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

Six water companies overcharged customers between £800m and £1.5bn by “significantly or systematically” underreporting the true scale of their sewage pollution of rivers and waterways, a tribunal heard on Monday.

In the first environmental competition class action against water companies in England, lawyers argued that the privatised firms had abused their monopoly position to mislead regulators over the amount of sewage they were discharging from their assets over the past 10 years.

As a result the companies, Thames Water, Yorkshire Water, Anglian Water, Severn Trent, Northumbrian Water and United Utilities, were able to charge customers higher bills than they would have been allowed to if they had provided the regulators with a true picture of their sewage pollution.

Prof Carolyn Roberts, a water resource specialist, is taking the action in the competition appeals tribunal and seeking to represent millions of consumers who she believes have been overcharged by hundreds of millions of pounds.

Julian Gregory, for Roberts, told the tribunal on Monday that all the water firms were monopolies that were not subject to any competitive pressures to provide sewerage services to the public. The companies were all legally required to report pollution to the regulators – the Environment Agency and Ofwat, he said.

“Sewage spills pose a threat to wildlife, the environment and public health,” said Gregory.

The pricing regime, controlled by Ofwat, allows the regulator to limit the amount charged to customers for the monopoly services of providing drinking water and sewerage.

The structure provides a financial incentive for water companies to reduce sewage pollution.

But Gregory said the six companies had misled both Ofwat and the Environment Agency by significantly or systematically underreporting the number of sewage discharges from their treatment works and combined sewer overflows from 2014 onwards.

By misleading the regulators on the true scale of sewage discharges, they had been allowed by Ofwat to charge customers higher prices than if they had reported the sewage pollution accurately, said Gregory.

“Carolyn Roberts estimates across the six water companies customers may have been overcharged £800m to £1.5bn,” he said.

“Many people care deeply about the state of our rivers … sewage spills to them can be incredibly damaging. As the true number of sewage spills have become apparent there has been a public outcry,” he said.

“If the defendants [water companies] have been underreporting spills they will not have been properly incentivised to reduce sewage spills.”

Gregory said analysis of Thames Water data alone suggested the company may have failed to report more than 6,000 raw sewage discharges.

Roberts is applying to the tribunal for collective proceedings orders (CPOs) against the six water companies.

If the orders are granted, the proposed claims can proceed to a full trial to establish whether water companies have been overcharging household customers. Customers would automatically be refunded millions of pounds.

“As a professor of the environment, I have a deep appreciation of our waterways and their influence on our wider environment and firmly believe in preserving them for future generations,” said Roberts.

“I hope to be authorised as the class representative to bring these claims on behalf of millions of household consumers who have been overcharged due to the anti-competitive practices employed by these six water companies.”

The six water companies are defending the allegations in the tribunal.

A spokesperson for Water UK, the industry body, said: “This highly speculative claim is entirely without merit. The regulator has confirmed that over 99% of sewage works comply with their legal requirements. If companies fail to deliver on their commitments, then bills will automatically be reduced.”

Heavy rain caused extensive flooding in central Japan over the weekend, with at least one person reported dead and several more unaccounted for.

Officials said “unprecedented” rainfall generated floods and landslides in Ishikawa prefecture, where a powerful 7.5-magnitude earthquake on New Year’s Day killed more than 200 people. The Japan meteorological agency issued its highest-level warning for Ishikawa, advising of a “life-threatening situation”.

Authorities ordered tens of thousands of people to evacuate as more than a dozen rivers overflowed by late morning on Saturday, and a number of people were rescued from flood water in the cities of Wajima and Suzu. On Saturday morning 121mm (4.8in) of rain was recorded in one hour in Wajima, and 84.5mm in Suzu.

This was the heaviest rain observed in these locations since comparative data became available in 1929. Niigata and Yamagata prefectures were also affected with 16,000 people told to evacuate.

Elsewhere, Storm Boris moved into Italy late last week, having earlier caused devastation and some of the worst floods in decades in parts of Austria, Romania, the Czech Republic and Poland. The storm inflicted more suffering in some northern and central Italian regions. More than 1,000 people in Emilia-Romagna were forced to evacuate after floods and landslides, while towns in the central region of Marche also experienced significant flooding. The Italian air force was called in to rescue people who had escaped the flood water by climbing on to their rooftops in several towns, including Traversara di Bagnacavallo.

On the Adriatic coast, the seaside resort of Falconara Marittima had more than 200mm of rain over Wednesday and Thursday. The September average is just 67mm. More than 300mm was recorded in the Apennine mountain region. Conditions improved on Friday and during the course of the weekend as the low pressure responsible for the extreme rainfall eased away.

In stark contrast to the wet weather, northern Portugal has been suffering the effects of deadly wildfires. The prime minister declared a “state of calamity” for the areas worst affected on Tuesday. By Wednesday, 5,000 firefighters were battling more than 100 wildfires. Seven people have died, including three firefighters. Favourable weather conditions helped firefighters to contain the vast majority of the blazes by Friday.

The first time I came face to face with a great white shark, it was dead. I had caught it in my net. And I was so happy. I thought: I can bring a fortune back to my village. I can feed my family. I’m Malagasy – I come from Andavadoaka, a small fishing village on the south-west coast of Madagascar. It is a very dry place where no crops can grow. The name of my tribe, Vezo, means people who live off the ocean, but also people who survive it. Because we rely on it.

I became a shark fisher when I was 16 years old. I dropped out of school because my parents couldn’t afford to support me any more, and followed my uncle into fishing so I could bring some money back to my family. I didn’t see a shark as a magnificent creature. My mindset was: make money, kill, make money, kill. Support my family.

I caught the great white when I was 18 years old. We were in shark territory, 15km offshore and decided to pull in our net because the weather was getting really bad. We couldn’t see what was inside because the net was too deep. Then one of my crew put on a diving mask, saw the shark and shouted.

I put my life in danger to bring that shark home. It was the most terrifying thing I have ever done. It was 4 metres (13ft) long and weighed about 400kg. My boat was 6 metres long, with a 4-metre sail.

The weather was very stormy, lots of wind and heavy rain, and the weight of the shark meant that I had to sink the boat to the surface level of the ocean to get it onboard. We had no radio, no mobile phones, no engine. It took us five hours to sail back to shore. I shared half the meat with my community, and sold the rest for $120 (£90).

For five years, I used to kill up to 50 sharks a day – although on a bad day it was more like three. What made me stop was my brother. He began working with Blue Ventures, a British conservation NGO, to educate the people in my village about sharks. He made me reflect on my work and helped me get a new job, as a shark fishing data collector for Frances Humber, a conservationist with the NGO. I didn’t make good money, but I learned English and about marine life conservation.

The more I learned about sharks and the important role they play in balancing our marine ecosystem and ensuring my own family has enough fish to eat, the more they fascinated me. So I put my life in danger again, this time to help conservationists document overfishing and expose the shark fin trade in Madagascar. I helped a US reporter, Isobel Yeung, go undercover and film a large Chinese warehouse of shark fins with a hidden camera, and more recently I myself filmed a huge industrial fishing vessel that had about 4,000 dead sharks onboard.

It was heartbreaking. My community could eat for two months from what just one of those boats catches in our waters and takes to China.

I became a conservation and wildlife film-maker and photographer because I realised that making films and documentaries is one of the key ways we can protect sharks. It allows me to raise awareness about how beautiful these creatures are – and what is happening to them in our oceans.

I had the best dive of my life recently, filming whale sharks. When I got into the water, nine of them congregated around me, feeding on small plankton. Each was large enough to kill me but they are among the most gentle animals in the ocean.

I cannot describe how happy I was that day, down there with those sharks, witnessing the thriving marine life of the ocean. When I’m 90, I will still tell my child about it. I wanted to stay in that water, for ever.

As told to Donna Ferguson

At least six people have died and 10 others are missing after heavy rain triggered flooding and landslides along a peninsula in Japan that is still recovering from a deadly earthquake at the start of the year.

Public broadcaster NHK and other outlets said on Monday that six people had been confirmed dead, while the Kyodo news agency said more than 100 communities had been cut off by blocked roads after almost two dozen rivers burst their banks.

Two of the deaths occurred near a landslide-hit tunnel in the city of Wajima, Ishikawa prefecture, which was undergoing repairs after being damaged in the New Year’s Day earthquake.

Elsewhere in Ishikawa, two people were missing after being swept away and eight others were unaccounted for, Kyodo added.

Rainfall in Wajima and the nearby city of Suzu reached twice the levels for September in an average year. Japan’s meteorological agency has downgraded its “special warnings” for the area to “warnings”, but advised residents to remain vigilant.

The prime minister, Fumio Kishida, has instructed officials to monitor the damage and cooperate with local authorities as the region was still in the process of recovering from January’s earthquake when the rain, caused by an extratropical depression, arrived.

Heavy rain pounded Ishikawa from Saturday, with more than 540 millimetres (21 inches) recorded in the city of Wajima over 72 hours, the heaviest continuous rain since comparative data became available.

The region is still reeling from a magnitude-7.5 quake at the start of the year, which toppled buildings, triggered tsunami waves and sparked a major fire.

Flood waters inundated emergency housing built for those who had lost their homes in the New Year’s Day quake, which killed at least 374 people, according to Ishikawa government figures.

On Monday, 4,000 households were left without power after the rain, according to the Hokuriku Electric Power Company.

Akemi Yamashita, a 54-year-old Wajima resident, said she had been driving on Saturday when “within only 30 minutes or so, water gushed into the street and quickly rose to half the height of my car”.

“I was talking to other residents of Wajima yesterday, and they said, ‘it’s so heart-breaking to live in this city’. I got teary when I heard that,” she said, describing the earthquake and floods as “like something from a movie”.

In Wajima on Sunday, splintered branches and a huge uprooted tree piled up at a bridge over a river where the raging brown waters almost reached ground level.

Military personnel were sent to the Ishikawa region to join rescue workers over the weekend, as tens of thousands of residents were urged to evacuate.

Scientists say human-driven climate change is intensifying the risk posed by heavy rains because a warmer atmosphere holds more water.

The areas under the emergency warning saw “heavy rain of unprecedented levels”, JMA forecaster Satoshi Sugimoto said on Saturday, adding: “It is a situation in which you have to secure your safety immediately”.

With Agence France-Presse

Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus has married his partner in a ceremony officiated by the TV presenter Sandi Toksvig.

The 79-year-old Swedish singer, who has been married twice before, met Christina Sas in Nuremberg, Germany, in 2021 in connection with the release of Abba’s latest album Voyage.

A post to his Instagram page said: “Today on the 21st of September 2024, Björn Ulvaeus married Christina Sas from Herning, Denmark. They met in Nurnberg in 2021 in connection with the release of Abba’s last album Voyage and started dating in the spring of 2022.

“The wedding took place in Copenhagen in the presence of close friends and family. Sandi Toksvig, Anne Linnet and Kaya Brüel generously performed and made the evening extra special.”

Ulvaeus posted photos from the day, one of which shows former Great British Bake Off host Toksvig dressed in a red robe. The presenter is standing next to Ulvaeus, wearing a suit, and his wife, wearing a muted green wrap dress.

Representatives for Ulvaeus confirmed to the PA news agency that Toksvig had held the ceremony.

Ulvaeus is known for being one-quarter of Swedish pop group Abba, who this year celebrated 50 years since they won the Eurovision song contest with Waterloo.

The group originally comprised two couples – Ulvaeus and Agnetha Fältskog, and Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad. Fältskog and Ulvaeus, who married in 1971, divorced in 1980, while Andersson and Lyngstad divorced in 1981 – a year before the band split.

The quartet did not reform to perform at Eurovision this year despite the event being held in Sweden after Loreen won the competition in 2023 with her hit single Tattoo. Ulvaeus was also previously married to Lena Kallersjö.

Kamala Harris laid down another challenge to Republican rival Donald Trump to meet her for a second debate before November’s presidential election, telling supporters in New York that her opponent “seems to be looking for an excuse” to avoid a second confrontation.

On Saturday, the vice-president and Democratic nominee said she had accepted an invitation from CNN to debate the former president, but Trump said it was already “too late”.

In her remarks at a New York fundraiser, Harris doubled down in her taunting of Trump over the issue, saying: “I think we should have another debate.”

“I accepted an invitation to debate in October, which my opponent seems to be looking for an excuse to avoid when he should accept,” she added. “He should accept because I feel very strongly that we owe it to the American people, to the voters, to meet once more before election day.”

The question of the US’s high stakes presidential debates has hung over the candidates since Joe Biden dropped out of the race following a disastrous performance in June. The single scheduled debate between Trump and Harris, earlier this month, was widely viewed to have gone Harris’s way and been a serious blow to Trump.

But it did not move the polls as much as the Harris campaign hoped and her campaign is still tasked with introducing her to US voters. Last week, Harris went on Oprah to help smooth the introduction along.

This week Harris is due to reveal a set of new economic policies. Polls show she is steadily gaining trust on the key issue of the economy, which often favors Trump and the Republican party.

On Sunday, Harris returned to the key themes of the message Democrats wish to underline – a threat to democracy they perceive a second Trump terms represents and the knife-edge that polls suggest the race remains balanced upon.

“This is a man who said he would be a dictator on day one … just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails,” Harris said in New York. “This race is as close as it could be. This is a margin of error race … and I am running and we are running as the underdog.”

Harris called Trump an “unserious man”, but said the consequences of putting him back in the White House were “very serious”.

Head-to-head polls tend to show Harris with a narrow but solid lead over Trump, though the situation is more mixed in the crucial swing states that will decide the race to the White House. That is a reverse of the situation when Biden was in the race, where Trump had established a firm lead over the US president.

Russia was left badly isolated at a high-profile UN summit in New York when it made a surprise move to derail an ambitious pact designed to revive the UN – and failed.

Russia’s move to defer adoption of the agreement on the grounds that it supposedly represented western interests was rejected on Sunday by 143 votes to seven with 15 abstentions.

The Russian delegation said that if the planned vote endorsing the high-profile “pact for the future” were not deferred pending further talks, it would seek to move an amendment asserting the key issues addressed in the pact are the subject of domestic jurisdiction in which the UN should not seek to intervene.

But the overwhelming UN general assembly vote threw out Russia’s call for deferment and its amendment.

The Russian move, at the outset of the two-day “summit for the future”, looked diplomatically clumsy, if perhaps designed for domestic consumption. It angered speakers from the African Union (AU) and Mexico, underlining that Moscow had only limited support, notably from Belarus, Venezuela, Syria and Iran.

The AU, led by the Democratic Republic of Congo, called for the Russian amendment to be rejected.

The pact is seen by many in the global south as both a well-intended and necessary collective effort at UN renewal as well as a personal legacy for a relatively popular UN secretary general António Guterres.

But the controversy underlined the extent to which ideological divisions have damaged multilateral cooperation at the UN, the very issue that the pact was seeking to address.

Russia objected to 25 provisions in the draft pact, including asserting the primacy of national jurisdiction and rejecting language on universal access to sexual and reproductive health rights, as well as gender empowerment more broadly.

With the Russian move crushed, Guterres told the summit that the pact’s aim was “to bring multilateralism back from the brink at a time when the world [is] heading off the rails”. Twenty-first-century challenges – from debt in developing countries to the climate crisis – required 21st-century solutions.

Graham Gordon, head of global advocacy at Christian Aid, said of the pact: “The key point of the document, given its inherent limits, is that it does provide pointers of what should be achieved in other forums including the IMF, at Cop and at the G20. The key test will be in 12 months in assessing how much momentum this provides. It is a striking document in its admission of how multilateralism is currently failing.”

Guterres had advocated for a Summit for the Future more than two years ago as an attempt to persuade world leaders in the wake of the global Covid outbreak that cooperation and multilateralism had to be revived.

The pact, spanning 26 pages and 56 recommendations, says it is offering a new beginning for multilateralism and repeatedly asserts the primacy of international law. But the lack of new specifics has weakened its impact.

The document covers reform and expansion of the UN security council to make the body more representative of the 21st century, a UN role in governing artificial intelligence, the phasing out of fossil fuels in energy systems, reform of multilateral financial institutions, a recommitment to full nuclear disarmament and modernising UN peacekeeping so it evolves into war prevention.

Concrete ideas include a biennial UN summit on the global economy, an emergency platform for managing pandemics, food insecurity and environmental disasters, and a new UN oversight body of experts advising on the risks posed by AI for all economies.

A major sticking point was western opposition to the UN playing a role in making international financial institutions more representative. A UN-led push to include a reference to a $500bn (£375bn) stimulus to put the sustainable development goals back on track was also rejected.