Mexicans are stranded by deadly floods, millions of Bangladeshis are left homeless and threatened by disease, rare rhinos are decimated by rains in India. The manifestations of climate change are widespread and ominous, but governments still cannot agree on a strategy to combat global warming.
People in Chiapas State, Mexico, set out on foot this week in search of help rather than wait for a slow trickle of aid, even as President Ernesto Zedillo said his government had the situation under control.
Men, women and children walked in some cases for more than a day, crossing rain-swollen rivers, muddy swamps and dense jungle to arrive at emergency shelters set up along the battered Pacific coast of Mexico's southernmost state.
Many of them mourned family members lost to gushing torrents and mudslides which killed at least 400 people and left some 850 missing, according to a government report. A week of downpours dumped 2,000mm (780 inches) of rains in the country's southernmost point, about half average annual rainfall.
Yet rescue efforts continued to be a challenge. Continuing rains along the coast slowed helicopter airlifts for a third day in a row, adding to the despair of tens of thousands of people still cut off from overland routes by flooding in the impoverished state.
Along the Xelaju river soldiers armed with pickaxes and shovels worked to unearth the bodies of those who relatives feared did not escape the flood waters in time.
The floods have left an estimated 100,000 people homeless.
Meanwhile in Bangladesh, Dhaka authorities employed thousands of extra workers to clean up the city as floods receded to leave mounds of stinking rubbish which pose a new health hazard.
The floods, which left millions homeless out of Bangladesh's 120 million people, have claimed 1,000 lives and caused widespread devastation to agriculture, industry and transport networks.
Makeshift homes have sprung up to house the homeless, and emergency food aid is arriving at the country's ports to be delivered to the victims of the floods, which covered two-thirds of Bangladesh.
The health department said some 225,000 people were suffering from diarrhoea and other water-borne diseases; 200 have died from the illness.
In Tokyo delegates from more than 20 major developed and developing countries ended a two-day meeting yesterday with no fresh agreements on ways to combat global warming. However, delegates said the closed-door ministerial conference played an instrumental role in maintaining the "momentum" gained last November in Kyoto.
The Tokyo conference was held to lay a groundwork for an annual UN conference on climate change scheduled to be held in Buenos Aires in November.
In Kyoto last December a gathering of 159 countries agreed on cutting greenhouse gas emissions. The conference agreed that developed nations should cut emission of carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse" effects.
In India tigers and other animals living in Kaziranga national park in Assam state were threatened by floods, the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) said yesterday.
The 172 sq mile park is home to 60 per cent of Asia's 1,500 one-horned Indian rhinoceros and about 80 tigers. The freak floods, the worst in decades, have killed 31 rhinoceros, 20 buffalo, six elephant and more than 400 deer, the WWF said.