The man behind Project 2025, the rightwing policy manifesto that includes calls for a sharp increase in immigrant deportations if Donald Trump is elected, told university colleagues about two decades ago that he had killed a neighborhood dog with a shovel because it was barking and disturbing his family, according to former colleagues who spoke to the Guardian.

Kevin Roberts, now the president of the Heritage Foundation, is alleged to have told colleagues and dinner guests that he killed a neighbor’s pit bull around 2004 while he was working as a still relatively unknown history professor at New Mexico State University.

“My recollection of his account was that he was discussing in the hallway with various members of the faculty, including me, that a neighbor’s dog had been barking pretty relentlessly and was, you know, keeping the baby and probably the parents awake and that he kind of lost it and took a shovel and killed the dog. End of problem,” said Kenneth Hammond, who was chair of the university’s history department at the time.

Two other people – a professor and her spouse – recall hearing a similar account directly from Roberts at a dinner at his home. Three other professors also said they heard the account at that time from the colleagues who said they had heard it directly from Roberts.

None recall Roberts – who worked at the university as an assistant professor from 2003 to 2005 – ever saying that the dog he allegedly said he killed was actively threatening him or his family.

In a statement to the Guardian, Roberts denied ever killing a dog with a shovel. He did not answer questions about why several people say he told them that he had.

“This is a patently untrue and baseless story backed by zero evidence. In 2004, a neighbor’s chained pit bull attempted to jump a fence into my backyard as I was gardening with my young daughter. Thankfully, the owner arrived in time to restrain the animal before it could get loose and attack us.”

The people who say they heard Roberts talk about killing a dog at the time said they found the apparent admission to be unsettling and said they did not ask Roberts – who as a conservative Republican was already seen as something of an outsider among the university’s mostly liberal academic staff – to provide any more detail about the incident.

“I think that probably people were not eager to engage with him over this. It sounded like a pretty crazy thing to do and people didn’t want to get into it at that point,” Hammond said.

News of Roberts’s alleged comments to colleagues comes as Trump, the Republican nominee for president, and his running mate, JD Vance, have engaged in a racist and false propaganda campaign to demonize Haitian immigrants living in Springfield, Ohio, by claiming that they have been killing and eating people’s pets. The xenophobic claims, which are probably meant to strengthen support among white, racist and anti-immigrant voters, have incited multiple bomb threats that have disrupted the Springfield community.

Project 2025, which was written by the Heritage Foundation under Roberts’s watch, has become a focal point of the 2024 presidential election as Democrats warn that its radical policy prescriptions – such as the eradication of the Department of Education and imposing further restrictions on abortion – will serve as a blueprint for Trump’s administration if he is elected. Both Trump and Vance have sought to distance themselves from the 900-page report, with Trump claiming he had not read it. But in a foreword to Roberts’s book written by Vance, the vice-presidential nominee praises Roberts’s “depth and stature within the American Right” and says that, “in the fights that [lie] ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon”.

Roberts is one of the most prominent rightwing voices in Washington. He has close ties to Opus Dei, the Catholic group, and has spoken openly about how he considers the outlawing of birth control to be one of the “hardest” political battles facing conservatives in the future.

Twenty years ago, Roberts – now a staunch supporter of Trump – was an academic who may have been uneasy among fellow professors who were not politically aligned with him. Yet, Hammond said, colleagues treated him with respect and kindness – including bringing food to his home after his wife had a baby – and were happy to have him working at the university.

One former colleague remembers being reprimanded by Roberts after she used her university email account to tell colleagues she was going to help campaign for John Kerry, the then Democratic nominee for president, because she recalled him saying – rightly, she now admits – that it was inappropriate. But relations were generally good.

Marsha Weisiger, a colleague of Roberts at the time who is now an environmental history professor at the University of Oregon, recalled being invited to dinner at Roberts’s home with her husband, and Roberts telling both of them the story about how he had hit a neighbor’s pit bull with a shovel and killed it.

“My husband and I were stunned. First of all, that he would do such a thing. And second of all, that he would tell us about it. If I did something horrific, I would not be telling my colleagues about it,” she said.

To make matters worse, she recalled Roberts saying that the neighbor in question also had puppies and that he had considered killing them, too. Weisiger’s husband, who asked not to be named, recalled Roberts saying he had complained about the dog to the police, who were not responsive, and that the dog sometimes got into his yard.

Roberts, public records confirm, was living with his wife and young family in a modest and mostly immigrant community in Las Cruces at the time, in a historic neighborhood lined with traditional adobe homes and chain-link fences.

In his statement, Roberts claimed that the city later arrived and removed “more than ten dogs” from his neighbor’s property, citing animal abuse. He said he was “incredibly grateful” to animal control for rescuing the “abused animals” and was grateful that he and his daughter did not have physical contact with the dog.

Roberts also identified the man who he called the “animal owner”: a native of Las Cruces named Daniel Aran who, a spokesperson for Roberts pointed out in an email, was sentenced to 78 months in prison for cocaine trafficking in 2017, more than a decade after the alleged incident occurred.

Public records and the Guardian’s reporting confirm that Aran and his mother lived nextdoor to Roberts at the time that Roberts lived there.

The Guardian could not independently verify whether Roberts actually killed a dog or whether Roberts’s account of his interactions with his neighbor’s dog was accurate. The Guardian has repeatedly sought out public records to try to verify the alleged accounts. The city of Las Cruces, the police and animal control authorities said public records were not available for the time frame in which the alleged incident occurred.

But the Guardian did track down Daniel Aran, whose mother Norma Noriega still lives in the adobe home next to where Roberts previously lived in Las Cruces.

Noriega’s family moved into their home in about 2002 with her husband and children – Denise Aran, who was about seven at the time, and Daniel, who was about 16.

Daniel Aran, who has been released from prison and is now the owner of a small construction company, spoke to the Guardian from the front yard of the small stone house. Aran is lean and muscular, with a chiseled face and hardened stare.

“When I was younger, I was wild. But I gave respect to get respect. Now I’m more about work and family,” he said, dusting off his clothes from a day of construction. “And I’ve always been a dog lover, an animal lover, since I was a little kid. I’ve always had dogs.”

Aran said he was diligent about watching his dogs – small pit bulls – which he bred, selling the pups as a way of making money for his family’s household.

When asked if he had a dog disappear around 2004, he said: “Yes, definitely, my dog, Loca, my little female”. She had been his favorite, he said.

“I had one female, and that was her. She was a little, little thing like this,” he said, holding up his hands in an affectionate gesture. “She was a tiny, cute little thing.”

“She went missing, and we never could find her,” he said.

When he was asked by the Guardian about comments Roberts allegedly made to colleagues about killing a neighborhood pit bull with a shovel, he grimaced. “Man, you never know what’s inside someone’s head.”

“I’m not here to make up stories or to say he did it,” he said. “But it was right around 2004 when all that happened, that Loca was missing,” he said. “I wish I could say, yeah, I know this fool did that. But I can’t tell you that. But what I can tell you is that my dog went missing, and we never found her. She wasn’t at the dog catchers.”

Aran also denied Roberts’s claim that dogs had been taken away from the property.

“We had three dogs that we kept, and then there were puppies occasionally that I would sell,” he said.

His mother, 53-year-old Norma Noriega, sitting out in the front yard, also disputed Roberts’s account.

“That never happened,” she said in Spanish. “[Animal services] never came and took dogs. Sure, [the dogs] would get out on occasion, and we’d go find them and bring them back. But there was never an incident where our dogs were taken, for abuse or whatever, that is simply not true.

“It was only with Loca that we could never figure out what happened. She disappeared, and we always knew it was strange that we simply never saw her again. [Daniel] went out looking for her, but she was never found,” said Noriega.

The family has had a number of pit bulls over the years – Brownie and Casper were their longtime pets – but it was the disappearance of Loca that had always distressed the family.

“She’s the one that disappeared. We went out looking for her, we went out to the dog catchers, and we never found her,” Aran said quietly. “And I know the dog catchers never got her.”

Asked about his recollection of Roberts, Aran said: “Well, it’s been more than 20 years,” and he did acknowledge that his dogs could be noisy.

“I’m pretty sure he had to have some patience,” said Aran. “But, as far as I can remember, he never came across as disrespectful,” he said.

Additional reporting by Melissa Segura

In Norway, nature is something of a national obsession. Norwegian children are taught that “there is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing”, and Norwegian babies are packed into thermals and overalls and taken on day trips to the woods. Cross-country skiing, hunting for wild mushrooms or cloudberries, or huffing and puffing up a mountain are standard weekend activities.

The recent decision to scrap a campaign that aimed to attract more foreign tourists to the country’s rural landscapes was a stark reminder of this: rather than encouraging tourists and the income they provide, many Norwegians would prefer to protect their natural environment.

Norway has some extremely beautiful landscapes, such as Lofoten, a stunning chain of islands that offers northern lights during the winter months and midnight sun during summer, and the countless breathtaking fjords. It is therefore no surprise that tourist numbers have surged in the last few years.

Lofoten, for instance, has seen a 15% increase in tourism from 2022 to 2023. And this summer has seen a record number of vehicles on the road in the area, as many Europeans drive to Norway. Another contributing factor to the explosion in tourism is the newly started direct flights from cities in western Europe like London and Amsterdam to “the Paris of the north”: nearby Tromsø. Visiting Norway from the US and European countries has also become cheaper than it used to be as the currency rate has dropped. Norway has enough cool, rainy days to satisfy those who are growing sick of heatwaves, and enough remote and sparsely populated landscapes to escape the crowds in other parts of Europe. While other destinations have imposed measures on tourists once they arrive – such as Venice’s €5 “tourist tax” – Norway is highly unlikely to do any such thing. The Norwegian approach is to deter them from coming by slashing funding for tourism adverts, as the Western Norway tourist board has done, and quietly shelving campaigns.

Nature and outdoor activities are needed to get our minds off the cold, harsh and unforgivingly dark winters, which last about six months a year, with just five to six hours of daylight in the south and polar nights in the north, meaning the sun doesn’t rise above the horizon for months. Slaloming down snowy slopes or skiing cross-country through the woods is far preferable to becoming a prisoner in one’s own home. But that will get harder with tourism. You only need to look at the Alps to see how tourism can cause overcrowded villages, traffic jams and worn-down hiking trails and skiing slopes.

There’s an increasing fear that Norway’s natural landscapes might become overcrowded or misused, especially because large parts of the country are free to roam, thanks to centuries-old traditions and laws called allemannsretten (literally: “everyone has ownership”). What these mean is that anyone has the right to roam free in the wilderness, and set up camp, even if the land has an owner. As long as camp is set 150 metres from houses and cabins and for a maximum of two days, you can usually pitch your tent wherever you like.

There is another unique tradition administered by the Norwegian Tourist Organisation, which gives its members access to hundreds of small cabins almost for free (about £20 a night). These are simple wood cabins placed in remote, picturesque areas, mostly with outdoor toilets, no heating and no water. They are well taken care of and loved, as the visitors have to “leave it as you found it” – meaning you keep it clean and fix it if you break it. Foreigners are allowed to apply for membership, allowing them to access these cabins, but the organisation tells me it has made a conscious decision not to advertise this fact internationally.

Norway’s pain threshold for tourists is low – lower than it might be in other countries where tourism is a vital source of national income. Partly, that’s because Norway can afford to miss out on potential tourism income as it has the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund. One could also point out the irony of Norway being the world’s fifth largest oil exporter, and a prime contributor to global heating, while it obsesses about protecting its woods and mountains. In this sense, the recent scrapping of this campaign points to something deeper: Norway and Norwegians struggle with the dilemma of retaining their privileges, which flow largely from fossil fuels, while scrambling to save nature.

You may think the strong sentiments to preserve Norwegian nature and heritage may have some undercurrents of racism and nationalism, but I would argue that it is not about where the tourists are from, but whether they respect nature and the local traditions.

The love for the outdoors is almost as a religion to many Norwegians. So much so that even trying to adapt to the climate crisis cannot interfere with nature. The Norwegian authorities have for years been trying to put up onshore wind power plants across the country in an effort to produce more green energy, for instance. But these plans have faced resistance from locals, who object to the damage these structures do to the natural environment.

In the long term, saying no to tourists may become more difficult. Norway has been struggling with high inflation, high interest rates, and tanking currency rates. Economic disparity and social injustice have seeped into one of the world’s most successful welfare states, affecting those less fortunate, the sick and the poor. One in 10 Norwegian children are growing up in poverty, many of whom belong to immigrant families. Arguably, a booming tourism industry could be a means of diversifying away from fossil fuels, and securing a much-needed source of income.

However, there is still time to put in place measures that welcome the tourists, and at the same time safeguard our natural environment. Visitors need clearer signs, guidelines and guides telling them how to protect themselves and nature. There needs to be proper infrastructure put in place that doesn’t strain our wilderness, and there needs to be stricter regulations – such as the one in the west-coast city of Bergen, where a maximum of 8,000 cruise ship tourists are allowed to step ashore daily.

To put a ticket on visits to places such as the spectacular Pulpit Rock might not be the Norwegian way, but to try to regulate the number of tourists to the country is.

6 May 2023

Today the UK woke up to a day of excitement. A day of street parties, a national holiday, and celebrations for a new king. It was also day three of gale-force winds on Fair Isle, and it was the day my mother died. A brief phone call from her care home, then the aloneness. The phone call came as I stood outside the south lighthouse. I watched the tower-tall waves, Payne’s grey, reflecting the colour of the sky. Waves built by wide, powerful seas and a wild wind that rocked me back and forth on my heels. The news was expected; it was the logical conclusion for a fragile 92-year-old.

But illogically your own mother’s death is never expected. We were not close, but at that moment that seemed irrelevant. My father had died four years ago so a door had now closed on a past that was gone for ever. It seemed very fitting to stand by this wild sea to take in the news, the wind bending back the curling waves, an aqua-turquoise light topping each wave.

The Pacific country of Kiribati might be surrounded by water, but on land its population is running dry. The ocean around them is steadily encroaching, contaminating underground wells and leeching salt into the soil.

“Our waters have been infected,” climate activist and law student Christine Tekanene says. “Those who are affected, they now can’t survive with the water that changed after sea level rise.”

The freshwater crisis is just one of the many threats driven by rising seas in Kiribati. Its people live on a series of atolls, peaking barely a couple of metres above a sprawling tract of the Pacific Ocean. As global temperatures rise and ice sheets melt, Kiribati – and other low-lying nations like it – are experiencing extreme and regular flooding, frequent coastal erosion and persistent food and water insecurity.

This week the United Nations general assembly will hold a high-level meeting to address the existential threats posed by sea level rise as the issue climbs the international agenda; last year the UN security council debated it for the first time.

Wednesday’s meeting aims to build political consensus on action to address the widespread social, economic and legal consequences of rising seas.

Samoa’s UN representative, Fatumanava Dr Pa’olelei Luteru, says the upcoming UN meeting is long overdue and “extremely important” for island nations.

“Economically, militarily, we’re not powerful,” says Luteru, who also serves as the current chair of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS). “At least within the context of the UN and the multilateral system we have the possibility and the opportunity to engage and achieve some of the things that are a priority for us.”

‘We’re still fighting’

Sea level rise presents a range of contentious issues, not least of which is whether low-lying nations and their governments should begin preparations to relocate their populations. While some countries, like Tuvalu, have accepted this possibility and are lobbying for international recognition of their sovereignty even if their islands disappear, others seem more cautious. A decade ago, Kiribati bought land in Fiji as a potential refuge for its citizens, but the government has since reconsidered that strategy.

Ambassador Luteru says many small island states are unwilling to concede their futures, and “have not used the word ‘existential’” when referring to the threat of climate change on their statehoods.

“There’s a clear expression from people that they do not want to move,” he says.

Meanwhile, Tekanene says many Pacific Islanders feel “offended” when asked about their lands disappearing. “We’re still fighting, we’re not drowning,” she says.

Some experts argue, however, that world leaders must urgently face the reality of disappearing homelands for millions living on small islands and coastal areas.

Dr Benjamin Strauss, CEO and chief scientist at Climate Central, warns that while the worst impacts of sea level rise can be delayed, they cannot be undone.

“The long term sea level rise that we’ve already locked in is almost certain to drown a great number of Pacific atolls,” he says. “In the end, there are speeds and amounts of sea level rise that will make it impossible to stay on many islands.”

Kamal Amakrane from the Global Centre for Climate Mobility, who has been helping the UN general assembly prepare for the high-level meeting, stresses that while people have “the right to remain” in their homelands, it’s equally important to ensure safe and dignified options for those who are forced to relocate.

“The international community and regional institutions should enable climate mobility pathways,” Amakrane told the Guardian via email.

Both creating these migration pathways, and developing solutions to protect islands so people can stay, will require major financing from wealthier nations. Kiribati is seeking billions of dollars from foreign donors to raise its islands and escape the worst harms of rising seas. Strauss says it would take “some sort of massively heroic, unimaginable kind of geoengineering” to ensure island nations can withstand the impacts of sea level rise.

“A lot of the atoll nations don’t have a great deal of resources,” Strauss says. “So it’s not clear how much they would be able to invest and how much the world would decide to invest.”

For Kiribati, the situation is expected to get much worse. A recent Nasa assessment found the country will see sea levels rise up to 50 centimetres by 2050 whether or not global emissions are cut before then. If worst-case predictions come true, some of its islands will be uninhabitable, if not completely lost, by the end of the century.

Faced with such a looming catastrophe, activists like Tekanene are urging world leaders to do more to protect their country.

“We want to ensure that developed nations take responsibility for the historical emissions contributing to this crisis,” she says.

“They can help prevent it … they can do it more than us.”

A federal jury in Texas on Monday cleared a group of Donald Trump’s supporters and found one driver liable in a civil trial over a so-called “Trump Train” that surrounded a Biden-Harris campaign bus on a busy highway days before the 2020 election.

The two-week trial in a federal courthouse in Austin centered on whether the actions of the “Trump Train” participants amounted to political intimidation. Among those onboard the bus was Wendy Davis, the former Democratic lawmaker, who testified she feared for her life while a convoy of Trump supporters boxed in the bus along Interstate 35.

The jury awarded $10,000 to the bus driver.

Plaintiffs in the lawsuit had alleged they were terrorised and intimidated for more than 90 minutes on 20 October 2020, as they took a bus tour canvassing for the Democratic ticket in the final days of the election in Texas as they travelled from San Antonio to Austin.

About 40 vehicles flying Make America Great Again flags encircled the bus, trying to run it off the road and playing what the suit claims was a “madcap game of highway ‘chicken’”.

No criminal charges were filed against the six Trump supporters who were sued by Davis and two others onboard the bus. Civil rights advocates hoped a guilty verdict would send a clear message about what constitutes political violence and intimidation.

Video that Davis recorded from the bus shows pickup trucks with large Trump flags slowing down to box in the bus as it tried to move away from the group of Trump supporters. One of the defendants hit a campaign volunteer’s car while the trucks occupied all lanes of traffic, forcing the bus and everyone around it to a 15mph crawl.

The event was canceled after Davis and others on the bus – a campaign staffer and the driver – made repeated calls to 911 asking for a police escort through San Marcos and no help arrived.

Davis, who is best known for the 11-hour speech she made in the Texas senate in 2013 to filibuster an anti-abortion bill, said she suffered “substantial emotional distress” form the experience.

Associated press contributed to this report

Democrats are increasingly worried that pollsters are undercounting Donald Trump’s voter support, rating his prospects of winning November’s presidential election as much higher than headline opinion polling figures suggest.

While most national surveys show consistent, though moderate, leads for Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, some supporters are unnerved by the small margin of her advantage in three northern battlegrounds – Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – which are deemed must-wins in her quest for the White House.

Although some polls have shown the vice-president with leads of between four and six points in Pennsylvania – generally judged the most important swing state – others show Trump trailing by smaller deficits. Narrower gaps separate the two in Michigan and Wisconsin, where Harris’s lead is just 1 or 2%, according to several different recent polls.

Underpinning Democrats’ fears is the knowledge that Trump greatly out-performed predictions in all three states in 2016, when he narrowly won them en route to his election triumph over Hillary Clinton, and in 2020, when he was pipped by Joe Biden by far smaller margins than forecast.

The worries are compounded by the latest New York Times/Siena poll, which records Trump performing more robustly in three Sun belt battleground states – Georgia, Arizona and North Carolina – than he has in weeks.

The survey shows the Republican nominee leading by five points – 50 to 45% – in Arizona, which Biden won by just over 10,000 votes in 2020, and four points – 49 to 45% – in Georgia, which was won by the president by a similar margin. In North Carolina, where Trump is trying to avoid being tarred by revelations over past comments by Mark Robinson, the GOP’s candidate for governor, he has a smaller advantage, 49 to 47%.

Putting the Democrats’ worries into perspective are projections showing that Trump will win all seven designated battleground states – the seventh being Nevada – if he outstrips polling predictions by the same margins he achieved in losing the 2020 election.

A separate projection by Focaldata – using a model that takes into account different demographic factors in determining the likelihood that certain cohorts will vote – reduces Harris’s lead by an average of 2.4% across swing states.

“In an election which could be decided by just 60,000 voters in November, this margin could easily be the difference between a right and wrong call on the election winner,” writes Focaldata’s Patrick Flynn. “Pollsters who simply rely on self-reporting [in defining likely voters] may be subject to another polling miss in Trump’s favor.”

The one piece of encouraging news for Harris is that she will win every swing state except Georgia if the polls turn out to be as wrong as they were in the campaign for the 2022 congressional midterm elections.

That has not placated some Democrats, who note that both Clinton and Biden were performing better against Trump in polling – both nationally and in swing states – than Harris is now.

“That’s ominous. There’s no question that is concerning, but you’re working as hard as you can work, no matter what,” the Hill quoted one unnamed Democratic senator as saying. “My sense is there’s not a lot more you can do than we’re already doing.”

John Fetterman, the Democratic senator for Pennsylvania, told the same site that Trump was a threat despite some buoyant recent polling for Harris in his state. “Polling has really been seriously damaged since 2016 … Trump is going to be tough in Pennsylvania, and that’s absolutely the truth,” he said.

In a further worrying sign for Harris, the New York Times/Siena poll indicated that her “bounce” from this month’s debate against Trump – which most surveys indicated she won – was the smallest enjoyed by any presidential debate-winning candidate in the 21st century.

“On average, Kamala Harris is faring about one point better across 34 polls that measured the race before and after the debate,” wrote the New York Times’ chief polling analyst Nate Cohn, concluding that the contest remained deadlocked despite the encounter.

“George W Bush, John Kerry, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and, yes, Donald J Trump earlier this year, all peaked with gains of at least two points after their debates.”

Twenty-five years ago, when I lived in Barcelona, it had a brilliant scheme for getting rid of unwanted articles (Councils in England to get revised guidance on ‘middle-class fly-tipping’, 22 September). Each barrio had one night every month when you could put your stuff out on the pavement – first to be picked over by your neighbours, then by people coming back from a night out, when you invariably picked up something you didn’t want, and then the professional pickers with vans. In the early hours, the pavement would be cleared by binmen and washed by the nightly cleaners – job done.

The answer is to have only one night in each area, which is well known so people visit especially for it. Recycling is a cause for reward and celebration, not fines. And for goodness sake, leave class out of it.
Jane Swan
Delabole, Cornwall

Industrial civilisation is close to breaching a seventh planetary boundary, and may already have crossed it, according to scientists who have compiled the latest report on the state of the world’s life-support systems.

“Ocean acidification is approaching a critical threshold”, particularly in higher-latitude regions, says the latest report on planetary boundaries. “The growing acidification poses an increasing threat to marine ecosystems.”

The report, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), builds on years of research showing there are nine systems and processes – the planetary boundaries – that contribute to the stability of the planet’s life-support functions.

Thresholds beyond which they can no longer properly function have already been breached in six. Climate change, the introduction of novel entities, change in biosphere integrity and modification of biogeochemical flows are judged to be in high-risk zones, while planetary boundaries are also transgressed in land system change and freshwater change but to a lesser extent. All have worsened, according to the data.

Stratospheric ozone depletion has remained stable, however, and there has been a slight improvement in atmospheric aerosol loading, the research says.

At a briefing outlining the findings, Levke Caesar, a climate physicist at PIK and co-author of the report, said there were two reasons the levels of ocean acidification were concerning.

“One is [that] the indicator for ocean acidification, which is the current aragonite separation state, while still being in the safe operating space, is approaching the threshold of transgressing the safe boundary,” Caesar said.

“The second is that there are actually several new studies that were published over the last years that indicate that even these current conditions may already be problematic for a variety of marine organisms, suggesting a need [to] re-evaluate which levels can actually be called safe.”

Ocean acidification was getting worse globally, with the effects most pronounced in the Southern Ocean and the Arctic Ocean, she added.

Ocean acidification is the phenomenon of increasing acidity (decreasing pH) in ocean water due to the absorption of atmospheric CO₂. The process not only harms calcifying organisms, potentially leading to food web breakdown, but also reduces the ocean’s efficiency in acting as a vital carbon sink.

“This illustrates the connection between ocean acidification … and biosphere integrity,” Caesar said. “Indeed, one of the main messages of our report is that all nine planetary boundaries are highly interconnected.

“This means that any human perturbation of the global environment that we observe at the moment … cannot be addressed as if they were separate issues, which is how it is at the moment primarily handled. Because this type of approach ignores that the components of the Earth system constantly interact forming a large network where changes in one area affect the others.”

Planetary boundary science was pioneered in 2009 by Johan Rockstrom, the director of the PIK, and others. In that research and two subsequent reports, the researchers identified and quantified boundaries relating to climate change, biosphere, land system change, freshwater change, biogeochemical flows, ocean acidification, atmospheric aerosol loading, ozone layer depletion and the introduction of novel entities, such as synthetic chemicals, to the environment.

The transgression of boundaries in each of those areas risks disrupting the stability, resilience and liveability of the state of the planet that has persisted for the past 12,000 years and that has allowed the rise of complex human civilisation.

The report, which came a year after the last, is the first of what will now be annual “planetary health checks” published by PIK, Rockstrom said.

“We recognise that the planet’s health … is at such risk today that we in science must also now step up and step right out in to the uncomfortable zone and say that we are now committing ourselves to produce every year a scientific measuring of the entire health assessment – a risk assessment – across all the planetary boundaries,” he said. “This is much more than science, this is science for change.”

Unlike previous iterations of PIK’s planetary boundaries research, the report does not appear in an academic journal but is instead written and formatted for a popular audience. Rockstrom and his colleagues said the findings were based on peer-reviewed science.

As I filed a recent Guardian Birdwatch column, about the rare Sabine’s gull that turned up unexpectedly on my local patch on the Somerset coast, I realised I have been contributing these short articles for exactly half my lifetime. When counted alongside my Weatherwatch column, this month sees my 1,000th dispatch from the great outdoors.

Coincidentally, my first Birdwatch, in January 1993, was also about gulls. It celebrated both their beauty and their ability to adapt to living alongside us, even though most people don’t appreciate them. Since then, Britain’s birdlife has changed beyond what I could have ever imagined.

When I was a fledgling birder, during the 1960s and 1970s, the number of species either gained or lost as British breeding birds was in low single figures. I recall the surprise and excitement when Cetti’s warbler and the Mediterranean gull colonised southern England, and the sense of loss we all felt when two once-common birds – red-backed shrike and wryneck – disappeared. During a brief spell of cooling in the north Atlantic, snowy owl – and a handful of other species – arrived from the north. But they stayed for just a few years, before beating a rapid retreat as climate change began to take hold.

Yet, as I have documented in the past decade or so, my adopted county has seen the arrival of little egrets, cattle egrets and great white egrets from continental Europe, bitterns and marsh harriers from the east, and (with a helping hand from conservationists) our tallest bird, the common crane. While these exotic new species are a welcome addition to our avifauna, many of them would not be here were it not for the milder winters brought about by the climate crisis.

My life has also changed dramatically since I first began writing for the Guardian. Then, I was living with my young family in north London, with little or no time to watch birds. Soon afterwards, following a move to west London, I stumbled across my first “local patch”, Lonsdale Road reservoir alongside the River Thames, next to the famous Boat Race course.

For the following three years I documented my sightings here in each month’s Birdwatch column, noting the changes of birdlife from season to season. During that time I received a letter from a reader who also frequented this tiny nature reserve, containing a stern admonishment. “You write about your local patch,” she wrote, “But it’s not just yours, it’s our local patch!” Suitably chastened, I duly apologised.

Wherever I have lived since, I made sure I featured each new local patch in my column, contrasting with accounts of my exotic adventures to far-flung locations around the world. These were thanks to my new career as a wildlife TV producer at the BBC Natural History Unit, usually accompanied by presenter Bill Oddie.

Guardian readers vicariously joined us as we went birding at Disney World in Florida, in Trinidad and Tobago, Mallorca and Poland, and on the Icelandic island of Surtsey – a land mass younger than I was, having emerged from beneath the ocean after undersea volcanic activity in late 1963. A trip to Antarctica with Michaela Strachan for the Really Wild Show, and to the Maasai Mara for Big Cat Diary, were also highlights for me – and hopefully for you, too.

By then in my 40s, I began to delve back in time, recalling the birding adventures of my childhood. Most were on the gravel pits and reservoirs of suburbia, a place famously described by the author and broadcaster Kenneth Allsop as “the messy limbo that is neither town nor country”. But there were also visits to the Isles of Scilly, north Norfolk, and the Kentish birding hotpots of Stodmarsh and Dungeness, which we cycled to as teenagers in the days when children were given the freedom to explore alone.

All of these pieces – my first 150 columns – were collated and published by the Guardian and Aurum Press in one of my earliest books, This Birding Life. I now realise that this marked a major advance for me: having turned my hobby into my job, I was embracing the genre of “New Nature Writing” – more personal, intimate and narrative-led accounts of the natural world.

This change was triggered by a divorce, remarriage, and my move to the West Country with my new young family. For the first few years here, I wrote mainly about the birds in our large garden on the Somerset Levels. The swallows, the very first bird I saw as we arrived at our new home on a baking July day; the buzzards, so scarce when I was growing up that my mother had to drive me all the way to north Wales to see one; and the blue-crowned parakeet – an escaped bird – that appeared unexpectedly a few months after our move. I was reminded of London’s rose-ringed parakeets, those impossibly noisy and exotic newcomers which are now all over the capital, but still haven’t made it to Somerset. I miss them.

As the years went by, and the children began to grow up, I explored farther afield. I now often write about the birds of my current favourite local patch on the Somerset coast, which I call the Three Rivers – the Huntspill, Parrett and Brue – and which I visit with my birding companions most weekends. The Sabine’s gull featured in this month’s 1,000th column was the 150th species I have seen there. Yet my excitement was tinged with the realisation that, during my 18 years of living in Somerset, I have witnessed the precipitous declines of so many once-common and familiar species.

It was recently announced that five species of seabird, including that extraordinary global traveller the Arctic tern, have joined the Red List of Birds of Conservation Concern. This has raised the total of UK breeding and wintering species on that list to 73 – that’s more than twice as many as on the first Red List in 1996, and representing three out of 10 of all our regularly occurring bird species. Most shockingly of all, species that even recently were common summer visitors – the swift and house martin –are now on the Red List. This is not just down to climate change, but also the decline of flying insects as a result of the biodiversity crisis.

Meanwhile, the British Ornithologists’ Union’s official list of birds recorded in Britain – including rare vagrants from around the globe – has risen since 1992 from just under 550 species to more than 630. To put this in perspective, I still have my battered copy of The Status of Birds in Britain and Ireland, published in 1971, which lists only 470 species – just three-quarters of today’s number.

This huge increase is down to the effects of the climate crisis on global weather patterns, producing more frequent and extreme weather events. These have in turn led to a higher incidence of vagrancy, such as the unprecedented landfall of North American landbirds on our western coasts, such as the magnolia and Canada warblers, both of which display much brighter and more striking plumage, combining yellows, blacks and greys, than our rather drab Old World warblers.

As well as the newly red-listed swift and house martin, familiar birds from my childhood, such as the grey partridge and turtle dove, have virtually disappeared from our rural countryside. As has that classic sign of spring: the cuckoo.

Soon after moving here, I chanced across Mick, who grew up in our village in the 1950s. “Did you used to get cuckoos here?” I asked. He responded with that look, a mix of kindness and pity, which Somerset folk give to idiots like me from “up London”. “Cuckoos …” he said. “Cuckoos? They used to drive us mad.”

I tried to imagine a time when the call of the cuckoo was an irritation rather than a wonder. And I didn’t hear one in my village for many years, until a timely visitor called twice from the bottom of our garden, on the morning of my 60th birthday, during the spring 2020 lockdown. Sadly, cuckoos have continued to decline on the Somerset Levels and this year I only heard one.

So, having clocked up my 1,000th column on weather, climate and birds, I wonder if I’ll still be writing them in another 32 years’ time, when I’m 96? I was cheered recently by the report that the doyen of Guardian columnists, the chess master Leonard Barden, is still making his weekly contribution at the age of 95, after almost 70 years at the helm.

But what will have happened to our weather, climate and birds by 2056? Looking back to 1992, it would have been hard to imagine the changes I have witnessed since then, so I’m not going to make any predictions. What I can say is that unless we halt the runaway progress of both the climate and the global biodiversity crises, then not only will the weather be unimaginably horrific, but there will be far fewer birds left to write about.

On a lighter note – and my wife, Suzanne, always tells me to end on a positive point – the younger generation is fighting much harder than we ever did to try to halt, and then reverse, the negative effects of our current calamities. Maybe they will, against all the odds, be able to return us to a time when changes in the weather were simply a topic of daily small talk, and common species of bird were just that – common.

Stephen Moss is a naturalist and author. His latest book, The Starling: A Biography, is published by Square Peg on 3 October

Stephen would like to thank his editors at the Guardian: Tim Radford, Celia Locks, Liz McCabe, Bibi van der Zee and Alan Evans