More than a third of the Amazon rainforest is struggling to recover from drought, according to a new study that warns of a “critical slowing down” of this globally important ecosystem.

The signs of weakening resilience raise concerns that the world’s greatest tropical forest – and biggest terrestrial carbon sink – is degrading towards a point of no return.

It follows four supposedly “one-in-a-century” dry spells in less than 20 years, highlighting how a human-disrupted climate is putting unusually intense strains on trees and other plants, many of which are dying of dehydration.

In the past, the canopy of the South American tropical forest, which covers an area equivalent to about half of Europe, would shrink and expand in tandem with the annual dry and rainy seasons. It also had the capacity to bounce back from a single drought.

But in recent times, recoveries have become more sluggish because droughts are growing more intense in the south-east of the Amazon and more frequent in the north-west.

The new paper, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examines satellite images of vegetation activity from 2001 to 2019. Tens of thousands of pixels, each covering a 25-sq km (9.65-sq mile) area, were analysed on a month-by-month basis and correlated with local rainfall data.

The authors’ goal was to investigate how “the frequency, intensity, or duration of droughts contributes to stability loss of Amazon vegetation”.

They found 37% of the mature vegetation in the region exhibited a slowing-down trend. While the patterns varied from area to area, they concluded that the highly deforested and degraded south-eastern Amazon was most vulnerable to a “tipping event”: in other words, a calamitous decline of the tropical rainforest to a different, drier state.

Their research found drought intensity was a more significant factor than drought frequency, though a combination of the two was most destabilising.

The paper’s lead author, Johanna Van Passel, said the satellite images only showed part of the true picture, and the situation below the canopy could be more severe. “Trees are the last part of the ecosystem to show tipping points because they have the longest life cycle and are most able to cope,” she said. “If we are already seeing a tipping point getting closer at this macro forest level, then it must be getting worse at a micro level.”

This is dire news for the Amazon and the world. The rainforest is home to 15,000 tree species, which help to draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But this ability – and the forest’s overall resilience – is being weakened by climate chaos caused by human burning of trees, gas, oil and coal. The paper says the slowing recovery rate of the forest may be an “early indicator” of large-scale ecosystem collapse.

“It makes me very worried about the future of the Amazon,” Van Passel said. “It is a warning sign that a tipping point can be reached in the future if these droughts continue to increase and get more intense.”

The Amazon, which is normally home to the biggest body of freshwater in the world, suffered a devastating drought last year that left its once-mighty rivers at record low levels, worsened forest fires and led to the mass die-off of more than 100 river dolphins. This was a continuation of a broader trend. The paper notes that the Amazon areas that had the lowest rainfall since the early 2000s suffered the largest decline in stability.

Trees are more likely to die in intense, very hot droughts due to two causes: hydraulic failure, which occurs when the plant’s xylem vessels rupture and lose their ability to pump water, and carbon starvation, which happens when trees are forced to close their stomata and eventually choke from a lack of photosynthesis.

Rainy seasons are growing shorter and more intense, which also hurts the ability of the forest to recover from drought because many tree species have not evolved to cope with extreme conditions.

In future, these trends will worsen because global heating will increase the intensity and frequency of droughts over the Amazon. The paper notes that this is “expected to cause changes in forest structure and functioning by increasing forest mortality and can potentially bring more areas in the Amazon closer to a tipping point”. Areas that are already affected by human tree cutting and fires are particularly vulnerable.

The paper warns the change in the internal rain cycle in the affected areas “may trigger a cascading effect, potentially leading to further slowing down in other parts of the Amazon forest, with implications for global effects on other tipping points”. To counter this, it urges international policymakers to protect mature forests, Indigenous peoples and other traditional communities, as well as reducing overall greenhouse gas emissions.

“The message to policymakers is that we must protect the forest that is still there, especially in the south of the Amazon. Farmers should stop cutting forest because they lose out when this reduces rainfall,” Van Passel said. “We must stop climate change. We have all this information, now let’s act on it … I’m worried, but hopeful.”

Donald Trump is depicted as a rapist who assaulted his first wife, Ivana, in a new biopic, The Apprentice, which has its world premiere in competition at this year’s Cannes film festival on Monday. Directed by the Iranian-Danish film-maker Ali Abbasi, the drama provides a fictionalised account of a 1989 incident that was previously detailed in the couple’s divorce proceedings.

The scene, which occurs near the end of The Apprentice, depicts Trump reacting with fury after Ivana disparages his physical appearance. “You have a face like a fucking orange,” she tells him. “You’re getting fat, you’re getting ugly, and you’re getting bald.” The future president is then shown forcing his wife to the floor and raping her. “Did I find your G-spot?” he asks in the film.

In her 1990 divorce deposition, Ivana Trump described a similar assault that she said occurred shortly after her husband’s scalp-reduction surgery. She claimed that Trump pushed her to the floor and pulled out handfuls of her hair. Ivana initially described what followed as a rape, but later walked back on the claim. In a 1993 statement, she said, “On one occasion during 1989, Mr Trump and I had marital relations in which he behaved very differently towards me than he had during our marriage. As a woman I felt violated … I referred to this as a rape, but I do not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.”

During the couple’s divorce proceedings, Trump dismissed his wife’s version of the incident as “obviously false”.

Scripted by the bestselling non-fiction author Gabriel Sherman, The Apprentice casts Romanian-born actor Sebastian Stan as Trump and Maria Bakalova as Ivana, while the Succession star Jeremy Strong plays the brutish New York lawyer Roy Cohn. The film is a twisted rites-of-passage drama that shows Cohn schooling the young Trump in the dark arts of American business. One of the key rules, Cohn tells Trump, is: “Admit nothing, deny everything.”

The Apprentice is competing for Cannes’ crowning Palme d’Or award. However, while the Canadian, Danish and Irish-backed production has already been sold to a number of foreign territories, it has reportedly yet to land a US distribution deal. The film is also claimed to be facing a legal challenge from lawyers connected to billionaire Trump donor Dan Snyder. Variety magazine reports that Snyder had invested in The Apprentice believing that it would paint a positive portrait of Trump and was rumoured to have been outraged after viewing a rough cut of the film.

Since the 1970s, at least 25 women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct, which he has denied. Last year the former president was found liable for the sexual abuse of the writer E Jean Carroll in the mid-1990s and was ordered to pay damages of $83.3m. He has never been charged with or convicted of rape.

Ivana Trump – the mother of Donald Jr, Ivanka and Eric Trump – died in July 2022 after falling down the stairs at her home in Manhattan. Her body is buried on the grounds of the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

Eagles that have migratory routes through Ukraine have shifted their flight paths to avoid areas affected by the conflict, researchers have found.

GPS data has revealed that greater spotted eagles not only made large detours after the invasion began, but also curtailed pitstops to rest and refuel, or avoided making them altogether.

The upshot, the team say, is that the vulnerable raptors took longer to reach their breeding grounds, and probably expended more energy to get there.

“It’s kind of like if you were to run a marathon but you had no water breaks. And at the end, someone asks you to run an extra seven or eight miles,” said Charlie Russell of the University of East Anglia, a co-author of the study.

The researchers warned the situation could delay breeding, as the eagles could need longer to recuperate, and affect the survival chances of any young, as prey may be less available when the eggs hatch.

Writing in the journal Current Biology, Russell and colleagues reported how they analysed migration routes taken by 19 greater spotted eagles as they flew through Ukraine to breeding grounds in southern Belarus in March and April 2022 – just weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine began. While females travel from overwintering grounds in Greece, males travel from sites in east Africa.

The researchers compared these paths with 65 migrations recorded from 20 birds in 2018-21.

The findings suggest the eagles travelled an extra 53 miles (85km) on average after the invasion. Russell said one eagle added an extra 155 miles to its route.

The journey took, on average, 55 hours longer after the conflict started, with males found to have a lower flight speed than before the conflict began.

And while 90% of eagles made stopovers in Ukraine before the conflict, only 32% did so after the invasion, with some sites avoided altogether.

The team said the greatest deviations from a direct path occurred where military activity was higher. However, Russell said, the degree to which the eagles appeared to have been affected varied.

Indeed while one eagle, nicknamed Borovets, continued to fly via Kyiv despite intense fighting, another – known as Denisa – shifted its path after flying within a kilometre of explosions and battles around the outskirts of the city.

Russell said the detours appeared to have been made on the fly in response to sporadic events.

“It is not like the birds are checking the news every morning to figure out where they should or shouldn’t fly on their migrations,” he said.

Russell said the results may underestimate the impact of the conflict, given some eagles could also be exposed to such stresses during the breeding period itself.

“Right now, there is not much that we can do, but it’s important that we are understanding the stresses on these populations, so that in a post-conflict scenario we can help to not just support greater spotted eagle populations and help them recover, but ecosystems as a whole,” he added.

Dr Josh Milburn, a philosopher at Loughborough University whose research explores ethical questions about animals and warfare, said the study expanded on what is already known about the negative effects of the conflict on Ukraine’s domesticated and captive wild animals.

“On rare occasions, wild animals can benefit from human conflict,” he said. “But the findings of this study echo what we know from previous research, focused on other war zones: war has an overwhelmingly negative impact on wild animals – both in terms of conservation goals and in terms of the suffering of individual animals.”

Microplastics have been found in human testicles, with researchers saying the discovery might be linked to declining sperm counts in men.

The scientists tested 23 human testes, as well as 47 testes from pet dogs. They found microplastic pollution in every sample.

The human testicles had been preserved and so their sperm count could not be measured. However, the sperm count in the dogs’ testes could be assessed and was lower in samples with higher contamination with PVC. The study demonstrates a correlation but further research is needed to prove microplastics cause sperm counts to fall.

Sperm counts in men have been falling for decades, with chemical pollution such as pesticides implicated by many studies. Microplastics have also recently been discovered in human blood, placentas and breast milk, indicating widespread contamination of people’s bodies. The impact on health is as yet unknown but microplastics have been shown to cause damage to human cells in the laboratory.

Vast amounts of plastic waste are dumped in the environment and microplastics have polluted the entire planet, from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans. People are known to consume the tiny particles via food and water as well as breathing them in.

The particles could lodge in tissue and cause inflammation, as air pollution particles do, or chemicals in the plastics could cause harm. In March, doctors warned of potentially life-threatening effects after finding a substantially raised risk of stroke, heart attack and earlier death in people whose blood vessels were contaminated with microscopic plastics.

“At the beginning, I doubted whether microplastics could penetrate the reproductive system,” said Prof Xiaozhong Yu, at the University of New Mexico in the US. “When I first received the results for dogs I was surprised. I was even more surprised when I received the results for humans.”

The testes analysed were obtained from postmortems in 2016, with the men ranging in age from 16 to 88 when they died. “The impact on the younger generation might be more concerning” now that there is more plastic than ever in the environment, Yu said.

The study, published in the journal Toxicological Sciences, involved dissolving the tissue samples and then analysing the plastic that remained. The dogs’ testes were obtained from veterinary practices that conducted neutering operations.

The human testicles had a plastic concentration almost three times higher than that found in the dog testes: 330 micrograms per gram of tissue compared with 123 micrograms. Polyethylene, used in plastic bags and bottles, was the most common microplastic found, followed by PVC.

“PVC can release a lot of chemicals that interfere with spermatogenesis and it contains chemicals that cause endocrine disruption,” Yu said. The human testes had been routinely collected by the New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator and were available following a seven-year storage requirement after which the samples are usually discarded.

A smaller study in China in 2023 also found microplastics in six human testes and 30 semen samples. Recent studies in mice have reported that microplastics reduced sperm count and caused abnormalities and hormone disruptions.

Step into a grocery store in France and you’re liable to see a green, yellow or red score on the front of most packaged foods: a green “A” for the healthiest, a red “E” for the least nutritious. Zip across the globe to Chile, and that traffic light-like label becomes a stop sign, warning consumers when a food contains a high amount of sugar, salt, saturated fats or calories.

Today, more than a dozen countries require that companies print nutritional labels on the front of food packages – a move that’s come as the rate of diet-related diseases, like hypertension, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke and obesity, increases worldwide.

So far, the United States does not require any front-of-package nutrition labels. But that could soon change. The US Food and Drug Administration is currently developing front-of-package labels that it could require corporations to begin printing as early as 2027. Despite significant opposition from food companies, many of which are drawing on big tobacco’s playbook, the FDA is evaluating different mandatory label designs to determine which is most effective at informing consumers, but also which is legal under US corporate free speech laws.

As emerging research identifies a wide range of health impacts linked to the consumption of ultra-processed food, conversations about nutritional labels are growing more urgent. To date, the labels under consideration by the FDA (and implemented in other countries) mark only “nutrients of concern”, like sugar and sodium – not-ultra processed foods. But many advocates say that should change.

UPFs are industrially formulated products made out of substances extracted from foods, like sugars, salts, hydrogenated fats, bulking agents and starches (think sugary breakfast cereals, microwave dinners, soft drinks and packaged snacks). Today, UPFs make up 73% of the US food supply, according to Northeastern University’s Network Science Institute, and provide the average US adult with more than 60% of their daily calories. But research is increasingly linking UPFs to a whole host of health issues: from cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes to colorectal cancer and depression.

For most of human history, the greatest challenge in the food industry was having enough nutritious and safely preserved food to feed everyone year-round.

“The industrialization of the food supply solved that problem for most of the world, and definitely most of the developed world,” said Amy Bentley, a professor of food studies at New York University.

In the 1970s, many food companies began voluntarily printing nutrition facts on their packages, and the FDA began requiring it in 1993. But, despite the nutrition facts labels, rates of diet-related diseases continued rising.

Today, more than one million people die from diet-related diseases in the US every year. So, in 2006, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (or CSPI), a non-profit watchdog and consumer advocacy group focused on food policy, filed a citizen petition with the FDA, asking the agency to require a front-of-package label. The idea was that the current nutrition-facts label on the backs of packages was both unclear and easy to ignore – it required a high level of math and nutritional knowledge to interpret and was hidden out of sight.

The FDA never formally responded to that petition, but did ask the non-profit Institute of Medicine (today known as the National Academy of Medicine) to study front-of-package nutrition labeling. In 2010 and again in 2012, the institute released reports recommending those labels. In a move that labeling advocates suspect was designed to pre-empt mandatory labeling requirements, two food industry trade groups developed a voluntary front-of-package label called Facts Up Front.

Those labels, which are now featured on products from Cheerios to boxed mac and cheese, include the grams and percentage daily values for both nutrients of concern, like sugar and salt, and those that are important for our health, like fiber and potassium. Although Facts Up Front did move important nutrition facts to the fronts of food packages, labeling advocates point out that the label is still difficult to interpret.

As Facts Up Front appeared in the US, nutrition advocates in Latin America were developing a different labeling system. In 2016, Chile introduced the first nutritional warning label in the world – a black, stop sign-shaped label that companies were required to add if a food exceeded a high enough threshold of sugar, salt, saturated fat or calories. Researchers across the region had determined that the most effective nutritional labels were those that interpreted information for consumers (for example, saying “high in sodium” or “excess sodium”, instead of “570mg sodium”) and used icons. In quick succession, Peru, Uruguay, Mexico, Argentina and Colombia began rolling out similar warning labels.

“People really do struggle in the real world to interpret percent daily value,” says Marissa G Hall, a professor of health behavior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Gillings School of Global Public Health. “Front-of-package labels are this huge opportunity to really level the playing field and make that information more accessible.”

In August 2022, CSPI filed a new citizen petition with the FDA to have the agency require front-of-package labeling – and the FDA is currently studying different labels it may soon mandate or recommend companies print.

Although research shows that a “high in” label is most effective, a traffic light-like label (now popular across much of Europe) is also under consideration. But, in the US, commercial speech is protected under the first amendment (although supreme court rulings have found that the government can compel corporations to share “purely factual and uncontroversial information”). Because of that, it’s unlikely that the FDA will require corporations to print a stop sign (essentially saying “Don’t eat this!”) or denote which foods are ultra processed (a still-emerging area of scientific debate).

Labels “should not raise unnecessary fear in consumers through health warnings and symbols or otherwise promote the avoidance of food ingredients or additives that have been affirmed safe by federal regulatory bodies”, two industry trade groups – the Consumer Brands Association and the Food Industry Association, which run the voluntary Facts Up Front program – wrote in a 2022 public comment to the FDA.

“We are concerned that interpretive systems, such as a red/green light system, will raise unnecessary fear in consumers based on a single limiter nutrient without providing meaningful information as to how that food item might fit into overall healthy eating patterns,” they continued, adding that the agency should focus on educating consumers on the existing nutrition-facts panel and working within the Facts Up Front framework.

Labeling advocates are critical of that approach. “The food industry is drawing heavily on the same playbook that the tobacco industry used to oppose regulation. And one of the things that they love to do is propose self-regulation,” said Lindsey Smith Taillie, a professor of nutrition also at UNC Chapel Hill’s Gillings School of Global Public Health. “It’s their way of getting a labeling system without having any meaningful consequences.”

“We know people, especially parents, really do want to make healthier choices for their kids,” said Hall. “I like to think of labels as not the sort of authoritarian policy that’s telling you you could never eat this kind of cereal again. I think it’s really providing information to consumers that they want to have and deserve to have.”

The FDA was scheduled to publish an initial labeling rule in December 2023, but pushed its own deadline to June 2024. If it happens then, the FDA will send the rule to the White House, where the Office of Management and Budget will determine whether to release the rule for public comment before finalizing it.

“That’s a really critical stage because that’s when the food industry is going to start meeting not just with the FDA, but with the White House and saying: ‘Maybe you should hold onto this, not publish it so close to an election,’” said Eva Greenthal, a CSPI senior policy scientist.

The outcome of the elections could alter the course of labeling dramatically. If Donald Trump wins, the FDA will likely freeze labeling efforts. Meanwhile, if Biden wins, the FDA will likely proceed on schedule – issuing a final rule, and then a compliance deadline for big corporations and small businesses to begin printing labels (typically two to three years). When the FDA releases a rule, food companies and trade associations will likely sue the agency for infringing on their first amendment rights – which could draw out the rollout of new labels even longer.

“Regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats are in the White House or hold the Senate or the House, the food industry is going to try to delay the process and deny the science and influence lawmakers and regulators along the way,” said Greenthal.

That delay tactic – like self-regulation – comes straight from the tobacco industry. And many food industry executives aren’t just looking at the tobacco-industry playbook from a distance – they were involved in creating it.

“A lot of the CEOs and the executives, they have moved on from tobacco and they now work in food,” said Eric Crosbie, a professor of behavioral health and health administration and policy at the University of Nevada, Reno. He points to Kraft Foods, which was owned by Philip Morris USA, the maker of Marlboro cigarettes, and Nabisco, which was owned by RJ Reynolds, the maker of Camels – and notes a 2023 study that found that tobacco companies distributed the most hyper-palatable foods on the market.

The US has been trying to compel corporations to print graphic images (photographs or drawings, not just text) on cigarette packages since 2009. When people wonder why the country doesn’t have more rigorous food labels, Crosbie points to that. “Well, just look at tobacco,” he said. “Thirteen years of a delay because of the first amendment” and its provisions for corporations.

Last year, food-labeling advocates organized to introduce two bills into Congress: the Truth in Labeling act and the Food Labeling Modernization act. If either passed the legislature, it could entirely bypass the FDA timeline. But that’s unlikely with Republicans controlling the House.

Even if the FDA does require food companies to print mandatory, interpretive labels, there’s still the evolving issue of ultra-processed foods.

Taillie and her colleagues at the University of North Carolina are testing an ultra-processed food label, and they hope that research might guide future efforts to label UPFs as our understanding of their health impacts deepens.

But Xaq Frohlich, a history professor at Auburn University and author of the book From Label to Table: Regulating Food in America in the Information Age, isn’t so sure the FDA would consider an “ultra-processed” label. He points to the agency’s regulation of genetically modified food, when it decided that it didn’t matter whether a plant had been modified, so long as the food it produced was not. One of the arguments the FDA made then, he remembers, was “we focus on the product, not the process”. If that’s still the case, ultra processed or unprocessed may not matter to the agency.

Another way to tackle the presence of UPFs in our food system would be for the US Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services to issue a recommendation on ultra-processed foods in the US Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which are updated every five years and due to be revised in 2025. Those guidelines form the basis for all federal food policies, from the labeling requirements that the FDA issues to school meals, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the Women, Infants and Children supplemental nutrition program (WIC) and other programs. All of this helps to explain why Americans with lower incomes eat the most ultra-processed food.

Although the 2025 dietary guidelines advisory committee has been tasked with evaluating research related to ultra-processed foods, it’s unclear what they’ll recommend – and whether the guidelines will actually include their recommendations. In 2022, Crosbie published a study that found that 95% of the members of the 2020 dietary guidelines committee had conflicts of interest with the food or pharmaceutical industries.

If the dietary guidelines committee addresses ultra-processed foods, “it would go a long way to trickling into policy”, said Jennifer Pomeranz, a public health lawyer and professor at New York University. “That doesn’t have to be the chronology of it, though. It could happen in other ways.” She points to a bill the Massachusetts state legislature debated, but failed to pass, in 2021 which would have limited the amount of ultra processed food served in schools.

Though there are powerful and immediate regulatory actions the federal government could take to address heightened consumption of ultra-processed foods, weaning ourselves from them entirely may require examining the forces – industrialization, poverty, unpaid domestic labor and agriculture policy – that made them so tantalizing in the first place.

Read more from this series:

After a lull in recent weeks, storm season in the US has begun to ramp up again, with 100mph winds and tennis ball-sized hail hitting Kansas on Sunday. It has been a busy season so far in terms of severe storms, with late spring into early summer typically bringing the greatest risk for tornadoes across the plains and midwest. An area of low pressure moving in across the central US, combined with rich moisture streaming in from the Gulf of Mexico, will probably continue the threat of tornadoes and large hail across numerous states. On Tuesday in particular, this severe weather risk may extend from Oklahoma all the way up to the Great Lakes.

This setup of low pressure could lead not just to a large outbreak of severe weather across the US later this week, but also to a sharp temperature gradient across the US and Canada as the warm air is fed into higher latitudes. In eastern Canada and the north-eastern US, temperatures are likely to reach 10C above the average for the time of year. Cities such as Ottawa and Detroit could have daytime maximum temperatures of 30C by Wednesday.

Yet move into western areas of Canada and the US, and you’ll see temperatures plummet nearly 20C on the other side of the cold front – this helped by the central area of low pressure over the US simultaneously pulling down the colder air to lower latitudes. The maximum temperatures are expected to struggle to reach into double digits on Wednesday and Thursday, before temperatures recover closer to the average for all parts of the North American continent.

South America will have similarly wild swings in temperature. While parts of Brazil and Paraguay will see temperatures 6-8C above the average, large swathes of Chile and Argentina will be having their first taste of winter later this week as temperatures are predicted to fall over 10C below the norm. In Argentina especially, daytime maximum temperatures are unlikely to reach double figures, with the city of Mendoza potentially struggling to reach 5C on Friday 24th – about 13C below the average. There will be little relief through the weekend as the cold conditions look to persist into next week.

Late last month, the coronation of Jeff Bezos and his partner Lauren Sánchez as environmental royalty was complete. At Conservation International’s glitzy annual gala in New York, with Harrison Ford, Jacinda Ardern and Shailene Woodley looking on, the couple were given the global visionary award for the financial contribution of the Bezos Earth Fund to the natural world.

“Jeff and Lauren are making history, not just with the sum of their investment in nature but also the speed of it,” said the Conservation International CEO, Dr M Sanjayan, whose organisation received a $20m grant from Bezos in 2021 for its work in the tropical Andes.

Launched with a skeleton team in February 2020, the Bezos Earth Fund aims to give away $10bn (£7.9bn) of the Amazon founder’s $200bn personal fortune to combat the climate crisis and biodiversity loss by the end of the decade. So far, it has issued more than 230 grants worth $2bn, funding initiatives from AI environmental solutions to clean energy for disadvantaged communities.

In the process, the Bezos Earth Fund has become one of the most influential voices in the climate and biodiversity sector, with its fellows, advisers and directors a high-profile presence at international negotiations. Its ranks include the former UK environment minister Zac Goldsmith, the leading African environmentalist Wanjira Mathai, and the former Barack Obama adviser Paul Bodnar. Multimillion-dollar grants from the fund support dozens of leading NGOs and initiatives.

But privately in the climate and biodiversity sector, the mood around the Bezos Earth Fund has turned to one of growing unease. Researchers, climate policy advisers and NGO staff voiced concerns about the level of influence the organisation holds over critical environmental institutions for halting climate change and biodiversity loss, many of which now count Bezos Earth Fund among their biggest funders. Some did not want to be named due to concerns about the consequences for their own funding.

“We have seen millions of dollars paid to conservation and climate organisations. So many have taken money from the Bezos Earth Fund and I find it really worrying. There is obviously a risk of a conflict of interest,” says Holger Hoffmann-Riem from the Swiss NGO Go for Impact. “The credibility of the system relies on independence.”

One climate policy expert, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says: “In the few years since it started distributing enormous amounts of money for climate change and conservation, Bezos Earth Fund has established influence over many major initiatives and their board members.

“At this point, Bezos Earth Fund’s enormous presence in the climate and conservation space starts to look less philanthropical, and more like an attempt to take over the corporate governance system for its own interests and agenda.”

Dr Stephan Singer, a senior global energy policy adviser with Climate Action Network International, says: “Philanthropic organisations like the Bezos Earth Fund are fundamentally important for civil society across the globe to fund interventions on key environmental and climate issues. But there are large problems on the political implications.

“The projects of the Bezos fund do not address the key issues of the fundamental climate crisis we are facing – they are nice but unfortunately cosmetic.”

A spokesperson for the Bezos Earth Fund said there was no conflict of interest and that its grants further the public interest exclusively. They said it took the accusations seriously as the comments seek to undermine the reputation of the Bezos Earth Fund and its staff.

Many in the conservation and climate world say their concerns crystallised this year, when a bitter internal row erupted at the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), one of the world’s most important climate certification organisations. The SBTi, which received an $18m grant from Bezos in 2021, is the organisation responsible for assessing whether some of the world’s leading companies are decarbonising in line with the Paris agreement.

In April, the SBTi board unexpectedly announced plans to allow companies to meet their climate targets with carbon offsets from the unregulated voluntary carbon market for indirect emissions. The move provoked internal fury. Staff and technical advisers said they were not consulted about the announcement and warned it could open the door to greenwashing.

They expressed fears that the science-based process was being sidelined in favour of more company-friendly policies with weaker standards, with large polluters allowed to buy offsets instead of cutting emissions. Dozens of SBTi staff called for the resignation of the CEO, Luiz Fernando do Amaral, and board members, including the Bezos fellow Iván Duque, in an internal letter.

Since the announcement, Amaral expressed regret for the confusion around the comments and said no rules had yet been changed. But the turmoil has placed lobbying efforts from the Bezos Earth Fund and other pro-carbon market organisations under increased scrutiny.

A spokesperson for the SBTi said the organisation regretted the announcement had been “open to misinterpretation” and that any changes would follow a standard consultation process.

A month before the SBTi announcement, the Bezos Earth Fund had organised a two-day meeting in London, and on the agenda was the role of offsets in corporate claims. Leading figures from the offsetting industry were invited, many of whom have pushed for the SBTi to allow offsets to boost demand in the struggling sector. One projection estimates that if the SBTi change is allowed to go through, it would be worth at least $19bn to the voluntary carbon market. A number of sources interviewed by the Guardian raised concerns that the meeting had influenced the board’s decision.

“It is hard not to see a link between the London meeting and the decision of the SBTi board meeting a few weeks later,” says Juliette de Grandpré, an SBTi technical advisory group member and climate policy expert with the NewClimate Institute.

“It is fairly easy to reconstruct that the Bezos foundation funds many pro-carbon markets initiatives in the US.”

The Bezos Earth Fund strongly disputes the claims, saying that it was not involved in the announcement by the SBTi board and the London workshop had nothing to do with the SBTi offsetting statement. It added that support for carbon markets from SBTi board members predates the statement.

Dr Andrew Steer, the president and CEO of the Bezos Earth Fund, says the environmental standard-setting institutions it funded had impressive leadership and made up their own minds: “They are strong and committed to transparency, high-integrity standards and analytical rigour. Any suggestion that they don’t make their own decisions is clearly wide of the mark.”

Bezos has given at least $45m (£36m) to carbon markets initiatives so far, according to the fund’s website, including an effort from the former US climate envoy John Kerry to pay developing countries to decommission coal funded by carbon credits.

With many leading companies struggling to make good on ambitious net zero targets, supporters of carbon markets argue that allowing firms to buy offsets in the short term could help funnel billions of dollars to initiatives to protect rainforest, renewable energy and other decarbonisation schemes while benefiting biodiversity and local communities.

Despite their claimed potential, there is widespread scientific evidence that offsetting schemes often do little to mitigate global heating and have increasingly become the focus of greenwashing crackdowns by regulators in the EU and the UK. A confidential draft of preliminary SBTi analysis seen by the Guardianfound that offsets are largely ineffective in their current form. The SBTi said that no analysis had yet been completed, including interim findings.

Many climate policy experts say that companies should be focused on the deep emission cuts needed to meet the Paris agreement, worrying that offsets are a distraction.

“In only a couple of years since it launched, the Bezos Earth Fund has become one of the most influential funders in the carbon market space, and has played a significant role in providing pro-market organisations with resources to promote the role of carbon markets. There is a real risk that excessively pro-market funding leads to drowning out more critical voices which provide the necessary counterbalance to the debate,” says Sam Van den plas, a policy director at the NGO Carbon Market Watch.

A spokesperson for the Bezos Earth Fund says the organisation acknowledged quality issues in the carbon market and its grants were aimed at improving standards that provide clear benefits to Indigenous peoples and communities. Bezos Earth Fund disputes that its funding is unbalanced.

SBTi has been known for its fierce independence, continually updating its assessments of corporate claims: easyJet, Microsoft and Walmart are among the dozens of companies that have had their net zero commitments delisted by the SBTi in recent months for not providing longer-term targets.

Kaya Axelsson, a research fellow at Oxford Net Zero, who is among 32 academics who signed a letter in Nature arguing against the SBTi announcement, says that the organisation’s independence is vital for highlighting where real environmental action is taking place.

“SBTi fills a critical role advising corporate climate action,” she says. “Without it, or something like it, companies can set targets that look good but get us nowhere near our temperature goals for a safe and liveable climate. Ultimately this should be a role for governments because voluntary initiatives like this are vulnerable to special interest capture and companies can choose to reject them if they find targets difficult to meet.”

A spokesperson for the SBTi says the organisation had a conflicts of interest policy displayed on its website and has multiple and diverse stakeholders with a range of views.

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

If 2020 was the year that Black Lives Matter went mainstream, 2024 was the year it died. Quietly, without even the customary whimper, the trappings of diversity so frantically sought and flamboyantly brandished after those protests four years ago are being discarded.

Like so many of the promises and pledges of the pandemic era, those of its accompanying racial equality movement have been swallowed whole by reality. But it’s worth remembering how large, how global, how fashionable it all was at the time. There were big, iconic moments, such as the removal of statues in Europe and the US, that triggered soul-searching about our history, and which opened up productive avenues of reappraisal. And there were others that four years later you cringe to remember: the black squares on social media, Nancy Pelosi taking the knee wearing kente cloth, Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner also taking the knee while looking soberly into the camera.

When it came to institutions and corporations, this mass movement was translated – or, rather, flattened – into a question of representation; of quickly incorporating more Black people, rather than any kind of root-and-branch reform. A movement that had been triggered by police brutality, and whose main demand was reforming policing and the safety of marginalised Black communities, spread across the world and resulted in more Black faces on the cover of Vogue magazine.

In a way, it could only have ever been thus. If you are to measure the success of the movement through its most high-profile adoptions, then the initiatives that came out of this period, those that emphasised diversity, equity and inclusion in the workforce, were already stillborn. Bringing more people of colour into pre-existing structures is far too narrow a route to systemic racial equalisation – it could only ever, at best, replicate those systems in a broader palette.

At worst, it was exploitation for reputation-management purposes. Take the BBC’s former head of creative diversity, Joanna Abeyie, who left last July after a year and a half in the role. She loved the job, she says, but that wasn’t enough. “These roles can become untenable when autonomy, influence and decision-making is minimal to absent,” Abeyie wrote. “When there is no sign of improvement and the role is created because optically it’s the right thing to do.” The role she reported to, that of director of diversity and inclusion, was quietly killed off when the person who held it left in early May after less than two years in the position.

It is part of a global slowdown. According to Revelio Labs, a workforce data company, the rate of attrition for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) positions has been about double that of other roles. Outgoing DEI executives report not only an unsupportive work environment, but active hostility. And even before that, despite the big 2020 heave-ho, progress on employment and retention has been stubbornly slow, patchy or easily clawed back.

The BBC is still falling short of the BAME leadership target that it set in 2018. The overall impression is of organisations assuming that this would be easy and would not require proper budgets, or uncomfortable transparency about salaries, seniority of roles and who ultimately calls the shots and makes the big decisions.

But it’s not easy. The work of racial diversity is not about expansion, but rebalancing – the former is about supplementing an organisation; the latter is about redistributing its resources. One implies gains, the other loss. It’s no surprise that to organisations that live and die by the bottom line, even the gains are beginning to seem as if they’re not worth the effort. The legacy of Black Lives Matter cannot be worked out within the balance sheet of a tech company.

Especially as the moment has passed, colossally so. The backlash began before the kente cloth had come back from the dry cleaners. Black Lives Matter immediately entered the realm of culture war, included in the package of “woke” and radical causes that are to be summarily sneered at by rightwing parties and the rightwing press. It’s not just an unfriendly climate. The backlash has brought with it potent, chilling legislation.

In the UK, Black Lives Matter was described as containing “partisan” political views that “must not be promoted to pupils”, in government guidance about political impartiality in classrooms. In the US, a spate of contentious anti-DEI lawsuits by rightwing groups and individuals, recently encouraged by the supreme court ruling against affirmative action, have targeted small businesses and large established ones, prompting several to pre-emptively water down their diversity and inclusion policies.

One of the organisations sued for policies discriminatory to non-Black people is North Central University in Minneapolis. Legal Insurrection Foundation, a far-right advocacy group, accused the university of violating the Civil Rights Act by reserving a scholarship for Black or African American students. The scholarship, in a neat encapsulation of the onslaught against the spirit of 2020, is the George Floyd memorial scholarship.

Meanwhile, there is a growing demonstration across the political spectrum that diversity and politics are two different things. Rishi Sunak’s appointment as prime minister came with not only the same policies of crackdowns on strikes, protest and even human rights laws, but also a bitter bonus of using the promotions of Black and brown people to positions of power to scold us. We’re here, aren’t we? Sunak says, living proof that you should stop griping about racism.

Whatever residual, misty-eyed longing there was for people of colour to reach the highest offices was surely dashed by a brown multimillionaire endlessly bleating that he is here to “stop the boats”. Personally, little has been more helpful in removing the scales from my eyes than the notion that Kemi Badenoch’s rise is something to be celebrated.

That doesn’t mean all of those models we have been offered so far amount to naught. Racial minorities have the right to bad or self-interested politics, and they have the right through diversity initiatives, whatever their motivations, to make more money and have more opportunities within whatever career they choose. It is not their responsibility to calibrate their role in nudging along the cause of better policing or maternal health when they just want to make movies, work in Stem or – to be fair – be on the cover of Vogue.

And this is all progress that is meaningful, broadly redistributive, and even potentially fruitful in terms of coming close to meeting those broader political and economic goals in the long run. But it seems that even that window is closing in favour of brute “meritocracy” – which means, increasingly, closing the door to all those who don’t already have a head start.

Which is why there must be something else that broadens the definition of equality beyond meeting liberal criteria of success for the Black individual. Away from the corporate world, that something is happening. BLM UK has for three years been disbursing funds to people affected by deaths in police and psychiatric custody, and to groups combating the hostile environment. It’s on a much smaller scale than the sort of mass adoption of diversity as the answer we saw in 2020, but in it there is a committed understanding of racial justice as a goal that can be achieved only by tackling, in a focused way, the policies that fall sharply on the heads of the most insecure and hurt their health, safety, dignity and even basic participation in social and economic life.

Black Lives Matter as a mainstream taking of the knee may be dead; but in a more modest, targeted and, we can hope, sustainable way, it is still very much alive. And perhaps that’s as it should be.

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Scientists say they have a made a potentially “gamechanging” breakthrough in breast cancer research after discovering how to preserve breast tissue outside the body for at least a week.

The study, which was funded by the Prevent Breast Cancer charity, found tissue could be preserved in a special gel solution, which will help scientists identify the most effective drug treatments for patients.

Experts found the preserved breast tissue maintained its structure, cell types and ability to respond to a series of drugs in the same way as normal breast tissue.

Published in the Journal of Mammary Gland Biology and Neoplasia, the research could bolster the development of new drugs to treat and prevent breast cancer, without the need for testing on animals.

Dr Hannah Harrison, a research fellow at the University of Manchester, said the discovery would help scientists test the most appropriate drugs on living tissue for the treatment and prevention of breast cancer.

She said: “There are various risk-reducing options for women at high risk of developing breast cancer – for example, those with a significant family history or who have mutations in the BRCA [breast cancer] genes.

“However, not all drugs work for all women. This new approach means that we can start to determine which drugs will work for which women by measuring their impact on living tissue.

“Ultimately, this means that women can take the most effective drug for their particular genetic makeup.”

Harrison and her team managed to keep breast tissue viable outside the body for relatively long periods. “By testing different hydrogel formulas we were able to find a solution that preserves human breast tissue for at least a week – and often even longer,” she said.

“This is a real gamechanger for breast cancer research in many ways. We can better test drugs for both the prevention and treatment of cancer, and can examine how factors like breast density – which we know is a risk factor for breast cancer – react to particular hormones or chemicals to see if this has an impact on cancer development.”

Scientists used the gel solution VitroGel to preserve the tissue.

In their work, they said the identification of new drugs had been “hampered by a lack of good pre-clinical models”.

What has been available until now cannot “fully recapitulate the complexities of the human tissue, lacking human extracellular matrix, stroma, and immune cells, all of which are known to influence therapy response”, they said.

Lester Barr, a consultant breast surgeon and founder of Prevent Breast Cancer, said: “Breast cancer mortality is decreasing in the UK thanks to improved screening and treatment options, but incidences continue to rise and breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in the UK.

“It’s therefore really important that we develop new prevention and risk-reduction options for women, especially for those with a high risk due to their family history or genetics.

“This breakthrough means that researchers will be able to test new drugs in the lab with far greater accuracy, which should mean fewer drugs failing at clinical trials and ultimately better results for women affected by this terrible disease.

“It’s a hugely exciting development in animal-free research which puts us in a really strong place to find new drugs to prevent breast cancer.”

On average, almost 56,000 women a year in UK are diagnosed with breast cancer, according to figures from Cancer Research UK.

Globally, breast cancer is the second most common form of cancer accounting for 11.6% of newly diagnosed cancer cases, behind lung cancer which accounts for 12.4% of new cases, according to the World Health Organization.

But survival rates for breast cancer have improved significantly. Women diagnosed with early breast cancer are 66% less likely to die from the disease than they were 20 years ago, according to research from the University of Oxford.

Figures from Cancer UK show that 76% of breast cancer patients survive for 10 years or more.