Ministers are under growing pressure to firm up plans for a green levy on imports to the UK before the general election campaign.

The government is consulting on plans to introduce a carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) from 2027. Under the system, overseas companies wishing to export key goods to the UK would have to show they were paying for their carbon emissions, or face a levy equivalent to the price paid for carbon by UK manufacturers.

This would ensure British manufacturers obliged to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions under the net zero target were not undercut by products from countries with lighter climate rules.

The CBAM is likely to affect imports of carbon-intensive goods, such as steel, cement, glass and ceramics, but the details of the scheme have yet to be set out.

Many Conservative MPs, Labour and the Liberal Democrats, and many businesses and economists, have said they support the plans in principle. However, some on the right of the Tory party, including arch free marketeers who object to such “red tape” interventions, and figures such as David Frost who are sceptical of the net zero goal, are opposed.

There are concerns this opposition will slow progress on the plans, and could mean the CBAM is in effect shelved before the general election, which must be held before the end of January.

The Conservative Environment Network, which comprises more than 100 backbench Tory MPs, urged ministers to press ahead. Tim Loughton, the MP for East Worthing and Shoreham, said: “We should be proud of the Conservative government’s successes in decarbonising our economy. But not every country has followed our lead. If we want to support British industry, we must ensure a level playing field for them to compete with cheaper carbon-intensive imports. These include those produced in China with its coal-dominated power grid.”

John Penrose, the Tory MP for Weston-super-Mare, said a CBAM for the UK would benefit all nations. “Once those countries realise that polluting doesn’t pay, because there’s no competitive advantage in it for them, they will have an incentive to become greener themselves,” he said. “As Conservatives, promoting free markets and handing on a healthy planet for future generations is part of our DNA. A CBAM provides a free-market way to tackle climate change.”

CBAMs have been discussed for decades, but have taken on new urgency in recent years as efforts to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions have increased in developed countries. Last October, the EU introduced a trial CBAM, requiring manufacturers to show data on the emissions involved in the manufacture of certain goods, chiefly cement, iron, steel, aluminium and fertilisers.

From 2026, when the EU begins to impose levies for imports where the carbon price is lower than its own, UK manufacturers could potentially face charges totalling hundreds of millions of pounds a year unless they can show regulators they are paying an equivalent carbon price in the UK.

Jo Gideon, the Tory MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central, said UK companies would be at a severe disadvantage unless the government acted quickly. “When the EU implements its CBAM, high-carbon goods will no longer be able to enter the EU tariff-free. The manufacturers of these goods will instead turn to us, flooding our market with these cheaper goods and undercutting our British industries who have done the right thing and started to decarbonise,” she said.

“While there are still important questions about the design and scope of the UK’s CBAM, I hope that we can introduce this mechanism quickly to prevent this dumping of higher carbon goods.”

Labour is understood to support the principle of the CBAM, but is awaiting detail on the proposals. Wera Hobhouse, the Liberal Democrat spokesperson for energy and climate change, said: “Introducing a CBAM for high-emission products is a vital step in tackling the climate emergency and protecting UK businesses from unfair competition. With the government’s consultation set to conclude in just a few months, ministers must press ahead with these plans without delay. This mustn’t turn into another Conservative setback in our country’s efforts to fight climate change.”

Laith Whitwham, a senior policy adviser at the E3G thinktank, said: “The government has committed to introducing a CBAM in 2027 – a year behind the EU – but it could go much faster, particularly as the UK does not need to reach agreement across 27 member states. Dithering and delay at this point weakens the competitiveness of UK industry and threatens to slow the pace of global decarbonisation through the risk of carbon leakage.”

The Guardian has revealed that India is seeking exemptions from the UK’s CBAM as part of a potential trade deal. Whitwham said that would “be a disaster for the UK’s consumption emissions and for its steel sector. The UK government has just agreed to provide £500m to Indian steel giant Tata Steel to replace its UK blast furnace in Port Talbot with a cleaner electric arc furnace. Exempting India from the UK CBAM now would allow Tata to import steel from its higher carbon blast furnaces in India, without paying a carbon price – which UK producers must do. The UK would in effect be closing its own blast furnaces only to import more steel from blast furnaces abroad.”

A Treasury spokesperson said: “We are currently consulting on delivering a UK CBAM to ensure highly traded, carbon-intensive products from overseas face a comparable carbon price to that paid if the good were produced in the UK. This should give UK industry the confidence to invest knowing that their efforts won’t be undermined by carbon leakage.”

Farmers have been dealing with record-breaking rainfall over at least the past year, meaning food produced in Britain has fallen drastically.

Livestock and crops have been affected as fields have been submerged since last autumn on account of it being an exceptionally wet 18 months.

According to the Met Office, 1,695.9mm of rain fell from October 2022 to March 2024, the highest amount record for any 18-month period in England.

Here, British farmers and growers tell us how they have handled the inclement weather conditions and what the heavy rainfall means for their immediate futures.

‘We are going to have an appalling harvest this year’

Our farm is mainly arable so it’s crops that we grow. The constraints that we are facing this year means we are going to have an appalling harvest. We’ve hardly got any crops in the ground at all, I’ve only managed to get 30 hectares [74 acres] of my 170 hectares planted and we have 110 hectares of “croppable” land. That’s less than a third.

Generally you plant in the autumn but the difficulty we’ve had this year is that from mid-October to effectively now, there has just been non-stop rain. Usually, you get rain but there will be pockets of dry weather for two or three weeks at a time to do the planting. That simply hasn’t happened. For people who got crops in the ground before mid-October, that’s fine, but for me and many others if I plant too early I get this terrible weed called black-grass and that takes over my crop.

We’ve all been caught out this year. I would imagine there will still be thousands of unplanted hectares. The difference between this year and any other is there has been no pocket of fine weather, that’s why it has been such a big problem.

Everyone is saying this is extraordinary. There have been bad years but this year has been particularly bad. You do wonder whether it is climate change throwing a curveball here because we are moving to more and more extremes. When it came to planting crops last autumn, it was fine but harvest 2022 was incredibly dry, meaning they dried up too quickly and the yields weren’t great at all. Tom Allen-Stevens, 54, farmer and agriculture journalist, Faringdon, Oxfordshire

‘There’s no sign of fields drying out soon’

The fields simply aren’t having a chance to dry out. We can’t use our tractor to cultivate, so we haven’t done any of the major plantings that are usually in the ground by now, such as main crop potatoes and onions, summer brassicas and salads. There’s no sign of them drying out soon.

We can’t use the tractor because it will wreck the soil structure, which, as agroecological growers, we’re keen to preserve. Instead we’ve been focusing on our polytunnels and using this space to maximum benefit. This is a tiny area in proportion to our fields though and can’t accommodate enough food to meet the needs of our box scheme.

It’s going to have a huge impact on our business, as customers are likely to cancel their subscription if the amount of veg they receive each week is too small for too long. The “hungry gap” [a few weeks, usually falling between April and early June, when winter crops have ended but the new season’s plantings are yet to be harvested] is going to be way longer than usual. Also, we sometimes buy in from a local organic wholesaler to top up our boxes when we don’t have much of our own produce available; this will be much more expensive this year as so many big UK growers are affected.

Longer term, these unpredictable weather patterns are a worrying indicator of climate change, and confirmation of the need to entirely restructure our food system to enable genuinely sustainable production that meets the needs of local communities and is accessible for all. Rhian Williams, 31, vegetable grower at a community supported agriculture farm, Leeds

‘We still have the vast majority of our cattle inside’

The main enterprise it has affected from our perspective is the cereals, in terms of getting them planted and also the sheep. The lambing percentage was lower, as a result [the percentage of ewes exposed to a ram per breeding period that have lambed].

It’s just been hard work. You get up in the morning and you don’t see a forecast where there is a better [weather] window. It’s quite frustrating and we have to condense a lot of our work into quite small windows at present. It’s a lot more hurried, we are working extended hours into the evenings or starting earlier in the mornings.

At the moment, we still have the vast majority of our cattle inside. We just can’t put anything out because it’s so wet. The sheep are lambing, so we are having to hold them inside until we get a dry weather window so they get stronger before we put them out.

On the cereal side, we couldn’t sow a single seed yet for spring barley until Thursday which, here in Scotland, is quite important for the whisky trade, as well as for our straw bedding for the livestock. Scott Maher, 50, mixed farmer partner, Angus, Scotland

‘If the rain stops, we then have to worry about drought – the seasons are so unpredictable now’

I work as a shepherd for somebody who runs an extensive grass-based system. He keeps exclusively sheep and probably has about 1,000 lambing ewes spread around a large area in the Cotswolds.

Weather is a massive factor but so much of that has been compounded by general issues that are affecting people in day-to-day life. Farming is one of the only industries where we produce things sold at wholesale but we have to pay retail prices for our input – fuel and feed, for example – which has all gone up. That’s always been an issue in the industry.

Last year, we had drought conditions during the peak grass-growing times of the year, spring and early summer. Now we have had to deal with flooding. Some of the fields are completely underwater and are basically inaccessible unless you are prepared to get very wet feet. We’ve had to spread the stock out as far as we can around the land area and keep it understocked by industry standards in order to have that margin for inclement conditions.

If it does stop raining, we then have concerns about whether there will be another drought. The weather seasons are so unpredictable now and that also brings issues of parasites, flies, more insects which we wouldn’t normally see in this country that bring disease such as bluetongue. Elizabeth Johnson, shepherd and vet student, Gloucestershire

Julian Medina comes from a long line of fishers in the north of Colombia’s Gulf of Morrosquillo who use small-scale and often traditional methods to catch species such as mackerel, tuna and cojinúa.

Medina went into business as a young man but was drawn back to his roots, and ended up leading a fishing organisation. For years he has campaigned against the encroachment of fossil fuel companies, pollution and overfishing, which are destroying the gulf’s delicate ecosystem and people’s livelihoods.

He says there have been huge declines in the amount of fish he and others can catch – 70% in the past decade – leading to widespread hunger in an already poor region. “We are now getting fish below the minimum size, which are the ones that could have provided us with security in the future.”

Medina is angry at the fossil fuel companies that are taking over part of the coast and have caused oil spills, and angry at the authorities that license them and undermine community attempts to restore mangrove forests. He is also deeply concerned about how warming water is bleaching the coral reefs through which his prey swims.

“We see how industrial activity is affecting our entire ecosystem,” he says. “But we also know that climate change is affecting our environment. It is a struggle and we are trying to make it visible in order to be heard.”

Medina will be telling his story this week to a panel of judges in Barbados during the first part of a historic hearing on climate change by the inter-American court of human rights.

The inquiry was instigated by Colombia and Chile, which together asked the court to set out what legal responsibilities states have to tackle climate change and to stop it breaching people’s human rights.

The detailed request seeks clarity on many issues, including children’s and women’s rights, environmental defenders, and common but differentiated responsibilities – the idea that all countries have a role to play in tackling climate change but some should bear a bigger burden. As well as mitigating and adapting to climate change, it asks how states should tackle the inevitable loss and damage.

Although climate change affects the whole world, the two countries told the court that its effects are not experienced uniformly or fairly. Their request letter warns that people in Chile and Colombia already deal with the daily consequences of the climate emergency, including droughts, floods, landslides and fires.

“These phenomena highlight the need to respond urgently and based on the principles of equity, justice, cooperation and sustainability, with a focus on human rights,” they said.

Courts around the world are increasingly making the link between climate justice and human rights. This month, the European court of human rights ruled for the first time that weak government climate policies violated fundamental human rights.

But the global south is leading the way. The Costa Rica-based court was set up in 1979 to interpret and apply the US convention on human rights, a treaty ratified by members of the Organization of American States. Twenty states have accepted its jurisdiction, including most Latin American countries and several Caribbean islands. Neither the US nor Canada have done so.

It is the third international court tasked with providing an advisory opinion on climate change, alongside the international court of justice and the international tribunal for the law of the aea. Such opinions are highly influential and set the framework for future legal action.

However, the inter-American court is the only one focusing on human rights. In a previous opinion it recognised the right to a healthy environment and affirmed that states must protect human rights affected by environmental harm, even if it happens outside their borders.

That recognition was enforced in March, when it ruled that Peru had violated the right to a healthy environment of people living in the country’s “most contaminated town”.

“The inter-American court is generally known and sees itself as a court that is much more willing to innovate with the law and to draw on sources from around the world,” said Sophie Marjanac, the accountable corporations lead at environmental law charity ClientEarth who will be speaking at the Barbados hearing.

Unlike the other courts, the inter-American court accepts written submissions from organisations and individuals, and has invited many of these to its oral hearings.

The hearing will begin with statements from the governments of Chile, Colombia and Barbados, followed by Mexico and Vanuatu. The court will then hear from UN bodies, legal experts from the Americas and further afield, local and national campaign groups, trade unions and refugee organisations. The eclectic mix of speakers includes Grupo Energía Bogotá, a large regional gas company.

One key part of the opinion tackles intergenerational equity, and the court will hear directly from youth people.

Jovana Hoschitalek, 18, a teacher and Grenadian climate campaigner, has seen significant changes in her home island.

“The sea is rising, quite a few of our plants are dying and water is becoming more scarce,” she said. “Sooner or later the things that I have grown up with, my younger sisters aren’t going to be able to experience.”

Hoschitalek is preparing to tell the court about her experiences. “I want to try to tell them how important it is that the future generations can be seen because … children won’t be able to survive the harsh climate that will come if things don’t take a drastic change.”

Trina Chiemi, the founder of youth network Fast Action on Climate to Ensure Intergenerational Justice, hopes the hearing will be an empowering process. “With the inter-American court we’re able to share our voices directly, and they’re able to look and see the faces of the people that are affected.”

The court’s subsequent hearings in the Brazilian cities of Brasília and Manaus in May will include many more frontline stories from the climate crisis including people living in “sacrifice zones” in Chile, Bolivian women fighting to protect their local water supplies and Indigenous communities.

Medina and others are speaking at the hearing with the support of Asociación Interamericana para la Defensa del Ambiente (Aida), an environmental law organisation that works in Latin America.

“A lot of issues that are going to be raised may seem disconnected,” said Marcella Ribeiro, a senior human rights and environment attorney for Aida. “But what I think is really beautiful [about] hearing from environmental defenders and communities directly is that they can pinpoint where or how these environmental issues connect with climate change. For example, environmental degradation and their ability to adapt.”

Once the opinion is published, it will have direct influence on the countries that accept the court’s jurisdiction. Legal experts say it will be an authoritative source on the obligations of states to respond to climate change, potentially boosting action to cut greenhouse gas emissions, supporting adaptation measures and helping establish mechanisms to address loss and damage.

Campaigners also hope it will invigorate existing climate lawsuits and petitions, such as those currently stalled at the inter-American commission on human rights (the court’s sister organisation), and say it could form the basis for future domestic or regional climate litigation.

It could even be used by countries during arbitration claims in investor-state dispute settlements, many of which are brought by companies in extractive industries.

The opinion is expected to have an impact outside the Americas too, including on the ICJ’s pending advisory opinion.

“We in the territories know something about our environment, we know what is happening,” said Medina. “Many scientists come and study what is happening and they can give context. But we who have experienced the changes … it is very important that our voices are heard.”