Farmers who have their entire cropping land submerged underwater have found they are ineligible for a government flooding hardship fund – because their farms are too far from a major river.

According to the Met Office, 1,695.9mm of rain fell from October 2022 to March 2024, the highest amount for any 18-month period in England since the organisation started collecting comparable data in 1836. Scientists have said climate breakdown is likely to cause more intense periods of rain in the UK.

Agriculture organisations said earlier this week that food production was down in the UK because so much cropland was underwater after the floods.

The government this week opened a farming recovery fund scheme, under which eligible farmers can access grants of between £500 and £25,000 to return their land to the condition it was in before exceptional flooding owing to Storm Henk in January.

But farmers have said they have had funding applications refused because they do not meet criteria such as being located near a designated major river.

John Charles-Jones is an arable farmer based in Nottinghamshire. He said he was six miles from the nearest river and not eligible for the fund. His farm has been waterlogged since Storm Babet in October, with most of his topsoil washed away, making it unviable for cropping.

His losses are expected to go into six figures as he planted a third of his planned crops in the autumn before the rain hit, and only 10%-15% of that planted crop will be viable.

Charles-Jones pointed out the farming minister, Mark Spencer, was himself from a farming background in Nottinghamshire, one of the worst-affected counties, but that farmers in the area had been blocked from the fund.

“The eligibility criteria for recipients are completely flawed,” he said, “How could anyone take so long to come up with such nonsense? I don’t think I have ever witnessed such an ill-thought-out scheme. It is difficult to know quite where to start in picking it all to pieces. For once I had higher hopes, with farming minister Mark Spencer actually living and farming in one of the worst-affected counties.”

Andrew Naish, also from Nottinghamshire, said he had faced the same problem. “Whilst grants are technically available, it looks like you will have to have walked on the moon to qualify,” he said. “We, like many farmers, have suffered flooding and large financial losses this winter but fail to meet the criteria for claiming because the government has set the parameters at unachievable levels.”

Henry Ward, an arable farmer based in Short Ferry, east of Lincoln, is perhaps one of the most recognisable growers who have been hit by recent floods. His farm has been shown on news programmes over the past few months as it is entirely underwater, with his farmhouse sitting on what resembles an island in the middle of murky water.

His application for the hardship fund has been refused, despite the fact his farm has been underwater for six months. This is because his nearby river, the Barlings Eau, does not count as a major river in the scheme. Ward told the BBC: “If I’m not eligible, then who on earth is? I’m sure everyone is sick of seeing the pictures in the news as much as I am – but our farmhouse and yard is literally an island in the middle of a 500-acre [202-hectare] lake.”

Ward said his losses were about £100,000, and that he was eligible to claim £3,000 for a small piece of land away from the main farm that was close to the River Witham, but not able to claim any funding for the main farm, which was responsible for the bulk of his losses.

Rachel Hallos, the vice-president of the National Farmers’ Union, said: “It has very quickly become clear that there are major issues with the newly announced farming recovery fund, which aimed to help farmers devastated by Storm Henk in January.

“We are hearing from numerous members who have suffered catastrophic impacts who have been told they are not eligible for the fund because some of their affected areas are more than 150 metres from ‘main’ rivers. These include members with 90% of their land saturated or underwater, and huge damage to buildings and equipment.

“We are taking this up with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs urgently. I cannot believe this is what ministers intended when they launched the fund, which was a welcome and well-intentioned development, which seems to have been fundamentally let down in the detail. While the impact of the weather goes far beyond Storm Henk, this could have been a good start but, as it stands, it simply doesn’t work.”

Defra has been contacted for comment.

Staff at one of the world’s leading climate-certification organisations have called for the CEO and board members to resign after they announced plans to allow companies to meet their climate targets with carbon offsets.

They fear that companies will use the offsets for greenwashing, while avoiding making the necessary cuts in greenhouse gas emissions – without which the world faces climate catastrophe.

The UN-backed Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), which certifies whether a company is on track to help limit global heating to under 1.5C, has validated hundreds of net zero plans from companies including J Sainsbury plc, John Lewis and Maersk. Until now, the SBTi has ruled out the use of carbon offsets, instead emphasising the importance of deep greenhouse gas emissions cuts.

But on Tuesday, the SBTi board of trustees released plans to allow carbon credits in their net zero standard by permitting companies to use them to offset emissions from their supply chains, known as scope 3 emissions.

The board said there was “ongoing healthy debate on the subject”, but that “when properly supported by policies, standards and procedures based on scientific evidence”, the use of offsets in supply chains could be “an additional tool to tackle climate change”, and so it had decided to extend their use. They said a draft of the new rules would be published by July.

The announcement was met with fury by many SBTi staff and advisers, who say they were not consulted on the decision and that the move is not based on science.

In a letter to management seen by the Guardian, they called for the statement to be withdrawn, and for the resignation of CEO Luiz Fernando do Amaral and any board members who supported the decision.

The statement read: “We stand ready to support any efforts aimed at ensuring that the SBTi does not become a greenwashing platform where decisions are unduly influenced by lobbyists, driven by potential conflicts of interest and poor adherence to existing governance procedures. In the event that our concerns are not addressed, SBTi staff will have no choice but to take further action.”

The SBTi did not respond to request for comment.

The announcement from SBTi’s board of trustees was widely celebrated by carbon market proponents, who say the move could increase demand for offsets. Advocates for carbon markets say that a scaled-up system could help generate much-needed finance for the global south to fund climate-change mitigation and adaptation.

But scientific studies into popular offsetting schemes have found that, in practice, many do almost nothing to limit global heating. It is often unclear how much money from the sale of offsets makes it to communities on the ground.

Ben Rattenbury, a policy analyst at data provider Sylvera, said the move was “a very big deal” for the carbon markets.

“The world can’t afford this transition without carbon credits, so it’s very encouraging to see SBTi open the door for companies to be able to use them for a proportion of their scope 3 emissions reductions targets – while respecting the mitigation hierarchy,” he said.

Reacting to the move, Johan Rockström, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told the Guardian that while there was little to no room for offsetting, he did not think that the SBTi decision was so dramatic.

“I do appreciate the SBTi challenge of how to incentivise companies to take responsibility for scope 3 emissions. In a transition phase, I can see that allowing for offsetting may be the only options as long as scope 1 and 2 emissions follow the carbon law of fossil-fuel phaseout and if the offsets are truly robust – preferably focused on ‘like for like’,” he said.

“SBTi companies are generally engaged in trying to be carbon neutral as fast as possible, and they are leading their sectors when they quantify scope 3 emissions, so giving some opening for how to deal with this in the short run – say, the next five years – is acceptable,” he added.

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 shrill carder (Bombus sylvarum) is the bookmakers’ early favourite for invertebrate of the year. (I’m picturing a smooth, charming worm giving it the bookies’ patter and an embittered elderly grasshopper totting up the odds, disgruntled because his kind wasn’t nominated.)

Here flies one of our smallest bumblebees, a distinctive greyish-green and straw-hued species which is named after the high-pitched buzz it makes when airborne.

Bees, in particular bumblebees, are our most popular insects. We identify with their communal lifestyles, admire their industry, enjoy their association with sunny days and flowers and, increasingly, appreciate their importance as pollinators – for crops, for us, for all life on Earth.

Despite our love for the shrill carder, it is being pushed to extinction in Britain. Once common in the lowlands, it vanished from most places during the 20th century. It is now found in fragmented populations in pockets of Kent, Essex, Somerset, Wiltshire, and south and west Wales that include wetlands, dry grasslands, dunes and brownfield sites.

What these varied places have in common is that they are not intensively farmed. One of its most significant sites in the south-east is the brownfield nature reserve at Canvey Wick, another demonstration of the importance of brownfield sites and why they must not be the default choice for new development.

The shrill carder has declined for much the same reason as has much abundance and biodiversity in Britain: intensive farming practices that have destroyed 98% of flower-rich meadows in England and Wales over the past century.

The shrill carder comes late to the season, with its queens not usually emerging from hibernation until May. Research suggests the bees do not forage as far from the nest as many other species, so it needs flower-rich habitats and undisturbed nesting grounds. It nests in rough, tussocky grassland, within clumps of grass or just below ground.

Colonies are small, with only about 50 workers in a mature nest, and males and daughter queens emerge late, too, at the end of August or September. So the species needs late-flowering plants – plentiful supplies of nectar in September – to ensure the next generation goes into hibernation well fed.

Unfortunately, the intensification of farming has meant the traditional annual hay-cut in July – which enabled some plants to flower again in September – has been replaced with multiple cuts for silage throughout the growing season, reducing the supply of late flowers. And previously untidy, uncut field margins – another source of late nectar and nesting grounds – have been cultivated. It means there is no space for the shrill carder.

Saving this bumblebee is a British conservation priority. Jenny Jones, a Green party member in the Lords, even got a tattoo of the shrill carder to raise awareness of its plight, and there have been plenty of schemes over the past 15 years to boost flower-rich habitat in the areas where it survives.

We excel at saving species on the brink of extinction, but we are less good at changing the big picture. An increasing number of farmers are showing how to produce food and make space for nature, but most farms are still run on intensive lines and will continue to be as long as government rules ensure that is the best and easiest way to make a living.

So vote shrill carder, vote for change and vote for a future for our pollinating insects – and a future for us.

• Welcome to the Guardian’s UK invertebrate of the year competition. Between 2 April and 12 April we are profiling the incredible invertebrates that live in and around the UK. At midnight on Friday 12 April, voting will open to decide which is our favourite invertebrate – for now – with the winner to be announced on Monday 15 April

Schools evacuated due to toxic gas. Smelly tap water at home. Tourist operators and fishers struggling to stay in business. Job losses. Power outages affecting tens of thousands of people at a time. Dangerous health problems. Even lives lost.

Such crises were some of the consequences of sargassum seaweed in the islands of the Caribbean in 2023, which have become common in the region since 2011, when massive blooms began inundating the shorelines in the spring and summer months.

On 18 April 2023 in Guadeloupe, the air-quality monitoring agency Gwad’Air advised vulnerable people to leave some areas because of toxic levels of gas produced by sargassum. Six weeks later, about 600 miles to the north-west, it blocked an intake pipe at an electricity plant at Punta Catalina in the Dominican Republic. One of the facility’s units was forced to temporarily shut down, and a 20-year-old diver named Elías Poling later drowned while trying to fix the problem.

In Jamaica, during the months of July and August, fishers found themselves struggling through another season as floating sargassum blocked their small boats and diminished their catch.

“Sometimes, the boats can’t even come into the creek,” said Richard Osbourne, a Jamaican fisher. “It blocks the whole channel.”

In the British Virgin Islands (BVI), most of Virgin Gorda’s 4,000 residents had to deal with sporadic water shut-offs and odorous tap water for weeks after sargassum was sucked into their main desalination plant last August.

And in Puerto Rico, a highly unusual late-season influx inundated the beaches of the Aguadilla area for the first time, leaving residents such as Christian Natal out of work for a week when it shut down businesses, including the jetski rental company where he works.

These people were among the thousands affected by sargassum blooms last year alone in the Caribbean, where about 70% of the population of about 44 million lives near the coast, according to the World Bank.

Scientists have blamed the explosive growth of the seaweed on global pollution, climate breakdown and other international problems that Caribbean islands did little to cause and lack the political power to resolve.

“Seaweed must be seen as an impact of global warming, with the opening up of the right to compensation on the grounds that we are small, vulnerable islands,” said Sylvie Gustave-dit-Duflo, the vice-president of the Guadeloupe region in charge of environmental issues and president of the French Biodiversity Office.

She added that the countries of the Caribbean Community (Caricom) – which include 15 member states and five associate members that are territories or colonies – recorded economic losses of about $102m due to sargassum in 2022 alone.

“These figures do not take into account the losses recorded in all the other Caribbean countries, including the French islands,” she said. Nor do they take into account yearly costs of beach cleaning estimated to be as high as an additional $210m.

Gustave-dit-Duflo and other experts say the global problem requires a global response. But so far, the Caribbean has failed to coordinate even a region-wide strategy and the international community has largely turned a blind eye. National-level responses, which in most Caribbean countries include a draft management strategy that has not been officially adopted or adequately funded, have done little to take up the slack.

Most sargassum influxes are predictable, and the worst impacts are often preventable. But again and again Caribbean governments have waited to react until the crisis stage. And even then the responses have often focused on protecting the tourism industry while other groups, such as local communities or fishers, are left behind.

As a result, the health, livelihoods and natural environment of residents have been endangered, and hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on reactive emergency responses that experts said could have been better spent on prevention, planning and mitigation.

At the conference of the parties to the UN framework convention on climate change (Cop28) last December in Dubai, Gustave-dit-Duflo helped to unveil a French proposal for the sort of international response she said was urgently needed. It included forming a global coalition to better understand the problem, ensuring that sargassum is on the agenda of major international forums, and continuing previous work in partnership with the EU, among other measures.

But to implement the proposal, governments in the Caribbean and further abroad will have to overcome hurdles that have previously stymied cooperation, including political and legislative differences, funding shortages and debate about whether to prioritise health, the environment, the economy or other areas.

In the meantime, sargassum has already started to arrive on the Caribbean’s shores once again. And once again, the region is not ready.

The ‘great Atlantic sargassum belt’

Sargassum is not a bad thing in itself. Nor is it new to the Caribbean, where it has always washed ashore in modest quantities in the spring and summer, providing habitat for marine life and helping build beaches as it decays.

But in 2011 sargassum suddenly swamped shorelines without warning. It piled several feet high on some beaches. It stank like rotten eggs as it decomposed and shut down resorts, dealing a major blow to a tourism sector in some areas of the Caribbean that were still struggling to recover from the 2008-2009 global recession. It gave coastal residents headaches, nausea and respiratory problems. It disrupted turtle nesting sites and threatened reefs and mangroves.

As sargassum continued to flood the Caribbean and the western coast of Africa 8,000 miles away, scientists made a surprising discovery. Historically, most of the seasonal influx in the Caribbean had come from a 2-million-square-mile gyre in the northern Atlantic Ocean: the Sargasso Sea.

“The Sargasso [Sea] has been around for hundreds of thousands of years, and it’s an ecosystem that was perfect, so to speak,” said Elena Martínez, an oceanographer based in the Dominican Republic. “It was there, surrounded by four oceans gyres – or currents – that kept it perfect.”

But scientists soon learned that most of the new Caribbean influx was not coming from the Sargasso Sea any more: it was coming from a new sargassum ecosystem that had formed in the southern Atlantic Ocean.

The area, named “the great Atlantic sargassum belt” in a 2019 article in Science is now visible from space, and its length often exceeds 5,000 miles, according to scientists who use satellites to track it.

Its cause is still debated. Dr Brian Lapointe, a sargassum researcher, sees the Atlantic belt as a global version of a smaller bloom he witnessed in 1991 that shut down a nuclear power plant and other electricity facilities along the Florida coast.

Since the 1980s the world population has nearly doubled, explained Lapointe, a professor at Florida Atlantic University. This in turn has led to a massive increase in the sargassum-boosting nutrients washing out of major rivers such as the Mississippi in the US, the Amazon and Orinoco in South America, and the Congo in Africa.

“To grow that world population we’ve used these fertilisers, we’ve deforested along all the major rivers in the world,” he said. “The nitrogen has gone up faster than the phosphorus from all these human activities, including wastewater; sewage from the increasing human population.”

Another likely culprit is climate breakdown. Martínez said warming waters may have disrupted the giant gyre that held the Sargasso Sea in place for thousands of years, releasing sargassum to float south and form the new belt.

The new belt also receives additional nutrients from the Sahara dust that frequently blows across the Atlantic, which itself could be exacerbated by climate impacts such as the expansion of deserts as temperatures rise. Some scientists also argue that warming oceans provide a more sargassum-friendly growing environment.

Experts tend to agree that the great Atlantic sargassum belt is here to stay – and that it is a global problem that needs a global response.

That much was clear by 2018, when the belt grew to a record size that was estimated to weigh 22m tonnes and much of the Caribbean saw its worst-ever inundation. The season spurred increasing calls for a collaborative international response.

But broad international action has not materialised. Despite a growing patchwork of studies and projects across the region, various attempts by the UN and others to coordinate a Caribbean-wide response have been largely stalled by funding shortages, geopolitical issues, the Covid-19 pandemic and other factors.

No Caribbean strategy is in place, and a region-wide warning and monitoring centre proposed in 2019 has not been established.

In 2022, the Saint Lucian sargassum researcher Dr Bethia Thomas produced videos about the village of Praslin Bay and two other nearby communities as part of her doctoral thesis. In each video, several residents listed complaints ranging from breathing problems to the destruction of fisheries to corroding jewellery.

“It affects how I breathe, and I also think it affects the children and the way that they function, because sometimes they’re so moody and they cannot sit and do the activities because it’s so awful,” a teacher said in the Praslin Bay video. “And I think it’s affecting us mentally.”

In the absence of a regional strategy, national sargassum management plans have been developed in most countries and territories in the Caribbean, including Saint Lucia, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, the BVI, Anguilla and Montserrat.

But few have been officially adopted at the government level, and even fewer are adequately funded or closely followed.

“Sometimes the small communities get left behind,” Thomas said. “Maybe not intentionally, but in small island developing states with limited resources, you have to prioritise. And perhaps other things – like building a new hospital and constructing new roads, new schools – might take precedence over developing a sargassum management plan.”

Negligible investment from polluting countries

As residents experience health and economic consequences, Caribbean leaders have often complained about a shortage of money to deal with the crisis. Local funds, they said, are tied up with many competing priorities, including handling climate-related impacts such as hurricanes, droughts and flooding.

They also said the cost of the sargassum crisis should be shouldered in part by the larger countries mostly responsible for it, but that accessing international climate financing for the purpose was not easy.

A lack of funding and regional coordination has also stymied efforts to monetise the seaweed by finding a large-scale sustainable use for it.

“Even though there are so many things you can make with sargassum, the actual amount of sargassum that is used for products is still very low,” said Dr Franziska Elmer, a researcher based in Mexico.

Sargassum and Cop28: invasion starts to garner attention

The 2023 sargassum bloom in the Caribbean had mostly abated by 2 December when Gustave-dit-Duflo stood at a podium 8,000 miles away during a side event at the Cop28 meeting in Dubai.

As dignitaries looked on, she issued a stark warning about sargassum. “It is a very invasive and aggressive phenomenon, and through all the Caribbean it affects tourism, and all the economies of the region are based on biodiversity and tourism,” she told those gathered at the French pavilion on the sidelines of the conference. “The Caribbean has a lot of hotspots of biodiversity. So if we don’t act, in 20 years this marine biology, including the reef, will disappear from our coast.”

She said the French government wanted the issue to be discussed on one of the high-level panels of the United Nations conference on the oceans to be held in Nice, France, in June 2025.

“We manage sargassum at a local level, but this is not a phenomenon of an island,” she said. “It is the whole basin of the Caribbean and a part of the Atlantic. This is why all the countries that are impacted, we need to create an international coalition to be able to find means and ways to act.”

As countries work to establish an international response, time is of the essence for residents of the coastal Caribbean.

Shortly after Cop28 drew to a close, scientists at the University of South Florida estimated the sargassum floating in the tropical Atlantic Ocean at about 5m metric tonnes, compared with a December average of about 2m. By February, the mass had increased to about 9m tonnes – the second-highest quantity ever recorded for the month.

In other words, another record-setting sargassum season could have just started.

• This article, coordinated by the Puerto Rico Center for Investigative Journalism and produced by the BVI Beacon, RCI Group Guadeloupe, América Futura, El País América, Television Jamaica and the Virgin Islands Daily News, is published here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now. Reporters Rafael René Díaz Torres (Centro de Periodismo Investigativo), and Mariela Mejía (Diario Libre) collaborated in this investigation. This investigation is the result of a fellowship awarded by the Center for Investigative Journalism’s Training Institute and was made possible in part with the support of Open Society Foundations.

Joe Biden has vowed that US commitment to defend Israel against Iran was “ironclad” as concerns rose in Washington that a “significant” Iranian strike could happen within days, in retaliation for the bombing of an Iranian consular building in Damascus.

US and allied officials fear that a strike is imminent and could come in the form of a direct missile launch from Iran, rather than an attack through a proxy like Hezbollah in Lebanon. Israel has vowed to respond in kind to such a direct strike, raising the prospect of a regional war, which US officials now believe is more likely than at any point since the beginning of the Gaza conflict on 7 October.

Biden’s pledge of support to Israel at the White House, intended as a deterrent, came a few hours after Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, repeated a threat to strike back against Israel over the Damascus bombing that killed 12 people, including Gen Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a senior figure in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and six other guard members.

“When they attacked our consulate area, it was like they attacked our territory,” Khamenei said, in remarks broadcast by Iranian state TV. “The evil regime must be punished, and it will be punished.”

Israel’s foreign minister, Israel Katz, responded in a post on the X social media platform, vowing that: “If Iran attacks from its territory, Israel will respond and attack in Iran.”

Israel has not formally taken responsibility for the 1 April bombing, but Israeli and US officials have made clear it carried out the strike.

Israel and Iran have been trading blows in Lebanon and Syria for months, but Biden administration officials fear that the 1 April Damascus bombing on an Iranian diplomatic building, which Tehran considers its own territory, has significantly raised the threat of the Gaza war widening into a broader conflict.

Since the Damascus bombing, Tehran has sent Washington messages attributing ultimate blame for the attack on the US and warning the US to stay out of its confrontation with Israel.

Biden’s pledge to Israel on the White House lawn, in a joint appearance with the Japanese prime minister, Fumio Kishida, appeared to be a response to that warning, insisting the US would not stay on the sidelines.

“We also want to address the Iranian threat to launch a significant – they’re threatening to launch a significant attack in Israel,” Biden said. “As I told Prime Minister Netanyahu, our commitment to Israel’s security against these threats from Iran and its proxies is ironclad. Let me say it again, ironclad. We’re gonna do all we can to protect Israel’s security.”

The Biden administration is seeking to head off a direct Iranian attack by messaging that Tehran cannot assume that US forces in the region, reinforced significantly since the start of the Gaza war, would stay out of a conflict with Israel.

“We’ve been clear that we do not want this conflict to escalate or spread further in the region. We’ll continue to undertake diplomatic efforts to ensure that remains the case,” the spokesperson said. “We also retain a military presence in the region to deter those who seek to take advantage of the conflict.”

Secretary of state Antony Blinken reiterated that message on Wednesday in a call with Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant, in which he made clear the US would stand with Israel against any threats by Iran, the state department said.

Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli diplomat and adviser to prime ministers Ehud Barak and Shimon Peres, said: “The prevailing conventional wisdom is that because the attack in Damascus was directly against Iran, then that means that Iran will have to respond to retaliate directly, rather than via a proxy.

“From what I’m hearing here, the most telling sign is that Khamenei has mentioned the need to retaliate twice in the last week in his sermons or whatever,” Pinkas said. “Usually, they don’t do that. Usually they are much more opaque and only commit to a response one day at the right moment and in the right place.”

Among the possible targets are Israeli embassies around the world, and they have been taking extra security precautions in the wake of the Damascus bombing, but US officials also believe that a direct strike on military or government targets on Israeli territory is also a significant possibility.

The US and Israeli militaries and intelligence agencies are in constant contact about the threat. Axios reported that the head of US Central Command, Gen Erik Kurilla, is due in Israel on Thursday to discuss coordination with his Israeli counterparts and the defence minister, Yoav Gallant.

The ability of the Biden administration to rein in an Israeli response to an Iranian attack would very much depend on the specifics. If Iranian retaliation comes in the form of an assault on an Israeli embassy, or if an incoming Iranian missile or drone is intercepted, it may be possible to prevent escalation, officials said, but if an Iranian strike caused multiple casualties inside Israel, it would be very much harder.

The world’s coal power capacity grew for the first time since 2019 last year, despite warnings that coal plants need to close at a rate of at least 6% each year to avoid a climate emergency.

A report by Global Energy Monitor found that coal power capacity grew by 2% last year, driven by an increase in new coal plants across China and a slowdown of plant closures in Europe and the US.

About 69.5 gigawatts (GW) of coal plant capacity came online last year, of which two-thirds were built in China, according to the report. There were also plants built in Indonesia, India, Vietnam, Japan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, South Korea, Greece and Zimbabwe.

Meanwhile, a slowdown in coal plant shutdowns in the US and Europe led to more than 21GW retiring last year. This resulted in a net annual increase of almost 48.5GW for the year, the highest since 2016.

The authors of the report said coal plants needed to shut at a faster pace, and that China needed to adopt stricter controls on its expansion of capacity.

Flora Champenois, a Global Energy Monitor analyst, said: “Otherwise we can forget about meeting our goals in the Paris agreement and reaping the benefits that a swift transition to clean energy will bring,.”

Climate scientists have said all coal plants should be shut by 2040 – unless they are fitted with effective carbon-removal technology – if governments hope to limit global heating to within 1.5C of pre-industrialised levels.

This would require an average of 126GW of coal plants to retire from the current fleet of 2,130GW every year for the next 17 years, according to the report, or the equivalent of about two plants a week.

Champenois described last year’s coal plant expansion as an “anomaly” as more signs point to it “reversing course”. “But countries that have coal plants to retire need to do so more quickly, and countries that have plans for new coal plants must make sure these are never built.”

Research by Capital Economics suggests China’s appetite for coal power may reduce as low-carbon options accelerate.

The report found that a resurgence in hydropower this year, combined with China’s expansion of wind, solar and nuclear power, could mark the start of a steady decline in its coal demand.

Coal plant retirements were expected to pick up speed across Europe and the US this year, and fewer countries were beginning construction of new plants, Champenois said.

The report found that construction started on less than 4GW of new projects outside China last year, a quarter of the annual average between 2015 and 2022 for the same set of countries.

Concern that the Great Barrier Reef may be suffering the most severe mass coral bleaching event on record has escalated after a conservation group released footage showing damage up to 18 metres below the surface.

Dr Selina Ward, a marine biologist and former academic director of the University of Queensland’s Heron Island Research Station, said it was the worst bleaching she had seen in 30 years working on the reef, and that some coral was starting to die.

The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority last week said aerial surveys of more than 1,000 individual reefs revealed more than half were rated as having high or very high levels of bleaching, and a smaller number in the south – less than 10% of the total – had extreme bleaching. Only about a quarter were relatively unaffected.

It confirmed the 2,300-kilometre reef system was experiencing its fifth mass bleaching event in eight years. The authority said sea surface temperatures had been between 0.5C and 1.5C hotter than expected for this time of year.

The Australian Marine Conservation Society on Thursday released video and photos that it said showed bleaching on the southern part of the reef extended to greater depths than had been previously reported this year.

Ward said the impact of bleaching had been extensive across 16 sites that she visited in the reef’s southern section, affecting coral species that had usually been resistant to bleaching. Some coral had started to die, a process that usually takes weeks or months after bleaching occurs.

“I feel devastated,” she said. “I’ve been working on the reef since 1992 but this [event], I’m really struggling with.”

Quick Guide

What is coral bleaching?

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Coral bleaching describes a process where the coral animal expels the algae that live in their tissues and give them their colour and much of their nutrients.

Without their algae, a coral’s white skeleton can be seen through their translucent flesh, giving a bleached appearance.

Mass coral bleaching over large areas, first noticed in the 1980s around the Caribbean, is caused by rising ocean temperatures.

Some corals also display fluorescent colours under stress when they release a pigment that filters light. Sunlight also plays a role in triggering bleaching.

Corals can survive bleaching if temperatures are not too extreme or prolonged.  But extreme marine heatwaves can kill corals outright.

Coral bleaching can also have sub-lethal effects, including increased susceptibility to disease and reduced rates of growth and reproduction.

Scientists say the gaps between bleaching events are becoming too short to allow reefs to recover.

Coral reefs are considered one of the planet’s ecosystems most at risk from global heating. Reefs support fisheries that feed hundreds of millions of people, as well as supporting major tourism industries.

The world’s biggest coral reef system – Australia’s Great Barrier Reef – has suffered seven mass bleaching events since 1998, of which five were in the past decade. 

Ward said sea temperatures at two of the sites she visited were the same at the surface and 20 metres below the surface. This was “very unusual”, and reinforced the need for rapid action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, she said.

“What are we doing to stop the reef from being lost?” Ward said. “We cannot expect to save the Great Barrier Reef and be opening new fossil fuel developments. It’s time to act and there are no more excuses.”

Coral bleaching occurs when the coral becomes heat stressed and ejects the tiny marine algae, known as zooxanthellae, that live in its tissue and give most of its colour and energy. With the zooxanthellae gone, the coral starves and its bone-white calcium skeleton becomes visible.

If the elevated temperature doesn’t last long, the coral can recover. Otherwise, it starts to die. In the most severe cases, the bleaching is skipped and the coral dies almost immediately, usually turning a dirty brown.

Terry Hughes, an emeritus professor at James Cook University and longtime reef bleaching researcher, said the aerial surveys showed “the most widespread and most severe mass bleaching and mortality event ever recorded on the Great Barrier Reef”.

He said the scale of the damage was comparable to 2016, the worst previous year experienced, but there were now fewer individual reefs untouched by bleaching between southern Queensland and the Torres Strait. He said the area south of Townsville had been particularly badly hit this year.

“We’re already seeing extensive loss of corals at the time of peak bleaching,” he said. “It’s heartbreaking to see damage as severe as this as soon as this.”

Hughes said every part of the reef system had now bleached at least once since 1998. Some reefs had bleached three or four times. He said the cumulative damage made it harder for reefs to recover and more likely they would succumb.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2018 found that most tropical coral reefs would be lost if global heating was limited to an average of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels and 99% were likely to be lost of heating reached 2C. They found they would be at high risk at 1.2C, a level that may have already been reached.

Dr Lissa Schindler, an ecologist and the reef campaign manager with the Australian Marine Conservation Society, called on the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority to release maps showing the extent and severity of the bleaching so the public had a true picture of the scale of the impact.

Schindler also urged the authority, which she described as the reef’s custodian, to play a greater role in advocating for stronger action on emissions.

She said in the past the authority had called for “strong and fast national action” to deal with the climate crisis, but a more recent climate statement it issued focused on global action and did not say anything about Australia needing to increase what it was doing.

“If the Albanese government is serious about its commitment to Unesco to protect the reef then it must commit to net zero emissions by 2035 and stop approving new fossil fuel projects,” she said.

Scientists have said the government’s emissions reduction targets – a 43% cut compared with 2005 levels and net zero by 2050 – are consistent with global action that could lead to 2C of global heating.

Interviewed on ABC’s Radio National on Wednesday, the environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, said the government was “very concerned about the bleaching that we see at the moment, sadly, not just on the Great Barrier Reef, but right around the world”.

She said the government was doing “whatever we can” to get to net zero emissions. “We need to protect the reef because it’s … unique in the world and also 64,000 people rely on it for their work,” she said.

On a gripping, occasionally frantic night at the Parc des Princes, Paris Saint-Germain and Barcelona produced a game that felt like the opposite of the shared “Barça DNA” Xavi had spoken about in the build-up to this quarter-final.

Never mind control, patterns and a fight for space. This was an increasingly wild game, building from a mannered start into a second half of sweeping mob-handed attacks, feather-light defending and chances that simply came and went, posts clipped, shots blocked in desperation.

By the end Barcelona had done enough to deserve their 3-2 lead heading back to the Camp Nou. Xavi spoke about control afterwards and said he was “very happy” with the defensive work of his players. But nobody who watched the more unbound parts of this game would see anything other than goals on both sides in the second leg. Frankly this could have been anything.

Security around the Parc des Princes had been beefed up before the game in response to the threat from the terror group Islamic State. Drones circled the sky. Heavily tooled-up police occupied the corners. Paris 2024 is still planning a mass city-centre Olympic opening ceremony a hundred days from now. It keeps on being scaled back. Expect a little more of that from here.

The Parc was rocking at kick-off, drenched in a lengthy pre-match Star Wars-themed son-et-lumière show that involved playing the Imperial March quite a lot, and climaxed with the unfurling of an enormous militaristic Yoda banner. And why not?

Barcelona had Frenkie de Jong back from injury. PSG had Marquinhos covering at right-back again and Marco Asensio starting through the centre of the attack.

The home team set out to stretch the pitch early on, wingers staying very wide, trying to disrupt the central yellow box. But it was Barça who had the first real sight of goal on 20 minutes after some laboured spells of PSG possession. Raphinha, who had a wonderful game here, won a corner on the right. Robert Lewandowski leapt above Gianluigi Donnarumma’s flailing fist to send a  looping header towards goal, only for Nuno Mendes to hook the ball clear.

PSG were stodgy on the ball, always funnelling it back towards the two obvious outlets, Kylian Mbappé, who did very little in this game, and the more sprightly Ousmane Dembélé. Luis Enrique has been a convincing coach of PSG. The fans love him. The team are on a 27-game unbeaten run. Denuded of its basking superstars, this PSG project has begun to resemble an actual sport-style team-type object, baroque attacking riches sacrificed for energy and a more basic set of patterns.

Barça looked the more supple attacking unit, and they duly took the lead on 35 minutes with a goal made and scored by their three-man front line. Lewandowski broke a flimsy challenge close to halfway and shuttled a pass out to Lamine Yamal on the right. His cross was deflected back towards Raphinha, who finished beautifully, lofting the ball beyond the covering blue shirts into the top corner.

Luis Enrique rejigged during the break, bringing on the jet-heeled Bradley Barcola for Asensio and shifting Dembélé to a roving No 9 role. It worked almost immediately, Dembélé cutting inside and lashing a thrilling left-footed shot high into the net past Marc-André ter Stegen.

Within five minutes of the restart the game had turned on its head. PSG’s second goal was beautifully constructed, Fabián Ruiz playing a lovely little delayed pass to meet Vitinha’s run through the inside left channel. He slid the ball into the corner of the net.

Faced with some sustained aggression Barcelona’s entire defensive structure had simply dissolved like an over-dunked digestive biscuit. For a while they were clinging on, thrown by the more potent angles created by Dembélé’s runs from the centre. Barcola veered in from the right like a downhill slalom skier and saw a powerful shot palmed up on to the bar.

Xavi responded by sending on João Félix and Pedri, and just as quickly Barcelona were level. This was a beautiful goal, albeit conceived and executed under zero pressure from the PSG midfield. Pedri had time to loft a lovely, delicate pass down the centre. Raphinha’s volley into the corner on the run was a dreamy, high-craft piece of finishing.

By this stage Barcelona had Ilkay Gündogan playing up front with Lewandowski, with Félix and Pedri just behind, and there was a hugely engaging sense of chaos in the air. Dembélé shimmied through on the left and clipped a shot on to the post.

But with 76 minutes gone it was 3-2 to the visitors. Andreas Christensen (having only just sneaked on to the pitch) headed straight in from a corner with his first touch of the ball, again unmolested by any obvious defensive attention. Barça hung on to their lead at the death, but only just. This one has plenty of road left to run.

UK householders considering swapping their gas boiler for an electric heat pump could see how they work by visiting an early adopter in their area.

A new service aims to help would-be heat pump owners to book a visit with households that already have one installed, through a website launched by the innovation charity Nesta.

The site, VisitAHeatPump.com, allows users to locate one of 150 households that have signed up to host interested visitors to look at their low-carbon heating systems.

Currently London and central Scotland have the highest concentration of heat pump hosts, while East Anglia is “becoming a heat pump hotspot” with 11 hosts advertising on the platform so far, Nesta says.

Katy King, a director at Nesta, said the service would make it easier for prospective heat pump owners to see how the devices worked in a real-life setting, and ask any questions they may have.

Q&A

What are heat pumps and why is the UK government pushing them?

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In simple terms, an electric heat pump works like a reverse fridge, extracting warmth from the outside air, the ground or a nearby water source before concentrating the heat and transferring it indoors. They can usually be found outside a home, and they look like a standard air-conditioning unit.

About 85% of UK homes use gas boilers for heating, making it one of the most polluting sectors of the economy. The fossil fuels used in our homes for heating, hot water and cooking make up more than a fifth of the UK’s carbon emissions, meaning low-carbon alternatives are critical if the UK government hopes to meet its climate targets.

Jillian Ambrose

Photograph: KBImages/https://www.alamy.com

“We hope that if more people can see heat pumps in real-life settings, then more people will have confidence that a heat pump is the right fit to heat their home,” she said. “Changing the way we heat our homes is one of the most meaningful things we can do to cut carbon emissions. Many homeowners are keen to make green improvements but don’t get the opportunity to see how low-carbon technologies, such as heat pumps, work in action.”

The government has identified heat pumps as a crucial technology to help cut carbon emissions from heating, which makes up more than a third of the UK’s total greenhouse gas emissions.

Ministers aim to have 600,000 pumps installed a year by 2028, but take-up has been hampered by high costs and scepticism of the new technology. In response, the government has increased its grant scheme to £7,500 to help bring down costs to levels more comparable to conventional gas boilers.

Martin Callanan, the minister for energy efficiency and green finance, said: “This fantastic new service will help families work out whether a heat pump is right for them, and we’ll continue supporting households to make the switch with our £7,500 grant. We already know that heat pumps are three times more efficient than gas boilers and demand is soaring, with applications to our boiler upgrade scheme up 75% on last February,” he said.

The amount of food being produced by British farmers has been badly hit by the record-breaking rainfall, it has been reported.

Farming groups say that both livestock and crops have been affected by the “exceptionally wet” past 18 months, meaning the UK will be reliant on imports for wheat in the coming year and potentially beyond.

According to the Met Office, 1,695.9mm of rain fell from October 2022 to March 2024, the highest amount for any 18-month period in England since records began.

We want to know from those working in the UK agriculture sector if your production has been affected by the weather? What is the impact on crops and yields? How are you dealing with fields that have become waterlogged?