The concept of “net zero” has become a political slogan used to start a “dangerous” culture war over the climate, and may be better dropped, the outgoing head of the UK’s climate watchdog has warned.

Chris Stark, the chief executive of the Climate Change Committee (CCC), said sensible improvements to the economy and people’s lives were being blocked by a populist response to the net zero label, and he would be “intensely relaxed” about losing the term.

“Net zero has definitely become a slogan that I feel occasionally is now unhelpful, because it’s so associated with the campaigns against it,” he said. “That wasn’t something I expected.”

Politicians on all sides are now wary of associating themselves with the term, he said, which was inhibiting progress. Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, made several policy U-turns last year, including delaying the changeover to electric vehicles, while the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, watered down a promise to invest £28bn a year in a green economy.

“It’s the culture warriors who have really taken against it,” said Stark. “A small group of politicians or political voices has moved in to say that net zero is something that you can’t afford, net zero is something that you should be afraid of … But we’ve still got to reduce emissions. In the end, that’s all that matters.”

The real fight was to make the UK’s economy competitive with other countries that were investing heavily in renewable energy, electric vehicles and other green technologies that were the focus of innovation and investment around the world, he said.

“If it [net zero] is only a slogan, if it is seen as a sort of holding pen for a whole host of cultural issues, then I’m intensely relaxed about dropping it,” he said. “We keep it as a scientific target, but we don’t need to use it as a badge that we keep on every programme.”

Stark gave the example of heat pumps, which have been demonised in some quarters despite offering a low-carbon and potentially low-cost alternative to gas boilers.

“It’s very strange that some see heat pumps as an enemy of the people,” he said, in an interview with the Guardian before leaving his post this Friday. “This is a remarkably sensible technology that we’ve known about for a long time, a straightforward technology to put in your house to keep it warm, or to keep it cool in the summer. But in this country, they’ve taken on a totally different totemic role, as a technology that is being somehow forced upon the populace. I think that’s very dangerous.”

Policymakers should focus instead on what lies behind net zero – investment in the UK’s economy, in ways that would not only reduce greenhouse gas emissions but cut energy use, improve national security, clean up the air and protect nature and the countryside, he added.

“We are talking about cleaning up the economy and making it more productive – you can call that anything you like,” Stark said.

He has been chief executive of the CCC, the statutory body that advises government under the 2008 Climate Change Act, since 2018, under the chair John Gummer (Lord Deben), the former Conservative environment minister. Stark, who will move to the Carbon Trust, a consultancy set up by the government to help businesses cut emissions, leaves at a time when the organisation is without a permanent chair, as Deben left last year and the devolved governments have rejected the Tories’ choice as the new chair.

Tackling the climate crisis has been presented as a massive change, but Stark was at pains to point out that it would not be. “The world that we’ll have in 2050 is extremely similar to the one we have now. We will still be flying, we’ll still be eating meat, we will still be warming our homes, just heating them differently,” he said. “The lifestyle change that goes with this is not enormous at all.”

But it was not just those who were against climate action who were causing the problem, according to Stark. Climate activists were also alarming people, he warned, and creating “quite a serious barrier to large parts of the political spectrum to support climate action” by forceful protests, and presenting environmental policies as radical.

“It would be more helpful if they were less divisive,” he said. “I don’t think it is radical. It’s really important that we stop using words like that, as it is understandably frightening.”

Politicians could design measures so the costs were borne by those best able to shoulder them and people on lower incomes were also able to take advantage of home insulation, heat pumps and other ways of reducing energy bills. “We do need a policy package that is fair,” he said.

Stark pointed to China, the US and the EU, which are all investing heavily in low-carbon technologies that are cheaper or becoming cheaper than fossil fuels. People should not listen to trying to delay the transition, he said. “We will regret going slow in this transition, because we’ll be missing out on the economic benefits of it.”

Ministers are under growing pressure to firm up plans for a green levy on imports to the UK before the general election campaign.

The government is consulting on plans to introduce a carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) from 2027. Under the system, overseas companies wishing to export key goods to the UK would have to show they were paying for their carbon emissions, or face a levy equivalent to the price paid for carbon by UK manufacturers.

This would ensure British manufacturers obliged to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions under the net zero target were not undercut by products from countries with lighter climate rules.

The CBAM is likely to affect imports of carbon-intensive goods, such as steel, cement, glass and ceramics, but the details of the scheme have yet to be set out.

Many Conservative MPs, Labour and the Liberal Democrats, and many businesses and economists, have said they support the plans in principle. However, some on the right of the Tory party, including arch free marketeers who object to such “red tape” interventions, and figures such as David Frost who are sceptical of the net zero goal, are opposed.

There are concerns this opposition will slow progress on the plans, and could mean the CBAM is in effect shelved before the general election, which must be held before the end of January.

The Conservative Environment Network, which comprises more than 100 backbench Tory MPs, urged ministers to press ahead. Tim Loughton, the MP for East Worthing and Shoreham, said: “We should be proud of the Conservative government’s successes in decarbonising our economy. But not every country has followed our lead. If we want to support British industry, we must ensure a level playing field for them to compete with cheaper carbon-intensive imports. These include those produced in China with its coal-dominated power grid.”

John Penrose, the Tory MP for Weston-super-Mare, said a CBAM for the UK would benefit all nations. “Once those countries realise that polluting doesn’t pay, because there’s no competitive advantage in it for them, they will have an incentive to become greener themselves,” he said. “As Conservatives, promoting free markets and handing on a healthy planet for future generations is part of our DNA. A CBAM provides a free-market way to tackle climate change.”

CBAMs have been discussed for decades, but have taken on new urgency in recent years as efforts to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions have increased in developed countries. Last October, the EU introduced a trial CBAM, requiring manufacturers to show data on the emissions involved in the manufacture of certain goods, chiefly cement, iron, steel, aluminium and fertilisers.

From 2026, when the EU begins to impose levies for imports where the carbon price is lower than its own, UK manufacturers could potentially face charges totalling hundreds of millions of pounds a year unless they can show regulators they are paying an equivalent carbon price in the UK.

Jo Gideon, the Tory MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central, said UK companies would be at a severe disadvantage unless the government acted quickly. “When the EU implements its CBAM, high-carbon goods will no longer be able to enter the EU tariff-free. The manufacturers of these goods will instead turn to us, flooding our market with these cheaper goods and undercutting our British industries who have done the right thing and started to decarbonise,” she said.

“While there are still important questions about the design and scope of the UK’s CBAM, I hope that we can introduce this mechanism quickly to prevent this dumping of higher carbon goods.”

Labour is understood to support the principle of the CBAM, but is awaiting detail on the proposals. Wera Hobhouse, the Liberal Democrat spokesperson for energy and climate change, said: “Introducing a CBAM for high-emission products is a vital step in tackling the climate emergency and protecting UK businesses from unfair competition. With the government’s consultation set to conclude in just a few months, ministers must press ahead with these plans without delay. This mustn’t turn into another Conservative setback in our country’s efforts to fight climate change.”

Laith Whitwham, a senior policy adviser at the E3G thinktank, said: “The government has committed to introducing a CBAM in 2027 – a year behind the EU – but it could go much faster, particularly as the UK does not need to reach agreement across 27 member states. Dithering and delay at this point weakens the competitiveness of UK industry and threatens to slow the pace of global decarbonisation through the risk of carbon leakage.”

The Guardian has revealed that India is seeking exemptions from the UK’s CBAM as part of a potential trade deal. Whitwham said that would “be a disaster for the UK’s consumption emissions and for its steel sector. The UK government has just agreed to provide £500m to Indian steel giant Tata Steel to replace its UK blast furnace in Port Talbot with a cleaner electric arc furnace. Exempting India from the UK CBAM now would allow Tata to import steel from its higher carbon blast furnaces in India, without paying a carbon price – which UK producers must do. The UK would in effect be closing its own blast furnaces only to import more steel from blast furnaces abroad.”

A Treasury spokesperson said: “We are currently consulting on delivering a UK CBAM to ensure highly traded, carbon-intensive products from overseas face a comparable carbon price to that paid if the good were produced in the UK. This should give UK industry the confidence to invest knowing that their efforts won’t be undermined by carbon leakage.”

Farmers have been dealing with record-breaking rainfall over at least the past year, meaning food produced in Britain has fallen drastically.

Livestock and crops have been affected as fields have been submerged since last autumn on account of it being an exceptionally wet 18 months.

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

Here, British farmers and growers tell us how they have handled the inclement weather conditions and what the heavy rainfall means for their immediate futures.

‘We are going to have an appalling harvest this year’

Our farm is mainly arable so it’s crops that we grow. The constraints that we are facing this year means we are going to have an appalling harvest. We’ve hardly got any crops in the ground at all, I’ve only managed to get 30 hectares [74 acres] of my 170 hectares planted and we have 110 hectares of “croppable” land. That’s less than a third.

Generally you plant in the autumn but the difficulty we’ve had this year is that from mid-October to effectively now, there has just been non-stop rain. Usually, you get rain but there will be pockets of dry weather for two or three weeks at a time to do the planting. That simply hasn’t happened. For people who got crops in the ground before mid-October, that’s fine, but for me and many others if I plant too early I get this terrible weed called black-grass and that takes over my crop.

We’ve all been caught out this year. I would imagine there will still be thousands of unplanted hectares. The difference between this year and any other is there has been no pocket of fine weather, that’s why it has been such a big problem.

Everyone is saying this is extraordinary. There have been bad years but this year has been particularly bad. You do wonder whether it is climate change throwing a curveball here because we are moving to more and more extremes. When it came to planting crops last autumn, it was fine but harvest 2022 was incredibly dry, meaning they dried up too quickly and the yields weren’t great at all. Tom Allen-Stevens, 54, farmer and agriculture journalist, Faringdon, Oxfordshire

‘There’s no sign of fields drying out soon’

The fields simply aren’t having a chance to dry out. We can’t use our tractor to cultivate, so we haven’t done any of the major plantings that are usually in the ground by now, such as main crop potatoes and onions, summer brassicas and salads. There’s no sign of them drying out soon.

We can’t use the tractor because it will wreck the soil structure, which, as agroecological growers, we’re keen to preserve. Instead we’ve been focusing on our polytunnels and using this space to maximum benefit. This is a tiny area in proportion to our fields though and can’t accommodate enough food to meet the needs of our box scheme.

It’s going to have a huge impact on our business, as customers are likely to cancel their subscription if the amount of veg they receive each week is too small for too long. The “hungry gap” [a few weeks, usually falling between April and early June, when winter crops have ended but the new season’s plantings are yet to be harvested] is going to be way longer than usual. Also, we sometimes buy in from a local organic wholesaler to top up our boxes when we don’t have much of our own produce available; this will be much more expensive this year as so many big UK growers are affected.

Longer term, these unpredictable weather patterns are a worrying indicator of climate change, and confirmation of the need to entirely restructure our food system to enable genuinely sustainable production that meets the needs of local communities and is accessible for all. Rhian Williams, 31, vegetable grower at a community supported agriculture farm, Leeds

‘We still have the vast majority of our cattle inside’

The main enterprise it has affected from our perspective is the cereals, in terms of getting them planted and also the sheep. The lambing percentage was lower, as a result [the percentage of ewes exposed to a ram per breeding period that have lambed].

It’s just been hard work. You get up in the morning and you don’t see a forecast where there is a better [weather] window. It’s quite frustrating and we have to condense a lot of our work into quite small windows at present. It’s a lot more hurried, we are working extended hours into the evenings or starting earlier in the mornings.

At the moment, we still have the vast majority of our cattle inside. We just can’t put anything out because it’s so wet. The sheep are lambing, so we are having to hold them inside until we get a dry weather window so they get stronger before we put them out.

On the cereal side, we couldn’t sow a single seed yet for spring barley until Thursday which, here in Scotland, is quite important for the whisky trade, as well as for our straw bedding for the livestock. Scott Maher, 50, mixed farmer partner, Angus, Scotland

‘If the rain stops, we then have to worry about drought – the seasons are so unpredictable now’

I work as a shepherd for somebody who runs an extensive grass-based system. He keeps exclusively sheep and probably has about 1,000 lambing ewes spread around a large area in the Cotswolds.

Weather is a massive factor but so much of that has been compounded by general issues that are affecting people in day-to-day life. Farming is one of the only industries where we produce things sold at wholesale but we have to pay retail prices for our input – fuel and feed, for example – which has all gone up. That’s always been an issue in the industry.

Last year, we had drought conditions during the peak grass-growing times of the year, spring and early summer. Now we have had to deal with flooding. Some of the fields are completely underwater and are basically inaccessible unless you are prepared to get very wet feet. We’ve had to spread the stock out as far as we can around the land area and keep it understocked by industry standards in order to have that margin for inclement conditions.

If it does stop raining, we then have concerns about whether there will be another drought. The weather seasons are so unpredictable now and that also brings issues of parasites, flies, more insects which we wouldn’t normally see in this country that bring disease such as bluetongue. Elizabeth Johnson, shepherd and vet student, Gloucestershire