They call it cloud milking, a zero-energy technique to extract water from fog that is revolutionising the recovery of forests devastated by fire and drought.

The idea began as a pilot project in the Canary Islands. The plan was to exploit the moisture-laden “sea of clouds” that hangs over the region in order to aid reforestation, and has since been extended to several other countries to produce drinking water, and to irrigate crops.

“In recent year the Canaries have undergone a severe process of desertification and we’ve lost a lot of forest through agriculture. And then in 2007 and 2009, as a result of climate change, there were major fires in forested areas that are normally wet,” said Gustavo Viera, the technical director of the publicly-funded project in the Canaries.

Viera said that after the devastating fires they sought ways to deliver water to remote, mountainous areas without creating infrastructure, or using fossil fuels to extract ground water from deep wells.

The project, named Life Nieblas (niebla is the Spanish word for fog) began, backed by the EU, intended to mimic the way that the leaves of the local species of laurel trees capture water droplets from fog, by using sheets of plastic mesh erected in the path of the wind. As the wind blows fog through the mesh, water droplets collect and fall into the containers below, which is used to irrigate new saplings until they have sufficient leaves to capture the water themselves.

However, the wind, though vital to the original structure, proved a problem as it destroys all but the smallest structures.

“We needed to solve the problem of the fragility of the netting while minimising the environmental impact,” Viera said. “We developed a system that imitates pine needles, which are very good for capturing water while also letting the air pass through, and it’s a system that can easily be replicated in other locations and that’s also easy to transport to where it’s needed.”

In the new models, water condenses on the fine metal fronds of the structures, replicating the way conifers collect water from the atmosphere.

The water is discharged automatically without any energy supply or CO₂ emissions and no machinery is used to transport it from one place to another. No electrical systems are used for irrigation and the water footprint is also reduced as no aquifers or rivers are exploited. The only power needed is for building the collectors and getting them in place.

A slightly different technique is also being applied to reforest an abandoned quarry in Garraf, a rugged area south of Barcelona.

“Here we are using individual water collectors of the type used to keep herbivores from eating young plants,” said Vicenç Carabassa, the project’s head scientist, who works for the Centre for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications (CREAF), a public research institute at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

“They collect rain and the heavy dew that falls on summer mornings and also provide shade.”

Carabassa pointed out that not every type of fog is suitable because some don’t have a high enough moisture content. The ideal fog is orographic or mountain fog, which exists in many Mediterranean regions and also in northern Portugal.

“The Canaries are the perfect laboratory to develop these techniques,” said Carabassa. “But there are other areas where the conditions are optimal and where there is a tradition of water capture from fog, such as Chile and Morocco.”

The method is now being used to supply drinking water and water for irrigation to the Chilean coastal village of Chungungo in Coquimbo province, while in the Cape Verde archipelago Life Nieblas collectors, combined with locally-made wooden structures, are providing 1,000 litres of water per day, which is used to irrigate crops and water livestock.

All the information necessary to create fog collectors is freely available to the public on the project’s website, and Viera said they’ve had many enquiries.

The benefits are palpable. In the Barranco del Andén ravine in Gran Canaria, 35.8 hectares (96 acres) have been reforested and 15,000 trees of various laurel species have been planted, with a survival rate of 86%, double the figure of traditional reforestation.

“We have recovered the forest’s potential to capture atmospheric carbon and estimate that we have captured around 175 tonnes of CO₂ per year,” Viera said.

The Life Nieblas project saves not only in fossil energy consumption and CO₂, but it is also cheaper and uses less water than traditional reforestation systems.

“We’re living with drought throughout the Mediterranean and also in the Canaries and now every drop of water counts,” said Carabassa, adding that we have to learn to live with much less water.

“This technique is never going to be an alternative to a desalination plant but in remote areas where water supply is difficult and expensive this can be a real alternative.”

With less than a week to go until the 2024 election, more than 57.5 million Americans have already voted, according to the Election Lab at the University of Florida. The number represents more than a third of the total turnout for the 2020 elections – it is hard to say what it means, as 2020 saw a high number of mail-in votes because of the Covid pandemic, but turnout in some states indicates that the Republican push for supporters to vote early is working.

Dressed in an orange hi-vis vest after a campaign stunt in a garbage truck, Republican nominee Donald Trump used a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, to take aim at the Democrats over Joe Biden’s “garbage” comments, thanked sanitation workers and promised to protect women “whether they like it or not”.

Elsewhere in Wisconsin, Kamala Harris appealed to first-time voters, for whom she said the issues of climate change, gun control, and abortion access are “not political. This is your lived experience.” She was speaking shortly after a new CNN poll showed her six points ahead of Trump in the state.

Here’s what else happened on Wednesday:

Kamala Harris election news and updates

• Harris spoke in Harrisburg, the Pennsylvania state capital, which is in one of the few counties that voted for Joe Biden in 2020. Polls show a tied race in Pennsylvania, which both campaigns are competing fiercely for. The path to winning 270 electoral votes is much more difficult for the candidate who loses Pennsylvania. Harris did not mention the racist remark about Puerto Rico made by a comedian at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday, but the state’s sizeable Latino and Puerto Rican population could be a decisive voting bloc.

• The former Republican governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger has announced that he is backing Harris in next week’s election. In a long post on X, Schwarzenegger, 77, said that while he doesn’t “really do endorsements”, he felt compelled to formally endorse Harris and her pick for vice-president, Tim Walz.

• In an op-ed for the Guardian, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders addressed progressives’ concerns about voting for Harris given the Biden administration’s stance on Israel’s war on Gaza. “I understand that there are millions of Americans who disagree with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on the terrible war in Gaza. I am one of them,” he writes, adding that “on this issue, Donald Trump and his rightwing friends are worse.”

Donald Trump election news and updates

• Before his Green Bay rally, refused to apologise for the comments made about Puerto Rico at his Madison Square Garden rally, instead repeating his assertion that he did not know who the comedian was or how he got booked. “He’s a comedian, what can I tell you? I know nothing about him. I don’t know why he’s there.”

• A Pennsylvania judge on Wednesday sided with Trump’s campaign and agreed to extend an in-person voting option in suburban Philadelphia, where long lines on the final day led to complaints voters were being disfranchised by an unprepared election office.

• The House speaker, Mike Johnson, said there would be “massive” healthcare changes if Trump wins next Tuesday, including abolishing Obamacare. “Healthcare reform’s going to be a big part of the agenda,” Johnson, speaking at a rally in Pennsylvania on Monday, told the crowd. “When I say we’re going to have a very aggressive first 100 days agenda, we got a lot of things still on the table.”

Elsewhere on the campaign trail

• A Republican former congressional candidate was charged with stealing ballots during a test of a voting system in Madison county, Indiana, state police said on Tuesday. During the test on 3 October, which involved four voting machines and 136 candidate ballots marked for testing, officials discovered that two ballots were missing, according to the Indiana state police.

• A majority of voters in swing states do not believe Trump will accept defeat if he loses next week’s presidential election and fear that his supporters will turn to violence in an attempt to install him in power, a new poll suggests.

• The pace of US economic growth slowed over the summer but continued its two-year expansion, according to data released on Wednesday. US gross domestic product (GDP) – a broad measure of economic health – rose by 2.8% in the third quarter, short of economists’ expectations of 3.1%, and down from the previous quarter’s 3% reading.

• Officials in south-west Washington were able to salvage almost 500 damaged ballots from a ballot box that was set on fire on Monday in what officials have called an attack on democracy. An unknown number of ballots were destroyed when someone placed incendiary devices in a drop box in Vancouver, Washington, while three ballots were damaged in a fire at a box in nearby Portland, Oregon. Those fires and one other are linked, officials have said.

Read more about the 2024 US election:

I first encountered whale poop 30 years ago while I was working on a right whale research project. On one of my first days on the water, in the Bay of Fundy, in eastern Canada, we came upon a feeding male right whale with mud on its head – or bonnet – a sign that it had been feeding at the bottom of the bay. It had come up to breathe and rest.

Just before it dived in again, it released this enormous faecal plume.

There were gallons of poop in that water. It looked like red floating bricks. The smell was overwhelming. Some whale poop smells like brine and seawater, but with right whales, there’s a strong smell of sulphur.

If you get that poop on your clothes, you have to throw them away. You’re never going to wash it out.

I didn’t know it then, but that faecal plume would later spark my global search for whale faeces, from Iceland to Mexico, Alaska and Hawaii.

Since then, I’ve learned that whale faeces can tell us not only about the diet of a whale, but also about their hormones and reproductive status. It can reveal the whale’s stress levels, gut microbiome and genetic lineage. It even allows us to look at the level of mercury and pollution in the ocean – everything from microplastics to parasite loads.

Ambergris, which is formed in the hindgut of sperm whales when they digest squid beaks, is rare and extremely valuable. Since the 1970s, its trade has been restricted in many countries. But in the past, it was used to make perfumes, which were worn by Elizabeth I, Charles I and Casanova.

Whale faecal plumes can be neon green or bright red. At times, they sparkle with silver scales, like the sun glinting on the water. Every whale defecation is unique.

As for the smell, the poop of right whales is the strongest and foulest but I love the smell now.

It helped set the course for my research career. Two years after I saw whale poop for the first time, I took my first class in marine ecology and learned about one of the most important processes in the ocean, especially in carbon sequestration: the biological pump.

Phytoplankton, or algae, only grow near the surface of the ocean, where there is enough light for photosynthesis. Animals such as krill and copepods feed on it there and they are eaten by fish and even whales.

When this phytoplankton dies or is consumed, some of those nutrients are removed from the atmosphere and can sink to the bottom of the ocean. In this way, the biological pump plays an important role in moving carbon to the deep sea.

But I remember sitting there in class that day, thinking: there’s something missing here. Right whales often feed at depth and poop at the surface, so they’re likely bringing important nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus and iron back up to the surface.

That set me off on the idea of a “whale pump” – which we’ve since discovered does the opposite of the biological pump. It pumps nutrients back up to the surface.

These nutrients can get picked up by phytoplankton and go through the entire ocean food chain. This is important because one of the justifications for whaling in Japan, Norway and Iceland is that whales eat “our fish”, therefore if there are too many whales, there will be a decline in fisheries.

The whale pump demonstrates it’s more complicated than that – and that the presence of whales in the ocean might actually increase fish populations.

As well as helping us to understand the state of the present ocean, whale poop gives us a glimpse into the past ocean and what it was like when there were hundreds of thousands of whales in the sea. If we can restore whales and the nutrient pathways that historically existed through their poop, it could help support more biodiversity in the ocean.

As told to Donna Ferguson

Governments risk another decade of failure on biodiversity loss, due to the slow implementation of an international agreement to halt the destruction of Earth’s ecosystems, experts have warned.

Less than two years ago, the world reached a historic agreement at the Cop15 summit in Montreal to stop the human-caused destruction of life on our planet. The deal included targets to protect 30% of the planet for nature by the end of the decade (30×30), reform $500bn (then £410bn) of environmentally damaging subsidies, and begin restoring 30% of the planet’s degraded ecosystems.

But as country representatives dig into their second week of negotiations at Cop16 in Cali, Colombia – their first meeting since Montreal – alarm is growing at the lack of concrete progress on any of the major targets they agreed upon. An increasing number of indicators show that governments are not on track. They still need to protect an area of land equivalent to the combined size of Brazil and Australia, and an expanse of sea larger than the Indian Ocean to meet the headline 30×30 target, according to a new UN report.

Weak progress on funding for nature and almost no progress on subsidy reform have also frustrated observers. At the time of publication, 158 countries are yet to submit formal plans on how they are going to meet the targets, according to Carbon Brief, missing their deadline this month ahead of the biodiversity summit in Cali, where governments are not likely to set a new deadline.

“Progress has been too slow. I think political prioritisation of nature is still too low. This is reflected by progress on the targets. Several target are very easy to measure: 30×30 has metrics on area and quality, finance has a dollar figure. We have new data on both that show we’re not on pace,” said Brian O’Donnell, director of the Campaign for Nature.

“This is a moment to demonstrate seriousness and build trust. On finance especially, it’s been disturbing at times to go to parties to ask for their path forward for finance and be treated as if we are asking for something new or unrealistic, as opposed to what they just agreed two years ago. To me, that is a reflection of not a true commitment to this,” he said.

The world has never met a target to stem the destruction of wildlife and life-sustaining ecosystems. Amid growing scientific warnings about the state of life on Earth, there has been a major push to make sure this decade is different, and that governments comply with targets designed to prevent wildlife extinctions, such as cuts to pesticides use and pollution.

Leading figures in conservation and science have raised concerns about the progress governments are making towards the targets in Cali. Martin Harper, CEO of Birdlife International, said meaningful action on commitments was vital.

“We cannot accept inaction as the new normal. This means more action to bolster efforts to recover threatened species, to protect and restore more land, fresh water and sea, and to transform our food, energy and industrial systems. We have five years to raise hundreds of billions of dollars. If we don’t see it materialise, I dread to think where we will be in 2030,” he said.

Inger Andersen, the UN environment head, said it was too early to say whether governments were not doing enough to meet the targets, underscoring that many were working hard. She said there had been signs of progress, but acknowledged more needed to be done.

“The world is working on it. Will we meet every single target by 2030? I hope. If we don’t, is that a catastrophe? No, but did we make a promise to each other that we are going to stretch and do the very best that we can,” she said. “We still have six years to go.”

Scientists at the nature summit in Cali said that the political pace was not matching the scale of the challenge. Nathalie Seddon, professor of biodiversity at University of Oxford, said much more was needed by the end of the decade.

“The biodiversity goals’ 2030 deadline exists for a reason: biodiverse, resilient ecosystems are the foundation of our economies and wellbeing. A bad outcome here isn’t just bad news for wildlife; it undermines food security, water quality, disaster resilience and economic stability. It worsens climate impacts of record-breaking heat, wildfires, floods and droughts,” she said.

Yadvinder Malhi, a professor of ecosystem science at the University of Oxford, said: “The very limited progress we’ve seen so far in the negotiations at Cop16 is insufficient to address the very real implications of getting this wrong. Biodiversity is continuing to decline at an alarming rate. I really hope that the crunch discussions this week yield those commitments, for the sake of a flourishing future for people and for our planet.”

A judge ordered all parties, including Elon Musk, to attend a court hearing in Philadelphia on Thursday in a lawsuit seeking to stop a political action committee controlled by the billionaire from awarding $1m to registered US voters in battleground states before the 5 November election.

The Philadelphia district attorney’s office filed the lawsuit on Monday. It called the giveaway by Musk’s America Pac, which backs Donald Trump, an “illegal lottery” that entices Pennsylvania residents to share personal data.

“It is further ordered that all parties must be present at the time of the hearing,” a judge wrote on Wednesday in an order with the county court of common pleas. The hearing in the case was moved up to Thursday morning from Friday.

A representative for America Pac did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Musk’s representatives have not responded to requests for comment.

Musk has promised to give $1m each day to someone who signs his online free-speech and gun-rights petition. Legal experts consulted by Reuters last week were divided on whether the giveaway violates federal laws that make it a crime to pay or offer to pay a person to register to vote. The justice department sent a letter to America Pac warning that the billionaire’s giveaways for registered voters who sign his petition may violate federal law, CNN reported last week.

Before an extremely tight presidential race between Trump and Kamala Harris, Pennsylvania is seen as a crucial swing state that could determine the outcome of the election. “Pennsylvania will be a decisive Republican victory,” Musk tweeted on Wednesday.

Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, said earlier this month that he thought law enforcement should look into the legality of the giveaway.

“I think there are real questions with how he is spending money in this race, how the dark money is flowing, not just into Pennsylvania, but apparently now into the pockets of Pennsylvanians,” Shapiro told NBC’s Meet the Press on 20 October. “That is deeply concerning.”

At a Musk town hall in Pittsburgh on 20 October, at which the Tesla CEO praised Trump and gave a giant $1m check to a woman in a red Trump T-shirt, audience members appeared unfazed by the criticism of the scheme, and said they admired Musk’s success as a businessman, and what they saw as his championing of free speech.

“I fear if Trump does not win, we are going to have a single-party state that is going to be like California, but actually worse,” Musk told the audience.

Musk has shared photographs of voters with $1m checks on X, the social media platform he owns. On Wednesday, the America Pac account announced that “Joshua from North Carolina earned $1M after signing our petition in support of the Constitution”.

The Trump campaign is broadly reliant on outside groups for canvassing voters, meaning the super Pac founded by Musk – the world’s richest man – plays an outsized role in what is expected to be a razor-thin election.

In the days leading up to the election, mysterious monuments continue to pop up in cities across the US, poking fun at candidate Donald Trump and his supporters.

On Wednesday in Maja Park in Philadelphia, a large statue of Trump was propped up. Titled “In Honor of a Lifetime of Sexual Assault”, the monument, showing Trump smiling and holding his hand in a suggestive manner, quotes from the infamous 2005 recording – leaked in 2016 – in which Trump is heard bragging about sexually assaulting women.

The monument was quickly removed, Philly Voice reported.

On Sunday, a similar satirical statue was found in Portland, Oregon. It was beheaded that day and further damaged by a Portland city council candidate and Trump supporter, who filmed himself chipping away at the base of the statue.

Underneath the statues in Philadelphia and Portland is a plaque with Trump’s brag about his status and how it allows him to sexually assault women: “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”

The two statues, in Philadelphia and Portland, were placed behind, and next to, nude sculptures sanctioned by the respective cities.

The Access Hollywood tape was recorded in 2005 and published by the Washington Post in 2016, a month before that year’s election. The tape’s release shook up the election, with some Republicans withdrawing their support for Trump.

Although Trump has never been criminally charged for sexual offenses, 27 women have accused him of sexual assault. Last year, a jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing writer E Jean Carroll in a civil suit.

The recent Philadelphia and Portland statues follow other satirical Trump-related statues, found throughout the country.

In Washington on Monday, a tiki torch statue titled “The Donald J Trump Enduring Flame” was placed a few blocks away from the White House. The statue evokes the white nationalist Unite the Right rally from 2017, in which neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The first satirical statue, installed last Thursday also in Washington, depicts a bronze pile of feces on Nancy Pelosi’s desk and references the January 6 attack. After Trump supporters marched on the Capitol that day, some broke into the building, attempting to overturn the 2020 election.

“This memorial honors the brave men and women who broke into the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021 to loot, urinate and defecate throughout those hallowed halls in order to overturn an election,” the statue read.

Although it is unknown who is behind the four statues, the Washington Post reported that the National Park Service approved a request by Julia Jimenez-Pyzik to install the poop monument on the National Mall. On Tuesday, an anonymous person called the Washington Post to say he and others were behind the tiki torch and poop installations. On Wednesday, the same person called back, claiming they also were responsible for the Philadelphia and Portland statues.

“We are hoping they spark conversation about what we view are certain political issues that are relevant to voters and how they make their decision voting,” the anonymous caller told the Post.

UK farms worth more than £1 million will no longer be exempt from paying inheritance tax, Rachel Reeves has announced in her autumn budget.

For combined business and agricultural assets above £1 million, there will be a 50% inheritance tax relief, at an effective rate of 20%, from April 2026.

We would like to hear from UK farmers about their views on the changes. How might you be affected? Do you have any concerns?

The former Republican governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger has announced that he is backing Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris in next week’s election.

In a long post on X, Schwarzenegger, 77, said that while he doesn’t “really do endorsements” … “hate[s] politics” and doesn’t “trust most politicians”, he felt compelled to formally endorse Harris and her pick for vice president Tim Walz.

“I will always be an American before I am a Republican,” he wrote. “That’s why, this week, I am voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. I’m sharing it with all of you because I think there are a lot of you who feel like I do. You don’t recognise our country. And you are right to be furious.”

Schwarzenegger, who quit acting between 2003 and 2011 while he served in California, continued by writing that he was disappointed in all those who have been in power in the US over the past decades who have discussed addressing the national debt and “our broken immigration system” yet not managing to do so. This continued during election campaigning, he said, as politicians prefer “having talking points” for elections rather than performing “the public service that will make Americans’ lives better.”

“It is a just game to them. But it is life for my fellow Americans. We should be pissed,” Schwarzenegger wrote. “But a candidate who won’t respect your vote unless it is for him, a candidate who will send his followers to storm the Capitol while he watches with a Diet Coke, a candidate who has shown no ability to work to pass any policy besides a tax cut that helped his donors and other rich people like me but helped no one else else, a candidate who thinks Americans who disagree with him are the bigger enemies than China, Russia, or North Korea – that won’t solve our problems.”

Schwarzenegger, who replaced Donald Trump as host of The New Celebrity Apprentice in 2016, has long been an outspoken critic of the former president and current Republican candidate. Schwarzenegger likened the 6 January attack on the Capitol to the Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany and described Trump as “a failed leader. He will go down in history as the worst president ever.”

He returned to the aftermath of the 2020 election on X, saying that “rejecting the results of an election is as un-American as it gets. To someone like me who talks to people all over the world and still knows America is the shining city on a hill, calling America [a] trash can for the world is so unpatriotic, it makes me furious.”

Were Trump to be re-elected, he said, “it will just be four more years of bullshit with no results that makes us angrier and angrier, more divided, and more hateful. We need to close the door on this chapter of American history, and I know that former President Trump won’t do that.”

“I want to move forward as a country,” he concluded, “and even though I have plenty of disagreements with their platform, I think the only way to do that is with Harris and Walz.”