Rain may have brought respite to baking northern India at the start of this week, after more than a month of extreme heat - but such uncomfortable temperatures are likely to hit more often as the planet warms.

Scientists working with the World Weather Attribution initiative said climate change made this year's devastating early heat in India and Pakistan 30 times more likely - and warned that with future global warming, heatwaves like this will become even more common and severe.

They noted, too, that the people hit hardest are those who must go outside to earn a daily wage, such as street vendors, construction and farm workers and traffic police, who lack access to consistent electricity and cooling at home, limiting their options to cope with prolonged heat stress.

Our correspondents in Delhi and Karachi reported from their cities on the impacts on locals like fruit seller Mohammad Ikrar who has fed dozens of rotting mangoes and melons to passing stray cows at the end of each day as he doesn't own a refrigerator, meaning his fruit quickly spoils.

"This heat is torturous. But if I want to buy an AC (air conditioner) or fridge one day, I have to do this," said Ikrar, wearing a full sleeve shirt and white headwrap to fend off the 44C heat on the streets of Noida, a satellite city of New Delhi.

Almost 323 million people across India are at high risk from extreme heat and a lack of cooling equipment such as fans and refrigerators, found a report released last week by Sustainable Energy for All, which also listed China, Indonesia and Pakistan as "critical" countries.

In South Africa, meanwhile, communites in KwaZulu-Natal province have been battered by heavy rains once again in recent days.

The new disaster comes hard on the heels of last month's floods, which killed at least 430 people, displaced thousands and caused damage estimated at 10 billion rand ($685 million).

The crisis - as seen with rising cases of extreme weather around the world - has also left mental scars.

In South Africa, many flood survivors are still traumatised or grieving, and others feel defeated and unable to start rebuilding their lives, according to medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF).

Our reporter Kim Harrisberg went to talk to some sheltering at a community centre - including Nozipho Sithole, who when she closes her eyes to sleep still hears the screams of her neighbour's two young children as they were swept away by the floodwaters.

The burden of climate change and the fossil fuel industry fuelling it is falling on people in many unseen ways in poorer parts of the world.

Rural families in Bangladesh are using a large chunk of their budgets to protect themselves from floods, storms and rising seas, especially lower-income households headed by women who are allocating up to 30% of their spending for that purpose, researchers said last week.

And in Ecuador, Anastasia Moloney visited the tropical town of Lago Agrio at the heart of the country's oil industry in the Amazon rainforest where indigenous people, farming communities, green activists and lawyers have said gas flaring causes serious damage to the environment and health, contaminating the air and water supplies.

There young people are leading demands for a ban on the use of the flares, buoyed by court rulings that are starting to recognize the toxic fallout of the practice, even as Ecuador's government plans to ramp up oil production.

"What's happening here is a crime," said 11-year-old Leonela Moncayo who filed a landmark case against the government with eight other schoolgirls. "We'll keep fighting for future generations."

And we'll have more from Ecuador soon on lessons from indigenous groups battling to protect the Amazon - keep reading!

Megan

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