An Alaska man and two police officers rescued a baby moose from what police described as “a sure demise” after it fell into a lake and got stuck in a narrow space between a floatplane and a dock.

Spencer Warren, who works for the outdoor tourism company Destination Alaska Adventure Co, had arrived at work about 6.30am on Friday to prepare a floatplane for the day’s trip when he heard what he thought was an odd-sounding bird.

He quickly spotted the moose calf stuck between the floats of the plane and the dock at Beluga Lake in Homer, a Kenai peninsula community about 220 miles (350km) south of Anchorage. The floats replace the wheels on a plane, allowing it to take off and land on water.

He immediately thought, “Oh, man, where is mama? I know she’s nearby,” before spotting the worried mother about 4ft (1.2 meters) away with another calf. Mother moose can be dangerously protective of their calves – a photographer was killed by a mama moose protecting her calf just last month in Homer.

The baby moose tried to get out of the lake, but couldn’t get its footing on the top of the metal float with its hooves. Its wary mother was keeping Warren, the would-be rescuer, from getting too close as it struggled.

“It’s like an ice rink for the moose and its hooves,” Warren said of Friday’s rescue. “So he just kept slipping and slipping and could not get up.”

Warren checked in with his boss, who called Homer police.

One officer eventually positioned his police cruiser between the mama moose and the floatplane to allow another officer and Warren to rescue the calf, Lt Ryan Browning of the Homer police told the Associated Press.

The calf had one leg outstretched across the top of the plane’s float, where it was stuck.

“You know, kind of thankfully, he wasn’t moving so that it made the rescue a little bit easier,” Warren said. “We just lifted him straight out and put him on the dock there.”

The exhausted calf splayed out on the boardwalk until an officer helped it stand. The calf reunited with its mother and she licked the water off its body – all of it caught on camera by Warren.

“Anytime you can rescue a little critter, it always makes you feel good,” Browning said.

Prof Lynn Dicks has had her hands in the soil for almost three decades – and she has watched it slowly become stripped of invertebrate life.

“In my life, I have seen the decline,” says Dicks, an ecology professor at the University of Cambridge. She knows it from the data: “The data we have of long-term trends in insect abundance over time, that the decline rates are, on average, about 1% a year.

But she sees it, every day, as well. “There are fewer insects just flying around. When you leave the window open and the lights on at night, you don’t get flooded with them any more like you used to.”

Dicks has spent her lift trying to work out why, exactly, the UK’s insect populations are nosediving before it is too late to stop species being lost for ever. And pesticide use – the pesticides that farmers have been using on crops for decades – are one of the key factors.

While farming groups say the weight of pesticides used in the UK has halved since 1990, scientists and campaign groups say this is not an accurate measurement of chemical usage. This is because the types of chemicals used have become more toxic and the area of land treated with pesticides has increased.

Pesticide Action Network says some modern pesticides are 10,000 times more toxic than DDT, a notoriously noxious chemical that was banned for its impact on human health and the environment.

And we still don’t know the effects these cocktails of chemicals have on insect ecosystems, pointed out Nick Mole, policy officer at Pesticide Action Network UK. “Hundreds of different pesticides are used to grow food in the UK. As a result, pesticides appear in millions of different combinations in varying concentrations in our landscape. However, safety assessments are only carried out for one chemical at a time. There is little to no understanding of how these pesticides interact with one another to affect soil, water and biodiversity. Much more research needs to be undertaken to understand this properly.”

Dicks said: “The wild insects are being exposed to a very wide range of pesticides as they go about their lives. And it’s fungicide, herbicides, molluscasides, insecticides, a whole cocktail of different things. In fact, a recent European study on bumblebees, showed an average of eight different chemicals in the pollen stores collected by bumblebees, and up to 27 different pesticides being collected.”

Governments also don’t legislate for combinations of toxic chemicals, she explains, adding: “We don’t really know how this is affecting insects more widely. I would say it’s affecting them. In that European study on bumblebees, they could measure the exposure. They call it the pesticide risk, but it’s basically a measure of the exposure to pesticides that’s weighted by their toxicity, and that measure predicted the number of bumblebee queens that could be produced, the number of bees in the colonies, and the way the colonies grew. In fact, the most exposed colonies produced 47% fewer queens than those that were least exposed.”

The State of Nature report, conducted in 2023, found insect numbers crashing. “Pollinating insects (bees, hoverflies and moths), which play a critical role in food production, show an average decrease in distribution of 18% since 1970. Predators of crop pests (ants, carabid, rove and ladybird beetles, hoverflies, dragonflies and wasps) showed an average decrease in distribution of 34%”.

Max Barclay, the curator of beetles at the Natural History Museum in London, said he had also noticed a decline: “I examined horse dung at the weekend in Sussex, and found it was entirely devoid of dung beetles and their larvae and was just lying on the pasture in its original shape for weeks instead of being broken down into the soil. This has potential long-term consequences for soil health and fertility. Intact piles of dung all over a pasture is not something I have experienced when I was starting out in beetle studies in the 1980s and 90s, but now is a commonplace sight.”

He said the pesticides used in livestock farming were decimating beetle populations: “Ivermectin and associated worming drugs used routinely for sheep, cattle and horses can have a devastating effect on dung beetle faunas, which are important for recycling nutrients into the soil and through their burrowing for soil aeration.”

And unlike with crop pesticides, the issue is getting worse and the worming drugs are more frequently used. “Ivermectin has been available since the 1970s but recently there has been a cultural change, from worming animals when needed, to administering regular worming doses whether or not there is evidence of worms. This means that the dung and pasture is permanently contaminated with toxic chemicals.”

Ali Karley, Jenni Stockan and Cathy Hawes, respectively an agroecologist, an invertebrate specialist and an ecologist working in arable biodiversity at the James Hutton Institute said they had also noticed beetle declines.

They said: “From our Environmental Change Network data at our Glensaugh research farm, a hill farm in north-east Scotland, we’ve seen a reduction of about 70% in ground beetle abundance over 30 years, although this number varies with habitat. The biggest declines are in bog heathland and the least in grassland.”

They said pesticide use could be reduced with a technique known as integrated pest management, which “seeks to use natural predators or parasites to control pests, using selective pesticides for backup only when pests are unable to be controlled by natural means. It’s important to adopt an integrated approach to enable pesticide reduction without increasing risk.”

Some farmers are doing this already. Dicks said she felt optimistic about the future, with many farmers ceasing to use insecticides.

“I’m quite optimistic that we can change and that we can reduce pesticide use in all of our farmland,” she said, “But it does take goodwill, and it’s going to take supporting farmers to do that, and getting research to show a positive effect of that transition on insects in the real environment.”

Out of a near cloudless sky comes a low, hornet-like drone, announcing the arrival of a flyer many times bigger than any of the neighbourhood birds. It is a localised summer regular and, over decades, I have learned to narrow down this particular sound to two similar species.

More than a century ago, a previous country diarist watched and listened as I do. The Cheshire naturalist TA Coward observed the first flying machines and their impact on birds. By the time he came to write his column in 1919, he noted: “A few years ago, the appearance of an aeroplane caused great consternation among these lesser flyers; rooks, pigeons, starlings, partridges and others scattered and took cover, long before our less keen eyes had spotted the approaching machine. Now they are indifferent.”

And so it is today. The approaching plane might have scared the Unterhose off the Luftwaffe, but it shows no sign of diverting the flightpath of fly-catching starlings. The Shuttleworth aerodrome is just four miles as the crow flies, and it is the norm to see summer displays of vintage aircraft. The Spitfire or Hurricane comes into view at buzzard height, and my limited reading tells me the curve in the wings pinpoints a Spitfire.

Coward pondered the radical change in bird behaviour he had witnessed within a short space of time: “Presumably they had learned that this stiff-winged, noisy creature is not a gliding hawk, and that it does not swoop upon or strike down any of their kind. But does each bird learn this lesson in its youth, or is there an acquired hereditary knowledge?” Such a question exercised me much of last month, when robins nesting in the garden flew within arm’s length many times every day to feed their young. When do birds work out that some big beasts have no predatory intent?

High above the Spitfire, white wisps trail across the sky. The pandemic restored our blue virginity and offered a reset. Humanity never took it. Ever more jets fly today, pumping out the climate-wrecking gases that present the true danger to birds and people alike.

In 2001, after spending a year studying in Beijing as part of our degree, two friends and I decided to travel to Mongolia and Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railway. We did everything as cheaply as possible, to the extent that I was terrified we were going to be flung off the train at the Mongolia-Russia border, because we’d got our visas from a tiny, dodgy-looking agency in a random tower block in Beijing.

Being worried was pretty much my default state at that time. I found talking to strangers difficult, and struggled to raise my hand in class. I was always terrified of making mistakes. Though it wasn’t a devastating shyness, I envied the way that friends and classmates always seemed at home in different groups and situations – a feeling that had always eluded me.

Studying Chinese was both a way of facing my fears head-on and a constant source of anxiety, as it demanded a willingness to make a complete fool of myself (the perils of a tonal language) and a confidence that I felt I just didn’t have. But, by the end of our year in Beijing, I was definitely making progress, and starting to feel more comfortable plunging into what had once felt like the high-wire balancing act of every conversation.

On this journey, though, the Chinese we’d been learning didn’t do us any good, as almost all the other passengers were Mongolian. But, despite the language barrier, we soon found ourselves lulled into the rhythm of life on the train, its closed world creating oddly intimate relationships (although the unfortunate gentleman who found himself sharing our cabin took one look at us and left, never to be seen on the journey again).

We spent hours watching the Russian landscape roll past. We jumped off the train at short station stops, as our fellow passengers laid out their goods on the ground, selling a few T-shirts or quilts before rolling everything up again, moments before the train left. We bought smoked fish from elderly ladies at the Irkutsk stop. We played cards in the guards’ cabin, communicating in a bit of shared Chinese, and in gestures and guesses, and vodka washed down with shots of milk.

There’s a point on the journey where the train crosses the border between Asia and Europe, and we decided to celebrate with a drink in the dining car. When we arrived, we walked straight into a party – music blaring, vodka flowing, boxes of chocolates being passed around. We were welcomed in, and crossed the border dancing to Robbie Williams and Mongolian pop, glancing outside just in time to glimpse the white obelisk that is the only sign of the meeting of continents. It was a moment I remember with a vivid sense of happiness – not because we were back in Europe but because I was here, on a train with people I’d just met, with a language we didn’t share, a long way from anywhere I knew and feeling absolutely exhilarated.

We got off the train late at night in a thunderstorm in Moscow, and somehow managed to find the state-approved hotel we’d booked in order to get our visas. After exploring Moscow and St Petersburg, my two friends flew back to the UK. But by now I was addicted, and I decided to carry on travelling home overland, taking a series of buses the rest of the way.

It was the first time I’d ever travelled completely alone – through six different countries, staying in cheap hostels, speaking to countless strangers, getting by with a few words from a phrase book and a reliance on the kindness of others. Every time I felt the familiar sense of panic at having to make conversation or navigate a new situation, I thought about that moment in the dining car, and the person I had felt I could be. I realised belatedly that it didn’t matter if there were awkward moments. I began to enjoy speaking to new people and started asking questions rather than attempt to fade into the background and hope nobody noticed me. I felt the world opening up.

Eventually I came back home to my parents’ house in Lancashire, refusing to ring for a lift, as if that would somehow negate all the confidence and self-reliance I had learned. I remember feeling that I could do anything.

After graduating I spent much of my 20s living abroad, in Japan, China and Italy. It’s a privileged position, being able to make that choice, and I know how lucky I’ve been. That evening in the dining car of the Trans-Siberian train fed a longing for adventure, for more of those chaotic, joyful, unexpected encounters with other places and lives. It helped turn me into a writer, raiding those memories for my novel. And above all it turned me into someone who isn’t always afraid of making mistakes; who feels at home in the world.

The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands by Sarah Brooks is published by W&N on 20 June, priced £14.99. To support the Guardian and the Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

A marine conservation group has initiated legal action against the UK government, claiming the Conservatives’ decision to issue North Sea oil and gas licences without taking into account their impact on the environment was unlawful.

Oceana UK, part of an international conservation organisation, said that in issuing 82 licences, Claire Coutinho, the secretary of state for energy security, and the North Sea Transition Authority, ignored advice from independent government experts about the potential effects on marine protected areas (MPAs).

The licences, issued between October 2023 and May 2024, cover 226 areas or “blocks” – a third of which overlap with MPAs. Oceana claims the assessments of the blocks – provided by an agency on behalf of the government – did not reflect the advice given by the independent government experts and so were in breach of the law.

The subsequent decision, on 3 May, to award the licences was also unlawful, for the same reason, it said.

More than 2,000 oil spills have happened in the North Sea since 2011, including 215 in MPAs, according to the investigative website, the Ferret. Marine life is at risk from routine spills, exposure to toxic chemicals and extreme noise pollution through seismic blasting connected to oil and gas activities.

“This is not a case of misunderstanding or lack of information,” said Hugo Tagholm, the executive director of Oceana UK. “This is a deliberate choice to unlawfully ignore expert advice and jeopardise our seas, climate and future.”

Last year, Greenpeace lost a legal challenge to the UK’s oil and gas licences, after a court ruled in favour of the government, which argued it was not required to assess the “downstream” greenhouse gases produced by consuming oil and gas.

Rowan Smith, a solicitor for Leigh Day acting on behalf of Oceana, said the charity’s case is that “it is unthinkable for the government to ignore advice from its experts that condemns plans for North Sea oil and gas expansion as harmful for protected marine habitats”.

He added: “Oceana hopes the secretary of state decides not to defend this legal claim, but our client is prepared to pursue it if that becomes necessary.”

A spokesperson for the North Sea Transition Authority said: “We do not comment on potential litigation matters.”

The Department of Energy Security and Net Zero were approached for a comment.

Peter Dutton has announced the Coalition proposes to build seven nuclear power plants and two proposed small modular reactors, but dodged questions about the cost of the plan.

A snap Coalition party room meeting on Wednesday heard the opposition proposes that Tarong and Callide in Queensland; Mount Piper and Liddell in New South Wales; Collie in Western Australia; Loy Yang in Victoria; and the Northern power station in South Australia host nuclear power plants.

The plan has been panned as more expensive than firming renewable energy and guaranteed to increase emissions due to increased reliance on fossil fuels until nuclear power is ready, which the Coalition claims could be as soon as 2035 in contrast to expert advice.

At a press conference in Sydney, Dutton confirmed the power plants, if built, would be owned by the commonwealth government, a similar model to NBN Co and Snowy Hydro.

But Dutton refused to say what the cost will be to the Australian taxpayer, claiming without evidence it will “cost a fraction” of Labor’s power plans. He said the cost would be released “in due course”, but did not commit to it before the election.

The sites are mostly in Coalition-held electorates: Colin Boyce’s seat of Flynn, the Nationals leader David Littleproud’s seat of Maranoa; Rick Wilson’s seat of O’Connor; and Rowan Ramsey’s seat of Grey. Liddell is in Labor MP Dan Repacholi’s seat of Hunter. Mount Piper is in National turned independent MP Andrew Gee’s electorate of Calare.

The sites were chosen on the basis of water availability, connection to the grid and the closure date of existing coal power plants. None are currently owned by the commonwealth, which Dutton suggested could be overcome by compulsorily acquiring the sites.

Dutton said the seven locations “can host new nuclear sites and that’ll be part of an energy mix with renewables and significant amounts of gas … particularly in the interim period”.

Construction of nuclear power plants would “utilise the existing distribution networks” when coal power plants reach the end of their life, he said.

The CSIRO Gencost report advised a “15+ year development time” should be expected for nuclear in Australia, meaning if a decision to pursue the technology was made next year then a plant would be deployed “no sooner than 2040”.

Dutton suggested that building two plants by 2035-37 with the remainder to be built in the 2040s was “achievable” and a “sensible rollout”. Dutton made light of the lead time, joking “I only have plans for three to four terms” in government.

Dutton said the Coalition would work with experts to determine the best technology for each site but, according to a media release, the power stations in Western and South Australia would be “SMR only”.

Despite the fact SMRs are not currently commercially available, Dutton asserted that the “technology is available”, with the same technology for nuclear propelled submarines “able to be translated” into civilian electricity.

The federal Coalition has attempted to ramp up pressure on Labor for refusing to lift the ban on nuclear energy, but faces opposition at the state level from its own side of politics, as Guardian Australia revealed in March.

Nuclear power is banned in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland, which prompted questions in party room on Wednesday. The Coalition would also require the Senate to overturn the federal ban.

On Tuesday the Queensland Liberal National Party leader, David Crisafulli, ruled out repealing Queensland’s legislated ban on the construction and operation of nuclear reactors.

“The answer is no, and I’ve made my view very clear on that,” he said, describing nuclear power as “not on our plan, not on our agenda”.

Dutton denied that his party is divided but acknowledged there had been “some debate” about whether premiers would agree to the plan. He suggested the commonwealth would negotiate to overcome their objections if the Coalition were elected.

“Somebody famously said ‘I would not stand between the premier and a bucket of money’,” he said.

The Coalition also played down the potential for local communities to oppose the plan. The shadow energy minister, Ted O’Brien, said they will benefit from “the cheapest and cleanest and most consistent energy in the country”; while Dutton said former coal communities are “instantly supportive of this proposal”.

In its latest GenCost report the CSIRO said electricity from nuclear energy would be at least 50% more expensive than solar and wind, with a theoretical 1,000MW nuclear plant built today to cost at least $8.6bn.

The chief executive of the Clean Energy Council, Kane Thornton, said the Coalition policy “is a recipe for delay and skyrocketing energy bills”.

“Australia has no nuclear power industry, so building new reactors would take at least 20 years.”

Ahead of the announcement the treasurer, Jim Chalmers, described the Coalition’s policy as “economic insanity”.

“Nuclear takes longer, it costs more and it will squander Australia’s unique combination of advantages,” he told Radio National.

“It is the worst combination of economic and ideological stupidity … it is fiscally irresponsible.”

Microplastics have been discovered in penises for the first time, raising questions about a potential role in erectile dysfunction.

The revelation comes after the pollutants were recently detected in testes and semen. Male fertility has fallen in recent decades and more research on potential harm of microplastics to reproduction is imperative, say experts.

The researchers said the penis could be particularly vulnerable to contamination with microplastics due to high blood flow during erections. People ingest microplastics through eating, drinking and breathing and the tiny particles have been detected in blood.

The study assessed tissue taken from five men who were undergoing surgery related to erectile dysfunction. Microplastics were found in four cases, with PET and polypropylene being the most prevalent. Both are used in food and drink packaging and other everyday items.

There appears to be widespread contamination of people’s bodies with microplastics, with scientists finding them wherever they look. The impact on health is as yet unknown but microplastics have been shown to cause damage to human cells in the laboratory.

The particles can cause inflammation in tissue, as air pollution particles do, and chemicals in the plastics could also cause harm. Doctors found a substantially raised risk of stroke and heart attack death in people whose arteries were contaminated with microplastics.

Millions of tonnes of plastic waste are dumped in the environment every year and much is broken down into microplastics. These have polluted the entire planet, from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans.

Dr Ranjith Ramasamy, who led the new research while at the University of Miami in the US, said: “The penis is a vascular, spongy organ so is definitely vulnerable. During an erection, a fifth of the blood volume in the whole body gets pumped to the penis.”

He added: “We know erectile dysfunction is multifactorial. You need good hormones, nerves, blood supply, and good smooth muscle tissue for an erection to happen.

“We found that microplastics were present in the smooth muscle of the penis. All we know is that they are not supposed to be there, and we suspect that it could lead to smooth muscle dysfunction.”

Ramasamy said more research was urgently needed to determine the potential role of microplastics in erectile dysfunction and male infertility. Sperm counts in men have been falling for decades and 40% of low counts remain unexplained, although chemical pollution has been implicated by many studies. Recent studies in mice have reported that microplastics reduced sperm count and caused abnormalities and hormone disruption.

Ramasamy said: “We’ve moved past whether we have microplastics in us, to whether there is a level of microplastics beyond which things become pathologic.”

The new research, published in IJIR: Your Sexual Medicine Journal, analysed tissue samples taken from five men who were undergoing surgery for an inflatable penile prosthesis, which is a treatment option for men with severe erectile dysfunction. The microplastics detected ranged in size from 0.5mm down to 0.002mm.

The researchers said the pervasive spread of microplastics was alarming andit was imperative to understand the potential implications for human health.

Ramasamy said: “As a society, we need to be cognisant that drinking water from plastic water bottles, getting takeout food in plastic containers and, even worse, microwaving food in plastic containers, are contributing to having things in our body that should not be there. And the penis is the one organ that everybody will pay attention to.”

Nearly 2,000 children under five are dying every day from air pollution, which has overtaken poor sanitation and a lack of clean water to become the second biggest health risk factor for young children around the world.

More than 8 million deaths, of children and adults, were caused by air pollution in 2021, according to a new study from the Health Effects Institute (HEI), as both outdoor and indoor pollution continue to take an increasing toll on health.

Dirty air is now the second biggest killer globally, overtaking tobacco use, and second only to high blood pressure, as a risk factor for death among the general population. Among children under five, air pollution is second only to malnutrition as a risk factor in mortality.

This year’s State of Global Air report, published by the HEI since 2017, and produced this year in partnership with Unicef, also shows that children in poor countries are suffering some of the worst impacts, with the death rate linked to air pollution in children under five 100 times higher in most of Africa than it is in high income countries.

Pallavi Pant, the lead author of the report and head of global health at HEI, pointed to the vast inequalities that the report has uncovered. “Far too much of the burden [is] borne by young children, older populations, and low and middle income countries,” she said.

Tiny particles called PM2.5 – meaning they are smaller than 2.5 micrometres in diameter – are to blame for more than 90% of global air pollution deaths, the report found. PM2.5 particles can enter the bloodstream and have been found to affect organs throughout the body. They have been found to be associated not only with lung disease but heart disease, stroke, diabetes, dementia and miscarriage.

The report showed how pervasive and damaging the prevalence of PM2.5 pollution has become, finding that the presence of elevated levels of the fine particles was now “the most consistent and accurate predictor of poor health outcomes” around the world.

Kitty van der Heijden, the deputy executive director of Unicef, said: “Our inaction is having profound effects on the next generation, with lifelong health and wellbeing impacts. The global urgency is undeniable. It is imperative that governments and businesses consider these estimates and locally available data and use it to inform meaningful, child-focused action to reduce air pollution and protect children’s health.”

The impacts of the climate crisis are also worsening air quality, according to the HEI. The report found that “as droughts become more severe and prolonged, and lands grow ever drier, wildfires ravage once-thriving forests and dust storms impact vast plains, filling the air with particles that linger for long periods of time.”

Higher temperatures in summer can also worsen the impacts of airborne pollutants such as nitrogen oxides, which at elevated temperatures can turn more readily into ozone, an irritant gas when breathed in. Long-term exposure to ozone contributed to nearly half a million deaths in 2021, the report found.

Tackling air pollution could also have beneficial impacts on the climate. About half a million of the deaths of children in 2021 were linked to dirty air indoors, mainly the result of cooking with dirty fuels, including biomass, charcoal, paraffin and coal. Switching to cleaner fuels, such as solar cookstoves, could vastly reduce PM2.5 emissions, as well as emissions of carbon dioxide.

About 2.3 billion people around the world lack access to clean cooking fuels. The International Energy Agency estimates that about $4bn a year is needed between now and 2030 to solve the problem in sub-Saharan Africa alone. It held a global summit last month that raised $2.2bn for projects to help move people across the continent to cleaner methods.

Fatih Birol, the executive director of the IEA, said the problem needed to be seen as a global priority for governments, with impacts on health, the climate and national economies, as well as gender equality, because women and girls are often given the task of finding firewood. “This is an issue that has been ignored for too long,” he said.

The State of Global Air report used data from the Global Burden of Disease study from 2021, covering more than 200 countries and territories around the world. Previous reports have found that nearly every person breathes unhealthy levels of air pollution each day, and that half a million babies were being killed each year by filthy air.

A coalition of environmental non-profit organizations have called on the the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) to add extreme heat and wildfire smoke to its list of major disasters that could qualify for emergency funding.

The Center for Biological Diversity signed a joint petition on Monday urging Fema, the federal government’s lead agency in responding to natural disasters, to officially recognize the increasing number of heat-related crises.

“It’s past time for Fema to address the climate emergency head-on. That means unlocking crucial funding for local governments to build robust and resilient solutions like community solar and storage, cooling centers and air filtration,” said Jean Su, energy justice director and senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity.

“That’s a critical way we can protect workers and vulnerable communities from the ravages of the climate emergency.”

More than 270 million Americans – roughly 80% of the country’s population – are experiencing a kind of heatwave, smashing records with temperatures at or above 90F (32.2C) for long periods of time under a weather phenomenon known as a heat dome. Experts said the type of heatwave the north-east is facing has not been seen in decades.

And it’s not even July.

Scientists warn that heatwaves are increasing in frequency as the climate crisis intensifies due to human activity, especially burning fossil fuels and deforestation. Last year was the hottest year on record and the US faced the most heatwaves since 1936.

The risks associated with the intense heat include more wildfires, poor air quality and a strain on infrastructure that delivers much needed power to keep cool. The National Weather Service says heat is the leading disaster-related killer in the US, killing more people than hurricanes, floods and tornadoes combined.

“One construction worker dies every three days in Texas and a huge factor in these deaths is heat; whether it’s heat stroke or hyperthermia or in some cases, prolonged illness that can affect eyesight and quality of life,” said Margarita Del Cid, Workers Defense Dallas member-leader.

Del Cid added: “Additionally, communities of color including Latines, generally reside in areas that are more susceptible to the effect of wildfire smoke that can lead to life-threatening illness such as asthma, bronchitis, and even affect the brain’s function. A federal standard to qualify heat and wildfire smoke as a major disaster will make way for life-saving and proactive resources and support in these vulnerable communities and areas”.

Fema has not issued a specific response to the petition, but the agency’s spokesperson for the western US states said there was nothing that would preclude an emergency declaration for extreme heat and noted that there would need to be an immediate threat to life and safety that local authorities could not respond to.

Fema did not immediately respond to a request for comment.