The majority of UK dairy farms are breaking pollution rules, with vast amounts of cow manure being spilled into rivers.

When animal waste enters the river, it causes a buildup of the nutrients found in the effluent, such as nitrates and phosphates. These cause algal blooms, which deplete the waterway of oxygen and block sunlight, choking fish and other aquatic life.

Sixty nine per cent of the 2,475 English dairy farms inspected by the Environment Agency between 2020 and 2021 were in breach of environmental regulations, according to new data released under freedom of information laws.

The problem is prevalent across the UK; in Wales 80% of the 83 dairy farms inspected by Natural Resources Wales between 2020 and 2022 were non-compliant with anti-pollution regulations. In Northern Ireland 50% of the 339 dairy farms inspected by the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs between 2020 and 2022 were not compliant, and in Scotland 60% of the 114 dairy farms initially inspected by the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency between 2020 and 2023 were in breach of regulations.

Campaigners have linked this pollution scandal to that caused by the sewage crisis because it also involves ageing infrastructure and intensification of effluent discharges.

They say that pricing pressures from supermarkets, where farmers are offered very little for milk, have caused producers to intensify their production by increasing the number of cows they keep.

Charles Watson, the chair of the charity River Action, said: “The unacceptable pollution levels caused by the UK dairy industry is not dissimilar to the current UK sewage pollution crisis: aged infrastructure, designed for much lower volumes of effluent, being overwhelmed by the combination of intensification of use and more volatile weather conditions.”

“With a herd of 50 cows calculated to be capable of emitting the equivalent amount of pollution as a human settlement of 10,000 people, it is hardly surprising that the dairy industry is placing an unsustainable pollution burden on many river catchments across the country. Meanwhile, yet another chapter in the British river pollution scandal unfolds, our impotent regulators continue to watch on in a solely advisory capacity, and the giant supermarket groups happily count their profits at the cost of the continuous degradation of the environment.”

River Action is calling for dairy processors to offer incentives to farmers who produce milk responsibly, either by less intensive farming or by investing to dispose of cow muck responsibly.

It is also asking for a strengthened response from regulators, asking them to fully enforce existing anti-pollution rules. Many farms go years without inspections because regulators do not have enough staff owing to underfunding. River Action has asked the devolved national bodies responsible to expand and extend existing grant schemes to improve the infrastructure for slurry management.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said: “We have set ambitious legally binding targets to reduce water pollution from agriculture and are taking wide-ranging action to clean up our waterways. This includes investing £74m in slurry infrastructure to help farmers cut agricultural runoff and rolling out new farming schemes to thousands of farmers to deliver environmental benefits and adopt more sustainable practices – all to reduce the amount of nutrients entering rivers.”

Research has estimated the health impacts from the coal-fired power plants that operate across India.

Six hundred coal power plants generate more than 70% of India’s electricity. Despite regulations passed in 2015, fewer than 5% of these plants operate with modern systems to clean up air pollutants from their chimneys. In China, 95% of coal-fired power plants were fitted with clean-up technologies by 2013.

Dr Asif Qureshi of the Indian Institute of Technology in Hyderabad and his team used a computer simulation of air pollution across India to test what would have happened if new technologies had been fitted to the power plants. They looked at two different technologies and found that controlling sulphur was the most effective single step, but applying both technologies together yielded the greatest gains.

As many as 720,000 early deaths could have been avoided over a 10-year period if the power plants had been cleaned up in 2010. Particle pollution would have reduced by up to 11% across the country. The research team found that people living around power plants would have experienced the greatest benefit, up to a 28% reduction in particle pollution, leading to about a 17% reduction in early deaths.

Installation and running costs are often cited as a reason to delay. Qureshi’s team therefore compared the cost of clean-up systems to the cost of the lives lost.

The capital and operating cost were estimated to be between $19.5bn and $32.8bn (about £16-26bn) a year. The benefits depend on the monetary value assigned to a human life. Using a range of international values the researchers calculated a benefit of between $18bn and as much as $604bn US dollars (about £14-481bn).

Qureshi said: “Even at this screening level there appears to be a strong case to implement clean-up technologies. If the industry or the policymakers could buy into this way of looking at the problem, maybe pollution control can be accelerated.”

Prof Maureen Cropper of the University of Maryland in the US led an earlier study on the impacts of planned coal power stations in India. Rather than focus on power plants that were already built, Cropper’s team looked at future options.

Cropper said: “There are large health co-benefits from switching to renewable energy from coal-fired power plants. Not building the future coal capacity that was planned in India in 2019 would avoid at least 844,000 premature deaths over the lives of these plants.”

Pub gardens often feature barren patios, characterless lawns and – worst of all – fake grass.

Now, the Royal Horticultural Society is asking landlords across the country to plant up their patios, saying they are full of untapped potential for urban green space and wildlife.

The charity, which also hosts the Chelsea flower show, this week announced the winner of its pub garden competition at its urban plant show in Manchester. The community-owned Star Inn in Salford will be the recipient of a “pub garden for bees” designed by Emma Tipping.

Tipping has chosen easy-to-maintain plants, with some evergreen ferns and shrubs as well as bright flowers such as geraniums for the pollinators, to make it attractive year-round.

The gardener said she focused on bee-friendly plants because “Manchester is famous for its bees” and they were an accessible way for people to help pollinators.

The design includes a “bee pub garden” with rocky areas for bees to rest on, nectar-rich plants and small watering holes.

Tipping said more pubs should green up their gardens because “it’s so rare to have a green space like this in an urban area that is being used, enjoyed and loved already, that has so much potential and can be relatively easily planted”.

She said she hoped other pubs would be inspired: “They can use this garden as a blueprint – it’s so hard to know where to start sometimes with planting, for those who haven’t done it before.”

Mick Smith, the licence holder for the pub, said the planting would be an asset to customers, many of whom do not have gardens of their own.

“If you come to our pub,” he said, “you’ll see that it’s a sun spot and in summertime, hardly anyone actually sits in the pub itself, they’re all sitting on the patio area, and it’s become like the lounge room and it really does deserve to have some decent plants. And for the good of the community at large, and for the bees.”

He said they hoped to tempt birds, insects and other nature from the nearby Cliff conservation area with their planting.

Tipping said one of the reasons the Star won was because it had a scheme whereby volunteers tided the patio, and one of the aims of the competition was to get people involved in gardening.

“There might be people in the local area that would love to do gardening but not have the space to do it if it’s an urban area,” she said. “So it gives something back to people who could look after it … they could come and do the gardening and have a little bit of space outside where they can be a bit creative.”

Perfect pub plants: a selection from Emma Tipping’s plant list

• Herbs including lemon balm, fennel, oregano and chives.

• Ferns including Asplenium scolopendrium, Polystichum aculeatum and Polypodium vulgare.

• Shrubs including Fatsia polycarpa “Green fingers”, Mahonia “Soft caress”, Pieris “Flaming silver”.

• Perennials including Euphorbia x martini, Geranium macrorrhizum “Spessart”, Heuchera “Black beauty”.

Ocean waves crashing on the world’s shores emit more PFAS into the air than the world’s industrial polluters, new research has found, raising concerns about environmental contamination and human exposure along coastlines.

The study measured levels of PFAS released from the bubbles that burst when waves crash, spraying aerosols into the air. It found sea spray levels were hundreds of thousands times higher than levels in the water.

The contaminated spray likely affects groundwater, surface water, vegetation, and agricultural products near coastlines that are far from industrial sources of PFAS, said Ian Cousins, a Stockholm University researcher and the study’s lead author.

“There is evidence that the ocean can be an important source [of PFAS air emissions],” Cousins said. “It is definitely impacting the coastline.”

PFAS are a class of 15,000 chemicals used across dozens of industries to make products resistant to water, stains and heat. Though the compounds are highly effective, they are also linked to cancer, kidney disease, birth defects, decreased immunity, liver problems and a range of other serious diseases.

They are dubbed “forever chemicals” because they do not naturally break down and are highly mobile once in the environment, so they continuously move through the ground, water and air. PFAS have been detected in all corners of the globe, from penguin eggs in Antarctica to polar bears in the Arctic.

The Stockholm researchers several years ago found that PFAS released from ocean waves crashing are released into the air around shorelines, then can travel thousands of kilometers through the atmosphere before the chemicals return to land.

The new research looked at levels in the sea spray as waves crash by testing ocean samples between Southampton in the UK and Chile. The chemicals’ levels were higher in the northern hemisphere in general because it is more industrialized and there is not much mixing of water across the equator, Cousins said.

It is unclear what the findings mean for human exposure. Inhalation of PFAS is an issue, but how much of the chemicals are breathed in, and air concentrations further from the waves, is still unknown.

Previous non-peer-reviewed research has found a correlation between higher PFAS levels in vegetation samples and proximity to the ocean, Cousin said, and his team is undertaking a similar study.

He said that the results show how the chemicals are powerful surfactants that concentrate on the surface of water, which helps explain why they move from the ocean to the air and atmosphere.

“We thought PFAS were going to go into the ocean and would disappear, but they cycle around and come back to land, and this could continue for a long time into the future,” he said.

A flagship UN report on livestock emissions is facing calls for retraction from two key experts it cited who say that the paper “seriously distorted” their work.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) misused their research to underestimate the potential of reduced meat intake to cut agricultural emissions, according to a letter sent to the FAO by the two academics, which the Guardian has seen.

Paul Behrens, an associate professor at Leiden University and Matthew Hayek, an assistant professor at New York University, both accuse the FAO study of systematic errors, poor framing, and highly inappropriate use of source data.

Hayek told the Guardian: “The FAO’s errors were multiple, egregious, conceptual and all had the consequence of reducing the emissions mitigation possibilities from dietary change far below what they should be. None of the mistakes had the opposite effect.”

Agriculture accounts for 23% of global greenhouse gas emissions, most of which are attributable to livestock in the form of methane from burps and manure, and deforestation for grazing and feed crops. As global meat production leapt by 39% in the first two decades of this century, agricultural emissions also rose by 14%.

At the Cop28 climate summit in December, the FAO published the third in a series of studies of the livestock emissions problem. As well as reducing the FAO’s estimate of livestock’s contribution to overall global heating for a third consecutive time, it used a paper written by Behrens and others in 2017 to argue that shifts away from meat eating could only reduce global agri-food emissions by between 2 and 5%.

Behrens’s paper from 2017 assessed the environmental impacts of government-backed nationally recommended diets (NRDs) of the time, which have since become outdated. Many countries, such as China and Denmark, have drastically reduced their recommended meat intake since then, while Germany now proposes a 75% plant-based diet in its NRD.

Behrens says “voluminous evidence” from larger environmental reports which recommended reductions in meat content, such as the Eat-Lancet Planetary Health Diet, were ignored, according to the letter.

“The scientific consensus at the moment is that dietary shifts are the biggest leverage we have to reduce emissions and other damage caused by our food system,” Behrens told the Guardian. “But the FAO chose the roughest and most inappropriate approach to their estimates and framed it in a way that was very useful for interest groups seeking to show that plant-based diets have a small mitigation potential compared to alternatives.”

Of more than 200 climate scientists surveyed by Behrens and Hayek for a recent paper, 78% said it was important for livestock herd sizes to peak by 2025 if the world was to stand a chance of preventing dangerous global heating.

As well as using obsolete NRDs, the scientists say the FAO report “systematically underestimates” the emissions-cutting potential of dietary shifts through what the letter calls a “series of methodological errors”.

The authors say these include: double-counting meat emissions until 2050, mixing different baseline years in analyses, and channelling data inputs that inappropriately favour diets allowing increased global meat consumption. The FAO paper also skips over the opportunity cost of carbon sequestration on non-farmed land.

Hayek said the FAO inappropriately cited a report he co-authored that measured all agri-food emissions, and applied it to livestock emissions alone. “It wasn’t just like comparing apples to oranges,” he said. “It was like comparing really small apples to really big oranges.”

Correspondingly, the mitigation potential from farming less livestock was underestimated by a factor of between 6 and 40, he said.

The FAO is the world’s primary source for agricultural data, and its reports are routinely used by authoritative bodies such as the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But the FAO is also mandated to increase livestock productivity so as to bolster nutrition and food security, arguably creating a conflict of interests.

Former officials have accused the FAO of censoring and sabotaging their work when it challenged livestock industry positions. A recent FAO roadmap to making the sector sustainable also omitted the option of reducing meat intake from a list of 120 policy interventions.

That paper received praise from meat industry lobbyists, one of whom called it “music to our ears” when it was released at Cop28.

An FAO spokesperson said: “As a knowledge-based organisation, FAO is fully committed to ensuring accuracy and integrity in scientific publications, especially given the significant implications for policymaking and public understanding.

“We would like to assure you that the report in question has undergone a rigorous review process with both an internal and external double-blind peer review to ensure that the research meets the highest standards of quality and accuracy, and that potential biases are minimised. FAO will look into the issues raised by the academics and undertake a technical exchange of views with them.”

The sound of an earthworm is a distinctive rasping and scrunching. Ants sound like the soothing patter of rain. A passing, tunnelling vole makes a noise like a squeaky dog’s toy repeatedly being chewed.

On a spring day at Rothamsted Research, an agricultural research institution in Hertfordshire, singing skylarks and the M1 motorway are competing for the airways. But the attention here is on the soundscapes underfoot: a rich ecosystem with its own alien sounds. More than half of the planet’s species live in the soil, and we are just starting to tune into what they are up to. Beetle larvae, millipedes, centipedes and woodlice have other sound signatures, and scientists are trying to decipher which sounds come from which creatures.

In a field divided up into test strips, Carlos Abrahams pushes a sensor the length of a knitting needle into the soil. With a pair of headphones on, he listens to the “poor man’s rainforest”: a dark landscape of miniature caves, tunnels and decomposing matter stewing away under our feet.

“A few ticks and clicks going on,” says Abrahams, an ecoacoustics specialist from Baker Consultants, as he listens in.

Abrahams and scientists from the University of Warwick are building up libraries of subterranean sounds. The soil makes different noises depending on the season and whether it’s night or day. Even in the afternoon when the soil has warmed up, sounds get richer, research suggests.

“The soil is such a mystery,” says Dr Jacqueline Stroud, from the University of Warwick’s Crop Centre. “This is like opening the door and seeing what is going on below ground. It’s a different way of exploring the world.”

Until recently, soil had been a relative blank spot for monitoring species abundance. Farmers and gardeners hoping to find out how healthy their soils were had to dig up spadefuls and carry out laborious tests.

Last year, a study found soil was the single most species-rich habitat on Earth, with more than half of all species living in it. But only a fraction have been identified, and most are too small to see. Soundscapes are becoming an increasingly popular way of monitoring wildlife abundance, above ground, beneath the earth and underwater.

Noisy soil is generally healthier because it contains a greater range of bugs and worms busying around. Soil organisms alter and improve the structure of soil by passing nutrients between one another and creating an environment that is well ventilated and diverse. These webs provide food, fibre and clean water for people – topsoil is where 95% of the planet’s food is grown.

Soils that have little biodiversity are more fragile: they have lost the structure and connections that keep particles together. This means they are more likely to be washed away by floods or blown away by strong winds. An estimated 24bn tonnes of fertile soil is lost every year through intensive farming, according to a UN-backed study, the Global Land Outlook.

Farmers have repeatedly asked for more efficient ways of measuring the abundance of earthworms, which are a good indicator of the heath of soils, according to researchers.

Baker Consultants and the University of Warwick have funding for a two-year research project developing a recording unit prototype. The aim is to record soil sounds at “big data” scales.

On the land Abrahams is testing, scientists are trialling more ecological ways of farming, including crop rotations with legumes and higher proportions of oats. In total there are 70 scientists working on this bit of land, marked out in 66 plots of 24m by 24m, finding out new things about soil structure, viruses, microbes and fungi – making it among the most studied soil in the world. “It’s a unique outdoor laboratory,” says Kim Hammond-Kosack from Rothamsted Research, who set up the experiments.

Abrahams and Stroud’s teams started their sampling at Rothamsted in October last year. Each month they take two recordings on each of the plots, measuring how activity above the ground affects what is happening in the soil.

Dr Simon Butler from the University of East Anglia has been listening to the soil before and after the application of zebra dung in Eswatini (previously known as Swaziland). The soil fizzed with activity post-application. “I’ve never really considered the sound of soils, so it was fascinating to hear how the acoustic properties change in response to the presence of fresh dung,” he says.

The sounds being produced are within the lower range of human hearing, so it’s possible there are sounds in the soil we haven’t heard yet. Early research from Switzerland shows soils were producing the most complex sounds in spring and summer, which declined in autumn and winter. Abrahams’ previous research has shown that soils in restored forests in the UK seem to have a greater diversity of sounds than soil from deforested plots. He says: “As a general rule, the more diverse it is above ground, the more that is going on in the soil.”

In January, researchers published what they believe is the first paper listening to tropical forest soils, which are among the most biodiverse habitats in the world. Like others, they documented multiple mysterious sounds. The next task is to create a library of soil sounds so they can work out what they’re actually listening to.

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

Good news for lazy gardeners: one labour-saving tweak could almost double the number of butterflies in your garden, according to a new scientific study – let the grass grow long.

In recent years nature lovers have been extolling the benefits of relaxed lawn maintenance with the growing popularity of the #NoMowMay campaign. Now an analysis of six years of butterfly sightings across 600 British gardens has provided the first scientific evidence that wilder lawns boost butterfly numbers.

The benefits of leaving areas of grass long were most pronounced in gardens within intensively farmed landscapes, with up to 93% more butterflies found and a greater range of species. Gardens with long grass in urban areas showed an 18% boost to butterfly abundance.

“We wanted to be able to give tried and tested gardening advice that will benefit butterflies, as we know lots of people want to help,” said Dr Richard Fox, the head of science at Butterfly Conservation and a co-author of the study, published in the journal Science of the Total Environment. “This study proves, for the first time, that allowing a patch of grass to grow long will attract more butterflies into your garden.”

The study found that another butterfly bonus for gardens was flowering ivy, which can flourish on walls in urban backyards. This increased the numbers of the holly blue – the caterpillars feed on ivy and holly – and the red admiral and comma, which benefit from its flowers as a crucial nectar source in autumn.

According to the study, long grass in gardens attracts more butterfly species whose caterpillars feed on grasses. These include meadow browns, gatekeepers, speckled woods, ringlets and small skippers. Fox said this suggested the boost in population was not simply because long grass provided more nectar from wildflowers within it, such as dandelions or knapweed, but because butterflies were seeking or actually breeding in rewilded lawns.

“It’s a really positive sign,” said Fox. “What people are doing with long grass in gardens is creating potential or actual breeding habitat. In order to make an impact on the biodiversity crisis we need to be creating places where butterflies and other wildlife can breed. This is simple, doesn’t cost anything and saves you time and effort.

“If you have a patch of long grass you may have grasshoppers, beetles and ant hills as well – there will be all these spinoffs.”

Private outdoor space makes up 7,280 sq km of land across Britain – an area larger than the counties of Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire combined – and an estimated 62% of this is vegetated gardens, and so potentially vital wildlife habitat.

According to Butterfly Conservation, the benefits of long grass to butterflies and other invertebrates is likely to be found in other grassy public spaces too, such as parks, school grounds, allotments and road verges. Through its Wild Spaces programme, the charity aims to transform 100,000 areas across the UK to help support butterfly populations.

Fox said the principle of managing long grass for butterflies was the same as wildlife-friendly meadow management: don’t do everything all at once.

To provide good habitat for butterfly caterpillars, long grass has to be left until late September or October before being cut lightly, and some species such as small skippers require long grass all year round.

“If you take part in #NoMowMay our message is, don’t just mow your grass in June,” said Fox.

Representatives for Kanye West have alleged that a man physically and sexually assaulted his wife Bianca Censori in an incident in Los Angeles.

Sources previously told TMZ that West was being investigated as a suspect in a battery incident earlier this week, after the rapper was alleged to have struck a man who had grabbed Censori.

The rapper’s team have subsequently released a statement, saying: “‘Grabbed’ is grossly inadequate as a description of what happened. Bianca was physically assaulted. The assailant didn’t merely collide into her. He put his hands under her dress, directly on her body, he grabbed her waist, he spun her around, and then he blew her kisses. She was battered and sexually assaulted.”

The Guardian has contacted the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) for further information.

It follows an incident in 2022 when West was investigated by the LAPD for battery of a person he claimed was taunting him. “He just had this real attitude, like, ‘Whatchu gonna do?’”, said West, who was not arrested or charged over the incident. “Imma just tell you, that blue Covid mask ain’t stop that knockout.”

West, who has changed his name to Ye, reportedly married Censori, an architect at his company Yeezy, in December 2022, less than a month after his divorce from Kim Kardashian was finalised.

That year West lost a series of brand partnership deals with Adidas and others in the wake of a series of antisemitic comments, including that Jewish people “tried to black ball anyone whoever opposes your agenda”. But he has enjoyed a career renaissance this year following the release of his album Vultures, a collaboration with vocalist Ty Dolla $ign which topped the US chart and produced the global hit Carnival, which also went to No 1 in the US.

In December 2023, West apologised for the antisemitic remarks, writing in Hebrew on social media: “I deeply regret any pain I may have caused … I am committed to making amends and promoting unity.”

Climate campaigners have accused Scottish ministers of being “inept” and “short-termist” after they scrapped Scotland’s target to cut carbon emissions by 75% by 2030.

Màiri McAllan, the Scottish net zero secretary, confirmed her government had abandoned that target and would also drop legally binding annual targets on reducing carbon emissions, after damning criticism from a UK advisory committee.

In what opposition politicians labelled a “humiliating” climbdown, McAllan said Scotland would instead follow the lead of the UK and Welsh governments by adopting five-yearly “carbon budgets” aimed at meeting its zero emissions target date of 2045.

McAllan told MSPs this decision had been heavily influenced by the UK Climate Change Committee, which said last month the 2030 target was “no longer credible” because of inadequate action on home heating, transport, farming and nature restoration by Scottish ministers.

She said the 2030 target had always been stretching, and claimed the new approach was simply a pragmatic response, acknowledging the huge scale of the task that involved “minor legislative amendments”.

But Prof Piers Forster, the CCC’s interim chair, said scrapping the 2030 target was “deeply disappointing” as it undermined effective climate action. He urged McAllan to set out the new commitments as soon as possible.

“Interim targets and plans to deliver against them are what makes any net zero commitment credible,” he said. “They are essential for enabling a stable transition. Long-term planning is vital for businesses, citizens and future parliaments. Today that has been undermined.”

Friends of the Earth Scotland, previously a supporter of Scotland’s efforts to be a “world leader” on climate action, said this reversal was “the worst environmental decision in the history of the Scottish parliament”.

Imogen Dow, its head of campaigns, said: “Instead of using the past decade to deliver warm homes, reliable public transport and a fair transition away from fossil fuels, inept, short-termist politicians have kept millions of people trapped in the broken status quo that only benefits big polluters.”

Jamie Livingstone, the head of Oxfam Scotland, said the decision was a “reprehensible retreat caused by [the Scottish government’s] recklessly inadequate level of action to date. With scientists linking deadly heatwaves in west Africa to climate change and Dubai drowning in a deluge of rain, the urgency of climate action couldn’t be clearer.”

The rollback is doubly difficult for Scottish ministers because Nicola Sturgeon, the previous first minister, had made the climate crisis one of her government’s top priorities. She was the first UK leader to acknowledge the planet faced a climate emergency.

Sturgeon signed a power-sharing deal with the Scottish Green party in 2021 which prioritised climate action, and then posed with Greta Thunberg at the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow later that year.

Graham Simpson, a Scottish Conservative MSP, said it was a surprise that Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater, the Scottish Green co-leaders who signed that agreement, had not resigned their ministerial posts in embarrassment. Harvie said the Greens were still driving change.

The Scottish government now has to table urgent legislation to scrap Holyrood’s current climate act, which sets annual targets, and instead use carbon budgets. Those five-yearly budgets set a ceiling for how much CO₂ can be emitted in those time periods.

McAllan said the Scottish government would quadruple the number of electric vehicle chargers, “explore” a new integrated public transport ticket system, pilot emissions reduction schemes on livestock farms, consult on a new carbon tax for large rural estates, and use rates relief to subsidise green energy for businesses.

Livingstone said these “largely recycled measures represent baby steps forward rather than the giant leaps needed and are a thinly veiled distraction from ministers’ failure to deliver their existing climate commitments”.