When it rains here, West Texans brace for the worst. With nowhere to go, water collects across sidewalks, roads and highways — the flat, desert landscape becomes a wetland in the blink of an eye.

Local officials in Ector County, which includes Odessa, said the region’s drainage system is out of date. But paying for upgrades will be a tremendous challenge.

Population, housing and commercial development have spiked, and the infrastructure has not kept up. Its drainage system, installed in the 1970s, is not equipped to handle the growth, county officials said.

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As 2025 draws to a close, the departure of the beleaguered acting director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, David Richardson, caps a tumultuous year for FEMA. In January, President Donald Trump took office and vowed to abolish the department.

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The Hong Kong high-rise fire, which spread across multiple buildings in a large residential complex, has killed dozens, with hundreds reported missing.

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“We couldn’t paint the robot blue like a traditional Smurf. It had to be painted with three reflective coats of yellow paint so that it’s clearly visible,” says Jan Sramota.

Sramota is a researcher at SINTEF and part of the team behind the rescue robot. The robot’s job is to move in after earthquakes, landslides, floods and other natural disasters. The rescue teams can unleash the yellow Smurfs when the situation becomes too unsafe for the human rescuers or there are too many places  to handle at once.

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Trelawney Parish sits in a rural, agricultural region of Western Jamaica that borders the country’s largest contiguous rainforest. Under normal circumstances, the parish is relentlessly green — covered in lush vegetation and long rows of orange trees — but the aftermath of Hurricane Melissa has “almost completely annihilated” the area, according to firefighter Ronell Hamilton. “Everything here is brown right now. It looks like California.”

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As the Trump administration deletes climate data and shutters resources that track the impacts of a warming world, nonprofits, state-level governments, and independent scientists are rushing to preserve the information. 

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The city of Clyde sits about two hours west of Fort Worth on the plains of north Texas. It gets its water from a lake by the same name a few miles away. Starting in 2022, scorching weather caused its levels to drop further and further. Within a year, officials had declared a water conservation emergency and, on August 1 of last year, they raised the warning level again. That meant residents rationing their spigot use even more tightly, especially lawn irrigation. The restrictions weren’t, however, the worst news that day: The city also missed two debt payments.

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Predicting bushfires is difficult at the best of times. But as climate change wreaks havoc with our world’s weather systems it’s getting harder and more important to get right.

And the behavior of wildfires worldwide over the last year has shown us just how unpredictable and devastating these fires have become.

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Hurricanes are America’s most destructive natural hazards, causing more deaths and property damage than any other type of disaster. Since 1980, these powerful tropical storms have done more than US$1.5 trillion in damage and killed more than 7,000 people.

The No. 1 cause of the damages and deaths from hurricanes is storm surge.

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