Extreme weather, such as droughts and storms, is increasing the risk of more girls being pushed into child marriage. Graihagh Jackson speaks to girls and parents in Bangladesh who are experiencing these impacts first hand, and finds out why this is happening and what is being done to stop the problem.

A huge thanks to UNICEF and Save the Children's Gabrielle Szabo, for their help in making this programme.

Got a climate question you’d like answered? Email: [email protected] or WhatsApp: +44 8000 321 721

Engineers across the globe, from China to East Africa and the US, are turning to a new, nature-based solutions to fight floods, which are becoming more likely in many places because of climate change. They’re taking a pickaxe to asphalt and concrete and instead are restoring wetlands, parks and riverbanks, turning our metropolises into so-called ‘sponge cities’. Plants, trees and lakes act just like a sponge, mopping up rainwater instead of letting it pool and eventually flood our homes.

Professor Priti Parikh tells Jordan Dunbar how these spongey solutions have many benefits beyond flooding, encouraging biodiversity, helping our mental health and storing the planet warming gas, carbon dioxide. The BBC’s China Correspondent, Laura Bicker, meets the man who came up with the concept, Professor Kongjian Yu, and visits Zhengzhou, a sponge city in the making. And Katya Reyna tells Jordan how her NGO is helping low-income communities in Portland in the US to ‘depave’ disused car parks, turning them into plant-oases.

Got a climate question you’d like answered? Email: [email protected] or WhatsApp: +44 8000 321 721

Contributors:

Producers: Graihagh Jackson, Ben Cooper and Joyce Liu

Presenter Graihagh Jackson and her regular panel take Climate Questions from listeners. BBC Climate Editor Justin Rowlatt, Prof Tamsin Edwards of King's College London, and Dr Akshat Rathi, senior climate reporter for Bloomberg News, discuss ideas for geo-engineering the atmosphere, the links between climate change and shipping, and which animals do the best job of helping us store carbon.

Plus, Graihagh visits a Climate Question listener to investigate his idea of using yoghurt to keep our homes cool in heatwaves!

If you've got a head-scratcher, email us at [email protected] or leave a Whatsapp message on +44 8000 321 721

Producer: Osman Iqbal

Climate change has been tightening its grip on the people of Afghanistan, with flood after flood and drought after drought. It’s considered one of the most vulnerable countries in the world, not just because it’s warming twice as fast as the global average, but because its people’s ability to fight back has been severely hampered by decades of conflict and war. To add insult to injury, Afghanistan has contributed very little to the industrial emissions that fuel the global climate crisis.

Since the Taliban takeover in 2021, financial aid to help locals adapt has drastically dropped, leaving Afghans to take matters into their own hands.

Experts include:

Have a question you’d like answered? Email: [email protected] or Whatsapp +44 8000 321 721, starting your message with "climate"

Producers: Jordan Dunbar and Barry Sadid from BBC Monitoring

In this special programme, the Climate Question team join forces with our World Service colleagues from People Fixing The World to share some of our favourite ways of fighting the impacts of climate change.

Jordan Dunbar and Myra Anubi discuss solutions big and small - from tidal power in Northern Ireland to floating solar panels in Albania. Plus, we hear about pioneering community initiatives to protect forests in Borneo and Colombia

Production team: Osman Iqbal, Zoe Gelber, Craig Langran, Tom Colls, Jon Bithrey and Simon Watts

Got a question for The Climate Question? Email us: [email protected]

The acclaimed US sci-fi author Kim Stanley Robinson is also a star in the world of climate activism because his work often features climate change - on Earth and beyond. Robinson has been a guest speaker at the COP climate summit, and novels such as The Ministry For The Future and The Mars Trilogy are admired by everyone from Barack Obama to former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres. Robinson's books are not just imaginative but scientifically accurate, and some of their ideas have even inspired new thinking about climate-proofing technology. Kim Stanley Robinson has been talking to the Climate Question team.

Presenters: Jordan Dunbar and Graihagh Jackson

Got a question for The Climate Question? Email us: [email protected]

Some of the world's biggest carbon emitters - including the EU, India and Indonesia - have just had elections. Will the results change their climate policies?

Graihagh Jackson and Jordan Dunbar are joined by Anna Holligan, BBC correspondent in the Netherlands; Carl Nasman, BBC climate journalist based in Washington; and BBC climate reporter Esme Stallard.

Producers: Ben Cooper and Graihagh Jackson

With more and more people moving to cities, informal settlements are expected to grow. When floods hit these unplanned places, it can be disastrous, as we often don’t know much about them. Crucial questions often remain difficult to answer, like how many people live there, what are the buildings made of, and could they withstand a flood?

Featuring:

This little-known pollutant is making us sick and driving the climate crisis. It commonly comes from burning coal, diesel or wood and has a habit of getting stuck in people’s lungs as well as causing glaciers to melt.

The Paris Olympics are less than a month away. The last games in Tokyo were one of the hottest on record, with more than a hundred athletes suffering heat-related illnesses. And France, the host of this year’s Olympics, is no stranger to heatwaves – the country has seen 23 since 2010.

So how are top athletes training their bodies to not only perform at their best in high temperatures, but also to protect their health? Presenter Qasa Alom heads inside a sweltering, state of the art heat chamber at Leeds Beckett University to find out how one of the fastest marathon runners in Britain, Phil Sesemann, is maximising his chances of success in his Olympic debut.

Other athletes are more used to these conditions. We join India’s top triathlete, Pragnya Mohan, for a training run and hear what it’s like to compete when the thermometer climbs above 45 degrees Celsius.

More and more athletes are adopting heat training strategies in a warming world - but do they affect men and women the same? Dr Jessica Mee, Research Fellow at the University of Worcester tells us about her pioneering research into the impacts of heat on women’s bodies.

Featuring:

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Presenter: Qasa Alom