Last week, gun-wielding conservation officers stuffed a 500-lb elephant seal in the back of a van, drove him along a winding highway in western Canada and left him on a remote beach “far from human habitation”.

The plan was to move the young seal far from British Columbia’s capital city, where over the last year, he has developed a reputation for ending up in “unusual locations”, including flower beds, city parks and busy roads.

Emerson, as he is known to locals, had other plans.

Less than a week after he was removed from Victoria, he made an “epic” 126-mile trek along the rugged west coast of Vancouver Island back to the city, a return that has left conservation officers in disbelief.

But Emerson’s presence and growing popularity has alarmed those same officers, as the public takes increasingly risky behaviour around the animal, including one group who encouraged a child to pet his nose.

Born in Washington state in 2022, the young pup was cared for by a group of volunteers after his mother left. Last year, he began popping up on beaches around Victoria and has since taken on near-celebrity status. When word spreads that he has been spotted lounging in the sun or sleeping between parked cars, crowds quickly gather with their cameras drawn.

“I’ve been coming down every day to see him for a month – big, old, fat thing,” Peggy McCann told local media last year. “Everybody else here also started watching him. I just think it was marvelous. It’s so nice to see this.”

Northern elephant seals spend most of their lives in the water but they come ashore to breed and moult. Emerson is currently doing the latter, undergoing a month-long biological process where he sheds all of his fur and underlying layer of skin that is “highly taxing” on the seal, said Canada’s department of fisheries and oceans.

On 1 April, he was spotted moulting in a busy park, prompting conservation officers to cordon off the area in yellow caution tape and post a sign warning the public to stay back – a request that was ignored.

Five days later, he was moved out of the city to better let him to moult “in peace”, the department said.

But his return – and apparent lack of interest in people – has created a troubling situation for conservation staff. Although Emerson has so far seemed unmoved by the gawking crowds, reports of harassment have increased to “concerning levels”.

“People have approached Emerson to try and pet him, take selfies with him, and on occasion prompted their small children to do the same,” the department said. “If public disturbances of the elephant seal continue, someone will get hurt.”

Conservation staff say they will probably be forced to move the young pinniped again.

“However, it would be ideal if this could be avoided to allow Emerson his space to complete his moulting process in the location he has chosen.”

The flood alert was issued on the morning of 20 October 2023. Storm Babet was coming. Be prepared.

Paul Gilbert, a 47-year-old landscape gardener from Chesterfield in Derbyshire, did what he always did when a flood alert came in: he went to check on his mum, Maureen.

Maureen lived on Tapton Terrace, a narrow row of red‑brick terrace houses yards from the River Rother in Chesterfield. Everyone who lives on the terrace, as residents call it, knew Maureen: she was an institution. She had lived there all of her 83 years, first at number 19, her parents’ house, and then at number 21, the house she moved to when she married Gilbert’s dad in 1975.

Because Maureen worked nights as a cleaner in a hotel and Gilbert’s dad worked early mornings on the railways, for many years Maureen slept downstairs on the sofa. She was a sturdy, trustworthy sort of person. “She would always keep mine and my brother’s secrets,” says Gilbert. “Never would tell my dad anything. Even when we used to skive off school and she’d see us in town, she would never tell him.”

On a sunny day, if you walked down the terrace, you would find Maureen outside, sitting in a chair, smoking a cigarette. No question, she would stop you for a chat. “If any neighbours came down, she’d talk to them for hours,” says Gilbert. Nobody minded: everyone on the terrace was fond of Maureen. In the evening, and well into the early hours, you would probably see a light glowing in her living room window: Maureen in her bed downstairs, watching Sky Sports. The carers who visited her three times a day often struggled to wake her in the morning. She could easily watch darts until two or three.

Maureen had arthritis, but Gilbert had long suspected that his mum wasn’t as physically challenged as she let on. Often, he would pop round – he visited every week – and find her standing at the sink or making dinner. “She’d always be going: ‘I can’t be getting up them stairs any more.’ And I’d say: ‘Who fetched that jigsaw down for you?’ And she’d say: ‘Oh! One of the carers.’” Before Covid hit, Maureen would go into town almost every day. “She’d go around the flea markets and the shops and the amusement arcades; she loved going and talking to anybody, strangers, it didn’t matter,” says Gilbert.

When she had to go into a care home temporarily while Gilbert renovated her bathroom, she absolutely hated it, he says: “She’d ring me every day. All she kept saying was: ‘I’m not staying here. You can’t make me stay here.’” The terrace, Maureen said, was her only home. She would never, ever go into a care home. “Her wish was to die in this house,” says Gilbert. Not that he expected that day to come any time soon. Maureen was stubborn and strong‑willed and irrepressible. “She just seemed to keep living for ever,” he says.

When Gilbert arrived at the terrace on the morning of Storm Babet, he set about building a sandbag wall around the front of the house and slotting together her metal flood door. He wasn’t unduly worried. The terrace had flooded before, in June 2007. Maureen simply waited it out upstairs. Afterwards, Gilbert installed flood defences at the house, including the flood door. The council put in other protective measures, such as non-return valves, which prevent liquid flowing upstream.

After Gilbert got the house prepared, he asked Maureen if she wanted to go upstairs. No, she said. She was watching the rugby. “She went: ‘If I can’t take my telly up there, I’m not going.’” Gilbert knew better than to argue with her.

Maureen called her son at 1.21pm. Water was coming into the house. He told her to go upstairs and she said she would. Then the phone went dead. When Gilbert rang back it went to answerphone. He thought: I bet you anything she’s bloody dropped the phone in water, or she’s not charged it overnight. Gilbert, who lives seven miles away, drove to the terrace to check on her, but the traffic was gridlocked. By now, Storm Babet was seething through Derbyshire. Many roads were closed.

He arrived with his 17-year-old son, Aaron, around 6.45pm. What was normally a 20-minute journey had taken more than five hours. It was dark. The road was closed. Fire and rescue were there, as well as someone from the water company. “They said: ‘We’ve evacuated all the houses.’ I said: ‘Where’s my mum then?’” The firefighters told Gilbert that they had knocked at his mum’s door, but nobody had answered. Fire and rescue were leaving; there was nothing more they could do. The water was shoulder-height. All the drain covers had popped up; there was debris and sewage everywhere. The terrace had turned into a fast-moving river. At Gilbert’s request, the fire brigade returned to Maureen’s house, even smashing a window to see if they could get in, but it was too dangerous.

Fine, said Gilbert. He would wait until they left and rescue his mother himself. A firefighter and the man from the water company patiently talked Gilbert out of his suicidal rescue mission. Gilbert remonstrated with them: “What would you do if it was your mum?”

A firefighter walked Gilbert and Aaron to a footbridge near the top of the terrace. He shone his torch into the swirling rapids of the swollen Rother. The water was 10cm (4in) over the top of the bridge; it looked like an inky‑black whirlpool. “He said: ‘Look at that. That is a torrent. You will not survive that.’”

Gilbert went home. He couldn’t sleep. He spent all night checking the river levels until it was safe for him to return – which he did at 9.30am. Outside Maureen’s house, the water was up to his knees. He pulled the window off its hinges and climbed through. “I saw something just under the window, which I thought was a blue cushion. As my leg touched what I thought was the cushion, I saw my mum roll over. I saw her face.”

Gilbert sighs. “She got her wish,” he says. The terrace was where she took her final breath.

Maureen was one of at least seven people to lose their lives to Storm Babet. In the six months since, the UK has experienced Storms Ciarán, Debi, Elin, Fergus, Gerrit, Henk, Isha, Jocelyn and Kathleen. Storms in the UK, Ireland and the Netherlands are named when they are likely to cause “medium” or “high” impact. With Kathleen, the UK equalled its record for the most named storms in a storm season, with five months to go. “These big floods are getting more frequent,” says Prof Hannah Cloke, a hydrologist at the University of Reading. “We can see the fingerprints of climate change.”

The average sea temperature for October was the highest on record. The warming of the oceans means that more water vapour is sucked into storms. It also affects the jet stream that carries weather to the UK. “It was the warmest October on record,” says Cloke. This March was the hottest recorded and the 10th month in a row to break records. Climate scientists have warned that we could be entering “uncharted territory”.

Storm Babet was not unexpected. The Met Office warned the public that it was coming five days before Maureen died. “You can see the storm coming towards you, you can see the amount of water and you know it’s going to be a problem,” says Cloke. “And yet still people die. It’s very frustrating, being in this field.” Maureen was not the first person to die in flooding near Chesterfield in recent years. In 2019, a 69-year-old woman died just 10 miles away, near the village of Matlock, after being swept away by flood water late at night.

Maureen died “in a known flood-risk area”, says Cloke. Tapton Terrace had flooded in 2007 and nearly flooded again in 2019. Why, I ask Cloke, do these deaths happen even in areas that are known to be at risk? “That’s a very interesting question,” she says. “I think it’s not always clear enough who’s responsible for what when it comes to flooding.”

So, who is responsible for flooding in the UK? To most, it seems like a simple answer: the government, specifically the Environment Agency (EA).

“People don’t realise that the Environment Agency is charged with managing flood risk, not stopping it,” says Mary Long-Dhonau, a flood-resilience campaigner known as Flood Mary. “Stopping it would mean in law that they have to build flood defences and protect everybody. Responsibility for protecting against flooding sadly lies with the homeowner.”

Long-Dhonau became a campaigner after her home in Worcester was flooded in 2000. “My neighbour had a carpet of sewage floating in her house. Another neighbour had just come back from her husband’s funeral. She lost all her wedding photos in the flood.” Afterwards, there was “no support”, she says.

I meet Long-Dhonau in Wainfleet All Saints, Lincolnshire, outside a community event organised by the town council with support from the EA. Wainfleet also flooded during Storm Babet. Here, as in Chesterfield, there is a feeling that the powers that be don’t care about smaller or rural communities devastated by flooding. Wainfleet has repeatedly flooded. The most recent incident, in 2019, was catastrophic: 61 properties were flooded, 580 homes were evacuated, 1,000 people were displaced. A military helicopter had to be brought in to drop sand in the River Steeping, which had breached its banks.

I climb into what Long-Dhonau calls her Floodmobile. It is a “little house on wheels”, she says. Inside are products to help protect your home: flood doors, pumps, airbricks, waterproof plaster and flood sacks that absorb water. Long‑Dhonau’s big thing is resilience: encouraging people to prepare their homes for floods, so that they can be restored easily at minimal expense.

Jean Hart, 73, drops by the Floodmobile. She flooded in 2019 and 2023. “We lost absolutely everything in 2019,” she says. “You could swim in that house.” Her positivity belies the devastating reality. “Now, we are so minimalist. It does make you focus your mind.” Everyone entering the Floodmobile is warm and welcoming towards Long-Dhonau. Many follow her on social media and are in the process of making their homes resilient, in line with her advice.

But inside the event, at a brewery on the outskirts of Wainfleet, the atmosphere is rancorous. Sandwiches are left uneaten as residents besiege a weary-looking EA representative. It is impossible to get near his stand due to the crowd around him, but I catch snippets of the conversation: people are talking about flood defences, and dredging, and they are angry.

Long-Dhonau points out that the EA, while a useful bogeyman, is frequently understaffed and under-resourced. It reported a £34m budget shortfall for 2022-23. Local authority flood risk-management departments are similarly understaffed. “Quite often it will be one man and his dog,” says Long-Dhonau. “I have a lot of respect for them. They care passionately about the people they serve and they often live in those communities.”

Even more poisonous is the mood in the room towards Matt Warman, the local Conservative MP. “I won’t talk to Matt, no,” mutters Stewart Peltell, 63, the chair of Wainfleet Flood Action Group. Peltell’s organisation wants the Steeping to be dredged and for new developments in the town to be restricted. The EA has carried out some dredging, but the group feels it hasn’t gone far enough. “More dredging would get a better flow,” says Peltell. “But it just seems as though it’s not going to happen.”

After Storm Babet, 70 residents attended an acrimonious meeting in the Woolpack pub. “He wasn’t happy, because he didn’t get invited,” says Peltell of Warman. “But I didn’t need to invite him. He could have come. It was an open meeting.” Peltell says Warman doesn’t answer emails from the group.

“Send me an email I’ve not replied to,” says an exasperated-sounding Warman when we meet later. The MP appears rattled. “I’m immensely frustrated that that meeting happened without inviting me.” He says that significant efforts were made after the 2019 floods to protect local properties and, as a result, only a few houses flooded in 2023. “We have made huge progress,” says Warman. “I absolutely agree that we need more funding, all of that stuff. But I think that one community group is not the whole story.”

Hart says: “People blame him, but he’s one person.”

Maureen’s funeral was held on 13 November 2023 at Chesterfield crematorium. Her coffin went out to the Match of the Day theme tune. Afterwards, the family went to a carvery. It was a running joke that whenever they ate out, Maureen would always bring food home with her. They laughed about wrapping up some of the spread in her honour.

When I visit Maureen’s house, Gilbert has cleared away the bulk of the mud and the muck, but a foul, earthy smell remains. A sediment line marks the height the water reached, about 1.5 metres. “I tried to save the photos, but they’re all ruined,” Gilbert says. He shows me one, a ripped black-and-white image of Maureen on the terrace. She looks to be in her early 20s; she is smiling and cuddling a small dog. Today, the neighbours have left flowers and cards outside Maureen’s door. “We’ll miss that wave you gave us whenever we came home,” reads one message.

Gilbert is a hardworking, practical man who cleaned out Maureen’s house – in freezing weather, on his own – in a matter of weeks. But it is hard for him, being here, among all the memories. For Gilbert, the terrace is full of ghosts. Maureen is the third family member he has found dead on this road. He found his grandmother’s body in her house when he was six or seven and his father’s body when he was 21. “Hopefully I won’t see any more,” he says.

When we meet for the second time, he is thinking about selling the house. “It’s just bad memories now,” he says. Going through his mum’s things – her clothes, the novelty mugs she collected when they went on day trips – is upsetting. He dreads coming here now.

Gilbert is frustrated with the council and the EA for not protecting the terrace against flooding. “I thought I’d done everything physically possible to make my mum safe and make sure her house wouldn’t flood. And it still did.” Gilbert would like to see the Rother dredged and a nearby bridge widened or replaced to enable the water to flow more easily. “The Environment Agency says dredging doesn’t help,” says Gilbert. “But why did we do it for hundreds of years? All of a sudden, we don’t do it now, because it’s too costly.”

In a statement, the EA said it “carried out crucial work on the ground during the flooding and has taken a number of steps to reduce flooding from the River Rother and [River] Hipper, including a new flood management project at Grassmoor country park designed to reduce the risk in Chesterfield”.

At Olympia House, an antiques centre two minutes’ walk from the terrace, Sofia Brown, the 38-year-old co-owner, also wants to see the river dredged. When I meet her, she is dressed in a white protective suit and work boots. She is busy hammering wet plaster off the walls – Olympia House also flooded during Storm Babet. It is backbreaking work that makes her arms ache. She is drying out the building herself, to save money, before getting in professional contractors. Olympia House was only partly insured, as it had flooded before, in 2019. The building is unheated; as we speak, our breath hangs in the air. I am very glad when someone offers me a cup of tea.

“Mental health-wise, I don’t want to talk to anybody,” she says. The business has been closed and the financial impact has been ruinous. Brown is trying to sell paint on the side, but she is burning through her savings with terrifying speed. Brown grinds her teeth in her sleep from stress. The pain is so bad that she is on nerve relaxers; she can eat only soft food, on one side of her mouth.

In November 2023, the EA, Yorkshire Water, Chesterfield borough council and Derbyshire county council organised a meeting at a community centre. “It was a bit of a slanging match,” says Gilbert, who attended. Rumours had circulated about a floodgate supposedly opening in nearby Wingerworth and contributing to damage caused by Storm Babet. These claims were unfounded and are denied by the EA.

Brown also went to the meeting. She said she asked an EA official whether they could dredge the river. “It was very much: ‘No, that won’t ever happen.’” She also mentioned the footbridge near the top of the terrace. “I said: ‘Can’t you just build a new bridge?’ And that was laughed at.” The conversation left her feeling that “we’re not worthy”, she says.

Brown is flood-proofing Olympia House as best she can, with waterproof plaster, screed flooring and metal partitions instead of wooden. Why go to all this trouble when it will probably flood again? “I can’t let go of the building,” she says. “It’s not that easy.”

Her grandfather, Abdul Latif, who moved to Britain from Pakistan, bought the building in 1986, originally to use as a sportswear factory. Brown promised him that she would keep it in the family: “I’ve given him my word.” She says that her grandfather asked the EA to dredge the Rother in the 1990s. “He started this fight. I’m going to try to finish it.”

There is a feeling among locals in frequently flooded places such as Wainfleet and Chesterfield that they aren’t high on anyone’s priority list. If they are lucky, a politician may visit in the aftermath, but they will be on the first train back to London. “At Tapton Terrace, nobody would ever have known who they were if nobody had died,” says Brown.

This perception isn’t wrong. It is harder for smaller communities to make the case for hard flood defences, meaning engineering solutions such as dykes, levees, reservoirs, barriers, flood walls and embankments. When determining whether to allocate funding, the EA scrutinises how many households would be protected and what damages would be avoided. “The prioritisation of where the EA spends its money on flood improvement schemes is very interesting,” says Cloke. “It needs to have a really high return on investment in order for it to get off the table.”

She highlights the forthcoming £176m flood scheme in Oxford, which has the second-fastest-growing economy of any UK city. “It seems that there is this divide between the people the EA care about and the people that they don’t,” says Cloke. “But it is very difficult, because there is not enough money to go around and there has to be some mechanism to decide where the investment happens. However, if we just base it on money and we don’t base it on people, that’s not good enough, is it?”

In Shropshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire, some communities flood from the River Severn multiple times a year. Heather Shepherd of the National Flood Forum knows one woman in Shrewsbury who has been flooded more than 20 times. “A lot of people would say: ‘Move.’ But it’s her grandparents’ home. It’s a family home,” she says. “She has spent over £30,000 on resilience measures and she still puts up with water.”

Britain used to build its way out of flooding with hard defences, such as the Thames Barrier, which protects London from storm surges and was completed at a cost of £461m in 1984. But in the 1990s and 2000s, the UK shifted towards a strategy of living with water, instead of fighting to keep it out. “What we have at the moment is a huge emphasis on people’s personal resilience, which undoubtedly has a place, but needs to be dovetailed into a bigger, bolder government vision for flood mitigation,” says Shepherd.

Many people can’t afford flood-resilience measures and government grants, such as the £5,000 made available to those affected by the 2019 floods, often aren’t sufficient to cover their costs. (The government-backed Flood Re scheme will also pay up to an extra £10,000 towards resilience measures for eligible households.) Shepherd, who lives in north Shropshire and whose home has flooded repeatedly, has spent £70,000 on resilience measures. “Aren’t I lucky that I can afford to do that? What about people in deprived areas who flood? They are the people we need to think about. It’s unfair.”

Shepherd is despondent about the longer-term vision for protecting Britain from flooding in an age of climate crisis. “There is no plan,” she says. A report from the independent Climate Change Committee recently warned that the UK’s plan to mitigate the worst effects of the climate crisis “falls far short of what is needed”. A 2023 National Audit Office report found that the government will protect 40% fewer properties from flooding than previously planned by 2027.

The Thames Barrier is designed to protect London until 2070, but most experts believe it will have to be updated by 2050 due to rising sea levels. The tube is particularly vulnerable to surface-water flooding, which is when excessive rainfall causes drains to overflow. In 2021, nine stations on the network were forced to close due to flash flooding; Pudding Mill Lane resembled a swimming pool. Cloke references the July 2021 flooding in Henan province, China, in which 12 people died on the subway in the city of Zhengzhou. “It wouldn’t take much to create quite a large disaster in this country,” she says.

In other developed nations, sewage and rainwater flow through separate pipes. But in most places in the UK, they go through the same drains. If a downpour causes the drains to overflow, all the water, including the sewage, is discharged into our rivers; sometimes, it comes out on to the streets. It is for this reason that Britain’s rivers and coastlines are stinking, polluted and biologically hazardous.

Privatised water companies are responsible for our drains, but unwilling to invest enormous sums of money to upgrade sewers. (The Thames super-sewer, recently completed at a cost of almost £5bn, is a notable exception.) In 2022, a parliamentary committee warned that “water companies and regulators … seem resigned to maintaining pre-Victorian practices of dumping sewage in rivers”.

And yet more intense and frequent rainfalls soak our crumbling infrastructure. Provisional figures from the Met Office, released last month, showed that England experienced its highest-ever amount of rainfall in the 18 months prior since records began in 1836. But preparing the country for the climate crisis does not appear to be on the political agenda. “We need someone at the top who cares about the environment, because, quite frankly, Rishi Sunak clearly doesn’t,” says Long-Dhonau. “We need someone to say: ‘This is happening, this is real.’”

When you speak to flood victims from smaller communities, one sentiment emerges. “We feel alone,” says Gilbert. “The government is not helping us. The Environment Agency is not helping us.” He has been told, in a letter from his MP, Labour’s Toby Perkins, that the EA doesn’t believe there is a cost-effective way to protect the terrace.

When communities feel abandoned, their instinct is to fight. Often, this fight is for hard flood defences or visible measures such as dredging.

“Every time I do a community thing, somebody’s going to say the D-word,” says Lauren Murtagh, a flood-resilience coordinator for the council in Hull, where 98% of the city is at risk of flooding. Among flooding experts, “dredging is a swearword”, she says. We meet at Hull’s Ferens art gallery, at an exhibition about the city’s history of flooding.

Also with us is Dr Steven Forrest, a lecturer in flood resilience at the University of Hull. “Dredging is something visual and people might be reassured by it and think that, in the past, it worked,” says Forrest. “But what we had in the past is not what we have now.” Although dredging can sometimes be appropriate, it can also destabilise riverbanks, have a negative impact on biodiversity and speed up the water flow, increasing the flood risk for communities downstream.

In the June 2007 floods, nearly 10,000 businesses and homes in Hull were damaged. A 28-year‑old man died after getting caught in a storm drain. In 2013, it flooded again. Afterwards, Hull implemented a holistic approach to flooding, called Living With Water. Hard flood defences were installed along the Humber estuary, at a cost of £42m.

We walk down the Hull Frontage, as the defences are called, on a blustery day. Outside The Deep, an aquarium shaped like a shark’s fin, children play on raised concrete steps that form part of the flood defences. By Victoria Dock, metal floodgates protect houses. We go to the tidal barrier, opened in 1980 to protect the city from storm surges. Many think it is a bridge; they don’t realise it protects them from the unrelenting North Sea. “It’s hard to see something when it works,” says Forrest.

In addition to hard flood defences, water is allowed into Hull in a managed way, often using nature. Aqua greens – essentially fields connected to a drainage system – collect rainwater during storms, draining it away slowly. In east Hull, seven hectares (17 acres) of woodland have been planted to absorb excess rainfall. Murtagh is in the process of distributing 1,000 water butts to residents. “One of the things that we’re really trying to get across is that flooding is everyone’s responsibility, but it doesn’t mean it’s just your responsibility,” Murtagh says.

The Dutch, who perhaps more than any other country have learned to live with water, have two words for flooding: wateroverlast, meaning water nuisance, and overstroming, meaning flood disaster. Hull is a model for how a city can learn to live with water: to see water as an occasional nuisance without tipping into disaster.

But whether there is the political will to replicate Hull’s success nationally, for smaller and rural communities, is doubtful. In Chesterfield, on the terrace, residents are selling up and moving away. Gilbert sold Maureen’s house at auction – it went for £66,000, less than neighbouring houses have sold for, but he was relieved to get rid of it. “It was a sad day, to see it go, the amount of time we’ve had it in our family. But I’m glad it’s gone now, because of the memories,” he says.

Visitors to the terrace won’t see Maureen sitting outside on a chair in the sun any more, or her light glowing in the window in the early hours of the morning. Tapton Terrace has claimed its final ghost. For Gilbert, it is time to move on.

Richard Broughton has been nosing around this neighbourhood for 22 years. He gossips about inhabitants past and present, reeling off information about their relationship status, openness to visitors, brawls and neighbourly disputes. “They used to have a big punch up in spring here,” he says, pointing out where one family’s territory ends and the next begins.

Some areas are eerily quiet, with popular old haunts lying uninhabited. “I always get a bit of a pang now, walking through here and it’s empty. It’s like walking down your local high street and seeing your favourite shops are closed and the pub is boarded up.”

Broughton’s domain is not a city block but an ancient woodland called Monks Wood, in Cambridgeshire. The inhabitants are marsh tits: tiny songbirds, each weighing about the same as two sheets of A4 paper.

Broughton holds up an old Nokia phone and plays a warning call. The bird he’s searching for is a kind of avian Hugh Hefner: nine years old in May and currently hitched up with a one-year-old. He quickly comes to inspect Broughton. Marsh tits are plucky and territorial, with a distinctive black cap and Inspector Clouseau-style moustaches – as soon as they hear the alarm call they race to investigate.

Soon, however, the calls of this family network of birds may only exist in the plastic casing of Broughton’s Nokia. More than 70 million birds have disappeared from the UK’s skies since 1970. The delicate calls of marsh tits – and other songbirds – are becoming harder to find, as populations plummet. The story from this wood is being played out nationally, as human noise gets louder and the sounds of nature vanish.

Broughton, who works at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, is Britain’s leading expert on these woodlands, and this family of marsh tits has been studied in more detail and for longer than any others in the country. The sound Broughton is playing is the noise of a bird he recorded 20 years ago. During that time he has attached coloured bands to the legs of more than 1,600 marsh tits to identify them. Only 1.7% of those birds are still alive.

The project was set up in 2002 to study the then-thriving population, but they started seriously declining 10 years in. When he started the study there were 22 pairs in this wood. Last year there were fewer than 10. The UK breeding population has declined by 80% in the last 55 years, so these encounters are increasingly rare.

By 2042 the population is projected to be zero. “We know what’s coming. Within my lifetime they will probably disappear. It can be distressing to watch because you get to know their lives and relationships,” says Broughton.

The decline of these birds is a case study in how increasing human activity can drive a species toward extinction. Their dwindling numbers are partly driven by growing competition from blue tits and great tits, which are benefiting from being fed by humans in their gardens (marsh tits wouldn’t venture into people’s gardens for food).

Then there are the declines of insects – a crucial food source. The birds rely on hawthorn-dwelling caterpillars to get in good condition for spring and then feed their freshly hatched young – but climate breakdown now means the hawthorn is coming into leaf long before the birds would normally be nesting. This woodland is a small island of suitable habitat surrounded by intensively farmed arable land. Marsh tits will not fly over open farmland, they only follow hedges and woodlands, so this population is becoming increasingly isolated and incestuous.

The study is also a microcosm of what’s happening more widely. On average there are 37% fewer woodland birds in our woods compared with 1970, with declines accelerating in the past five years.

“These birds are telling us that something serious is happening in the woods,” says Broughton. When he first came to the wood in 1999 there were nightingales, willow tits, hawfinches and lesser-spotted woodpeckers – birds that had been here for hundreds or thousands of years. “Now they’ve all gone,” he says. “Marsh tits will probably be next.” The removal of hedges, woodlands and increased numbers of deer are all reducing the size and quality of their habitats.

We spot Hefner 200 metres from where he was first ringed, nearly a decade ago. This five hectares (12 acres) of wood is this old male’s entire universe; he’s probably never left it, and knows it inside-out, right down to every tree and shrub. Over winter he will hide tens of thousands of seeds, a bit like a squirrel. “If they’re not on their territory they’re dead,” says Broughton. In that sense, they’re easy to monitor.

In the neighbouring territory there was a love story with a pair that were together for eight years. They were never apart. Then, one day, she disappeared. “It brought a lump to my throat,” says Broughton. The male appeared bereft, and didn’t pair up with the available females around him. Two months later he died too.

Broughton says he sometimes finds it hard to conduct science and see this happening on our watch. The wood is full of memories of particular birds, families and nests that are now long gone. “There is an emotional toll. I can’t feel neutral about it, I can’t just treat them as datapoints,” he says. “It’s my own ‘silent spring’.”

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

All of the UK’s native breeds of chicken, duck, geese and turkey are under threat because of bird flu, a report from the Rare Breeds Survival Trust (RBST) has found.

The disease, which has swept the globe after it originated in poultry farms in Asia, has caused devastating declines in bird populations. It has also now jumped to mammals and some cases have been found in humans, though it has not been found to be spreading from human to human.

The annual watchlist produced by the RBST also highlights concerns for native pig breeds. British Pig Association data shows declining numbers overall for the priority category pig breeds, including the Berkshire pig (total sows down from 363 in 2021 to 288 in 2023) and the Tamworth pig (total sows reduced from 304 in 2020 to 239 in 2023).

These declines continue after the pig market failure caused by rising costs, meaning farmers were being offered less than the cost of production for their products. The UK pig population has fallen from about 8m in the 1990s to just over 5m today.

The Rare Breeds Survival Trust chief executive, Christopher Price, said: “Today’s new RBST watchlist reflects the major challenges faced by people keeping pigs and poultry over the past two years, notably the avian flu outbreaks and the sustained increase in animal feed and husbandry costs. We have moved all native poultry breeds to the priority category as we continue providing urgent support for these irreplaceable breeds’ conservation.

“Seven of the UK’s 11 native pig breeds remain in the priority category, with most of the rare pig breeds now showing a sustained downward trend in total sow numbers. The at-risk Welsh pig, for example, has fallen from 457 sows in 2020 to 296 in 2023. We must reverse these worrying declines before it is too late.”

Native breeds of livestock are often used in rewilding projects for grazing because they tend to be hardier, so do not have to be kept indoors. Native poultry breeds are often seen as more sustainable and preferable to broiler chickens from an animal welfare perspective because they grow more slowly and tend to be kept free range.

Tom Davis, and RBST trustee and farm manager at Mudchute Park & Farm in east London, said: “The UK’s brilliant array of rare and native poultry is under serious threat. Under the continued threat of avian influenza, there is a clear decline in active breeding programmes – and when breed populations are so low, losing flocks can be devastating. Collecting comprehensive rare breed poultry data to steer conservation efforts is a serious challenge, and we really need more people to be encouraged to keep these birds and work with RBST and breed societies to help conserve them for the generations of the future.”

Healthier ready-to-eat meals could cut EU emissions by 48m tonnes annually and save customers €2.8bn (£2.4bn) each year, as well as reducing disease, a report has found.

Fast food and ready meals provide more than a sixth of the EU’s calories but contain far more salt and meat than doctors recommend, according to an analysis from the consultancy Systemiq commissioned by environmental nonprofit organisations Fern and Madre Brava.

They found that placing minimum health and sustainability standards on the companies who sell most of them would yield “huge” benefits to society.

“Making ready meals healthier and more sustainable is a no-regrets policy,” said Eduardo Montero Mansilla from the Spanish Consumers and Users’ Federation, one of 10 non-governmental organisations that co-authored the report. “We can improve the health of people and the planet at affordable prices.”

The report explored the effects of making big food companies comply with diets from the World Health Organization, which aims to avoid malnutrition and non-communicable disease, and the EAT-Lancet Commission, which tries to reduce environmental as well as human harm.

In both cases, they found that ready-to-eat meals would need to contain about half as many refined grains and two-thirds less meat, on average, as well as “significantly” more legumes.

While the report found that would save consumers €2.8bn in cheaper food and cut emissions by 48m tonnes each year, it did not count the additional economic benefits of hospitals spending less money on treating patients and employers losing less money from workers taking sick days.

“We are currently living in a diet-related health crisis,” said Alba Gil from the European Public Health Alliance, which co-authored the report. “Our dietary habits shape our health, and therefore our future. It makes only sense that policymakers regulate the environments where we consume food to make it healthy and affordable by design.”

Livestock are responsible for 12-20% of planet-heating pollution and increase the levels of some heart diseases and cancers in rich countries where the average person eats more meat than doctors recommend.

Climate scientists are clear that swapping from animal to plant-based proteins is a powerful step to keep the planet from heating, though doctors are unsure just how little meat is best for human health. The EAT-Lancet Commission, which is meeting this year to propose a wider range of diets and address concerns about micronutrient shortfalls in its planetary health diet, currently advises eating meat about once a week and fish twice a week.

The NGOs called on the EU to require big food companies to comply with health and sustainability guidelines for ready-made meals sold in the EU. The report did not analyse how consumers would respond to such a proposal.

Paul Behrens, an environmental change researcher at Leiden University who has studied food systems, who was not involved in the study, said: “This report is pragmatic in suggesting that not every meal has to be optimally healthy, but that the overall offering of caterers and retailers should meet dietary guidelines.”

He added: “If policymakers followed this advice, it would create a far healthier food culture that would benefit the planet, our wellbeing, and our wallets.”

The Albanese government has further delayed a commitment to rewrite Australia’s failing national environment laws.

The environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, said the government would introduce legislation in coming weeks to create two previously announced bodies – an environment protection agency and a second organisation called Environment Information Australia, which will provide public data on ecosystems, plants and animals.

But a commitment to introduce a suite of laws to address Australia’s extinction crisis, including new national environmental standards against which development proposals would be assessed, has been pushed back to an unspecified date.

At a media conference on Tuesday, Plibersek said the announcement of legislation for a national EPA – to be known as Environment Protection Australia – was a “historic day for the environment”.

But she did not guarantee that the broader package of environment laws, including the national standards, would be introduced before the next election. “They’ll be introduced when they’re ready,” she said.

The delay to wider reforms sparked accusations that the government was failing to deliver the overarching environment reform it announced in 2022. The Greens’ environment spokesperson, Sarah Hanson-Young, accused Labor of breaking a promise.

James Trezise, the director of the not-for-profit Biodiversity Council, said the delay was a “significant step back from what the Albanese government committed to in its nature positive plan”.

“Nature in Australia is in crisis and can’t afford delays in the comprehensive reforms needed to fix our weak and broken environmental laws,” he said.

Plibersek had initially promised to introduce new laws – first in draft form for consultation and then to the parliament – by last year.

Speaking in 2022, she said multiple reviews had shown the existing law, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, was “broken”. She promised changes in 2023 that would be better for business and the environment, including the introduction of national environmental standards, faster decision-making and improved trust and integrity in the system.

But the plans have faced a public backlash from the Western Australian Labor premier, Roger Cook, and the state’s powerful mining and resources industries.

On Tuesday, Plibersek said splitting up the changes would allow more time for consultation and to “make sure we get this right”.

“When I first announced the nature-positive plan, I said it would take a bit of cooperation, compromise and common sense to deliver. That’s exactly how we’re approaching the rollout,” she said.

Plibersek said the EPA legislation would create an agency with “strong new powers to better protect nature”, including being able to issue environment protection orders – effectively “stop-work” orders. She said the laws would allow the EPA to act as a delegate for the minister and make decisions on whether development proposals went ahead.

The agency would initially be focused on cracking down on illegal land clearing and enforcing environmental offsetting conditions. A government audit found about one in seven developments approved under the existing laws could be in breach of offset conditions that required some form of compensation in return for being allowed to damage nature.

Plibersek said the EPA chief would be an independent statutory appointment similar to the Australian federal police commissioner “to make sure no government can interfere with the new agency’s important enforcement work”. The agency would initially sit within the environment department before becoming an independent statutory authority in July 2025.

Plibersek said the second new body, Environment Information Australia, would release a national state of the environment report every two years. Its primary role would be to provide “up-to-the-minute” information on Australia’s environment to assist the public and business.

The Coalition’s environment spokesperson, Jonathon Duniam, said the announcement showed Plibersek had failed as environment minister, describing it as the creation of a “new bureaucracy with no new laws to administer”.

Hanson-Young said the changes did not go far enough to protect nature and accused the government of giving in to a two-year-long campaign by “the mining industry and big developers”. She said the government was engaged in “piecemeal tinkering”, when it had promised a full environment law reform package.

“Labor promised to fix Australia’s broken environment laws, but without stopping native forest logging and fossil fuel expansions, the government will be failing to protect our planet and failing to keep its promise to the Australian people,” she said.

Conservation groups called on the government to deliver the promised full package of reform before the election and expressed disappointment over the delays.

The Australian Conservation Foundation chief executive, Kelly O’Shanassy, said the promised crackdown on illegal land clearing and the establishment of an EPA were “welcome and necessary”, but without comprehensive reform, the agency would be “enforcing a flawed and ineffective law that still needs serious surgery”.

Environment groups are expected to air their concerns with the changes at a Senate inquiry hearing into the extinction crisis on Wednesday.

One of the biggest battles over Colorado River water is being staged in one of the west’s smallest rural enclaves.

Tucked into the bends of the lower Colorado River, Cibola, Arizona, is a community of about 200 people. Maybe 300, if you count the weekenders who come to boat and hunt. Dusty shrublands run into sleepy residential streets, which run into neat fields of cotton and alfalfa.

Nearly a decade ago, Greenstone Resource Partners LLC, a private company backed by global investors, bought almost 500 acres of agricultural land here in Cibola. In a first-of-its-kind deal, the company recently sold the water rights tied to the land to the town of Queen Creek, a suburb of Phoenix, for a $14m gross profit. More than 2,000 acre-feet of water from the Colorado River that was once used to irrigate farmland is now flowing, through a canal system, to the taps of homes more than 200 miles away.

A Guardian investigation into the unprecedented water transfer, and how it took shape, reveals that Greenstone strategically purchased land and influence to advance the deal. The company was able to do so by exploiting the arcane water policies governing the Colorado River.

Experts expect that such transfers will become more common as thirsty towns across the west seek increasingly scarce water. The climate crisis and chronic overuse have sapped the Colorado River watershed, leaving cities and farmers alike to contend with shortages. Amid a deepening drought and declines in the river’s reservoirs, Greenstone and firms like it have been discreetly acquiring thousands of acres of farmland.

As US states negotiate how they will divide up the river’s dwindling supplies, officials challenging the Greenstone transfer in court fear it will open the floodgates to many more private water sales, allowing investors to profit from scarcity. The purchases have alarmed local residents, who worry that water speculators scavenging agricultural land for valuable water rights will leave rural communities like Cibola in the dust.

“Here we are in the middle of a drought and trying to preserve the Colorado River, and we’re allowing water to be transferred off of the river,” said Regina Cobb, a former Republican state representative who has tried to limit transfers. “And in the process, we’re picking winners and losers.”

In February, a federal judge ruled that the Cibola-Queen Creek transfer was done without proper environmental review, ordering the federal Bureau of Reclamation to complete a more thorough evaluation. The US Department of Justice, which is representing the bureau in the legal proceeding, declined to comment on whether the bureau would be appealing the decision.

Meanwhile, Greenstone – which appears to be the first water brokerage firm to sell rights to the Colorado River – could help chart the course of how the resource can be bought and sold in the west.

The farm that was really an investment firm

Greenstone first arrived in Cibola a decade ago – though few here knew anything of the company at the time. Through a subsidiary called GSC Farm LLC, the company purchased 485 acres of land in the Cibola valley in 2013 and 2014, for about $9.8m. Hardly anyone in town took notice.

“Why would we?” said Holly Irwin, a supervisor for La Paz county, which encompasses Cibola.

Initially, Greenstone leased that land back to farmers, who planted fields of alfalfa and rows of puffball cotton.

Then, in 2018, the company sold the water tied to that farmland to Queen Creek, a fast-growing sprawl of gated communities on the outskirts of Arizona’s capital. The city’s government agreed to pay the company $24m for the annual entitlement to 2,033 acre-feet of Colorado River water.

In July of last year, amid continuing legal challenges and national scrutiny, that water was finally diverted. The alfalfa and cotton fields were fallowed – reduced to dry brush and cracked earth.

Many in town were blindsided. “We were all just like: what the heck?” Irwin recalled.

GSC Farm, she realized, wasn’t really a farm at all – it was part of a water investment firm that had brokered water transfer deals all across the south-west.

GSC Farm is one of at least 25 subsidiaries and affiliates of Greenstone, registered in Arizona and other states. Business registration records, deeds, loan documents and tax records show that these companies share the same executives. To local residents, including elected officials such as Irwin, it was initially unclear that the business – which had been acquiring thousands of acres of farmland not only in Cibola but across Arizona – went by so many names.

Greenstone’s executives and lawyers did not respond to the Guardian’s questions about the company’s corporate structure, its business model, and how it initiated the Queen Creek deal.

Public records revealed that Greenstone’s financial backers include the global investment firm MassMutual and its subsidiary Barings, as well as public pension funds. At least one of its acquisitions appears to be financed by Rabo AgriFinance, a subsidiary of the Dutch multinational banking and financial services company Rabobank.

On its website, Greenstone describes itself as “a water company” and as “a developer and owner of reliable, sustainable water supplies”. Its CEO, Mike Schlehuber, previously worked for Vidler Water Company – another firm that essentially brokers water supply – as well as Summit Global Management, a company that invests in water suppliers and water rights. Greenstone’s managing director and vice-president, Mike Malano – a former realtor based in Phoenix who remains “active in the Arizona development community”, per his company bio – got himself elected to the board of the Cibola valley irrigation and drainage district, a quasi-governmental organization that oversees the distribution of water for agriculture in the region.

Irwin was horrified. She felt that a company with ties to big banks and real estate developers, posing as a farm, had infiltrated her small town and sold off its most precious resource.

The deal won’t have an immediate impact on Cibola’s residents. It doesn’t affect the municipal water supply. But she worries that the transfer will be the first of many. And if more and more farms are fallowed to feed water to cities, what will become of rural towns along the river?

“It’ll be like Owens Valley,” she said, referring to the water grab that inspired the movie Chinatown. In the early 20th century, agents working for the city of Los Angeles, posing as farmers or ranchers, bought up land in the valley and diverted its water to sustain their metropolis, leaving behind a dustbowl.

By allowing the Greenstone deal to go through, “I’m afraid we’ve opened Pandora’s box,” she said.

The Colorado River, which stretches from the Rocky Mountains into Mexico, has declined by about 20% since the turn of the century, amid the most severe drought the west has seen in 1,200 years. In a painfully negotiated deal, Arizona, Nevada and California agreed to reduce the amount of water they draw from the river by 13% through 2026. Experts warned that even deeper cuts would be necessary in the coming decade, but states are currently deadlocked over a longer-term conservation plan.

“With ongoing shortages on the river, driven by climate change, Colorado River water is going to become very valuable,” said Rhett Larson, a professor of water law at Arizona State University. “Anyone who understands this dynamic thinks, ‘Well, if I could buy Colorado River water rights, that’s more valuable than owning oil in this country at this stage.’”

Though the price Queen Creek paid for the water was remarkable – amounting to more than $11,500 per acre-foot – lawyers and water experts in Arizona told the Guardian it would probably sell for even more today.

The process of selling and transferring the water, however, can be bureaucratic and complicated. In most cases, a company like Greenstone would have to first convince fellow landowners in their local irrigation district to allow the sale, and then secure approvals from the state department of water resources and the US Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that manages water in the west.

What Irwin and many of Cibola’s residents didn’t realize was that in their sleepy, riverside town, a select group of farmers and landowners had been working for years to facilitate such deals.

‘His dream was to sell this water’

Irrigation districts, as the name suggests, are designed to distribute water for irrigation across the US west. These districts were formed in the 19th and 20th centuries as cooperatives, allowing farmers to pool resources to develop water infrastructure. In the Colorado River basin, the districts contract with the Bureau of Reclamation to deliver water flowing through federal infrastructure to farms and ranches.

Farmers tend to be possessive of their precious water, explained Susanna Eden of the University of Arizona Water Resources Research Center. Most irrigation districts are set up to keep water for farming – and to keep it within their jurisdictions.

But in the Cibola valley irrigation and drainage district (CVIDD), landowners seem to have anticipated the market potential of their water.

“It has been said, and I think it has been demonstrated, that the Cibola valley irrigation and drainage district was set up by people who were investing in water, rather than pure agriculturalists,” said Eden.

In 1992, long before Greenstone arrived on the scene, CVIDD amended its contract with the Bureau of Reclamation to explicitly contemplate “water exchange, water lease, water transfer” or a change in the “type or place of use” of its water allotment.

The CVIDD board president, Michael Mullion, a farmer in Cibola who had been leasing land from GSC Farm in addition to tending his own land, vouched for the Greenstone’s water transfer at a 2019 hearing with the state’s department of water resources. In his testimony, Mullion talked about how his grandfather had come to the Cibola valley in 1949. “He brushed, cleared, levelled and built the canals for this particular ground,” he said. “But his dream was to actually sell this water.”

The district’s governing philosophy already aligned with Greenstone’s, but the company’s 500-acre purchase here allowed it to more directly influence the district’s policies. Irrigation district boards make key decisions about water in the district – and buying more land can buy more influence on the board. Landowners in the district are entitled to two votes for every acre they hold in board elections.

The district’s board of directors now includes the heads of prominent farming families in the area, including Mullion and his father, Bob, as well as Greenstone’s vice-president, Malano.

Over the years, CVIDD helped landowners, including Greenstone, gain more agency and direct control over their water rights. In most irrigation districts, the district contracts with the Bureau of Reclamation for the right to a lump sum of water, which it distributes to landowners and farmers.

However, a review of CVIDD’s contracts with the bureau revealed that between 2006 and 2014, the district began removing itself as the middleman – giving a few large landowners even more agency over how they use their water. Whereas in other irrigation districts, members would have to vote to approve a water transfer like the Greenstone deal, in the Cibola valley, some landowners can propose transfers as they please, subject to federal approval.

Amid growing public scrutiny of the Cibola-Queen Creek transfer, the CVIDD board in 2019 unanimously approved a resolution disputing the idea that water rights are reserved for local use, and supporting landowners’ right to change “the place of use and purpose of use” of their water.

“I believe they’ve been setting the stage for the Queen Creek transfer,” said Jamie Kelley, an attorney based in Bullhead City. “This was their long-term plan.”

Mullion and lawyers representing CVIDD did not respond to the Guardian’s questions about its founding principles. They also did not address critiques that their policies were set up to benefit landowners seeking to sell water rights.

Even now, after years of public debate and litigation, local residents remain baffled by the idea that water could be sold and siphoned away from them, for ever.

Down a dusty, two-lane road, just past the unassuming cream-colored building where the Cibola valley irrigation district is headquartered, a group gathered for an informal meeting with Holly Irwin last summer to discuss their grievances.

“Why is somebody coming from so far away to take water from here?” said Carol Stewart, who runs Karlz Country Store – the only shop in town.

She hosted a handful of friends and neighbors, mostly retirees and recreators who had settled here decades ago. Everyone huddled into Stewart’s wood-paneled mobile home, a respite from the searing heat, and shouted their questions over the buzz of the AC. What did the transfer mean? Would they have enough water to supply homes here?

“It’s all about the mighty dollar,” Irwin said. “It’s all about money, and how much they can come in and take advantage.”

This deal wouldn’t affect the town’s residential water supplies, Irwin explained. But it meant that more and more farmers might choose to sell out – the water that once irrigated Cibola’s fields could be diverted away. And as the Colorado River shrank, corporations were growing increasingly thirsty for rural supplies.

“Don’t we have water rights?” asked John Rosenfeld, who has lived in Cibola for 24 years. “I have a right to that water, because I’m paying for it.”

It wasn’t quite that simple, Irwin responded. Most of Cibola’s residents get their water from a municipal supply or from private wells. But some properties here come with water rights attached, sometimes dating back to before Arizona was a US state. In the 1800s and the decades following, miners and farmers could snatch water rights up and down the Colorado River simply by laying claim to the water and putting it to use for livestock or irrigating land. It didn’t matter to these settlers that some of that water and land was taken from Indigenous tribes that were here before them.

Those water rights were then passed down from generation to generation. They were formalized in agreements and interstate contracts that left some farming regions and tribes with the highest-priority water rights, while other rural and metropolitan areas received lower-priority rights. Such contracts assign water rights a “priority level” of one through six – priorities one through four represent rights for permanent water service, whereas priorities five and six represent the temporary rights to surplus supplies. The water rights Greenstone purchased in Cibola and sold to Queen Creek are fourth priority – permanently secured and prized.

Notably missing from the group at Karlz Country Store were farmers. The Guardian tried to contact a number of farmers in the region, but other than Mullion, none were available for an interview. Not all agriculturalists are interested in selling their water – but the option may be increasingly appealing as the climate crisis and water shortages disrupt their ability to farm effectively. “It’s hard to know, but demands create pressure,” said Wade Noble, an attorney representing farmers with the Wellton-Mohawk irrigation and drainage district, north of Cibola. “The drought on the river has created very high pressure.”

Greenstone isn’t the only company coveting such water rights. Across the US west, private investors have been scouring rural communities in search of high-priority water rights. In Arizona, Greenstone and firms like it have acquired thousands of acres of irrigable land and their corresponding water rights.

In the Cibola valley, for example, Western Water LLC, another company that specializes in “the sale and transfer of water rights”, owns about 100 acres of land, along with its entitlement to a modest 620 acre-feet of water, public records from the Bureau of Reclamation and La Paz county showed.

Before the Bureau of Reclamation approved Greenstone’s water transfer to Queen Creek, an investigation by the Arizona Republic found that Greenstone and its competitors had acquired thousands of acres of irrigable land across Arizona, including in La Paz, Pinal, Maricopa, Mohave and Yuma counties. The newspaper’s reports were cited by local officials who argued that Greenstone’s water transfer to Queen Creek would be a harbinger of many more such deals, as water becomes increasingly scarce across the west.

A Guardian review of deeds and other public records found that in Yuma county, companies associated with Greenstone hold about 5,300 acres of farmland, much of it within the Wellton-Mohawk irrigation and drainage district. Taxes on those lands were paid by Sunstone Farms LLC, a Greenstone subsidiary that leases agricultural properties.

There, unlike in CVIDD, individual landowners cannot initiate water transfer agreements on their own. But because votes within Wellton-Mohawk are also weighted based on how much land someone owns, larger landowners could seek more influence on its board. County records indicate that a Greenstone-affiliated LLC is one of the largest landowners in the district.

Meanwhile to the north, in Mohave county, Greenstone’s competitor Water Asset Management holds more than 2,400 acres, and access to nearly 16,000 acre-feet of water, per public records from the county.

In 2022, La Paz along with Mohave and Yuma counties filed a lawsuit against the Bureau of Reclamation, challenging its claim that the deal would cause “no significant” environmental impact.

“We are arguing in our lawsuit that Reclamation did not analyze the precedent that this transfer set,” said John Lemaster, an attorney representing Mohave county. “The entire purpose of Greenstone is to develop and sell water resources. We know future transfers are likely.”

This year, a federal judge in Arizona sided with them, ruling that the Bureau of Reclamation’s environmental evaluation was “arbitrary and capricious” and ordering the agency to prepare a more thorough assessment. While it’s unclear how the agency will proceed, given that water is already flowing to Queen Creek, the outcome could define how future deals are made and who can lay claim to the Colorado River’s water.

Greenstone, meanwhile, has tried to play down the significance of the transfer.

At a March 2022 committee hearing to discuss a bill introduced by Cobb, the former state representative who tried to limit water transfers, Malano balked at descriptions of his company as a hedge fund, describing Greenstone as “one of the largest farming operations in the state of Arizona”.

Indeed, Greenstone and its competitors, such as Water Asset Management, often lease their land to farmers. But Greenstone’s ultimate goal, per its website, “is to advance water transactions”. And it has been busy doing so. In 2017, it helped secure the right to Rio Grande water for a Facebook data center in Los Lunas, New Mexico. While the Queen Creek deal was the company’s first sale off the Colorado River, it has also brokered a number of deals to supply groundwater to developing communities across Arizona.

In September, the state’s Democratic attorney general filed an amicus brief in support of the counties challenging the transfer. “Future transfers will be likely, if not inevitable,” Kris Mayes wrote, “given the need for water across Arizona.”

A building boom strains a dwindling resource

Queen Creek is growing fast.

Wide, tree-lined boulevards vine off into neat, master-planned communities named Harvest and Encanterra, featuring resort pools, lush golf courses and ornamental lakes. Beyond the sand-hued estates, which blend into the Sonoran landscapes, there is construction. Cranes clear ground, crews build wood frames through suburban cul-de-sacs in various states of completion.

Queen Creek was the seventh-fastest growing city in the US, according to a Census Bureau report released last year. It, like many Arizona suburbs, has struggled to balance a development boom with a shrinking water supply.

Last year, the state moved to limit new housing construction in the suburbs of Phoenix – one of the fastest-growing metro areas in the country – to avoid emptying the region’s underground aquifers. Projecting a 4.86m acre-foot shortfall in groundwater supplies over the next century, the state announced that all future housing developments in the desert would have to find some other source of water, by purchasing or importing their supply.

Ambitious cities and developers have been left scrambling.

The suburb of Buckeye, west of Phoenix, has considered building a desalination plant in the Mexican town of Puerto Peñasco and piping the treated water several hundred miles north to Arizona.

Queen Creek’s water manager, Paul Gardner, said the town had been working for years to secure water for its future. In addition to piping water from the Colorado River, the city has also sought to import groundwater from the Harquahala valley, to the east of Cibola. It recently signed a $30m deal with Harquahala Valley Landowners LLC, a company that represents farmers and investors with water rights, to siphon off 5,000 acre-feet of ground water a year to feed its maze of gated communities and sprawling subdivisions.

Meanwhile, in Cibola, Holly Irwin dreams of development too – though of a different sort.

On the east bank of the Colorado, she recently oversaw the cleanup and restoration of a stretch of open space for residents and visitors. “Now we have trash cans, we have picnic tables,” Irwin said. “My goal is we’ll have campsites that stretch all the way down. And more electrical hookups for RVs.”

In the summertime, she hopes, the river will be filled with boats and its shore with picnickers and campers. “We could attract more people, from all over.”

Stewart, the shop owner, first came here as a “weekender” from San Diego, California. She was drawn to the region’s rugged beauty and rural familiarity. “This was a place to roam, to be with family.”

In the decade since she and her family moved here, she has also seen the Colorado shrink, and its lush banks fade. “There’s been years when you could basically walk across the river,” she said. “That is what has scared a lot of people. We need the water here.”

It’s taken a while to get here but Anthony Albanese is on the verge of promising what some economists and most clean energy advocates have been urging Australian governments to do for years. Or at least a version of it.

The prime minister’s promised “Future Made in Australia” act is clumsily named, and the announcement last week had few details, but the idea – that the government will need to use its weight to help develop green industries if the country is to make a rapid transition from fossil fuels to a clean economy – has been a long time coming.

Some of the criticism that followed has made headlines but been pretty unremarkable. It’s true that, if badly developed, an interventionist industry policy could become a money pit and create subsidy-dependent businesses. The government should absolutely aim not to do that. It underlines the importance of the decisions being made in Canberra before next month’s budget.

It’s also true that leaders will need to be bold, and an overly cautious approach is unlikely to do what’s needed. The expert consensus is that there is an opportunity in this moment – as the climate crisis worsens, and as countries comparable to Australia introduce strategies to attract trillions in clean investment – to spur the new industries needed to gain a foothold in new industries and help create green jobs.

It won’t last for ever at this scale. And taking it slow won’t avoid attacks on the government from people stuck on the idea that little of substance needs to change as the climate crisis rewrites the global economy. They’re going to happen anyway.

Other countries – in Europe, and Japan, Korea and Canada – are already chasing some of the trillions in global clean investment up for grabs in the decades ahead. They have mostly been reacting to what could be US$1tn in support for clean industries contained in that country’s paradigm-shifting Inflation Reduction Act.

But they are also responding to the slower creep of China’s massive green investment that has, for example, given it near complete dominance of the global solar supply chain that everyone relies on. It explains why several of the countries stuck the word “security” in the name of their green industry strategies.

The challenge for a resource-rich, medium-sized economy such as Australia is to identify industries in which it has a competitive advantage, and weigh how best to minimise the risks to taxpayers. It will be a while before it’s clear the extent to which the areas the government has backed to date – $2bn to kickstart a proposed green hydrogen industry, $1bn for solar panel supply chain manufacturing, and $4bn for mining and processing of critical minerals – fit into the category.

Smart minds have suggested that a sensible approach would be to mostly stop exporting raw materials and instead back onshore production and refinement of products such as ammonia, iron, steel, aluminium and a variety of critical minerals. Substantially more support will be needed, probably through tax breaks and direct investments as well as cheap loans and guarantees.

Consideration of how best to do this is running parallel with the equally important issue of how to ensure that people in the most fossil fuel-reliant parts of Australia are not trampled into the dust in a stampede for a clean future. We have known for years that parts of the country are likely to face a disproportionately hard future as dirty industries are inevitably phased down, and eventually out. Though often discussed, this issue has largely been ignored in national policy.

It hasn’t had the same attention as the promised shift to green industry policy, but there is evidence this is changing. Last month, as the government introduced legislation to create a Net Zero Economy Authority to help manage the transition to a clean economy, it quietly posted an impact analysis that is shaping its thinking.

The report assesses what will happen as at least 10 of the country’s remaining 19 coal-fired power plants shut by 2035. It estimates more than 3,000 coal power workers could lose their jobs, with spillover losses for about 900 contractors.

Past experience suggests as many as a third of the people who work at coal plants could still be unemployed a year after the generator has closed if left unsupported, and that their drop in earning capacity tends to be much greater than in other closing industries. The impact on financial hardship and health can ripple through a community and become a “self-reinforcing cycle” as people find it increasingly difficult to find work and lose skills and motivation.

These coal jobs are concentrated in just six regions across the country, notably Gladstone in central Queensland, the Hunter and Latrobe valleys, and Collie in Western Australia. Some of these areas are likely to benefit from new clean industries, which will mostly be regional, but it obviously won’t be a one-for-one match.

The report lists three ways the government could respond: do nothing, create a pooled redeployment policy for affected workers that the owners coal plants bosses can opt in to, or introduce laws that would allow it to force the owners of coal plants and their suppliers to take part in the redeployment arrangements and support their employees to find new jobs.

The latter two options would come at a public cost – almost $130m for the legislated third option – but the report argues the benefits that flowed from creating a pool of skilled workers for new employers, improving the social, health and welfare outcomes for workers and their families, and maintaining social cohesion and local identity would be significantly greater.

It also found more than 2.5 times as many workers were likely to be transferred into new jobs under the option that gave the government the power to force companies to act than if it made it a voluntary scheme. The “do nothing” option, in which the future of the workers would be left to the market, was not even assessed.

The implicit message is that the people affected by the historic transition under way need to be brought along for the ride, and given the help they need to get through it. As with the promised green industry policy, it’s taken a while to get here. But it’s the right place to start.

Australians are choosing hybrid over electric vehicles, but sales of both continue to climb while internal combustion engines record a decline.

Hybrids outsold EVs in three consecutive quarters with 95,129 sales – overtaking 69,593 EVs sold, according to the Australian Automobile Association’s quarterly EV Index released on Tuesday night.

The data also reinforced a recent trend of declining sales of conventional cars, which have fallen by 8.03% in the fourth quarter of 2023 to the first quarter of 2024. Their market share also dropped to 78.18%, sinking below 80% for the first time.

EVs rose to 8.70% market share in this time, while hybrids jumped to 11.95% – up from 6.26% in the first quarter of 2023.

“People are wanting to go into that lower cost, lower emissions motoring, but they just don’t think they are ready for the full EV experience,” Australian Automotive Dealer Association boss James Voortman said.

Premium prices amid a cost of living crisis, as well as a lack of recharging infrastructure, are the main concerns stopping consumers from making the transition to EVs, he said.

Three in five consumers are “less open to paying more money for an electric vehicle due to the current cost of living pressures,” Voortman said, pointing to AADA survey results released in February.

“During this time where everything is costing more” it can be more difficult for consumers to look beyond an EV’s upfront price premium and towards fuel savings, he said.

Charging infrastructure is “no doubt” another concern.

“There is a growing acceptance that you can do a lot of your charging at home, but not everyone has access to home charging,” Voortman said.

“I think as the infrastructure rolls out, we will see more and more people willing to take up an electric vehicle.”

The specific types of vehicles available can also pose as a barrier for consumers in need of a larger vehicle, like a ute, van or SUV are an affordable price point.

“It is going to take time for those vehicles to arrive,” Voortman said.

In the meantime, “hybrid technology [is] a stepping stone,” Voortman said.

While “there is no doubt that driving a hybrid is a lot more friendly for the environment than a pure petrol or diesel vehicle”, it is also “a lot more affordable for those customers”.

“There are significant benefits for for both customers but also for the environment,” Voortman said.

“There is no doubt the future is fully electric and zero emissions motoring, but there is going to be a bit of a journey to get there.”

“Hybrids are a good stepping stone to that future.”