on the desk: his photograph on top, and beneath it, text written in Mandarin Chinese.

He didn’t need to ask. His newsroom, the Information for Development Trust, had recently published exposes on Chinese mining projects that left open waste pits, poisoned rivers and displaced communities. “I know what this is about,” Majoni said.

The lead officer smiled, then pressed on about the tweet. Majoni walked free that day but stopped writing his weekly column. Later, he said, trusted police contacts confirmed what he already suspected: Chinese investors had been behind the interrogation.

...

The Chinese government’s repression of journalists at home is well known. Less visible is how that machinery now reaches far beyond its borders—and what that means for the environment.

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An Inside Climate News investigation has identified more than a dozen journalists who have faced retaliation for reporting on environmental destruction and human rights abuses tied to China’s ventures in African countries, likely a stark undercount. Many of those cases involve projects under Beijing’s $1.3 trillion Belt and Road Initiative, a massive investment effort into mines, ports, railways, pipelines and other infrastructure in mostly poor countries.

...

When a project carries political weight for both the Chinese government and local authorities, that’s often when repression happens, according to Sarah Cook, author of the UnderReported China newsletter who has studied the country’s media influence operations for more than 15 years.

“If there are muckraking journalists or whistleblowers who might expose environmental issues, it could potentially be in the interest of both the local actors and the Chinese-linked ones to put a stop to that,” Cook said.

That suppression hides or sanitizes environmental and human rights abuses, even as Chinese President Xi Jinping promotes the Belt and Road Initiative as a model of “green” development and positions China as a global climate leader.

...

China’s media influence campaign targets a continent crucial to the planet’s climate and ecological balance. Africa is home to the world’s second-largest rainforest, vast carbon-rich peatlands and a quarter of all mammal species, including endangered mountain gorillas, pangolins and chimpanzees. Its degradation threatens not only 1.5 billion Africans, but also Earth itself.

Polluting companies from other nations have been linked to attacks on journalists, too. But China’s role is distinct.

“We’re talking about a nation that is not only highly repressive but also the second-largest economy globally,” said Cook, who worked for years for Freedom House, which defends civil liberties around the globe. “This creates an unprecedented situation.”

...

Censorship is only half the story. Journalists across the Global South are regularly flown to China on all-expense-paid trips that function like indoctrination, according to some participants. Chinese officials have also showered underfunded news organizations in other countries with investments and gifts—from computers to cell phones—and later exerted influence to spike stories and promote flattering coverage, journalists and government officials interviewed for this article said.

“The Chinese are very good with disseminating their agenda,” said Leo Mutisya, manager of press freedom and advocacy at the Media Council of Kenya, an independent government institution tasked with protecting media independence.

Mutisya pointed to the reach of Chinese state media in Kenya, their sprawling Nairobi offices and their cozy ties with the Kenya Broadcasting Corp., which gives a regular slot to one Chinese network and a radio frequency to another. (The Kenya Broadcasting Corp. did not respond to requests for comment.) Chinese officials also organize private lunches and parties with Kenyan journalists and editors, Mutisya added, and sponsor the country’s annual journalism awards—handing out Huawei smartphones to winners.

...

China has cast its overseas mining and other ventures not as a new form of imperialism but as “win-win” partnerships among nations of the Global South—countries, it says, long oppressed by Western exploitation. The message resonates in places like Zimbabwe, where resentment of Western interference runs deep and memories of colonial horrors remain vivid.

After winning independence from Britain in 1980, freedom fighter Robert Mugabe came to power in Zimbabwe as a symbol of unity and liberation. But by the late 1990s, his rule had hardened into autocracy—marked by election rigging, repression and state violence. Western nations responded with sweeping sanctions, in part over human rights abuses but also over Zimbabwe’s efforts to redress deep land inequities left by racist colonial rule.

...

Beijing’s lending to Zimbabwe has come free from Western pressure to improve democracy and human rights—a hallmark of what Beijing calls its “noninterference” policy.

But that principle, said Richardson, who is also co-executive director of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, is “nothing more than words on paper.”

“The Chinese government interferes left, right and center,” Richardson said, adding that Beijing spends “massive amounts of time and money and effort on putting forward and protecting a very particular image of what it is.”

Environmental reporters and researchers across Africa described how that influence plays out in the media.

...

Hayli Gubbi volcano in Ethiopia erupted for the first time in at least 12 000 years on November 23, 2025, marking its first confirmed Holocene activity.

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/42335138

Archived link

A deal for a “road map” away from fossil fuels has been scuppered at Cop30 in Brazil after Saudi Arabia, Russia and China successfully blocked the proposal.

The conference in Belém, a city in the Amazon, had been dominated by a move for a concrete plan to shift away from oil, gas and coal and to stop deforestation. But the Brazilian hosts failed to find a way through the stand-off at the talks, which have ended with a watered-down deal 24 hours after they were due to finish.

Instead, Brazil’s proposed transition road map — which it called the the Belém Transition Compass, and which was supported by the UK, EU and nearly 100 other countries — will be pursued via a voluntary agreement to discuss it through diplomatic channels over the next two years, with a goal of reporting back at Cop31 in Turkey next year and Cop32 in Ethiopia in 2027. Experts warned that the conference — which was boycotted by the US after President Trump pulled out of the UN climate process — has seen the emergence of an “axis of obstruction” opposed to climate action.

A decade after every nation in the world signed the Paris agreement and pledged to unite to limit global warming, climate diplomacy ground on at glacial pace in Belém.

...

Professor Michael Jacobs of the think tank ODI Global and the University of Sheffield said: “Geopolitically, this is the creation of a new axis of obstruction — actively promoting fossil fuels and opposed to climate action.”

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Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland, who was in Belém for the talks, said: “This deal isn’t perfect and is far from what science requires. But at a time when multilateralism is being tested, it is significant that countries continue to move forward together.”

...

The most striking example of the clash of environmental idealism and economic reality is provided by the Cop30 hosts. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the Brazilian president, was determined to push through the roadmap away from fossil fuels: it was presented to delegates as his idea, his legacy in the battle against a warming world.

Yet just three weeks before Cop30 started, Brazil approved new oil exploration off its coast, close to the mouth of the Amazon. “I am totally in favour of a world one day that will not need any more fossil fuels, but this moment has not come yet,” Lula said in defence of the plans.

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One illustrates the huge boom in renewable power that is on the cards if countries follow through on their stated energy policies. Renewable power, the IEA [International Energy Agency] forecasts, will grow fourfold by 2050.

...

But [...] the same IEA report reveals that the demand for oil and gas is still rising, and if nations do not change tack, will not peak for another 25 years.

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I you are concerned about stopping climate change, renewables only do their job if they displace fossil fuels.

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When you think about pollution sources, you might imagine dirty power plants, toxic chemical factories emitting dirty smoke, or gasoline engines. You might not think of farms. But despite the pristine green fields, agriculture is actually a major source of pollution in the United States. Rampant overuse of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer is creating a multi-pronged pollution crisis. Farmers are caught in a system that forces their hand to apply about twice as much fertilizer as their crops can use. Fertilizer overkill threatens the nation’s water resources and the people who rely on them, damages farm soils, spews surprising amounts of a potent heat-trapping gas into our atmosphere, and is literally disrupting one of the planet’s major natural cycles.

Crucially, this system harms farmers themselves—raising their input costs, degrading their soil over time, and locking them into cropping patterns that are hard to escape.

Fertilizer overuse is accelerating the climate crisis

The problem is not that farmers use fertilizer—plants need it to grow. Rather, the problem is how much farmers use and how much land our current system devotes to continuous production of nitrogen-intensive crops.

Research shows that as much as 50% of applied nitrogen fertilizer is in excess of what crops need and is unused by plants. A portion of the excess unused fertilizer gets converted into gases like nitrous oxide (N2O) by soil microbes and released into the environment. Nitrous oxide is a potent heat-trapping gas: 265 times more powerful than carbon dioxide when it comes to its warming potential. In 2022, N2O accounted for 6% of all heat-trapping emissions in the United States.

Agriculture is the United States’ undisputed largest source of N2O, with agricultural soil management responsible for as much as 75% of the country’s N2O emissions. N2O also comes from other sources like burning fossil fuels, manufacturing nitric acid, and manufacturing fertilizer. In agricultural soils, use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers accounts for the majority of N2O emissions. To reduce these emissions, fertilizer overuse must come down. But it’s important to recognize that farmers often shoulder the financial and environmental burden of trying to manage risks in a system that incentivizes overapplication.

Fertilizer overuse pollutes our water and degrades our soil

Nitrogen overuse wreaks havoc in the environment because the runoff from unused fertilizer contains a vast amount of reactive nitrogen in the form of nitrates. When washed into lakes and streams, this reactive nitrogen helps algae multiply very quickly and create algal blooms. Algal blooms consume dissolved oxygen in the water, creating low- to no-oxygen areas in aquatic ecosystems called “dead zones” where nothing can survive. Farmers themselves are often frustrated by these outcomes, knowing that the fertilizer they paid for is literally washing away and causing damage downstream.

The impacts of nitrogen runoff reach far and wide and can harm aquatic ecosystems thousands of miles away. The best example of this is the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, which returns every summer and stretches thousands of miles. In 2025, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported the size of this dead zone at 4,402 square miles—roughly the same area as that of Connecticut. Nitrogen fertilizer runoff from the Midwest is one of the major contributors to the Gulf dead zone, estimated to cost $2.4 billion in lost livelihoods.

Nitrogen in the form of nitrate also leaches into groundwater sources and can end up contaminating drinking water supplies. Nitrate contamination is a widely reported problem in agriculture-heavy states like Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Exposure to nitrate is linked to a variety of serious health problems, as my colleague UCS Research Director for the Food & Environment program Stacy Woods writes. This means farming families—who are often on private wells—can be among the first harmed when nitrogen pollution reaches groundwater. Fertilizer overuse also harms the soil itself.

High doses of synthetic nitrogen acidify soils and disrupt the microbial communities that make nutrients naturally available to plants. Over time, this reduces soil biodiversity, suppresses beneficial fungi, and even harms earthworm populations that keep soils aerated and fertile. Instead of building living, resilient soils that are like sponges, heavy fertilizer use can leave land more degraded and make soils cement-like, dependent on ever-higher chemical inputs to provide the required plant nutrition. This soil degradation hurts farmers’ long-term profitability, trapping them in a cycle of needing ever more fertilizer just to maintain yields.

What is the nitrogen cycle?

Nitrogen is a classic example of something that’s good—essential for life on Earth—in small quantities, but you can have too much of a good thing. Natural biogeochemical cycles are slow processes. It takes microbes time to convert nitrogen and make it available for plants. But human-induced nitrogen cycle disruption has vastly altered how nitrogen moves and behaves in the environment, and created several short cuts that make a vast trove of reactive nitrogen ready for plant uptake.

To understand why we need fertilizers, we first must understand how nitrogen moves in the environment through a series of biogeochemical processes collectively called the nitrogen cycle.

The nitrogen cycle. Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

As I mentioned earlier, the most abundant form of nitrogen is atmospheric gaseous nitrogen (N2), which plants are unable to absorb. For nitrogen to become available for plants to use, it has to be converted into chemical forms like ammonium, nitrates, and nitrites that can then be absorbed through plant roots. This process is called nitrogen fixation.

Nitrogen fixation: The first step of the nitrogen cycle involves nitrogen reacting with hydrogen to form ammonia. Ammonia (NH3) is an intermediate form of nitrogen that can then be converted into nitrates and nitrites. Gaseous nitrogen is an extremely stable molecule with strong bonds, and large amounts of energy are required to break this bond and react with hydrogen to form ammonia. In nature, this energy comes from lightning, and also occurs naturally in leguminous plants which have a mutually beneficial (symbiotic) relationship with Rhizobium soil bacteria that transforms N2 into ammonium for plant uptake. In the human-derived fertilizer manufacturing process, this process is shortcut and the energy comes from the burning of fossil fuels in what is known as the Haber Bosch process

Nitrification: The next step in the nitrogen cycle is the conversion of ammonia into reactive forms of nitrogen like nitrites and nitrates. This process is called nitrification and is almost exclusively performed by various microbes in the soil. Microbes convert ammonia into forms like nitrates and nitrites that can be easily absorbed by plant roots. Plants then use these nitrates and nitrates for essential functions like synthesizing protein.

Denitrification: Nitrates that remain behind in the soil after plants have absorbed what they need are then converted back into N2 and nitrous oxide (N2O) by microbes through a process called denitrification. This allows for excess plant-available nitrogen in the soil to be released back into the atmosphere, maintaining a healthy level in the soil.

Ammonification: A second type of nitrogen conversion occurs when plants or other organisms excrete waste or die. Plant and animal tissues contain organic nitrogen in the form of proteins, amino acids, hormones, and DNA. Microbes in the soil help break down the tissue and convert the organic nitrogen to be released back into nature as ammonia. This process is known as ammonification.

Industrial agriculture has hijacked the natural nitrogen cycle

Today’s agricultural systems focus on growing vast acreages of nitrogen-hungry commodity crops like corn and soy in astonishing density—an amount of land that by itself drives enormous fertilizer demand, even if every acre were managed efficiently. These commodity crops require vast amounts of nitrogen (along with other nutrients like phosphorus and potassium) to support crop development and yield.

This is why fertilizers are added: to supplement the nitrogen in nature that plants can quickly absorb. Human activities like the use of synthetic fertilizers, livestock farming, and burning fossil fuels (with the associated emissions) have disrupted and altered the way nitrogen moves in the environment. Today’s environment has been overloaded with reactive nitrogen, which has serious implications for ecosystems, polluting air and water, and harming human health. Farmers are often acutely aware of these impacts, but deviating from the dominant system can bring real financial penalties. They haven’t chosen this system—policy, market concentration, and industry influence channel them toward high-input, high-volume production, even when it undermines long-term soil health and profitability.

What is the way forward in reducing nitrogen pollution?

The overreliance on costly agrichemical inputs and overdependence on fossil fuel fertilizers is a major driver of the climate crisis. Much of today’s fertilizer demand comes from how and where it is used—that enormous acreage devoted to continuous production of nitrogen-hungry commodity crops, especially corn. Reducing this acreage will require reforming market-distorting subsidies, particularly federally subsidized crop insurance, which rewards cultivation of nitrogen-intensive commodity crops and encourages planting, even on vulnerable land.

The first step in tackling nitrogen pollution is to prevent fertilizer overapplication. For farmers that means testing soil and applying fertilizer only where and when crops need it, and avoiding practices like blanket applications in the fall when plants do not need fertilizer and most of what is applied is wasted. Other on-farm fertilizer management practices include carefully managing irrigation of soils, since excess moisture increases N2O emissions, limiting applications to the spring, and using precise placement to maximize uptake. The logical starting point is to equip farmers with funding and technical assistance to optimize the application of fertilizers.

But neither efficiency improvements and precision, nor acreage reductions alone can deliver the scale of change required. Moving away from subsidies that encourage the overproduction of commodity crops would help transform current agricultural systems, as would investing more in US Department of Agriculture programs like the Conservation Stewardship Program and the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, which are backed by decades of science and farmer experience and can reduce reliance on costly synthetic fertilizers, thus improving soil health, protecting habitat, and improving water and air quality.

The bottom-line is clear: We need a large-scale shift to farming practices based on the science of agroecology, which treats farms like natural systems. Agroecological practices such as cover crops, buffer strips, restored wetlands, and managed grazing further help keep nutrients in place and build long-term soil health.

Our goal at UCS is to support farmers—not blame them—by helping reshape the system so they can thrive financially while reducing nitrogen pollution. There is plenty of clear scientific evidence that US agriculture needs to shift towards a model of agroecology for a healthier environment and climate.

To induce a system-wide transition to agricultural practices that build soil health and allow farmers to reduce costly inputs, UCS is tackling the problem of fertilizers. We aim to shine a light on how corporate entities keep farmers hooked on this treadmill of costly fertilizer and pesticide inputs, ultimately reducing their overreliance on synthetic nitrogen fertilizers. We continue to advocate for a transformational food and farming system that is more equitable and resilient, and that works for farmers, farmworkers, consumers, and our environment.

Archived link

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Chinese diplomats have used the global climate negotiations to oppose trade barriers that threaten the country’s enormous exports of the solar, wind and battery technology. Representatives from Asia’s top economy declined to step forward with an investment in a flagship rainforest conservation fund, limiting Brazil President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s prospects of raising an initially planned $25 billion.

...

Crucially, China — still the largest coal-consuming nation — has also skirted Lula’s attempts to broker a clearer road map for the world to transition away from fossil fuels. In the final hours of negotiations on Friday, a draft deal put forward by Brazil excluded reference to winding down fossil fuels, prompting anger from some 80 nations who had insisted on such language.

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“We are not seeing very convincing signals that China is stepping up,” on traditional climate leadership, said Yao Zhe, a Beijing-based global policy advisor at Greenpeace East Asia, and who is attending the Belém talks.

...

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/5683395

Archived version

No silence is more haunting than the one following an explosion. It does not only concern what war takes away from human life, but also what it takes away from nature: forests turned to ash, fields reduced to dust, waterways contaminated by military vehicles and weapons. In Ukraine, this silence has a date, 24 February 2022, but also an echo that extends beyond the present.

Wars do not end when the guns fall silent: they continue to cause damage for decades, frequently far from the eyes and geopolitical priorities of the moment. It is with this awareness that an unprecedented event is taking place: Ukraine intends to ask Russia for $43 billion in climate compensation.

That Kyiv intended to file this claim was already known, but today, Tuesday 18 November, the figure was made public for the first time. This is not a generic compensation for environmental damage, but a precise calculation of the greenhouse gas emissions generated by the attack, to which the “social cost of carbon” is applied, a yardstick used in climate studies to assess the economic impacts of global warming.

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The historical significance of this request is not only technical, but also legal and political. For the first time, an attacked country is arguing that an aggressor state must be held accountable for emissions caused by an illegal act of war; and the international mechanism to which Kyiv will turn – established by the Council of Europe following a UN General Assembly resolution – will accept claims for environmental compensation based on climate damage for the first time. The claim that Ukraine will file in 2026 will thus set an important precedent for other countries.

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The request is based on the report Climate Damage Caused by Russia's War in Ukraine – 36 months (opens pdf), a pioneering study that calculates the emissions generated by the conflict: 294 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent. This figure alone exceeds the annual emissions of 175 countries worldwide.

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Parts of the Argentine Pampas, a vast expanse of flat grasslands, look more like wetlands these days following record rains, with local farmers warning of a "catastrophic" impact to their livelihoods.

Two years ago, the region also suffered one of its worst droughts in decades.

"It is clear that there are issues related to climate change and... the increased frequency of very severe weather events," said Javier Rodriguez, the province's minister of agrarian development.

According to a report by the World Weather Attribution (WWA) scientific network, "it is likely that climate change increased the likelihood and intensity of the heavy rainfall" recorded in March.

The study: Enriched mantle generated through persistent convective erosion of continental roots

• Iceland declares threat to Atlantic Ocean current a national security risk
• Scientists warn current collapse could trigger modern-day ice age for Northern Europe
• Researchers working to understand how, and when, a collapse might occur