Four years ago, Berkeley made history when it became the first city in the US to ban natural gas hookups in new buildings.

It was a natural step for the famously progressive California community, which was an early adopter of curbside recycling in the 1970s, banned styrofoam in 1988, and more recently led the charge to outlaw single-use packaging and plastics.

But today the ban is dead in the water, after a lawsuit brought by a restaurant trade group challenged its legality, tying the ban’s enforcement up in court for years. Last month, the city finally gave in and began the process of repealing it.

For a moment, the news appeared devastating for efforts to transition away from fossil fuels. But even without the historic ban, local climate advocates and restaurant owners are imagining ways Berkeley could still lead a national push to transition away from natural gas, amid growing public awareness of its harms to both the climate and human health.

Alastair Iles, a professor of sustainability transitions at the University of California, Berkeley, remembers how community groups rallied with local legislators to introduce and pass the ban. “Communities and activists around the city identified very closely with the ban’s successful passing, and saw it as a sign that the city is continuing to tackle the challenge of climate change.”

He said these groups aren’t giving up hope that Berkeley can still set an example. “From what I have heard, they are upset, sad, and disheartened that the ban has been overturned,” said Iles. “But they also know that there are alternative ways forward.”

‘Fossil fuel-free city’

Berkeley has long been a leader on progressive climate legislation, and in 2018 the city council resolved to become a “fossil fuel-free city”.

So it wasn’t a surprise in July 2019 when the Berkeley city council unanimously passed an ordinance preventing natural gas hookups in new residential and commercial construction. At the time, nearly a third of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions came from natural gas. The move was lauded by environmental organizers as a step towards California’s goal of achieving 100% zero-carbon energy by 2045.

Berkeley’s move sparked a wave of action, and an inevitable backlash. In the years since, 135 cities and counties have introduced some type of building decarbonization ordinance. At the same time, 24 mostly red states have done the opposite, passing laws that prohibit cities from banning natural gas.

Yet before Berkeley’s natural gas ban could even take effect in January 2020, the California Restaurant Association (CRA) filed a lawsuit arguing both that the ban harmed restaurant owners who rely on gas stoves and also that, under the 1975 Energy and Policy Conservation Act, only the federal government has the authority to regulate energy standards for appliances.

Thus ensued a lengthy back and forth between the city and the trade group. In 2021, a US district judge sided with Berkeley, ruling that the city wasn’t trying to regulate appliances, but instead the fuel they used. CRA then took their case to the ninth circuit court of appeals, which ruled against the ban. In January 2023, Berkeley lost its request to have the case reheard and could have appealed to the US supreme court, but instead chose to settle with the CRA. Some environmental advocates have pointed out that the natural gas utility SoCalGas provided financial support to the restaurant association.

“Very likely, Berkeley decided that it might be counterproductive to keep the case going, because a loss could hurt similar city and state laws in other parts of the country along with California,” given the supreme court’s current conservative majority, said Iles. “More importantly, the supreme court could easily have made a more expansive ruling than needed, as it often has in the past few years, meaning that a range of options to require gas-free buildings could be prohibited.”

‘Cooking with gas is really a mindset’

The debate over natural gas has heated up in the past year, following 2023 studies that found gas stoves could be linked to more than 12% of childhood asthma cases in the US, and emit indoor pollutants at levels worse than secondhand smoke.

Despite the Berkeley blow, environmental leaders and business owners – including some of the city’s leading restaurateurs – don’t see this as the end of the road. Although Iles suspects other California cities will stop pursuing natural gas bans, he says many are considering alternative policy pathways.

“Learning from Berkeley’s ill-fated experience, cities across California and the US west have already introduced different rules focused on energy performance,” which require buildings to lower their energy usage but don’t set specific requirements as to how, he said, creating an incentive to use electric or solar rather than gas appliances without mandating it. “Cities can also set air pollution emission standards to favor electric appliances.”

Iles adds that last September, mayors from 25 California cities wrote to the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, “urging him to set statewide building codes that would require new buildings to be fully electric”. Just last month, California released a draft update to its building code that will encourage the use of heat pumps, which are fossil fuel-free heaters that are more efficient than gas furnaces, in all new homes beginning in 2026.

Meanwhile, despite the CRA’s stance, many chefs in Berkeley and beyond are considering their role in leading the way toward electrification. Last year, chef Alice Waters of Berkeley’s Michelin star restaurant Chez Panisse told Yahoo News that she plans to transition the restaurant to electric stoves, and that a new bar opening up next door would also use electric cooking.

“It’s a matter of getting used to it,” she told the outlet. “You just have to know a little more about cooking with it. It’s not rocket science.” In response to a Guardian inquiry about the transition, a spokesperson for Chez Panisse said there were no updates to share yet and that the bar was still under construction.

“Cooking with gas is really a mindset,” agrees chef Grégoire Jacquet, owner and founder of Grégoire, a high-end take-out restaurant in Berkeley who is exploring bringing more electric equipment into his kitchen. “Nowadays there is some stuff that really is pretty awesome when it comes to electric.”

But he acknowledges that it’s scary for chefs who have trained on gas stoves to make the switch, especially given the cost of buying new equipment. “I think if we all want to switch to electric, it’s going to take a lot of education and a lot of training.”

He hopes culinary schools will begin training new chefs on electric stoves early in their education, and that local governments will consider giving restaurants grants to encourage transitioning to electric, and to help cover the costs.

As Jacquet expands his business with new franchise locations, he’s planning to source both gas and electric cookers. It’s a sign of where the city, and others across the country, could be headed. The transition to electric is happening, says Jacquet. “But not fast enough,” he adds. “Because the Earth is dying.”

National parks are failing to tackle the biodiversity crisis, with just 6% of national park land in England and Wales managed effectively for nature, according to the first full assessment of how well they are supporting nature recovery.

National parks, which cover 10% of England and 20% of Wales and this year celebrate their 75th anniversary, are not restoring nature because of a chronic lack of government funding and because they were designed for a different era, according to the report by the Campaign for National Parks (CNP) charity.

The parks’ direct grant from government has been cut by 40% in real terms since 2010, with most national parks only receiving several million pounds – equivalent to the annual budget of a small secondary school.

Ruth Bradshaw, the policy manager for the CNP, said: “National parks are special places and they are the last refuges for struggling species like curlew, hen harrier and cuckoo. Nature in the national parks isn’t immune from the crisis that is happening elsewhere but there are huge opportunities to bring it back to good health. We need urgent action and major changes – the government needs to strengthen legislation and significantly increase the resources that are going into nature recovery in the national parks.”

National parks are key to Britain meeting its commitment to protecting 30% of land and sea for nature by 2030 but nature is still in retreat in these protected areas.

Peatlands, which store carbon and cover 43% of the land within national parks, are in poor condition: an estimated 1% of Dartmoor’s deep peat area is in a healthy condition, according to the CNP report. There had been virtually no change in woodland coverage across national parks in the five years to 2020, and rivers and lakes are in worsening health. The 47% of rivers in national parks judged in “good” health in 2013 fell to 39% in 2022.

Apart from the lack of funding, national parks are struggling to restore nature because only 13.7% of national park land is publicly owned, with the vast majority privately owned and managed as farmland. Most of this land has suffered from the same nature losses linked to the intensification of farming over the past 75 years in the rest of Britain.

Part of the problem, the CNP report said, was that national parks were created 75 years ago to address fears of urbanisation. Although enhancing wildlife is one of the parks’ statutory duties, the parks have not changed their mission to reflect the 21st-century climate and extinction crises.

The CNP is calling for a new deal for national parks, with the government setting a clear new priority that they are for nature protection and restoration alongside a doubling of core national park grants to restore 2010 funding levels.

It wants a ban on all burning of moorlands within national parks, a common practice on shooting estates; a ban on all forestry plantations on any depth of peat soil, a practice which can degrade peatlands and cause more carbon emissions; and the licensing of driven grouse shoots to reduce the illegal persecution of threatened species such as hen harrier.

It also wants government agencies, including the Ministry of Defence and Forestry England, and water companies to pay for the restoration of areas that have suffered from historic damage such as pollution, the planting of conifers on peatland and the cost of removing unexploded ordnance which makes restoration much more expensive.

It suggests creating citizen’s assemblies for every national park to better ensure that every citizen of whatever age, race and class feels welcome and can participate in decision-making within the parks alongside commoners – those who use the land for grazing animals – as well as farmers and landowners.

National parks are facing a long-running funding crisis. The Yorkshire Dales is facing a £4m hole for 2025-26 and some parks have warned they will need to close visitor centres or cut back on footpath management, reducing public access.

Tony Gates, the chief executive of Northumberland national park, where the core grant from Defra has shrank from £3.7m in 2006 to £2.6m today, welcomed the CNP report and its recommendation that national parks are given a leading role by government in recovering nature.

“We should be doing more, we could be doing more, and we’re best placed to do it. Governments just need to back us to do it,” he said. “Since I took over in 2006, I’ve lost a third of my staff. Most of the money we spend on nature recovery, we raise through fundraising, grants and philanthropic donations. If we were relying on core funding alone, we’re resourced to do very little. We don’t have the legal powers to do a lot around nature and yet as place-based organisations with a rich range of relationships built with landowners over decades, we’re best-placed to lead the way. But government aren’t backing us to do that.”

Prof Sir John Lawton, a conservation scientist and the author of an influential government review of how to recover nature in Britain, welcomed “the bold proposals” in the CNP report “to make more space for nature by restoring, recreating, and joining up habitats for the benefit of people and the creatures that live in these beautiful areas”.

“It won’t be easy,” said Lawton. “They are working landscapes, home to people and to wildlife, but the report makes clear how it can be done. Its vision fills me with hope.”

The CNP said it supported the government’s proposals to create more national parks but these must not come at the expense of funding the existing parks. Bradshaw said: “We really need to strengthen the way national parks are run to ensure that they are delivering for nature. Alongside that we should be thinking about places where there’s potential for future new national parks as well. We’re very clear that new national parks should only be introduced alongside increased funding for existing national parks. We certainly wouldn’t want to see new national parks resulting in reduced funding for existing national parks.”

From the moon jellyfish to the humble garden snail, invertebrates play a central – and often invisible – role in shaping our world. Numbering in their millions, species of insects, arachnids, snails, crustaceans, corals, jellyfish, sponges and echinoderms are among the least understood animals on Earth, often overshadowed by their vertebrate cousins.

We asked scientists to tell us about how invertebrates shape our world and structure its ecosystems – and the unforeseen consequences of their disappearance.

‘Nobody likes to step in poo’: decomposing world waste

Without shrimp, dung beetles and thousands of fly species, vast amounts of organic matter would not break down and the nutrients would not be recycled through ecosystems. Many invertebrate species feed and breed in the waste of plants and animals, and play a vital role in their healthy functioning.

“Nobody likes to step in poo when out for a walk and we often complain there is too much about – but things would be far worse without dung beetles and green bottle flies, both of which consume and break down animal poo removing the odour and creating fertiliser for our soils,” says Paul Hetherington, director of Buglife.

In the oceans, mussels, clams and lobsters are all important decomposers, while species such as sea cucumbers also play a role akin to earthworms.

“Burrowing sea cucumber that move through the sediments as part of their daily activities help to oxygenate them, which is important for numerous other processes,” said Annie Mercier, of Memorial University of Newfoundland, and co-chair of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) species survival commission sea cucumber specialist group. “Sea cucumbers are not only active recyclers, they are prey to many other animals, including crabs, fishes, turtles, sea otters, pinnipeds, eider ducks and more.”

Caffeine-hit blossoms and shrinking pansies: invertebrates shaping the plant world

Bees are famously crucial pollinators of human staples. But beetles, flies and other invertebrates are also essential for helping plants fruit and reproduce. One in every three mouthfuls that humans eat is the result of pollination, researchers estimate. The role of invertebrates shapes the way plants behave and evolve – such as coffee and citrus trees, that give insects a reward in return when they visit their flowers.

“Coffee and citrus flowers produce caffeinated nectar, which has a pharmacological effect on honeybees and bumblebees – it enhances their memory for the unique smells emanating from flowers and so helps the bees find these important food sources in complex floral landscapes,” says Prof Phil Stevenson, head of trait diversity and function at Kew Gardens. “In doing so, it helps the flowers get pollinated as the bees are more likely to return,” he says.

Many plants have evolved to attract particular species of invertebrates, such as prosopanche plants that are native to South America. The group produce heat to woo small nitidulidae beetles to spend the night inside them. When pollinators disappear, it can also change plants – a study in December found French wild pansies were producing smaller flowers and less nectar as pollinator numbers declined, effectively giving up on scarce insects and evolving to self-pollinate, scientists said.

Dave Goulson, a professor of biology at the University of Sussex who specialises in bee ecology, said the disappearance of pollinators was already having dramatic consequences in some parts of the planet.

“In parts of south-western China there are almost no pollinators left, and farmers are forced to hand-pollinate their apples and pears, as otherwise their crops would fail. In Bengal I have seen farmers hand-pollinating squash plants, and reports are coming in of farmers in parts of Brazil resorting to hand-pollinating passion fruits,” he wrote in his recent book Silent Earth.

Breaking down plastic waste

Invertebrates could help break down some of the billions of tonnes of plastic waste that humans produce every year. In 2022, researchers found that the larvae of the Zophobas morio, a beetle species, were capable of digesting polystyrene and successfully completed their lifecycle.

“Within 48 hours … the faeces they produce turn from their usual brown – when they eat bran – to white,” said Dr Chris Rinke of the University of Queensland, a co-author of the study.

Architects of the coral reefs

More than half a billion people depend on reefs around the world for food, protection and their livelihoods. They are natural barriers to storms, flooding and erosion, safeguarding human settlements, while also providing a home for thousands of fish species. Invertebrates are crucial reef builders, but they are threatened by the climate crisis.

“Reef-building hard corals are the architects of coral reefs – they create the physical structure of a reef as new corals grow on the skeletons of dead corals. On a diverse reef, the growing and eroding matrix of old and new skeletons results in complex structures and spaces, creating three-dimensional habitat for the myriad species living on a reef,” says David Obura, founding director of Cordio east Africa and head of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

Corals are not the only reef-building animals, says Julia Sigwart, a member of the IUCN species survival commission mollusc specialist group, who warns that marine invertebrates risk being overlooked.

“Marine invertebrate animals comprise the vast majority of the species diversity in the ocean, including many species that are not yet described or named. Because they are not so familiar to us humans, we often lump groups together; many people do not realise that sponges are animals, let alone that there are thousands of different species,” she says “This leaves a huge risk that species are going extinct before we even know that they are there, with surprising and potentially disastrous consequences.”

Upturning predator food chains

The spread of invasive invertebrates can have major consequences for the whole ecosystem. In January, a study found that the arrival of invasive big-headed ants in Kenya had set of an ecological chain reaction that led to lions making fewer zebra kills. Tree cover had fallen in areas where the big-headed ants had spread, providing less cover for lions to ambush zebras. Researchers said their findings had a global lesson about the importance of invertebrates.

“Although ants might seem small and unimportant, for holding together entire ecosystems this couldn’t be further from the truth. This recent study shows that native mutualistic ants are the fabric that holds together the African savanna,” says evolutionary biologist Dr Corrie Moreau, an expert on ants at Cornell University’s Moreau lab.

“When the native ants are displaced from their plant partners by invasive species this causes ripple effects across the entire landscape,” she says. “It is amazing to think that the small but mighty ant can influence the diets of top predators.”

Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on X for all the latest news and features

More than 200 of the nation’s hazardous chemical plants will be mandated to reduce toxic emissions linked to cancer, the Biden administration announced on Tuesday.

The long-awaited rule finalized by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will strengthen protections for communities living near industrial sites, especially along the Gulf coast.

The new update focuses on ethylene oxide, used to produce antifreeze, pesticides and sterilizing agents, as well as chloroprene, which is used to make synthetic rubber for shoes and wetsuits.

“President Biden believes every community in this country deserves to breathe clean air,” said the EPA administrator, Michael Regan, highlighting communities such as St John the Baptist parish in Louisiana. “We promised to listen to folks that are suffering from pollution and act to protect them. Today we deliver on that promise with strong final standards to slash pollution, reduce cancer risk and ensure cleaner air for nearby communities.”

Last time the government updated the pollution limits from chemical plants was 2006. The strengthened rule would lower toxic pollutants by 6,200 tons a year, and slash ethylene oxide and chloroprene emissions by 80%. The new update under the Clean Air Act would also require fence-line monitoring of six toxic air pollutants: ethylene oxide, chloroprene, vinyl chloride, benzene, 1,3-butadiene and ethylene dichloride.

“This shows the administration’s commitment to the issues of environmental justice,” said Adam Kron, a senior attorney with Earthjustice. “This rule will reduce a lot of hazardous air pollutants. There will be less cancer based on these emissions, there will be lives saved.”

There is only one facility in the US that produces the pollutant chloroprene, which is operated by the Japanese chemicals giant Denka and is situated in St John the Baptist parish in the heart of the heavily industrialised region in Louisiana known as “Cancer Alley”.

The EPA lists chloroprene as a likely human carcinogen and has long suggested a safe lifetime exposure limit of 0.2 micrograms per cubic metre. The agency has been monitoring the air around the Denka facility since 2016 and readings have regularly exceeded this limit by dozens of times.

Denka, a Japanese company that bought the former DuPont rubber-making plant in 2015, said it “vehemently opposes” the EPA’s latest action.