Lobbyists for the world’s biggest meat companies have lauded a better than expected outcome at Cop28, which they say left them “excited” and “enthusiastic” for their industry’s prospects.

US livestock bosses reflected on the conference’s implication for their sector on a virtual panel, fresh from “sharing US agriculture’s story” at the climate summit in December.

Campaigners and climate scientists had hoped the summit, which was billed as a “Food Cop” because of its focus on farming, would result in governments agreeing to ambitious action to transform food systems in line with the goals of the Paris climate agreement.

But while more than 130 governments vowed to tackle agriculture’s carbon footprint, a slew of announcements and initiatives failed to set binding targets, or to broach the question of reducing herds of ruminant livestock such as cattle and sheep, which are agriculture’s largest driver of emissions.

In the online discussion, which was hosted by the trade publication Feedstuffs, meat lobbyist groups made it clear they felt Cop28 resulted in a positive outcome.

The three representatives all said there had been widespread recognition at the Dubai summit that agriculture was a “solution” to the climate crisis, despite livestock accounting for more than 30% of anthropogenic methane emissions.

Outcomes at the summit were characterised as “far more positive … than we anticipated” by Constance Cullman, the president of the Animal Feed Industry Association (AFIA), a US lobby group whose members include some of the world’s biggest meat and animal feed producers.

She added that this was the first time she had “felt that optimistic” after a “large international gathering like this one”.

Cullman also praised the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO)’s “Global Roadmap” to tackle the climate crisis and end hunger, which she described as “music to our ears”, saying she particularly welcomed the report’s emphasis on “production and efficiency” over “looking at reduced consumption of animal protein”.

Academics described the FAO report’s failure to recommend cuts to meat-eating as “bewildering” in a March submission to the journal Nature Food.

According to a March paper, which surveyed more than 200 environmental and agricultural scientists, meat and dairy production must be drastically reduced – and fast – to align with the Paris agreement.

The report concludes that global emissions from livestock production need to decline by 50% during the next six years, with “high-producing and consuming nations” taking the lead.

The FAO said in a statement that its roadmap took a “balanced” approach to animal agriculture, saying that its report had “acknowledged the importance of livestock for poor people in traditional agrifood systems” and referred to the need for dietary shifts.

“We believe that some comments on the change in diets and the role of animal products in them are either misinformed because people have not properly read the roadmap report, or deliberately disingenuous for the sake of feeding vested interests narratives,” it said.

Another industry panellist, Eric Mittenthal, had attended Cop28 on behalf of lobby group the Meat Institute (formerly the North American Meat Institute, or Nami). He emphasised the importance of sharing the message that animal agriculture was necessary for nutrition and sustainability.

The Meat Institute represents hundreds of corporations in the meat supply chain, including the meat sector’s three largest companies, JBS, Cargill and Tyson Foods, which together have emissions equal to a major oil company on the scale of BP or Shell.

Sophie Nodzenski, a senior campaign strategist on food and agriculture at Greenpeace International, said it was “unsurprising” that industrial meat producers felt positively about Cop28’s outcomes “given that their interests essentially took the central stage there”.

The number of lobbyists for big meat and dairy companies tripled at Cop28, as revealed by DeSmog and the Guardian, amid rising scrutiny of the food sector’s climate impact, while smallholders and family farmers at the summit said they felt “drowned out”.

“Cop28 has rightly put the spotlight on the link between food production and the climate crisis, but the sheer number of Big Ag lobbyists present gave them an outsized influence,” Nodzenski said.

Documents seen by DeSmog and the Guardian show that the meat industry was poised to “tell its story and tell it well” before and during the Dubai conference, which it described as a “notoriously challenging environment”.

Cop28 had promised to increase action on food systems transformation, but campaigners and experts said its declarations and reports fell far short of what was needed.

On the second day of the summit, the leaders’ declaration on sustainable food systems, which was signed by more than 130 countries, committed to food systems transformation.

But while it was praised for moving food up the global climate agenda, the International Panel of Experts on Food Systems co-chair Lim Li Ching criticised the declaration for its “vague language” and noted the lack of any reference to “reducing overconsumption of industrially produced meat”.

The long-awaited FAO roadmap followed. While it proposed a 25% reduction in livestock methane emissions by 2030 to put the agriculture sector on track to reach global climate goals, it again failed to explicitly recommend a cut to meat and dairy consumption.

A reduction in “excess meat eating” – which is prevalent in high-income countries such as the US and UK – is a key recommendation of major scientific bodies, and has appeared in reports from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the recommendations of the EAT-Lancet commission.

The third Cop28 agreement that failed to tackle food system emissions was the “Global Stocktake”, in which agriculture was mentioned only in the context of adaptation to climate impacts, not mitigation, despite food systems making up around a third of greenhouse gas emissions overall.

Jamie Burr, a representative of the US Pork Board who spoke on Feedstuff’s panel, said he was “excited to see” the roadmap recognise efficiency as the best pathway to emissions reduction, going on to describe US agriculture as the “most efficient in the world”.

Industrial meat companies emphasise emissions intensity and efficiency over absolute cuts to emissions, or dietary shifts that would lead to a drop in production.

This is especially true in the US, where livestock methane emissions as reported to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change have increased by about 5% since 2010 according to the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, and have increased about 20% since 1990.

Cullman also welcomed the FAO’s proposals – including its plug for the role new technologies could play in bringing down methane emissions.

Numerous assessments have found that there is a role for efficiency and innovation to cut livestock emissions, although many technologies are unproven at scale. But to be effective, they should also be accompanied by a shift away from meat in diets, and, researchers caution, should not be used to delay demand-side policy.

Scrutiny of the FAO’s relationship with industry has grown in recent years. Last autumn, former officials said their work on livestock emissions had been censored because of pressure from industry and diplomats from large producer countries. Experts have called on the FAO for greater transparency, querying the lack of authors on the roadmap.

The FAO said: “The Global Roadmap has been developed with reference to and based on existing scientific and peer-reviewed publications. In no stage of the development of the roadmap were livestock industries consulted, or any inputs received from them.”

AFIA, Nami and the US Pork Board did not respond to a request for comment.

The meat lobbyists, whose industry enjoyed many routes to influence at the summit, also celebrated the cut-through of their message that industrial animal agriculture has an important role to play in addressing global hunger.

Cullman said that she was pleased to see there had been a “strong recognition” at Cop28 that animal products “had a real role in meeting the nutritional needs of folks around the globe”.

Burr added that Cops provided an opportunity for US agriculture groups to demonstrate how they “feed the world”, while Mittenthal said the Meat Institute had showcased how agriculture can be a “solution” for “healthy people and a healthy planet”.

A spokesperson for the Global Alliance for the Future of Food said the argument that industrial agriculture is “critical to address hunger” is one of the greatest “myths” shared by the industry.

As well as helping to drive global heating, which is undermining food security worldwide, the meat industry is also the leading driver of deforestation and ecosystem loss, while the overconsumption of animal products has been linked to a greater likelihood of developing illnesses such as heart disease.

The eyes have it. If you’re a sucker for a charismatic gaze, an impressive name and great rarity, then the distinguished jumping spider should get your vote.

But this acrobatic, spectacular-looking tiny spider with two large black forward-facing eyes is not merely a pretty face. It is a powerful environmentalist and mighty representative of the value of often-derided, seemingly desolate post-industrial landscapes.

The spider was only discovered in Britain in 2003 and is today only found in two locations: West Thurrock marshes and Swanscombe peninsula. Both are “brownfield” sites in the Thames Gateway, the largest area designated for new development in Europe.

Politicians from both right and left are queueing up to build on brownfield because it seems – and sounds – so much better to place new buildings on the footprint of old rather than concrete over the luscious greenbelt.

But life isn’t that simple, and most brownfield sites, particularly those in the warm, dry south-east, are far more biodiverse than farmers’ fields. Some are the most biodiverse sanctuaries in the land. The abandoned oil refinery at Canvey Wick, for instance, is home to nearly 2,000 invertebrate species. Many thrive because the old concrete and rubble create dry, sheltered and warm microclimates where species at the northern edge of their natural range can thrive.

The distinguished jumping spider is one such denizen of the rubble, liking old coal heaps and dry and salty terrain where relatively few plants survive.

Its name was given during a Victorian dispute over similar species. Like the other 37 jumping spider species found in Britain, it does not spin webs but uses its excellent eyesight (the best of any invertebrate except for cephalopods) and ability to leap 10 times its body length to catch prey. The male of the species also uses its keen eyes to assess the receptiveness of females during their mating dance, and making a quick exit to avoid getting eaten if his dance does not go down well.

The spider has been at the forefront of opposition to ambitious plans to build Britain’s “Disneyland” on Swanscombe peninsula and although plans have been withdrawn, the spider’s home and site of special scientific interest (SSSI) is still earmarked for development.

So vote distinguished, vote for treasuring our smallest creatures, and vote for leaving some brownfield sites alone. The spider’s success shows that our restless abandonment of yesterday’s industries opens up niches that wild nature is always ready to rapidly exploit. Which is well worth celebrating.

• Welcome to the Guardian’s UK invertebrate of the year competition. Every day between 2 April and 12 April we’ll be profiling one of the incredible invertebrates that live in and around the UK. Let us know which invertebrates you think we should be including here. And 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.

In 2019, 15,000 children from primary schools across the UK went out to their local playing field. Instead of kicking a ball around, they dug up worms, looked out for birds, and counted them both.

“The kids were just so enthusiastic about it. It was incredible,” said Blaise Martay, lead researcher from the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO). Martay had worried about the data quality – she thought children’s counting might vary with their enthusiasm. But the results “showed exactly what we’d expect”, she said: that more worms meant a greater number of blackbirds, robins and thrushes, the birds that rely on earthworms as a vital part of their diets. The data was consistent across school groups.

Earthworms are a keystone species with potentially enormous effects on above-ground wildlife and ecosystem functioning, yet we still know little about them. They live in a hidden landscape below our feet, breaking down organic matter into the soil so it can be used by other soil organisms. As they wriggle around, they create miniature tunnels, so air and water can pass through, with some deep-burrowing worms able to dig tunnels up to 2 metres deep. Sometimes called the “poor man’s tropical rainforest” on account of its biodiversity, topsoil is the bedrock for human food systems, and is where 95% of the planet’s food is grown.

Charles Darwin was so obsessed with these extraordinary creatures that he wrote his last book about them, based on a lifetime of study and fascination, and told his son William that what he hoped his book would reveal was that “worms have much bigger souls than anyone would suppose”. Darwin thought that “it may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organised creatures”, and his book was a bestseller.

But the UK’s first national assessment, published in 2023, found that earthworm populations had declined by a third over the past 25 years. “Such declines would likely have significant effects on soil health, ecosystem structure and function,” researchers wrote in a 2024 “horizon scan” identifying the biggest threats and possibilities for biodiversity, published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution.

Large-scale wildlife declines have been reported in oceans, freshwater, and on land, but what is happening under the soil is still relatively unknown. “We know birds that feed on earthworms are declining so we were wondering what was happening with the worms,” said Dr Ailidh Barnes, a research ecologist from BTO who conducted the national assessment.

Her paper found earthworm populations in the UK are in long-term decline of up to 2% a year. It is possible that other countries with similar land-use patterns have had equally dramatic declines. The biggest declines seen in Barnes’s study were in broadleaf woodland ecosystems. “That was the finding we were most surprised by,” said Barnes. It could be because the climate crisis is drying out the soil, or runoff from surrounding farmland.

It is possible that the loss of earthworms could already be affecting broader woodland ecology. On average there are 37% fewer woodland birds in British woods compared with 1970, with declines accelerating in the past five years. “The loss of worms could be playing a bigger part than we realise,” said Barnes.

Healthy worm populations are crucial for entire ecosystems, not just birds. Earthworms are ecosystem engineers. As they burrow and feed underground, they break down organic matter, which is then passed along the conveyor belt to smaller organisms. Wormholes create porous structures for water and air to travel through. They play a crucial role in nutrient recycling and soil fertility, which means they significantly contribute to global food production.

“Earthworms are vital at looking after the soil, which is the basis of all life and what grows our food,” said Barnes.

If trends revealed by her study hold true elsewhere the loss could affect our ability to feed a growing human population. Worms’ contribution to the world’s grain harvest matches that of Russia, according to a 2023 study, which found they help make 140m tonnes of food a year. This would make them the fourth largest global producer if they were a country.

Another paper from last year found more than half of the world’s species live in the soil. Yet despite their importance in supporting ecosystems and providing food for humans, soil invertebrates have been “woefully neglected” in biodiversity assessments. Extensive drainage, pesticide use and the use of inorganic fertilisers are likely to be driving them, but data on trends in population abundance are generally only available from studies covering small areas.

Barnes said: “They are vital for everything. When you start talking to people about earthworms they are interested, but they’re under the ground so they get forgotten about.”

• Welcome to the Guardian’s UK invertebrate of the year competition. Every day between 2 April and 12 April we’ll be profiling one of the incredible invertebrates that live in and around the UK. Let us know which invertebrates you think we should be including here. And 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.

• 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