Dear reader,

A new era of mega-blazes is upon us.

Wildfires from California to Siberia this year alone have uprooted tens of thousands, scorched vast swathes of land and stretched resources.

In the new climatic era, mega-fires may erupt within minutes of ignition, so an urgent revamp of firefighting is needed with tough laws to regulate outdoor fires and requiring homeowners in fire-prone areas to maintain "defensible areas", reports correspondent Arthur Neslen.

"The evolving nature of wildfires obliges us to really change our paradigm and put more emphasis on fire prevention than suppression," said Sebastien Penzini, deputy Europe chief of the U.N. Office for Disaster Risk Reduction.

"Because the fires to come - and those we're already observing in Europe - are completely beyond (our) control."

Meanwhile, as the Taliban rapidly took control of Afghanistan, thousands of Afghans rushed to purge their digital history and worried that biometric databases could be used to track and target them.

At heightened risk is anyone who was involved in the previous government, or worked in an international non-profit, or was an activist or a member of the security forces, said Welton Chang, chief technology officer at Human Rights First.

"With the data, it is much more difficult to hide, obfuscate your and your family's identities, and the data can also be used ...to create a new class structure - job applicants would have their bio-data compared to the database, and jobs could be denied on the basis of having (those) connections," he said.

And finally, there is hope that Kathmandu's notoriously polluted air will get cleaner with the launch of Nepal's first locally made e-motorbikes by startup Yatri Motorcycles, reports Aadesh Subedi.

The Himalayan nation is a small emitter of carbon globally, though emissions are rising. It had pledged in the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change that 20% of its vehicles would be electric by 2020; this figure is currently just 1%.

But the lack of charging stations and the high price of the e-motorbikes can be a deterrent, said Manish Pandey, a popular YouTuber who travels the country by motorbike.

"In a poor country like Nepal, with people having poor environmental awareness, almost every customer sees the price first, rather than whether the technology is environmentally friendly," he said.

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