Doctors groups are calling for urgent consideration of the rules for medical professionals who take peaceful direct action on the climate crisis, which they say is the “greatest threat to global health”, after a GP was suspended from the register for non-violent protest.

Dr Sarah Benn, a GP from Birmingham, was taken off the medical register for five months on Tuesday by the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS), the disciplinary arm of the General Medical Council (GMC), over her climate protests.

The tribunal said Benn’s fitness to practise as a doctor had been impaired by reason of misconduct. Benn, who is retired, has taken part in a number of peaceful protests since 2019.

Benn received conditional discharges after being convicted for taking part in peaceful protests, including two offences of obstructing a highway. In 2022 she was jailed for 32 days for breaching a civil injunction at Kingsbury oil terminal as part of a Just Stop Oil campaign.

Doctors groups were united in condemning the suspension from the medical register. The Doctors’ Association said: “Not all doctors subject to a custodial sentence having broken the law have been sanctioned by the MPTS. The MPTS can use its discretion.”

The suspension of Benn showed that the GMC would impose sanctions on doctors for raising serious concerns about the risk to public health from the greatest threat to global health the world had seen, the association said.

“Climate change, its effect on the planet, weather patterns, future health and even the survival of the human race is evidence-based,” it added.

“The profession has not been undermined by her actions, and the public is not concerned about one doctor trying to protect them and the planet but more by the inadequate response of the government and organisations, including the GMC, to our overwhelming and unprecedented climate crisis.”

The British Medical Association (BMA) said many people would find it very difficult to understand that a doctor’s ability to practise medicine could be suspended because of peaceful actions they take in protest of the climate crisis.

It called for urgent consideration of the rules, which it said meant a doctor was suspended for a punishment they had already received for taking part in a legitimately peaceful protest.

“This ruling sends a worrying message to other doctors about the regulation of matters not directly related to patient care or their clinical skills, and raises serious questions about the rules behind the handling of such cases,” the BMA said.

“The climate crisis is also a health crisis and as such doctors are understandably concerned.”

Benn’s case will be reviewed before the five-month suspension ends, when she could be struck off. In her submission to the tribunal, Benn included a statement by the UN special rapporteur on environmental defenders, Michel Forst, who earlier this year condemned the UK’s crackdown on environmental protest.

In his most recent statement Forst said the professional tribunals of medical doctors taking part in peaceful direct action suggested the situation in the UK was deteriorating. “It is important for me to stress that professional sanctions can definitely be considered as a form of penalisation, persecution or harassment,” he said.

Benn told the tribunal that as a doctor she had a “moral duty to take action”.

She said: “The climate emergency is a health emergency; not a potential future one, but here and now. If I know all this and I choose to stay quiet, I am failing in my obligations. I am breaching the guidance in good medical practice to make my patients’ health my first concern.”

But the tribunal found the “overwhelming majority of the public would not condone breaking the law in the repeated way in which Dr Benn did, especially given the impact, on the final occasion, to the wider public resources involved”.

Benn was the first of three GPs facing disciplinary action by the GMC for peaceful protest on the climate crisis.

In a letter to the GMC this week, the UK Health Alliance on Climate Change, which includes the royal colleges of medicine and medical journals, said there was widespread dismay among doctors at Benn’s suspension from the medical register for Just Stop Oil protests.

“Doctors cannot understand how a doctor can be punished for taking action to mitigate the damage to nature and climate, the major threat to global health,” the letter states.

“There is also dismay that Dr Benn is among the first doctors to appear before a tribunal after protesting and that the finding will set a precedent for other doctors who will be following. Many in the GMC must recognise that they are finding themselves on the wrong side of history.”

A GMC spokesperson said: ‘Dr Sarah Benn was referred to a hearing at the MPTS not for protesting about climate change, but for multiple breaches of a court order which resulted in a custodial sentence. Like all citizens, doctors have the right to express their personal opinions on issues, including climate change. There is nothing in our guidance to prevent them from doing so, nor from exercising their right to lobby government and to campaign, including taking part in protests.

“However, patients and the public rightly have a high degree of trust in doctors and that trust can be eroded if doctors repeatedly fail to comply with the law. Our fitness to practise investigations consider cases which are referred to us and where doctors have broken the law, not their motivations for doing so. It is not the role of regulators to determine UK law – that is a matter for parliament.”

The UK has been accused of “helping Russia pay for its war on Ukraine” by continuing to import record amounts of refined oil from countries processing Kremlin fossil fuels.

Government data analysed by the environmental news site Desmog shows that imports of refined oil from India, China and Turkey amounted to £2.2bn in 2023, the same record value as the previous year, up from £434.2m in 2021.

Russia is the largest crude oil supplier to India and China, while Turkey has become one of the biggest importers of Russian oil since the Kremlin launched its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

This comes as Russia is increasingly targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, with only a few major power plants not yet damaged or destroyed. UK politicians have been lobbying the US to approve £60bn in military aid for Ukraine, which finally passed on 20 April. The UK foreign secretary, David Cameron, has been advocating for frozen Russian assets to be deployed to Ukraine’s war effort.

In response to the 2022 invasion, allies of Ukraine pledged to divest from Russian oil and gas. The UK officially banned the import of Russian oil products from 5 December 2022. However, a loophole in the legislation has allowed Russian oil to continue to flow into the UK.

As long as Russian oil is refined in another country it is no longer considered to have originated in Russia, allowing it to evade the trade ban. As a result, Russian oil is being sold to allied countries for processing before being exported to the UK.

The campaign group Global Witness has called this a “laundering” process that is undermining Ukraine’s resistance to Russia.

The value of refined oil exported from India to the UK has risen dramatically since Russia’s 2022 invasion. In 2021, the UK imported £402.2m worth of refined oil from the country, which rose to £1.82bn in 2022 and stood at £1.5bn in 2023.

Imports of refined oil from China have increased more than 20-fold since 2021 – up from £30.2m in that year to £395.1m in 2022 and £663.9m in 2023. The value of refined oil imports from Turkey, meanwhile, has increased from just £1.8m in 2021 to £60.3m in 2023.

Lela Stanley, a senior investigator at Global Witness, said: “Millions of barrels of fuel made from Russian oil continue to pour into the UK. Last year alone, this trade was worth over £100m to the Kremlin. Make no mistake: until the government closes this loophole, Britain is helping Russia pay for its war on Ukraine.

“The good news? We can fix this. The UK should act now to ban the import of fuels made from Russian oil and show its support for Ukraine is sincere.”

Global Witness has estimated that throughout 2023, about 5.2m barrels of refined petroleum products produced from Russian crude oil were imported to the UK, with jet fuel accounting for most of the imports (4.6m barrels). It has been estimated that Russian-linked fuel has been used in one in 20 UK flights.

UK government records show that direct oil imports from Russia fell from £1.5bn in the first quarter of 2022 to zero the year after.

This led to a surge in fossil fuel imports from authoritarian petrostates. The UK spent £19.3bn on oil and gas imports from Algeria, Bahrain, Kuwait, Libya, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in the year to March 2023 – a 60% increase on the previous year.

In addition to procuring fossil fuels from petrostates, the UK and the EU have been buying refined Russian oil through the likes of India, China and Turkey.

Global Witness found that the EU imported 130m barrels from refineries processing Russian crude oil in 2023. The campaign group estimated that these purchases would probably have contributed €1.1bn (£940m) to the Kremlin in tax revenues.

Russia is now China’s largest crude oil supplier, with the volume of trade having increased by 24% in 2023 compared with the year before.

Oil and gas purchases by China and India have helped to stabilise the Russian economy, which shrank by just 2.1% in 2022 – considerably less than the 12% that had been forecast.

India has been unashamed about its purchasing of Russian oil. In November, the country’s foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, said India should be thanked for “softening the oil markets” by buying and selling Russian oil. “We have, as a consequence, actually managed global inflation. So people should be saying thank you,” he said.

Russia is India’s top oil supplier, contributing 40% of its oil imports. The country imported 1.76m barrels a day of Russian oil on average from April to September 2023, more than double the previous year.

Turkey has also been accused of “disguising” Russian oil and exporting it to Europe. US senators have even warned that oil supplied by Turkey’s Dörtyol plant may have ended up in American warships. Turkey is now the third largest recipient of Russian crude oil after Russia and China.

A Department for Energy Security and Net Zero spokesperson said: “After Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine and weaponisation of energy, we took immediate steps to end all imports of Russian fossil fuels, including a ban of oil and oil products that came into force in December 2022. In addition to providing proof that goods are not of Russian origin, importers must now include the country of last despatch to ensure oil from Russia is not being diverted through other countries. Since the ban came into effect there has been no import of Russian oil and oil products into the UK.”.

Every year from February through to June, the early morning chorus of birdsong is one of the most evocative manifestations of spring. During late winter I open the bedroom window before going to sleep, to hear that incredible mix of flutes, whistles and chirps that begin before first light, when I wake. I listen for the layers of song that simultaneously come from close by and far away.

This year though, the dawn chorus that once was the soundtrack for spring in central Cambridge has collapsed. It was noticeably quieter in 2023, and this year strikingly so. Blackbirds are depleted and song thrushes no longer heard at all. The dunnocks – once one of the most common garden songsters – have disappeared, as have the chaffinches, whose early February song was among the first audible confirmations of lengthening days. The cheery chatter of house sparrows is absent and the once familiar sound of coal tits has fallen silent. Long-tailed tits are now rare, and so far this year I’ve heard no blackcaps. Great and blue tits, robins and goldfinches, are still present, but down in number.

Ours is a normal suburban street, with Edwardian houses and a few interwar semis. We are lucky enough to have gardens with some mature trees, shrubs, patches of grass and plenty of places to nest, and all that looks pretty much the same as it has for years. Now, though, it is a neighbourhood that has fallen eerily quiet. The question of why is something I’ve pondered quite a bit during this unusually silent spring.

There are cats and magpies, but they’ve always been about. The odd sparrowhawk makes an appearance, but no more than usual. Disease, including avian influenza, has been a problem for various species nationally – but there is little evidence that it has so far been especially damaging to songbird populations. Nesting sites seem to be about the same and I can’t imagine why there might have been a sudden increase in pesticide use.

There is one factor though, which I think alongside many others, might have recently made a difference: the climate crisis. The brutal drought and heatwave that hit England in 2022 turned soils to concrete. Trees shed their leaves in summer while wetlands and ponds evaporated to rock hard pans of dried mud. That weather hit invertebrate populations hard. On top of the heat, disruption to seasonal patterns have in turn affected the timing of insect food being available for chicks. There seem to be very few insects around compared with previous springs.

Everywhere is different, with extreme weather and its consequences for wildlife varying from place to place, making it hard to pin down the blend of factors affecting populations. Friends and colleagues across the country report a mixed picture, with some hearing a dawn chorus like previous years. But in our eastern urban locality the change is dramatic.

So what might be done? Keeping trees and shrubs and adding more of the right kind would be useful, creating shade, food sources and nesting sites. More wildlife ponds to provide food and water. Lawns with uncut margins and more wild corners providing food and nest sites. Saying farewell to garden pesticides. Cats with bells on and ensuring feeders are cleaned to prevent infection will all help hard-pressed birds cope with bigger change.

When the climate crisis has been discussed, much of the emphasis has been on faraway places – Bangladesh, the Maldives, the Arctic – but now it is also local, personal and quite unsettling.

One way to cope would be to keep the window shut. A better one is to help the birds recover, by taking action in our gardens and parks, and redoubling efforts in boardrooms and among governments to drive forward with net zero ambitions. The frontline is both global and local if we want to enable wildlife to survive extremes.

Tony Juniper CBE is an environmentalist and Chair of Natural England

The plants slowly choke to death, wither and dry out. They die en masse, leaves dropping and bark turning grey, creating a sea of monochrome. Since scientists first discovered Xylella fastidiosa in 2013 in Puglia, Italy, it has killed a third of the region’s 60 million olive trees – which once produced almost half of Italy’s olive oil – many of which were centuries old. Farms stopped producing, olive mills went bankrupt and tourists avoided the area. With no known cure, the bacterium has already caused damage costing about €1bn.

“The greatest part of the territory was completely destroyed,” says Donato Boscia, a plant virologist and head researcher on Xylella at the Institute for Sustainable Plant Protection in Bari.

A decade later, far from nearing resolution, the threat to European plants from Xylella and other diseases is only growing: in February 2024, Puglia scientists found another Xylella subspecies, which had annihilated US vineyards and never previously been detected in Italy. For many farmers, scientists and regulators, the disease is emblematic of a far broader problem: the EU’s difficulty curtailing the introduction of devastating new plant diseases, despite regulatory efforts over the past decade. New data, released to the Guardian, shows that dozens of newly introduced disease outbreaks are detected in the EU every year, even as farmers and scientists struggle to contain previously introduced pathogens. As the climate heats, scientists warn the problem will get worse.

Across the EU, data shows, outbreaks of newly introduced plant disease have continued unabated at an average rate of 70 a year between 2015 and 2020, despite regulations introduced to stop their spread in 2016. While a number of member states have taken steps to prevent and curb the outbreaks, scientists, plant epidemiologists and agronomists say it is still insufficient.

“I can’t understand how, after Xylella, we learned almost nothing,” says Pierfederico La Notte, an Italian plant epidemiologist.

Import system – open or closed?

On a scorching June morning in 2023, Paolo Solmi, a phytosanitary inspector at the port of Ravenna in northern Italy, tells his team to open the first of 28 containers of Egyptian potatoes to check that day. They fill bags with 100 potatoes each before taking them to the labs for EU standardised tests.

“Once these checks have been passed, the goods are free to move within the European Union,” Solmi says.

The EU has an open import system: everything that is not known to be harmful can enter. Some countries, such as New Zealand and Chile, have opted for a closed system: everything is considered guilty until proven innocent.

Evidence shows that the Xylella bacteria came from Latin America and, most likely, got a ride from ornamental coffee plants passing through the Netherlands. About 30 billion rooted and unrooted plants, cuttings, bulbs and tissues came from third countries into Europe between 2005 and 2014, mainly through Dutch ports.

According to Alberto Santini, a forest pathologist at the Italian National Research Council, such an open system has been letting in an alarming number of plant pests and diseases from third countries.

“If you know your enemy, you can try to stop it from entering your country,” Santini says. But, he added, many pathogens are harmless elsewhere because ecosystems evolved with them. While Xyllela might not have affected coffee plants in Costa Rica, it thrived when it met the defenceless southern Italian olive trees.

The EU introduced new regulations in 2016 to better manage what gets in and how, and to deal with outbreaks quickly. Still, with so many ports of entry, scientists and regulators can’t keep up with the volumes coming in. Trioza erytreae, a sap-sucking pest, has been endangering Portuguese citrus; a bacterium infecting carrots and celery has been raising concerns around the continent; and Hymenoscyphus fraxineus has been killing ash trees in Poland. Many scientists fear the spread will be helped by the climate crisis, which is making Europe a warmer, more hospitable place for foreign plant pests to thrive.

“With the current system in Europe, we continuously introduce new organisms,” La Notte says. “In the context of climate change, it will be more and more difficult to manage them.”

Data provided to the Guardian by Wopke van der Werf and Hongyu Sun, researchers at Wageningen University and Research in the Netherlands, shows that there were 1,720 recorded outbreaks of alien plant disease between 1975 and 2020 in the EU, with Italy, France and Spain accounting for half of them. 2018 was the worst year, with 115 known cases.

The data is drawn from the European and Mediterranean Plant Protection Organization (EPPO) database, which records where alien plant diseases – outbreaks caused by alien insects, pathogens and nematodes – are found for the first time or in a new region inside the union. That data is likely an underestimate: EPPO collects new findings by scanning the scientific literature and acquiring official pest reports from its member countries’ national plant protection organisations, so its reports are limited to each country’s responsiveness and interest in investigating an uncommon pest sighting.

According to La Notte, a few crops – such as grape vines – are heavily regulated. But many others, especially ornamental plants, are treated more leniently, making them potential carriers of alien plant pests. Wooden pallets, internet plant sales, and travellers carrying prohibited plants or fruits are all responsible for bringing in diseases, according to several researchers interviewed for this story.

A long trading history

For some countries, such as the Netherlands, open trade in plants is a core part of their history and economy – and they have been resistant to increased regulation. Christian Linden, the founder and CEO of IBH Export, walks around his 14,000-sq metre storage area in the Aalsmeer Flower Auction house in the Netherlands. He imports cut flowers and pot plants, mostly from Turkey and east Africa, and redistributes them around Europe.

Linden says he doesn’t know much about pathogens or bugs entering through the plant trade, but isn’t concerned because the phytosanitary authorities “are very strict”. He thinks the 2016 plant health regulation created higher protection for the EU, and points out the introduction of plant passports, which did not exist when Xylella arrived in Italy. Today, he adds, if one customer finds a disease or a bug on an imported plant, the whole shipment is tracked down and destroyed.

“When it’s necessary to protect the environment, you have to do it,” he says.

John Van Ruiten, the former director of Naktuinbouw, the Netherlands inspection service for horticulture, says their controls on imported material are strict. However, he admits it’s hard to detect everything – insects, symptoms of bacteria or viruses – especially during a visual inspection: “It is impossible that inspectors have the knowledge of all diseases in all commodities.”

Only a sample of about 2% of imported plants are inspected for the presence of symptoms, according to international protocols, says the Netherlands Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority (NVWA). Given the number of plants that come through the main EU ports, it is “possible that new species will be introduced”.

The NVWA says it believes the Netherlands has a robust control system. For example, once certain live plants pass the border and end up in a nursery, the phytosanitary inspector rechecks them after two weeks to see if they carry any latent disease.

According to Van Ruiten, the burden of preventing disease shouldn’t fall entirely on the shoulders of the importers. He says exporting countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America should also conduct proper checks.

Balancing costs and benefits

In the port at Ravenna, phytosanitary inspector Solmi recognises the challenge. “Europe was born around the movement of goods, capital and people,” he says. “Our mission is to do our best within the open phytosanitary system because an alternative currently does not exist.”

But while the economic cost of what the EU could lose in terms of trading is substantial, so is the price of the damages caused by alien pests and diseases. How do you put a price on a lost forest of ash trees?

“The main issue on the economics is that data is kind of scarce,” says Françoise Petter, former assistant director at EPPO. The costs and benefits of a closed system have not been calculated, and it is unknown whether losses incurred by a slower trading system would be offset by the preserved value of EU agriculture and biodiversity.

“We’ve never tried to do a full comparison with a closed system,” Petter says. “That’s a little bit depressing, isn’t it?”

This article was developed with the support of Journalismfund Europe

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

The Coalition leader, Peter Dutton, has been trying to paint a picture of what life in Australia will be like if it tries to power itself mostly with renewable energy and without his technology of choice: nuclear.

Towering turbines offshore will hurt whales, dolphins and the fishing industry, factories will be forced to stop working because there’s not enough electricity and the landscape will be scoured by enough new transmission cables to stretch around the entire Australian coastline.

At the same time – so his story goes – only his option to go nuclear will save Australia from falling behind the rest of the world.

But Dutton’s dystopian image, with more brushstrokes added in an interview on the ABC’s flagship Insiders program, is a picture of inconsistencies, partial truths and misinformation.

Let’s have a look between the brushstrokes.

Is it a credible plan?

The Coalition has said it wants to put nuclear reactors at the sites of coal-fired power plants, but hasn’t said where, how big the reactors will be, when it wants them built or given an estimate on cost.

The Coalition has previously said it would give more details on its plan in time for its response to the Albanese government’s budget next month, but Dutton is now saying it will come “in due course”.

Despite this, Dutton claimed in his interview with the ABC’s David Speers that: “I believe that we’re the only party with a credible pathway to net zero by 2050.”

OK then.

28,000 kilometres?

Dutton claimed the government’s plans relied on “28,000km of poles and wires being erected” to connect renewables to the grid – a distance he said was “equal to the whole coastline of Australia”.

That’s a catchy soundbite, but where does this number come from?

According to the Australian Energy Market Operator’s most recent plan for the development of Australia’s east-coast electricity market, the most likely scenarios to decarbonise the electricity grid would require about 10,000km of additional transmission lines to be built between now and 2050.

What about the extra 18,000km? That figure comes in an estimate of what would be needed if Australia chose to become a major exporter of clean hydrogen as well as decarbonising the grid.

So about two-thirds of Dutton’s 28,000km is not so much related to decarbonising the electricity grid, but rather to an export industry that may or may not happen, to an as-yet-unknown extent.

Turning off power?

Dutton claimed: “At the moment, we’re telling businesses who have huge order books to turn down their activity in an afternoon shift because the lights go out on that grid. Now, no other developed country is saying that.”

Dutton is suggesting that businesses are being routinely forced to reduce their demand for power. This is simply not true.

Dr Dylan McConnell, an energy systems analyst at UNSW, says it’s very rare for businesses to be told by the market operator they are going to have their power interrupted.

Such “load shedding” has happened only five times in the last 15 years, he said, typically occurs in extreme conditions such as storms or coal plants going offline, and only a subset of consumers are affected.

There are two main formal voluntary schemes in place across the National Electricity Market (everywhere except NT and WA) where major electricity consumers can offer to reduce their demand for electricity at certain times, but businesses are compensated for being part of those schemes. Nobody is telling any of these businesses that they have to do anything.

Neither is it true that no other country is engaging in some sort of process where demand for electricity can be managed.

Is Australia really the only developed country engaged in what’s known as demand response? No.

The International Energy Agency lists the UK, US, France, Japan and South Korea as having large markets already in place to help their electricity systems balance the supply of electricity with demand.

McConnell said: “Demand response is becoming a common and important part of modern electricity systems. This includes countries like France and the US, which have both nuclear and demand response programs.”

G20 and nuclear

Dutton said Australia was the only G20 nation “not signed up to nuclear or currently using it”.

According to information from the World Nuclear Association, Australia is one of five G20 nations with no operating nuclear power plants, alongside Indonesia, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Germany and Turkey.

But aside from Italy, Germany and Australia, the rest do have some plans to develop nuclear power in the future. Dutton’s phrase “currently using it” allows him to capture countries like Italy that import electricity from nuclear nations.

But what’s also important to note is that among the G20 countries (actually 19 countries) nuclear is mostly playing a marginal role. Nuclear provides more than 5% of its electricity in only seven of those 19 countries.

Social licence?

Projects would need a “social licence” to go ahead, Dutton said, but there was opposition in western New South Wales where “productive” land was being sold for renewables projects.

This is a variation of a previous Dutton speech, where he lamented a supposed “carpeting of Australia’s prime agricultural land with solar and windfarms”.

The renewable energy industry’s Clean Energy Council has countered claims like this, saying even if all the country’s coal plants were replaced with solar farms, the amount of space needed would be about 0.027% of agricultural land.

The Coalition leader has been to the Hunter coast more than once where offshore windfarms are being planned, telling reporters they were a “travesty” and that they would put whales, dolphins and the fishing and tourism industries “at risk”. He told Speers the turbines would rise “260 metres out of the water”.

Dutton told the ABC that Australia should be mindful of the environmental consequences of windfarms – which is, of course, true – but his past statements have sounded more like cheerleading for voices opposed to the plans than an attempt to understand the scale and legitimacy of the concerns, some of which are being stoked by misinformation.

Dutton can’t know what impact offshore windfarms will have on fishing or tourism, but is willing in any case to use labels like “travesty”.

The UK government’s decision to weaken some of its climate commitments was a “retrograde step” that would set back vital cross-party action to cut carbon emissions, Claire O’Neill, a former Conservative climate minister, has said.

O’Neill, who was known as Claire Perry when she served as a minister under David Cameron and Theresa May, said the rolling back of emission reduction efforts by Rishi Sunak appeared to be a ploy for political advantage.

Speaking during a business visit to Sydney, she said the changes “are being made for political reasons to try and create political division and dividing lines”. She added: “If I did anything right in my time, it was to build cross-party consensus.”

She said she had considered it vital to maintain such consensus. “This had to outlast political cycles. And that’s what I find [the U-turn] a bit of a retrograde step.”

Last September Sunak delayed the ban on sales of petrol and diesel vehicles in the UK from 2030 to 2035, a move criticised this week by the outgoing chief executive of the Climate Change Committee, Chris Stark. Stark told the BBC the rest of the world now viewed the UK as “less ambitious on climate”.

Some senior Tories, led by Boris Johnson, criticised the move last year, with the former prime minister telling his successor that he “cannot afford to falter now” because heaping uncertainty on businesses could drive up prices for British families.

O’Neill said she was now “politically unaligned” after resigning her Conservative party membership a few years ago. It was vital to maintain “grown-up collaboration” to ensure the economy maintained a path to net zero emissions while grabbing the economic opportunities that arose as the world decarbonised, she added.

“Does anybody really think the price of carbon is going down? Do we think that the atmosphere is going to become more stable?” O’Neill said. “At some point, you have to take some risks and stick your neck out a bit and be courageous.”

O’Neill also commented on the delay in filling the vacancy of chair of the Climate Change Committee, left open since Lord Deben stepped down last year.

“I would hate to think it’s being done because it’s being offered up as a job to somebody retiring from politics,” she said. “But I can’t help but think, given the quality of the candidates they’ve got, that this is taking way too long.”

O’Neill holds several business titles including being a non-executive director of the Singapore stock exchange. On Tuesday, she took part in another of her roles as a global advisory board member to a hydrogen startup, Hysata.

Based in Wollongong to Sydney’s south, Hysata claims to be able to produce hydrogen with electrolysers that boost a world-leading energy efficiency.

Using earth-abundant materials, the company said its devices could split water into hydrogen and water with a 95% system efficiency (usually 41.5 kWh/kg), compared with about 75% for incumbents (or 52.5 kWh/kg).

“There’s going to be massive opportunities for hydrogen goods and services,” O’Neill said.

The Danish wind turbine company Vestas is among Hysata’s shareholders.

As UN talks begin to agree the first global treaty to reduce soaring plastic waste, the chair of the meetings has said he is confident countries will come together to secure an agreement.

Luis Vayas Valdivieso, the Ecuadorian ambassador to the UK, admitted it would be a challenge to overcome an impasse that has emerged between countries which produce plastic and others that have ambitions to tackle plastic pollution over its whole life. But Valdivieso, who will chair the UN intergovernmental negotiations on a future international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution in Ottawa, Canada, this week, said: “We have to face those challenges and work with them. Compromise is an important word that we need to take into account.

“This is a negotiation, there are regions and countries with a specific position that we understand. We know plastic pollution is affecting the environment, we know it’s affecting human health because of the substances in plastics.

“It is very important we are negotiating this treaty now. The world is in a triple crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution. But while there are agreements in place for the first two, we have no legislation, no global agreement on plastic pollution.”

Plastic pollution is a critical global concern, with about 400m tonnes produced every year, much of which ends up in our oceans or in landfill. Beyond the crisis of pollution, there is also a growing body of science exploring the rapid way that microplastics are affecting human health; a recent US study looked at 62 human placentas and found microplastics in every single one.

In a historic agreement in March 2022 countries adopted a mandate opening negotiations for a global, legally binding treaty to address the whole life cycle of plastics.

Previous negotiations in Nairobi stalled last November when oil-producing nations proposed to focus on waste management rather than scaling down production of plastic. Most – 98% – of single-use plastics are made from fossil fuels, and the top seven plastic-producing companies are fossil fuel companies, according to data from 2021.

Graham Forbes, the global plastic projects leader at Greenpeace USA, said: “You cannot solve the pollution crisis unless you constrain, reduce and restrict plastic production.”’

Valdivieso, however, said he had not stopped working since the Nairobi talks in his attempt to forge a pathway to the first legally binding agreement on plastic waste. “It is crucial now to bring the treaty back on track, because it has been delayed now,” he told the Guardian.

“We are going to face some challenges and we will face more, because we are talking about plastics that are a big part of the world’s economy. So there are challenges when you need to regulate pollution from those products.

“Our mandate is the whole life cycle of plastic. The challenge is to define that.

“But what is clear is we cannot manage the amount of plastic we are producing. Only 10% of it gets recycled, something needs to be done and that is why these negotiations are so important. We need to have the whole life cycle approach.”

Valdivieso said he was confident the talks would lead to the signing next year of the first legally binding treaty on plastic pollution, in a Paris-style agreement. The talks this week in Ottawa will be followed by talks in Korea at the end of the year and he said the text would be ready for all countries to sign for the treaty declaration next year.

Ecuador is one of four countries bidding to host the diplomatic conference – where the treaty would be signed, and wants to hold the event in the Galápagos Islands, where the waters are designated a Unesco heritage site but are suffering from plastic pollution.

Part of the discussions this week in Ottawa will be to decide where the treaty will be signed.

Valdivieso said: “Everyone is suffering from the impact of plastic pollution. Not only developing nations, and island nations, but everyone. If we don’t do something we will leave this problem to future generations.

“I became a grandfather recently and we need this tool, this incredible tool to end plastic pollution. I am confident that we will do it.”

A doctor who went to jail after a series of climate protests has been taken off the medical register for five months – and still faces being permanently struck off.

The Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service (MPTS) – the disciplinary arm of the General Medical Council (GMC) – suspended Dr Sarah Benn on Tuesday, having found last week that her fitness to practise as a doctor had been impaired by reason of misconduct.

Benn was the first of three GPs who could face being struck off for climate activism at disciplinary tribunals this year. She was referred to the MPTS after being found guilty of contempt of court for breaching a civil injunction at Kingsbury oil terminal as part of a Just Stop Oil campaign. This action led to her spending 32 days in prison.

In its decision, the tribunal noted that Benn’s actions did not give rise to concerns about patient safety, and there was evidence that she was an experienced doctor.

But it said there had been “no acknowledgement from Dr Benn that what she has done by breaking the law was wrong and no evidence that she has taken steps to remediate her actions”. And it found there was a “strong likelihood of repetition”, after Benn explicitly said she would continue with her actions.

Her case will be reviewed shortly before the suspension lapses. “They’ve given me essentially five months to offer apologies and regret and an undertaking to not do it again,” Benn told the Guardian. “But I’ve made my position very clear and really nothing is going to be any different in five months’ time.”

“They’ve just kicked the can down the road,” she said.

In its presentation to the tribunal last week, the GMC argued that Benn’s actions risked undermining the public’s trust in and respect for the medical profession. The lawyer Faye Rolfe, representing the organisation, said doctors submitted themselves to the rule of law and should uphold an even higher standard than ordinary citizens.

Benn contested this, telling the tribunal there was no evidence that she had caused patients to lose trust in her as a doctor or the wider public to lose trust in the profession. “It’s complex but we could credit the public with some common sense and integrity, and a desire to find the truth,” she said.

As part of her evidence, Benn submitted a statement by the UN special rapporteur on environmental defenders, Michel Forst, who earlier this year condemned the UK’s crackdown on environmental protest.

Forst said in his statement that developments over the past few months, including the professional tribunals of medical doctors, suggested the situation was deteriorating. “It is important for me to stress that professional sanctions can definitely be considered as a form of penalisation, persecution or harassment,” he said.

Benn, who is now retired, told the tribunal that as a doctor she had a “moral duty to take action”.

“The climate emergency is a health emergency; not a potential future one, but here and now. If I know all this and I choose to stay quiet, I am failing in my obligations. I am breaching the guidance in good medical practice to make my patients’ health my first concern.”

The tribunal acknowledged Benn’s sincere beliefs and said it respected her right to express them. It also said there was a broad spectrum of views among the general public about climate change, and the pace of action needed, and that there would likely be “considerable sympathy” for her concerns.

But it concluded that the “overwhelming majority of the public would not condone breaking the law in the repeated way in which Dr Benn did, especially given the impact, on the final occasion, to the wider public resources involved”.

Benn has received support from medical practitioners and doctors’ organisations. Dr Emma Runswick, the deputy chair of the British Medical Association council, said there was “no possible public or patient interest” in these kinds of proceedings, while the Doctors’ Association UK said it strongly believed that peaceful protest should not be viewed as condemnable professional misconduct “but as commendable public health advocacy”.

During the tribunal, Benn noted that the GMC had recently apologised to gay doctors struck off the medical register because of their sexuality. “In years to come, when events unfold and tipping points tip, and systems unravel, my prediction is that the reputation of those who tried their best to protect patients, the public, and future generations will be enhanced, not reduced,” she said.

As our small fishing boat slows to a halt in a shallow bay south-east of Puerto Ayora, Santa Cruz, in the Galápagos Islands, a green turtle surfaces next to us, followed by a second, then a third a few metres away. A spotted eagle ray glides underneath the vessel.

The skipper, Don Nelson, steps on to the black volcanic reef, slippery with algae. We follow, past exposed mangrove roots and up on to higher ground. Pelicans swooping into the trees and small birds, perching on branches, ignore our approach.

This remote archipelago still hosts the unique species such as giant tortoises and finches that inspired the naturalist Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution almost two centuries ago, and it is impossible not to be struck by the apparent harmony with which animals coexist with humans here.

But then, up ahead, a jarring sight: a marine iguana, a notable Galápagos species found nowhere else in the world, sits atop a mound of plastic litter – fishing buoys, oil drums, household containers and drinks bottles – pushed on to the reef by high spring tides. The prehistoric-looking reptile, classed as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), is among the species here most at risk from plastic.

“These reefs are resting places for pelicans and marine iguanas,” says Mariana Vera, Galápagos programme manager of Conservation International. “There are a lot of turtles because it is the nesting season. It is overwhelming and sad to see them full of plastic.”

Research has found that most of the plastic washed up here comes from Peru, Ecuador and China. Plastic originating in Asia is unlikely to have reached the Galápagos by ocean currents, according to a 2019 study, which suggests that items with Asian labels are likely to have come from nearby fishing boats.

Globally, about 20% of plastic pollution in the ocean comes from maritime sources, but in the Galápagos, although estimates vary greatly, that figure could be as high as 40%, according to research due to be published by the Galápagos marine reserve and the Galápagos Conservation Trust.

It has been four years since news of a massive fishing fleet of hundreds of mostly Chinese vessels surrounding the edge of this reserve shocked the world. It led to a vow, from the then president of Ecuador, Lenín Moreno, to protect what he described as “a seedbed of life for the entire planet”, and various diplomatic agreements between the countries.

Since then, the Chinese fishing fleet has reportedly kept a greater distance from Ecuador’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ), an area extending 200 nautical miles beyond its coast, throughout which it has jurisdiction over marine resources.

But the illegal dumping of plastic waste from its fishing vessels in the high seas – outside the EEZ – along with the other plastic from mainland Latin America, continues. “The problem is constant,” says Rodrigo Robalino, the Galápagos national park’s environmental manager, who accompanies us.

The islands are the second most important nesting and feeding area for marine turtles, listed as endangered by the IUCN, after Mexico.

“We find pollution like this on all the islands but there are hotspots where the tides and currents gather,” says Robalino. The windward shores have a heavier burden of plastic.

We walk past huge columns of cactus to a further tideline of sun-bleached mangrove roots, strewn with mainly clear plastic drinks bottles.

The pollution is recent, Robalino says, because it is clear, with no barnacles attached. We count 21 bottles in all, among strands of fishing line. Six, including a soap dispenser, have Asian labels; three are Peruvian, with brands including Inca Kola, a joint Peruvian and Coca-Cola brand, and Sporade, made by AJE and sold all over Latin America. Those with labels include international brands including Dasani, made by Coca-Cola, and PepsiCo’s Gatorade.

“These plastic bottles are coming from other countries in the region,” says Robalino. “But also from international fishing fleets, including the Chinese fleet that surrounds the marine reserve.”Twice a week, the reserve organises clean-ups of the four inhabited islands: Isabela, Floreana, San Cristóbal and Santa Cruz. Plastic is shipped to Guayaquil, 600 miles away in Ecuador, to be recycled or landfilled.

Last year, they collected 13m tonnes. For the more remote islands (there are 13 major islands and many more smaller ones), only occasional clean-ups are possible. They are more difficult to access and it can cost up to $2,000 (£1,600) and take up to 15 days to get there, clean up the beaches and return. From May to November, weather conditions make it impossible to reach many islands. For Robalino, Vera and the fishers and community volunteers who take part, the clean ups are a sisyphean task. But they have no choice.

“If we don’t do it, the plastic breaks down into fibres that birds often use for nests, and then into microplastics, which can be carried by the wind or go into the ocean,” says Robalino. Contaminated with chemicals, microplastics can be toxic and cause genetic damage to marine life and humans when ingested.

The waters around the Galápagos islands, which were designated a Unesco heritage site in 1978, are among the richest on Earth for biodiversity, partly due to their location amid three major ocean currents. The largest, the Humboldt current, sweeps cold, nutrient-rich water from Antarctica along the coasts of Chile and Peru, before turning west to the islands.

Thanks to the protection offered by the marine reserve, biodiversity on the islands, 97% of which are uninhabited, remains relatively undisturbed. But the currents, with their rich nutrients, have led to two of the largest threats: overfishing and plastic pollution.

“Currents are a source of life in the Galápagos,” says Nicolás Moity, a marine ecologist at the Charles Darwin Foundation on Santa Cruz. “They brought the species here at the beginning. The early giant tortoises came from the mainland as small tortoises and evolved here.

“You have warm and cold currents intermingling, creating an amazing plethora of life. You have penguins and corals in the same place.

“But now, in this globalised world, the currents are bringing plastics to the Galápagos,” he says.

Moity, who is working with the reserve and environmental organisations to identify how the plastic accumulation sites affect biodiversity so they can better target clean-ups, says that after some plastic-picking trips, “you come back three days later and you see the same”.

Three years ago, Moity examined sea urchins and found that 75% of them had ingested microplastics. “Microplastics get ingested by everything from zooplankton to bigger animals – and we don’t know the effect,” he says.

Many of the animals most at risk from plastic entanglement or ingestion are also under threat from other human activities, including degraded habitats and climate breakdown: the critically endangered Santa Cruz giant tortoises, endangered green turtles, vulnerable marine iguanas, endangered Galápagos sea lions and whale sharks, according to a paper in 2023. Earlier this year, another study showed giant tortoises were eating plastic, mistaking it for food, with
up to 86% of the debris found in tortoise faeces being plastic.

Ecuador has bid to host the signing of the UN plastics treaty, the first legally binding global treaty to halt plastic waste, in the Galápagos. The latest talks towards the treaty are under way this week in the Canadian capital, Ottawa, until 29 April. The aim is to complete negotiations by the end of 2024 and for the treaty to be signed in 2025.

Dr Jen Jones, chief executive of the UK-based Galápagos Conservation Trust, is working with the marine reserve to finalise a five-year study on plastic pollution. She expects to present some of the findings at this week’s talks.

“We have looked at multi-year datasets from clean-ups, looking at all plastics, bottles fishing gear, such as ropes and other items,” says Jones. She found a higher percentage of the plastic – “at least 40%” – came from maritime sources than previous research on plastic bottles suggested, which put the figure at about 13%.

The trust is also hosting a mini-summit for small islands in the Pacific, which suffer a similarly unfair burden of plastic pollution as the Galápagos, to highlight the islanders’ role in protecting the world’s biodiversity and to urge more powerful nations to address the unfair burden of plastic pollution.

“This is a social justice issue,” says Jones.

Senegal, Peru and Rwanda have also put forward bids to the UN at the treaty negotiations to have the resultant agreement signed in their countries.

The incoming chair of the talks in Canada, Luis Vayas Valdivieso, who is also the Ecuadorian ambassador to the UK, has an impartial role in the negotiations. But Valdivieso, who has recently returned from Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, a Chilean territory in Polynesia, where he witnessed plastic pollution, says he understands the unfair burden islanders and small-island nations face.

“I see the concern from the islands and the people from the islands,” he says. “They are making huge efforts. In the Galápagos and other islands they have special legislation – they don’t use single-use plastics, but still they are seeing pollution.

“You can have the best national legislation in the world, to ban plastics. But if you don’t have a global agreement, it won’t work.”

Two days before Trudi Warner faced court under threat of a contempt of court prosecution, she fell off her bike and ruptured the tendons in her hand.

Now the hand is black and blue, tightly bandaged, and requires surgery. It is an indication that 69-year-old Warner, who spent her working life as a child social worker and has committed her retirement to climate action, is not as tough and unflappable as her demeanour suggests.

“I cycled back from a friend’s house and all this was going through my head,” she said. “My mind wasn’t really focused on what I was doing. I was very tired, all of this was weighing on me, and I came off the bike.”

For a year government lawyers pursued Warner, determined to prosecute her for contempt of court – which carries a maximum two-year jail sentence – for a lone, silent protest in March last year in which she held up a placard highlighting the independence of juries.

It was a protest outside a London court that was born out of the increasing restrictions being placed on defendants in climate trials, which in effect removed their ability to explain their motivations for their peaceful but disruptive actions to a jury.

In a series of trials, individuals have been banned from mentioning to the jury the words “climate change”, the history of the civil rights movement or the issue of fuel poverty.

Those individuals who ignored the restrictions imposed by Judge Silas Reid at inner London crown court were sent to jail for contempt of court as a result.

“The state had been losing these climate cases until this point, and I think these restrictions were a pushback,” said Warner. “They left individuals with no defence in court.

“I just felt that this was an abuse of power, a miscarriage of justice. I thought, why are we having jury trials where defendants are supposed to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and not letting defendants speak to the jury about their actions? It made no sense. It felt like a scam. I wanted to challenge that.”

Her challenge last March was solitary, and mute. Its aim was to highlight a principle in UK law that juries can acquit defendants on their conscience, even in the face of facts that suggest their guilt and a judge’s direction.

Known as jury equity, its most famous enactment was in 1670 at the central criminal court in the Bushel case, when a jury refused a judge’s orders to convict two Quakers of unlawful assembly despite being jailed and denied food and water by the judge. It was a case that cemented the independence of juries and is celebrated with a marble plaque in the corridors of the Old Bailey.

In a hat tip to the Bushel case, Warner made a handwritten sign which read: “Jurors, you have an absolute right to acquit a defendant according to your conscience,” and stood outside the side entrance to inner London crown court on the opening day of a trial of Insulate Britain campaigners.

“I was like a human billboard. I said nothing, I didn’t engage with anyone, even if they came up and asked me questions,” she said.

But the protest had been noted by court officials who reported her to Reid. The following day Warner was handcuffed, locked up in the court’s custody unit, and later taken into the dock to face the judge.

Rather than make the decision himself, Reid referred her case to the government’s highest law officer, the attorney general, for a decision on whether to charge her with contempt of court.

Over the weeks and months that followed, Warner says, she felt like David facing Goliath in a battle that pitched a team of government law officers, paid for by taxpayers, against a lone woman in her late 60s.

“I got letters saying: ‘His Majesty’s solicitor general versus Trudi Ann Warner,’” she told the Guardian. “They sent a 133-page indictment on me. A hundred and thirty-three pages … all those government lawyers working on this for months – I mean just how much public money have the government spent?”

As the weeks of waiting went on, in May last year Warner fulfilled a promise to help a sheep farmer in Scotland with lambing. Living on the Isle of Eigg in a farmhouse with no wifi, she was contacted by a friend who suggested she find an internet connection and check her phone the following day.

“I went to the village hall and used their wifi the next day. When I checked my phone I saw an image of about 20 people outside inner London crown court. They were all holding placards saying: ‘If you prosecute Trudi, prosecute us too.’ When I saw that I broke down, to see all those people prepared to be prosecuted for contempt of court as well. It was an astonishing and moving act of solidarity,” she said.

It is the support of others involved in climate action that has helped Warner as she faced a possible prison term for contempt for her actions. As the case against her was thrown out on Monday, ensuring her liberty and rejecting the government argument to prosecute her, supporters were again outside court.

“This decision is empowering for people who have cases coming to court,” said Warner. “It is a victory in one battle. It has restored my faith a little in British justice. I was lucky, I had a balanced, independent and deeply thoughtful judge and I am grateful to him.”