Africa is suffering a plague of zombies - appliances, that is.

Hundreds of thousands of outdated air conditioners and refrigerators, mainly discarded by Europeans, arrive in African countries each year to meet growing demand for cooling as the planet heats up and temperatures rise uncomfortably.

But some nations, from Ghana to Rwanda, are trying to control the trade, worried the power-sucking devices are making overly heavy demands on limited electricity supplies - not to mention pumping out more climate-changing emissions.

"They come in branded as new, but when they're off-loaded it's mostly near-end-of-life e-waste," says Leslie Adogame of SRADev, a Nigerian environmental health research group.

Pakistan, meanwhile, is also trying to clean up its energy mix - and its polluted skies. The country has launched an ambitious switch to electric vehicles, with incentives for manufacturers and buyers. But after pushback from automakers, cars aren't yet part of the plan.

The head of Pakistan's electric vehicles manufacturing association likens the policy to "a wedding party arriving with no bridegroom". But the initial focus on rickshaws, motorcycles, buses and trucks is still a significant step toward a goal of having at least 30% of all vehicles running on electric power by 2030, writes correspondent Rina Saeed Khan.

In Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson will lay out on Tuesday how he plans to help the economy recover from its COVID-19 blow, including a huge leap in unemployment, through a £5-billion building plan for hospitals, schools and roads, among other things.

The UK's advisory Committee on Climate Change hopes post-pandemic measures will include support for training workers in clean energy jobs, hiking dirty fuel taxes, expanding electric-vehicle charging stations and insulating the nation's leaky homes - a big job creator and energy saver.

"If we are to emerge successfully from COVID-19, there is only one route and that route is one that enables us also to fight climate change," says the committee head.

Lisbon, meanwhile, is trying to bounce back from the pandemic and clean its polluted air by getting commuters back into homes in the centre of the Portuguese capital - the short-let ones left vacant by the virus-led downturn in tourism.

Will it work? Mayor Fernando Medina is betting yes. "There are signs that people are more aware and willing to make things different," he told me.

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