“The sea does not belong to despots,” Jules Verne wrote in 1869 in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. “Upon its surface men can still exercise unjust laws, fight, tear one another to pieces, and be carried away with terrestrial horrors. But at 30 feet below its level, their reign ceases, their influence is quenched, and their power disappears.”

Now, more than 150 years later, geopolitics experts are warning that Verne’s final sentiment, expressed as it was through the character of Captain Nemo, was wrong. From seabeds and sea caves to sea canyons, underwater ridges, seamounts, sea knolls and reefs, academics say countries around the world are using the politics of nationalism to permanently stamp their mark on the topography of the ocean.

Klaus Dodds, professor of geopolitics at Royal Holloway, University of London, says that countries today are engaged in a “scramble for the oceans”. “There’s more and more ocean grabbing going on in the world, because countries have been given legal permission to do that.”

Dr Sergei Basik, a geographer at Conestoga College in Ontario, Canada, says a relatively recent process of 3D mapping the ocean floor has allowed nations to assert their sovereignty over newfound undersea features, known as “bathyonyms”.

Just as in 1492, when it was a new map of the ocean that inspired and emboldened Christopher Columbus to set sail across the world to find a new trade route to Asia, leading to the colonisation of America, the once murky abyss of the ocean has now resolved into clearly defined topographical features on a 3D map. All of these require a name – and nation states hungry for valuable natural resources and national territory are staking symbolic claims on their “discoveries”.

“When we give a name to an object, we claim it. And we claim not only the surface. We claim the territory and all of its resources,” says Basik. “From an economic perspective nations are thinking about the potential [of the features]: how can we use this?”

Basik, who first outlined his thesis in the geography journal Area, fears that countries will one day mine these features for minerals or other economic assets whose power or value is not yet known. “The first step is the symbolic claim, and after that, we’re talking about commodification of the ocean and resources in the ocean.”

Countries must petition the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO), an intergovernmental body based in Monaco with 100 member states, for the right to name the features in internationally recognised nautical charts and documents.

During the 20th century, just 17 names for bathyonyms were proposed on average each year, Basik’s research shows. But since 2000, countries have proposed 95 names on average a year – and recently this trend has strengthened, with more than 1,000 names put forward since 2016.

Basik’s research reveals that Japan is the most zealous proposer of names for seabed objects in the world: it is responsible for naming 615 bathyonyms, followed by the US (560), France (346), Russia (313), New Zealand (308) and China (261).

Dodds says that, in part, this rush to name areas of the seabed has been stimulated by coastal states trying to extend their sovereign rights, which really revolve around potential mineral resources in the sea. “There’s been a lot of enthusiasm for mapping, surveying and carrying out geological investigations.”

Some countries are seeking to demonstrate that a nearby seabed is part of their continental shelf and therefore belongs to them. This then enables that country – under the rules and procedures of international sea laws – to potentially extend its underwater sovereignty by as much as 350 nautical miles from its coastline, Dodds says. “These are really huge areas we’re talking about.”

Naming a feature reinforces the point about exclusive ownership. “It’s saying: this is my space.” You name to begin the process of developing a more refined sense of ownership and sovereign authority, he says. For this reason, “the politics of naming is always tied to expressions of national identity”.

For example, the Alamang Reefs in the Makassar Strait were discovered by the Indonesian navy in 2022 and named by Indonesia after a traditional Indonesian sword. Similarly, the O’Higgins Guyot and Seamount, which were discovered in the south Pacific by a Chilean vessel, were named by Chile after the 19th-century Chilean independence leader Bernardo O’Higgins Riquelme last year.

Countries do not always restrict themselves to proposing names for geographical features near their own coastlines. “A lot of this attention around naming is now being increasingly developed to ever remoter parts of the seabed,” says Dodds.

For example, Bulgaria, which has a very modest presence in the Antarctic, has been one of the most enthusiastic exponents of Antarctic place naming. “This is probably a bit counterintuitive, because there are other countries that have done far more in Antarctica and have actually named far fewer features,” says Dodds. “But Bulgaria has conducted research in the Antarctic. And the whole point about Antarctica and the oceans, at that sort of depth, is that no country is close.”

He adds: “What’s happening is we’ve got an international legal system that is encouraging mapping and surveying and claiming. And one of the things that historically has driven a lot of this work is an interest in mining the deep seabed.”

For Basik too, the naming – and claiming – of ocean features is not merely a territorial issue. “This is not only about possible geopolitical conflicts and potential wars,” he says. “This is about the future and future development. This is about the potential for using the oceans in an absolutely unacceptable manner from an environmental point of view.”

Breakthroughs sometimes turn up in unexpected places. The researchers working on the international push to bring back the thylacine say they found theirs in a long-ignored bucket in the back of a cupboard at a Melbourne museum.

It contained an astonishingly well-preserved head of the extinct marsupial, also known as the Tasmanian tiger.

“It was literally a head in a bucket of ethanol in the back of a cupboard that had just been dumped there with all the skin removed, and been sitting there for about 110 years,” Prof Andrew Pask, the head of the thylacine integrated genetic restoration research (with the perfect acronym Tigrr) lab at the University of Melbourne, says.

“It was pretty putrid, a completely gruesome sight. People had chopped large chunks off it.”

Aesthetics aside, the specimen had a lot going for it. It contained material the scientists thought would be impossible to find – including long RNA molecules crucial to reconstructing an extinct animal’s genome. “This was the miracle that happened with this specimen,” he says. “It blew my mind.”

A year on, Pask says it has advanced the work of the team of Australian and US scientists who are trying to resurrect the species more than he expected at this stage. “We are further along than I thought we would be and we have completed a lot of things that we thought would be very challenging, and others said would be impossible,” he says.

The plan to ‘de-extinct’ the thylacine

The project to bring back the thylacine is being driven by Colossal, a Texas-based biotechnology “de-extinction and species preservation” company that is also aiming to recreate the woolly mammoth and the dodo using genetic engineering techniques.

Led by the tech and software entrepreneur Ben Lamm, Colossal has raised US$235m, employs 155 people directly and is funding research at 13 laboratories across the globe. They include the Tigrr lab, which operates at the University of Melbourne School of Biosciences.

The thylacine was Australia’s only marsupial apex predator. It once lived across the continent, but was restricted to Tasmania about 3,000 years ago. Dog-like in appearance and with stripes across its back, it was extensively hunted after European colonisation. The last known survivor died in captivity in 1936 and it was officially declared extinct in the 1980s.

Colossal says researchers have made several breakthroughs in its work on the species, putting the company much closer to its goal of returning the species to the wild in Tasmania. They include what they say is the highest quality ancient genome ever produced, with just 45 gaps in a genetic blueprint that contains about 3bn pieces of information.

Lamm says it is an “incredible scientific leap” putting the program “on track to de-extinct the thylacine”, while other recent breakthroughs will be immediately useful in protecting critically endangered species. “We are pushing as fast as possible to create the science necessary to make extinction a thing of the past,” he says.

The soft tissue of the Museums Victoria specimen that researchers dubbed “head in a bucket” contained preserved long sequences of DNA – genetic material that is the same in almost every cell nucleus in a body – but also long RNA molecules. Pask says the latter were crucial, and unexpected.

RNA is much less stable than DNA. It varies in different types of tissue within a specimen and contains what is effectively a readout of the active genes needed for a particular tissue to function. It meant researchers were able to get information related to the animal’s nose, eyes, tongue and other facial material, giving a picture of what a thylacine could taste, what it could smell, what kind of vision it had and how its brain functioned.

Pask says the result is the first annotated extinct animal genome, what he calls “an incredible blueprint”. “It helps us prove that what we are bringing back is genuinely a thylacine and not some hybrid animal,” he says.

The thylacine researchers aim to take stem cells from a living species with similar DNA to a thylacine, the fat-tailed dunnart, and turn them into the closest approximation of thylacine cells possible using gene editing expertise developed by George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and Colossal’s co-founder.

A thylacine-looking thing – but what comes next?

The announcement about the genetic breakthrough came ahead of an event at the SXSW festival in Sydney on Friday, where Lamm and Pask will talk about their work with the actor Luke Hemsworth. The Hemsworths have been vocal and financial backers of the project.

Colossal claims several other breakthroughs in their recent work, including the development of the first artificial reproductive technology to induce ovulation in marsupials, a step that could lead to captive breeding programs for threatened species.

They say they have fertilised single-cell embryos and culture them to over halfway through pregnancy in an artificial uterus, and refined work engineering resistance to cane toad toxin in the cells of another marsupial, the northern quoll.

On when a thylacine might be created, Pask says he expects the first “thylacine-looking thing” could be born within three to five years, but that he “wouldn’t call that a thylacine”.

He says the researchers are confident in creating a thylacine’s skull, legs and even stripes, but there are “still other things we still don’t know how to do”.

Other scientists are watching on with varying degrees of caution and scepticism. Some ask why so much funding and effort is going into bring back species when thousands that are still alive are on the brink of extinction. Euan Ritchie, a professor of wildlife ecology and conservation at Deakin University, says it is an ambitious project and likely to lead to breakthroughs that could help with conservation. But he says there will be other challenges “if-and-when we bring back thylacine-like animals”.

“I think we will probably get some thylacine-like animal, but they won’t actually be thylacines. The question is: what comes next?” he says.

“How will they behave in the wild and what effects might they have in the ecosystems? We have no idea how they are going to behave because there are no living thylacines left, and when you can bring back a thylacine-like animal it has got no other thylacine-like animals to learn from.

“That’s at least as big a challenge, if not a bigger challenge, than the genetic challenge. As an ecologist, that’s the big unknown.”

Kamala Harris faced a grilling on Fox News, with host Brett Baier pressing the vice-president on immigration, the economy and the Biden administration in a 30-minute interview on Wednesday night.

The Democratic candidate’s first appearance on the conservative network formed part of a direct appeal to right-leaning voters, after she was joined by more than 100 Republicans at a campaign event in Pennsylvania earlier in the day.

The interview was combative, with Harris, towards the end, speaking over Baier as she asked him to interview her “grounded in full assessment of the facts”, while calling him out for playing clips that she said were not relevant to what they were discussing.

Here are the key takeaways:

More than half the world’s food production will be at risk of failure within the next 25 years as a rapidly accelerating water crisis grips the planet, unless urgent action is taken to conserve water resources and end the destruction of the ecosystems on which our fresh water depends, experts have warned in a landmark review.

Half the world’s population already faces water scarcity, and that number is set to rise as the climate crisis worsens, according to a report from the Global Commission on the Economics of Water published on Thursday.

Demand for fresh water will outstrip supply by 40% by the end of the decade, because the world’s water systems are being put under “unprecedented stress”, the report found.

The commission found that governments and experts have vastly underestimated the amount of water needed for people to have decent lives. While 50 to 100 litres a day are required for each person’s health and hygiene, in fact people require about 4,000 litres a day in order to have adequate nutrition and a dignified life. For most regions, that volume cannot be achieved locally, so people are dependent on trade – in food, clothing and consumer goods – to meet their needs.

Some countries benefit more than others from “green water”, which is soil moisture that is necessary for food production, as opposed to “blue water” from rivers and lakes. The report found that water moves around the world in “atmospheric rivers” which transport moisture from one region to another.

About half the world’s rainfall over land comes from healthy vegetation in ecosystems that transpires water back into the atmosphere and generates clouds that then move downwind. China and Russia are the main beneficiaries of these “atmospheric river” systems, while India and Brazil are the major exporters, as their landmass supports the flow of green water to other regions. Between 40% and 60% of the source of fresh water rainfall is generated from neighbouring land use.

“The Chinese economy depends on sustainable forest management in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and the Baltic region,” said Prof Johan Rockström, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and one of the co-chairs of the commission. “You can make the same case for Brazil supplying fresh water to Argentina. This interconnectedness just shows that we have to place fresh water in the global economy as a global common good.”

Tharman Shanmugaratnam, the president of Singapore and a co-chair of the commission, said countries must start cooperating on the management of water resources before it was too late.

“We have to think radically about how we are going to preserve the sources of fresh water, how we are going to use it far more efficiently, and how we are going to be able to have access to fresh water available to every community, including the vulnerable – in other words, how we preserve equity [between rich and poor],” Shanmugaratnam said.

The Global Commission on the Economics of Water was set up by the Netherlands in 2022, drawing on the work of dozens of leading scientists and economists, to form a comprehensive view of the state of global hydrological systems and how they are managed. Its 194-page report is the biggest global study to examine all aspects of the water crisis and suggest remedies for policymakers.

The findings were surprisingly stark, said Rockström. “Water is victim number one of the [climate crisis], the environmental changes we see now aggregating at the global level, putting the entire stability of earth’s systems at risk,” he told the Guardian. “[The climate crisis] manifests itself first and foremost in droughts and floods. When you think of heatwaves and fires, the really hard impacts are via moisture – in the case of fires, [global heating] first dries out landscapes so that they burn.”

Every 1C increase in global temperatures adds another 7% of moisture to the atmosphere, which has the effect of “powering up” the hydrological cycle far more than would happen under normal variations. The destruction of nature is also further fuelling the crisis, because cutting down forests and draining wetlands disrupts the hydrological cycle that depends on transpiration from trees and the storage of water in soils.

Harmful subsidies are also distorting the world’s water systems, and must be addressed as a priority, the experts found. More than $700bn (£540bn) of subsidies each year go to agriculture, and a high proportion of these are misdirected, encouraging farmers to use more water than they need for irrigation or in wasteful practices.

Industry also benefits – about 80% of the wastewater used by industries around the world is not recycled.

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the director general of the World Trade Organization, also a co-chair of the commission, said countries must redirect the subsidies, axing harmful ones while ensuring poor people were not disadvantaged. “We must have a basket of policy tools working together if we are to get the three Es – efficiency, equity and environmental sustainability and justice. Therefore we have to couple the pricing of water with appropriate subsidies,” she said.

At present, subsidies mainly benefit those who are better off, Okonjo-Iweala added. “Industry is getting a lot of the subsidy, and richer people. So what we need are better targeted subsidies. We need to identify the poor people who really need this,” she said.

Developing countries must also be given access to the finance they need to overhaul their water systems, provide safe water and sanitation, and halt the destruction of the natural environment, the report found.

Mariana Mazzucato, professor of economics at University College London, and a co-chair of the commission, said loans made by public sector banks to developing countries should be made conditional on water reforms. “These could be improving water conservation and the efficiency of water use, or direct investment for water-intensive industries,” she said. “[We must ensure] profits are reinvested in productive activity such as research and development around water issues.”

Water problems also had an outsized impact on women and girls, Mazzucato added. “One of our commissioners is Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, the mayor of Freetown in Sierra Leone. She says most of the rapes and abuse of women actually happen when they’re going to fetch water,” Mazzucato said. “Child mortality, gender parity, the water collection burden, the food security burden – they’re all connected.”

Five main takeaways from the report

The world has a water crisis

More than 2 billion people lack access to safe drinking water, and 3.6 billion people – 44% of the population – lack access to safe sanitation. Every day, 1,000 children die from lack of access to safe water. Demand for fresh water is expected to outstrip its supply by 40% by the end of this decade. This crisis is worsening – without action, by 2050 water problems will shave about 8% off global GDP, with poor countries facing a 15% loss. Over half of the world’s food production comes from areas experiencing unstable trends in water availability.

There is no coordinated global effort to address this crisis

Despite the interconnectedness of global water systems there are no global governance structures for water. The UN has held only one water conference in the past 50 years, and only last month appointed a special envoy for water.

Climate breakdown is intensifying water scarcity

The impacts of the climate crisis are felt first on the world’s hydrological systems, and in some regions those systems are facing severe disruption or even collapse. Drought in the Amazon, floods across Europe and Asia, and glacier melt in mountains, which causes both flooding and droughts downstream, are all examples of the impacts of extreme weather that are likely to get worse in the near future. People’s overuse of water is also worsening the climate crisis – for instance, by draining carbon-rich peatlands and wetlands that then release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Water is artificially cheap for some and too expensive for others

Subsidies to agriculture around the world often have unintended consequences for water, providing perverse incentives for farmers to over-irrigate their crops or use water wastefully. Industries also have their water use subsidised, or their pollution ignored, in many countries. Meanwhile, poor people in developing countries frequently pay a high price for water, or can only access dirty sources. Realistic pricing for water that removes harmful subsidies but protects the poor must be a priority for governments.

Water is a common good

All of human life depends on water, but it is not recognised for the indispensable resource it is. The authors of the report urge a rethink of how water is regarded – not as an endlessly renewable resource, but as a global common good, with a global water pact by governments to ensure they protect water sources and create a “circular economy” for water in which it is reused and pollution cleaned up. Developing nations must be given access to finance to help them end the destruction of natural ecosystems that are a key part of the hydrological cycle.

The US supreme court declined on Wednesday to put on hold a new federal rule targeting carbon pollution from coal- and gas-fired power plants at the request of numerous states and industry groups in another major challenge to Joe Biden’s efforts to combat the climate crisis.

The justices denied emergency requests by West Virginia, Indiana and 25 other states – most of them Republican-led – as well as power companies and industry associations, to halt the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rule while litigation continues in a lower court. The regulation, aimed at cutting greenhouse gas emissions that drive the climate crisis, took effect on 8 July.

The rule would require existing coal- and new natural gas-fired plants eventually to reduce emissions including by capturing and storing carbon dioxide.

The EPA’s new rule, issued under the landmark Clean Air Act anti-pollution law, was issued two years after a major ruling by the supreme court in 2022 undercutting the agency’s power to issue sweeping regulations to force an electric-generation shift from coal to cleaner energy sources.

The EPA has said efforts to address the climate crisis and its impacts such as extreme weather and rising sea levels must include the power sector because fossil fuel-fired plants make up 25% of overall domestic greenhouse gas emissions.

Notably, the rule mandates that coal plants operating past 2038 and certain new gas plants reduce emissions by 90% by 2032 including by using carbon capture and storage systems that extract carbon dioxide from plant exhaust and sequester it underground.

The EPA has called the technology proven and technically feasible. The rule’s challengers have said it has not been shown effective at the scale predicted by the EPA.

The rule’s requirements are “really a backdoor avenue to forcing coal plants out of existence”, West Virginia, a major coal producer, and other state challengers said in a written filing.

The supreme court’s 2022 ruling was based on what is called the “major questions” legal doctrine embraced by its conservative justices that requires explicit congressional authorization for action on issues of broad importance and societal impact.

The states and certain other challengers contend that the EPA’s new rule likewise implicates a major question and exceeds the agency’s authority.

Numerous states and industry players filed multiple lawsuits challenging the rule in the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit, which on 19 July denied requests to pause the regulation pending its review.

The case did not implicate a major question because the EPA’s actions setting plant limits were “well within” its statutory authority, the DC circuit stated.

Paul Watson, the anti-whaling activist detained in Greenland and awaiting possible extradition to Japan, has appealed to Emmanuel Macron for political asylum in France.

Watson was detained in July after a Japanese request to Interpol over his confrontational tactics aimed at disrupting whaling operations in the Antarctic, and could face up to 15 years in prison if he is extradited and convicted.

His request to the French president was made in a letter several days ago, said Lamya Essemlali, the head of Sea Shepherd France, at a press conference in Paris. Macron has previously expressed his support for Watson and emphasised the importance of the case for environmental advocacy and human rights. There was no immediate comment from Macron’s office on Wednesday.

Essemlali said: “Paul is very attached to France, and it is also the second largest marine territory in the world, which means a lot for ocean conservation. Paul is currently living in France with his family.” She said Watson was “down” and “isolated” but “resilient”.

Jean Tamalet, a lawyer associated with Sea Shepherd France, part of the US-based non-profit conservation activist organisation, emphasised that the call for political asylum was largely symbolic and aimed at securing Watson’s release.

Critics of Watson’s arrest in Greenland have asserted that it stemmed from longstanding political motivations tied to Japan’s whaling practices, which are banned internationally under a 1986 treaty. Japan considers the practices part of its cultural heritage.

For decades, Watson has led high-profile confrontations with whaling ships in the Southern Ocean. The Greenland arrest occurred when Watson’s ship docked in Nuuk for refuelling on its way to intercept a Japanese whaling ship. Danish authorities are reviewing Japan’s request for his extradition.

More than a decade ago, Japan issued a red notice through Interpol. This is not an international arrest warrant but a request for cooperation between member states to locate and detain individuals pending extradition.

In the past, international authorities had paid little attention to the red notice, allowing Watson to travel freely, according to Tamalet, who said: “That has obviously changed.”

The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has laid out details of his “victory plan” in a speech to parliament that acknowledged increasing pressure from allies to negotiate an end to the conflict.

An “unconditional invite” to join Nato is at the heart of the plan he had pitched in private meetings in Washington DC and on a tour of European capitals before unveiling it publicly in Kyiv on Wednesday.

“We heard the word ‘negotiations’ from partners, and the word ‘justice’ much less often,” he admitted to lawmakers. His project was a response to that, he said, offering a chance of “decent peace” for the country.

A commitment to allow Ukraine into Nato would show the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, that his geopolitical plans were “headed for defeat”, Zelenskyy said.

Later on Wednesday, Zelenskiy spoke to Joe Biden, who announced a new $425m (£327m) military aid package, including air defence capability, air-to-ground munitions, armoured vehicles and critical munitions, the White House said in a statement.

Ukraine’s allies have been wary of the conflict expanding since Putin launched a full-scale invasion in February 2022 and began threatening to use nuclear weapons soon after.

The Nato chief, Mark Rutte, gave a muted response to Zelenskyy’s plans, saying that he and allies “take note” of it.

“The plan has many aspects and many political and military issues we really need to hammer out with the Ukrainians to understand what is behind it, to see what we can do, what we cannot do,” Rutte said.

Moscow rapidly denounced Zelenskyy’s proposal as an escalation. “He is pushing Nato into direct conflict with our country,” the foreign ministry spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, told reporters.

Zelenskyy also ruled out conceding territory to Russia, although analysts have said allowing Moscow effective control of some territory seized over nearly three years of war would be needed to halt fighting.

Overall, the vision laid out by Zelenskyy was as much an attempt to shift the global narrative around Ukraine’s future prospects as a strategic military project.

As the full-scale war heads towards its fourth year, Russia has been throwing soldiers and weapons into a slow but consistent advance on the eastern front.

The crisis in the Middle East has diverted funds and diplomatic attention from Ukraine, and if Donald Trump wins the US presidential election next month then Zelenskyy could soon be making his case to a hostile administration in Washington.

Zelenskyy described a Ukraine that could achieve a “just peace” if allies gave it better defence capabilities and a strategic non-nuclear deterrent, and that could then reward those who stood by it with investment opportunities.

Key to Ukraine’s economic potential are strategic mineral deposits that he said were worth trillions of dollars, including uranium, titanium, lithium and graphite, and the country’s rich soil, which produces a significant portion of the world’s wheat.

These were “strategically valuable resources and they will strengthen either Russia and its allies or Ukraine and the democratic world”, Zelenskyy said.

When the war with Russia ended, Ukraine would also have ranks of battle-hardened troops who could strengthen Nato forces in Europe and worldwide, he added.

Zelenskyy also argued that supporting Ukraine was as much self-defence as solidarity, describing a war that was already metastasising beyond Europe, with North Korean soldiers fighting alongside Russians troops for a state deploying Iranian weapons and cheered on by China.

“Russia and its allies want more wars. And that’s a fact. They are learning, and the more time they have to learn … the more the world will have to pay, unfortunately and inevitably, for the right to life, for the right to peace,” he said.

Artem Mazhulin contributed reporting

Florida officials have arrested the man who left his dog tied to a post in floodwaters ahead of Hurricane Milton’s landfall.

Florida state troopers found the dog last week, abandoned on the side of Interstate-75 in Tampa with flood waters up to his chest. The Florida highway patrol shared a video at the time of the bodycam footage and a caption: “Do NOT do this to your pets please … ”

On Monday the former owner, Giovanny Aldama Garcia, 23, of Ruskin, Florida, was arrested for aggravated animal cruelty.

The dog has been renamed from Jumbo to Trooper, the department of highway safety and motor vehicles said. At a news conference on Tuesday, Ron DeSantis said Trooper was currently in Tallahassee and will be adopted.

“The dog was very rattled from that experience,” the Florida governor said. “We said at the time, you don’t just tie up a dog and have them out there for a storm, totally unacceptable, and we’re gonna hold you accountable.”

According to online jail records reviewed by the Guardian, Aldama Garcia was released on a $2,500 cash bond on Tuesday after his Monday arrest. It is unclear when he is due in court for a hearing.

The office of Suzy Lopez, the state attorney who serves the 13th judicial circuit in Tampa and is overseeing this case, said in a news release that Aldama Garcia told investigators he was driving to Georgia to escape the hurricane but left his dog on the side of the road because he couldn’t find anyone to take him.

The dog was eventually rescued after a state trooper, Orlando Morales, got a tip from a driver. By the time he found the dog, the water had risen to the animal’s neck.

According to ABC News, two days later Aldama Garcia went to a local animal shelter to retrieve the dog, bringing pictures as proof of ownership, but the dog turned out to be in a different shelter. Aldama Garcia told them that he’d surrender ownership “if the current foster will take good care and love the dog”, and filled out the required paperwork to give up the dog, according to the affidavit seen by ABC News.

“In Hillsborough county, we take animal cruelty very seriously” Lopez said. “This defendant is charged with a felony and could face up to five years in prison for his actions. Quite frankly, I don’t think that is enough. Hopefully, lawmakers take a look at this case and discuss changing the law to allow for harsher penalties for people who abandon their animals during a state of emergency.”

Lopez also thanked Morales: “He’s an animal lover and father to a rescue dog himself. Thank you for your dedication to all of our residents – including the four-legged ones.”

More than 1,400 vehicles have been seized from drivers who have persistently ignored fines relating to London’s Ulez clean air zone, Transport for London has revealed, with more than £25m being recouped by bailiffs.

Bailiffs working on TfL’s behalf seized 1,429 vehicles in the last year from drivers who had repeatedly ignored penalty charge notices, with £710,000 being raised from the sale of nearly 800 of these cars.

The figures, which cover the 12 months up to the end of July, come a year after the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, extended the Ulez to cover all 32 London boroughs from a previous zone that covered the area between the capital’s north and south circular roads.

Vehicles that do not meet certain emissions standards and are caught using roads in the zone must pay a £12.50 daily charge, or a fine of up to £180 for non-payment.

If drivers do not pay this penalty it is registered as an unpaid debt and an order is made for recovery. If it remains unpaid, a warrant is issued which allows bailiffs to recover the outstanding debt.

TfL said that in the past 12 months bailiffs had recouped £25.6m from those who refused to pay penalty charge notices. This included one driver who was forced to settle a balance of £16,000 after 45 warrants were issued against them. In another case, a driver saw their vehicle seized to pay off an outstanding balance after ignoring 10 warrants.

TfL has hailed the Ulez expansion as a success, pointing to research showing that it has reduced levels of harmful air pollutants significantly since its introduction, as well as helping with the climate emergency by cutting London’s emissions.

However, the scheme has also faced a strong backlash from some quarters, including owners of non-compliant vehicles refusing to pay fines and others vandalising the cameras that police the zone.

TfL said a significant amount of debt remained outstanding and it was now tripling the number of staff in its investigations to help enforcement agencies target repeat offenders.

While the compliance of a vehicle is based on declared emissions rather than its age, a rule of thumb is that it affects diesels made before 2015 and petrol cars before 2006.

Last month, TfL was forced to refund drivers in Chingford, east London, after its camera had become misaligned and incorrectly charged vehicles outside the Ulez boundary.

In January, the Guardian revealed that hundreds of thousands of EU citizens could have been wrongly fined for driving in the Ulez zone, with five EU countries accusing TfL of illegally obtaining names and addresses of citizens in order to issue fines.

Alex Williams, TfL’s chief customer and strategy officer, said: “The most recent data shows that on average, over 96% of vehicles seen driving in the Ulez are compliant.

“We want to send a clear message to vehicle owners that if you receive a penalty charge for driving in the zone, you should not ignore it. Your penalty will progress to enforcement agents to recover the fines that you owe, and there is a risk that your vehicle and other items of property will be removed.”