The UK’s most hazardous nuclear site, Sellafield, has pleaded guilty to criminal charges related to cybersecurity failings brought by the industry regulator.

Lawyers acting for Sellafield told Westminster magistrates’ court on Thursday that cybersecurity requirements were “not sufficiently adhered to for a period” at the vast nuclear waste dump in Cumbria.

The charges relate to information technology security offences spanning a four-year period from 2019 to 2023. It emerged in March that the Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) intended to prosecute Sellafield for technology security offences.

Late last year the Guardian’s Nuclear Leaks investigation revealed a catalogue of IT failings at the site dating back several years.

Sellafield pleaded guilty to a charge that it had failed to “ensure that there was adequate protection of sensitive nuclear information on its information technology network”, the Financial Times reported.

The Guardian reported last year that the site systems had been hacked by groups linked to Russia and China in December last year, embedding sleeper malware that could lurk and be used to spy or attack systems. At the time, Sellafield said it did not have evidence of a successful cyber-attack.

Paul Greaney KC, acting for Sellafield, told the court: “It is important to emphasise there was not and has never been a successful cyber-attack on Sellafield.”

Greaney added that Sellafield’s systems were now robust and said media reports of hacks were “false”.

An ONR spokesperson said: “We acknowledge that Sellafield Limited has pleaded guilty to all charges.

“There is no evidence that any vulnerabilities have been exploited,” the spokesperson said, adding that due to ongoing legal proceedings the ONR could not offer further detail at this time.

Sentencing is expected to take place on 8 August.

The site has the largest store of plutonium in the world and is a sprawling rubbish dump for nuclear waste from weapons programmes and decades of atomic power generation.

The Guardian investigation revealed a string of IT issues, including concerns about external contractors being able to plug memory sticks into its computer system while unsupervised.

The investigation found problems had been known by senior figures at the nuclear site for at least a decade, according to a report dated from 2012, which warned there were “critical security vulnerabilities” that needed to be addressed urgently.

Sellafield’s computer servers were deemed so insecure that the problem was nicknamed Voldemort after the Harry Potter villain, according to a government official familiar with the ONR investigation and IT failings at the site, because it was so sensitive and dangerous.

At the time, Sellafield said that “all of our systems and servers have multiple layers of protection”.

“Critical networks that enable us to operate safely are isolated from our general IT network, meaning an attack on our IT system would not penetrate these,” a spokesperson said.

Britain’s public spending watchdog, the National Audit Office, launched an investigation into risks and costs at Sellafield earlier this year.

Serbia are demanding that Uefa punish Croatia and Albania after accusing their fans of hateful chanting during their Euro 2024 clash in Hamburg on Wednesday.

Jovan Surbatovic, general secretary of the Football Association of Serbia, said a formal complaint had been submitted, claiming that Croatia and Albania fans chanted “Kill, kill, kill the Serb” during the 2-2 draw. He even threatened that Serbia, themselves charged by Uefa for incidents during their defeat by England on Sunday, could withdraw from the tournament.

“First of all, I want to thank our fans for their support in the match against England and I hope we will beat Slovenia,” Surbatovic has been quoted as saying. “What happened is scandalous and we will ask Uefa for sanctions, even if it means not continuing the competition. If Uefa doesn’t punish them, we will think about how to proceed.”

On Monday, the Serbian Football Association was charged by Uefa after their supporters displayed a banner that “transmitted a provocative message unfit for a sports event” against England and for throwing objects inside the stadium in Gelsenkirchen.

That charge came after the Kosovo Football Federation complained to European football’s governing body about “Serbian fans displaying political, chauvinistic, and racist messages against Kosovo” during the same game.

“We were punished for isolated cases and our fans behaved much better than the others,” Surbatovic said. “One fan was punished for racist insults and we don’t want it to be attributed to others. We Serbs are gentlemen and we have an open heart.”

Serbia fans chanted “Kosovo is the heart of Serbia” in Munich’s Marienplatz on Thursday. Fans had gathered in the city-centre square before their team’s game with Slovenia at the Allianz Arena.

Two-time Olympic champion Katie Archibald will miss Paris 2024 after suffering a double leg break in a freak accident.

The 30-year-old Scottish cyclist fractured a tibia and fibula and dislocated an ankle having tripped over a garden step. She also sustained substantial ligament damage during the incident on Tuesday and has since undergone surgery.

“I tripped over a step in the garden and managed to, somehow, dislocate my ankle; break my tibia and fibula; and rip two ligaments off the bone. What the heck,” she posted on Instagram alongside a picture of her in a hospital bed.

“Had surgery yesterday to pin the bones back together and reattach the ligaments. Then hopefully this afternoon I’ll be going home. A hundred apologies for what this means for the Olympic team, which I’ve been told won’t involve me.

“I’m still processing that bit of news, but thought I better confirm it publicly instead of leaving it to the grapevine (trip hazard and all that).”

Archibald, who won team pursuit gold at Rio 2016 and then topped the podium in the madison alongside Laura Kenny at Tokyo 2020, has endured a horrendous past couple of years.

She missed the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham after colliding with a vehicle amid a series of injury setbacks, while her partner, mountain biker Rab Wardell, died suddenly that summer aged 37.

“A hundred thank yous for the fabulous doctors, nurses, radiographers, porters, physios, surgeons and more at the Manchester Royal Infirmary,” Archibald wrote in her social media post. “Might be back with more updates, might be gone from the socials for a bit – TBC. Ciao for now. Katie x”.

You are in denial about the climate crisis. We all are, argues the American scholar Tad DeLay. Right-wing climate deniers are not the only ones with a problem, he says when we speak in early June after the release of his book, Future of Denial. For denial doesn’t only amount to rejecting the evidence, he argues – it also consists of denying our role in the climate crisis; absolving ourselves through “carbon offsets, hybrid cars, local purchases, recycling”. And in this, far more of us are implicated.

In some ways, this argument might not seem all that new. Multiple authors have pointed out that green capitalism, not rightwing deniers of the crisis, is our greatest obstacle to properly confronting the problem. DeLay agrees. The difference is the lens he brings to it – using psychoanalysis to explain the mechanisms behind denial.

In doing so he refuses the neatness of a definite or concretely optimistic path forward. Elaborate yet accessible – one chapter tells the history of Earth through rising and falling carbon dioxide – Future of Denial is an eloquent, forthright text about the realities of the crisis and where it is heading. Similarly, when we speak, he is friendly, open and does not seem to wallow in despondency, but his research has led him to informed conclusions that recognise the uncertainty and difficulty of where we are. He forgoes “how to solve the crisis” answers. To offer up such promises would, I imagine, itself be a form of denial.

DeLay looks to Freud for a framework to understand denial: individuals negate distressing ideas and when the repressed thoughts begins to surface, people either deny reality or accept it but deny their moral culpability. This is how people respond to the climate crisis: rejecting the science or committing to “pseudo-solutions, gimmicks and false promises” to get themselves off the moral hook. “I like to joke that America and many western countries conveniently have a political party for whichever form of denial you would like with regard to the climate,” he says.

Raised as part of a “very Baptist evangelical fundamentalist megachurch” in Little Rock, Arkansas, he thought he would be a minister, but when he started reading theology and philosophy everything began to fall apart. As a first-generation college student, the literature, plus psychoanalysis, gave him a language to think through and out of the very religious “conceptual and cultural baggage” with which he grew up. DeLay brings all of his interests – psychoanalysis, philosophy and religion – to bear on the climate crisis.

One impetus for writing Future of Denial, he says, was watching the UK Labour party’s 2019 manifesto and US Democrat Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign proposals “get rejected largely by people who probably thought of themselves as science believers even though both of them were proposing the most ambitious climate plans” these countries had ever seen. This frustration shapes the book, which includes a chapter called What Does the Liberal Want?, that is sharply critical of liberalism and ends with the damning line: ”They have no plan … nothing is fine.”

This denial is seductive to us all and in many ways it is in fact essential to function in the world. “You can’t admit, as a capitalist subject, that there’s little you as an individual can do,” DeLay writes, “and neither can you imagine the end of capitalism.” Your options, then, are “intensely boring” (attending meetings to “advocate for a ban on new gas hook ups”) or “terrific” (“ecoterrorism”), and “denial is going to come out in surprising other ways”. DeLay himself is not immune. “My second child was born while this book was being written,” he says. “Sometimes people will ask me: is that a type of denial? Perhaps. Is … writing this book, me trying to be able to at least in part show them that I did what I could? Perhaps.”

Though an enthusiastic supporter of the youth climate movement, he has little time for clutching at the promise of young people saving us. “I am all too familiar with this impulse; when I’m especially despondent about the state of the world I look to them: they are the hope, they know what’s what. But it’s a “comforting fantasy”, he writes, which rests on believing that “education and passion will get the job done without mucking up free markets with regulation or central planning”. It also provides an easy out: “If generational politics works, then we needn’t concern ourselves with class politics.” There is the denial again – and one I hadn’t really recognised in myself.

Denial is, of course, part of our everyday behaviour, and DeLay has many examples. Teenagers act recklessly because they deny their own morality, someone who will not go to the doctor when they know they should is in denial and so, too, are people who have affairs and buy expensive cars because they cannot face up to how unsatisfying their life is. But when it comes to climate, there is too much focus on denial as “conscious belief”, DeLay thinks. “We talk as if we are Protestants who think you get saved by having the correct thoughts about the big important question.”

If it is possible at all, then, forcing action on the climate crisis will not be achieved by making people believe it is real and dangerous. “Most people don’t really care that much about their beliefs,” he says. Evangelicals who believe the end of the world is coming “still invest in retirement funds, right, they still have children, they still do all of the things [to] materially express a belief in some sort of future”.

The higher up the chain you go, the less individual neuroses are the problem. Even if everyone involved in fossil fuel extraction decided to stop, he argues, new companies would form overnight and file for leases with governments; the drive to consolidate profits and private property is unrelenting. DeLay points to the tight correlation between GDP and emissions, in particular GDP per capita: “The more money you have, the richer you are and the richer you are the more likely you are to emit according to a high emissions lifestyle.” He asks us all to reflect on the fact that whenever we hear the economy is doing well, that means fossil fuels are “doing great”.

Where to go from here? DeLay does not seem to have too much time for self-indulgent doom (he says some people seem to almost enjoy the anxiety and impotence), nor for simplistic, rosy roadmaps for a way forward.

He says there are some mitigation activities we should focus on. Though he’s no fan of reformism, without the Labour party in the UK or the Democrats in the US taking power, there is no chance of climate action, he says. Although what they offer is “not very much at all”, you can get some concessions from what he calls “capitalist climate governance” – the Paris accord, COP and “limited funding”. DeLay also does not advocate for living as hedonistically as you want, suggesting there is use in reducing your own emissions, even if this is patently not going to even touch the sides of the crisis.

We “cannot stop the progress of the storm”, he tells me. “This is too big, there is not a person on Earth who has the agency to stop this individually, it’s not even clear to me that anybody has much agency to stop this collectively … we might just be at the mercy of market logics where falling renewable prices eventually convert us over. At least that’s the hope, right, evidence is still kind of wanting.”

Adaptation has more of a chance, he thinks. Some of the things that are being proposed now are “grifts”, such as carbon offsets, but “may save us later”, such as carbon capture. More immediately, he says, we could all use any expertise we have to support local activist groups and encourage young people to devote their “life to this cause”.

As the effects of the crisis worsen, DeLay argues, inequality will rise, food prices will increase and police and border budgets will balloon. It will probably be people of colour, migrants, homeless people who will suffer the most, especially because when people see the hurricanes and the fires, they may believe in the climate crisis less, not more; politicians will turn up the barbarism and there will be something – or someone – else to blame. In this context, adaptation is also about unionising in your workplace and engaging with reactionaries while you do it, discouraging police work and doing things that are “illegal” to help house migrants.

There is no personal salvation though. “Just by driving to get groceries you emit carbon dioxide … a fifth of [which] … will still be in the air in 500,000 years, killing species that haven’t yet evolved.” We need to ask ourselves: “What if there just is no solution to that on any sort of meaningful scale?” and act accordingly.

Future of denial: the ideologies of climate change is published by Verso Books

A trade unionist has called for a crackdown against “barbaric exploitation” after an Indian farm worker died when he was allegedly being left on a road by his employer following an accident that severed his arm.

Satnam Singh, 31, was injured on Monday while working on machinery on a farm in Latina, a rural area close to Rome with a large community of Indian immigrant labourers.

Singh, who came to Italy with his wife three years ago, was allegedly left with his arm severed on the road outside his home in Borgo Santa Maria.

Police said they were called by his wife and an air ambulance was sent to transport him to San Camillo Forlalini hospital in Rome, where he died of his injuries on Wednesday.

His Italian employer is under investigation for manslaughter, violation of workplace safety regulations and failure to provide aid.

Singh had been working on a plastic roller wrapping machine attached to a tractor when the accident occurred, according to initial investigations.

“Adding to the horror of the accident is the fact that, instead of being rescued, the Indian farm worker was dumped near his home,” Laura Hardeep Kaur, general secretary of the Frosinone-Latina unit of the Flai Cgil union, told Il Giorno newspaper.

“He was left on the road like a bag of rags, like a sack of rubbish … despite his wife begging [the employer] to take him to hospital. Here we are not only faced with a serious workplace accident, which in itself is already alarming, we are faced with barbaric exploitation. Enough now.”

Latina is known as an area for the exploitation of migrant labourers. Hardeep Kaur said Singh was working for €5 an hour without a legal work contract. “Foreign labourers continue to be invisible, at the mercy of ferocious bosses, often Italian,” she added.

Italy’s labour minister, Marina Calderone, condemned the “true act of barbarity” and hoped that those responsible would be punished. “The Indian agricultural worker who suffered a serious accident in the countryside of Latina and was abandoned in very serious conditions … has died,” she told parliament.

Agriculture minister Francesco Lollobrigida said on Thursday that Giorgia Meloni’s government was “on the frontline … to fight against all forms of labour exploitation”. He added: “This is a tragedy which mustn’t leave us indifferent and on which full light must be shed.”

The centre-left Democratic party (PD) condemned the man’s treatment as a “defeat for civilisation”, while urging the government to take action to rid Italy of the so-called “agro-mafias” that run migrant labouring rackets.

Just Stop Oil activists have sprayed orange paint over private jets at Stansted airport on the airfield where Taylor Swift’s plane is stationed, the environmental group has said.

Two activists, Jennifer Kowalski, 28, a former sustainability manager from Dumbarton, and Cole Macdonald, 22, from Brighton, broke into a private airfield in Stansted at 5am on Thursday before targeting the jet.

In a post on X, Just Stop Oil (JSO) said: “Jennifer and Cole cut the fence into the private airfield at Stansted where taylorswift13’s jet is parked, demanding an emergency treaty to end fossil fuels by 2030.”

The accompanying video showed one of the activists cutting a hole in the fence before spraying the paint over the jets.

In February lawyers for Taylor Swift threatened legal action against a student who is tracking Swift’s jet use via social media. The X account CelebJets, found that the plane owned by Swift, was the most used by celebrities emitting more than 8,000 tonnes of carbon. A spokesperson for the singer denied that Swift was on every flight, saying her plane is loaned out to others.

The Stansted demonstration came as English Heritage pleaded with JSO to stop targeting cultural monuments after two protesters sprayed orange power on Stonehenge.

Nick Merriman, the chief executive of the national body that cares hundreds of national properties and sites including Stonehenge, condemned the protest as “vandalism to one of the world’s most celebrated ancient monuments”.

Two Just Stop Oil activists were arrested after the incident on Wednesday before summer solstice celebrations at the monument, which are due to begin on Thursday evening.

The group has targeted a series of cultural institutions in recent months including disrupting a Proms concert at the Royal Albert Hall; damaging a case around the Magna Carta at the British Library and throwing tomato soup over Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers in the National Gallery.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Tuesday, Merriman said: “We respect the rights of people to protest as an important right in British life. But we wish people would channel their protests, away from cultural heritage sites, museums and galleries, because we feel that doesn’t actually help their cause and causes this huge upset and disruption to the operation of these important sites.”

In a statement about the Stonehenge protest, Just Stop Oil said it was time for “megalithic action” to stop the extraction and burning of oil, gas and coal by 2030.

It said: “Continuing to burn coal, oil and gas will result in the death of millions. We have to come together to defend humanity, or we risk everything. That’s why Just Stop Oil is demanding that our next government sign up to a legally binding treaty to phase out fossil fuels by 2030.”

Merriman said the protest was “difficult to understand”.

He said: “Stonehenge is about 5,000 years old, and people in those ancient times were living so sustainably, and the stones are a testament to the desire of people to connect with nature and the Earth and the sun and the moon as well as each other.”

Restorers have managed to clean the orange powder from the stones using blown air to avoid damaging rare lichens on the surface, Merriman said.

He said: “Lichens are very fragile and sensitive indications of climate change, and the lichens on Stonehenge are actually quite rare in southern England. Luckily, our staff moved very quickly to remove the powdered substance from the lichen so it looks like they are OK.”

He also warned that if conditions had been wet more damage could have been done.

Merriman said: “We were very lucky, given that the atrocious weather we’ve had recently, that it wasn’t done in pouring rain, where we fear that there would have been quite some considerable damage to the lichens.”

He added: “The site is open to the public again and for the solstice tomorrow.”

The UK, Canada, New Zealand, Italy and Spain are among the rich countries contributing less than half their fair share of nature finance to poor countries, a new report has found.

Developed nations have agreed to collectively contribute a minimum of $20bn annually for nature restoration in low and middle-income countries by 2025. This money is in addition to the $100bn agreed for climate finance.

So far, Norway and Sweden are the only two countries providing a fair amount, while the “overwhelming majority of developed countries do not provide even half of their fair share,” according to the report by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) thinktank. The UK was providing about 24% of its commitment, while countries in southern and eastern Europe came at the bottom of the ranking, with Greece providing only about 10% of what it should, and Poland 5%.

Globally, nations are falling $11.6bn (£9.1bn) short on these financial commitments and must “dramatically scale up”, according to researchers who looked at each country’s progress based on 2021 data, which was the most recent to be released by governments. Some additional pledges have been made in the past three years but they do not “substantially move the needle”, experts say.

Rich countries are most responsible for the loss of nature globally over the past 60 years. The payments to poorer countries – which typically have the greatest reserves of biodiversity left and smaller ecological footprints – are designed to compensate for this overconsumption of the planet’s natural resources.

The report is the first analysis of how individual donor countries are delivering on their financial commitments made in the 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) at Cop15, where nature targets for the next decade were agreed upon.

Earth’s wildlife populations have plunged by an average of 69% in just under 50 years, and for decades nations have failed to meet UN targets to stop this decline.

“We hope this report serves as a wake-up call for high-income countries to fulfil their obligations,” said Laetitia Pettinotti, the lead author and a research fellow at ODI.

“Failing to reach the target undermines the UN convention on biological diversity and damages trust. But far more importantly, this failure represents a genuine threat to our shared prosperity, livelihoods, economies and health,” she said.

The 2022 Cop15 treaty had no details about much each country would contribute to the funding pot. This report calculates that by accounting for countries’ historical impact on nature, their gross national income and population to calculate how much each of the 28 donor countries needs to contribute to the $20bn.

Sara Pantuliano, the chief executive of ODI, said: “We are far from reaching this goal and must dramatically scale up our contributions within the next year.”

Collective agreements often shield wealthy nations from individual responsibility, she said: “Apportioning responsibility is a necessary step to enhance accountability, transparency and awareness.”

Germany and France come close to providing the necessary contributions, as does Australia.

Some countries have made financial contributions since 2021, according to an accompanying report by Campaign for Nature, which commissioned the research: 29 countries pledged to give the equivalent of $480m annually to the Global Environment Facility, while Canada, Germany, Japan, Luxembourg, Spain and the UK committed to giving $32m annually to the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund.

The report states: “While these are positive developments, it is not expected that these recent contributions substantially move the needle for those countries that are marked as below 50% of their fair share.”

The US is not party to the GBF and therefore did not commit itself to contributing to the target. If it were included it would be one of the poorest performers, the report concluded.

Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland, said: “The world is already spending $1.8tn each year on subsidising industries that are destroying nature. The pledge of $20bn a year is equivalent to only 1.1%, or about four days, of those subsidies. Wealthy governments have no excuse but to act with greater urgency.”

World leaders will come together at Cop16 in Cali, Colombia to review these financial commitments.

Dr Nicola Ranger, the director of the Resilient Planet Finance Lab at the University of Oxford, who was not involved in the research, said the overall findings were robust. She believes if the report fully accounted for the UK’s outsized impacts through global supply chains and finance for damaging sectors linked to pollution and deforestation, the country’s overall share of responsibility would be larger. “We’ve been turning the world’s nature capital into economic and financial capital for decades,” she said.

She added: “To meet our international commitments, the UK would need to accelerate our funding by a factor of four. It is right that the UK takes responsibility and plays its part in protecting biodiversity and meeting these global goals. But it is also squarely in our interests to do so … our economy is highly exposed to nature-related risks, of which half come from environmental damage overseas.”

Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on Twitter for all the latest news and features

The world’s consumption of fossil fuels climbed to a record high last year, driving emissions to more than 40 gigatonnes of CO₂ for the first time, according to a global energy report.

Despite a record rise in the use of renewable energy in 2023, consumption of fossil fuels continued to increase too, an annual review of world energy by the Energy Institute found.

Juliet Davenport, the president of the Energy Institute, said the report had revealed “another year of highs in our energy-hungry world” including a record high consumption of fossil fuels, which rose by 1.5% to 505 exajoules.

The findings threaten to dash hopes held by climate scientists that 2023 would be recorded as the year in which annual emissions peaked before the global fossil fuel economy begins a terminal decline.

The Energy Institute, the global professional body for the energy sector, found that while energy industry emissions may have reached a peak in advanced economies, developing economies are continuing to increase their reliance on coal, gas and oil.

Overall, fossil fuels made up 81.5% of the world’s primary energy last year, down only marginally from 82% the year before, according to the report, even as wind and solar farms generated record amounts of clean electricity.

The report, authored by consultants at KPMG and Kearney, found that wind and solar power climbed by 13% last year to reach a new record of 4,748 terawatt hours in 2023.

But that was not enough to match the world’s growing consumption of primary energy, which rose 2% last year to a record high of 620 exajoules and led to more fossil fuel use.

The review found that the world’s appetite for gas remained steady in 2024 while consumption of coal climbed by 1.6% and oil demand rose by 2% to reach 100m barrels a day for the first time.

Simon Virley, the UK head of energy and natural resources at KPMG, said: “In a year where we have seen the contribution of renewables reaching a new record high, ever increasing global energy demand means the share coming from fossil fuels has remained virtually unchanged at just over 80% for yet another year.”

Nick Wayth, the Energy Institute’s chief executive, added that the “slow” progress of the energy transition “masks diverse energy stories playing out across different geographies”.

“In advanced economies, we observe signs of demand for fossil fuels peaking, contrasting with economies in the global south for whom economic development and improvements in quality of life continue to drive fossil growth,” said Wayth.

The report found that, in India, fossil fuel consumption climbed by 8% last year, matching the increase in overall energy demand to make up 89% of all energy use. This meant that, for the first time, more coal was used in India than Europe and North America combined, it said.

In Europe, fossil fuels fell to below 70% of primary energy use for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, driven by falling demand and the growth of renewable energy.

Europe’s demand for gas in particular has continued to tumble since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which caused pipeline gas imports into Europe to collapse. Overall gas demand fell by 7% in 2023, according to the report, after a fall of 13% the previous year.

Canada will ban open-net pen salmon farming in British Columbia coastal waters in five years, the government has announced, a decision that has been welcomed by environmental groups but opposed by the aquaculture industry.

The Liberal government made the decision in 2019 to transition to closed containment technologies to protect declining wild Pacific salmon populations.

“Today, we are delivering on that promise and taking an important step in Canada’s path towards salmon and environmental conservation, sustainable aquaculture production, and clean technology,” said Jonathan Wilkinson, natural resources minister.

There are dozens of the farms in British Columbia. More than half of wild salmon stock populations are declining in the province’s waters, according to the Pacific Salmon Foundation.

The BC Salmon Farmers Association said the ban could cost up to 6,000 jobs and would harm an industry that generates C$1.2bn (US$880m) for the provincial economy.

“The idea that 70,000 tonnes of BC salmon can be produced on land in five years is unrealistic and ignores the current capabilities of modern salmon farming technology, as it has not been done successfully to scale anywhere in the world,” said the organisation’s executive director, Brian Kingzet.

The government said it would release a plan by the end of the month outlining how it would support First Nations, industry workers and communities that rely on open-net aquaculture for their livelihoods. Wilkinson said: “We recognise the importance of meaningful and thoughtful engagement with First Nations partners and communities as we move forward, in order to ensure that economic impacts are mitigated.”

Salmon spawn in freshwater but spend much of their adult life in the ocean, making closed containment operations challenging and more expensive than farming them in open-net pens that float in the sea. Environmental campaigners say these salmon farms harm wild salmon populations by spreading disease.

“There’s a large body of science that shows that they amplify parasites, viruses and bacteria right on the wild salmon migration routes and spread them to wild fish,” said Stan Proboszcz, an analyst with conservation group Watershed Watch Salmon Society. “Many of our stocks are in decline. So let’s take [open-net farms] out and give wild salmon a bit of a relief.”

The announcement needed to be enshrined in law “in case we see a change in government next year”, Proboszcz said.

Opinion polls have shown a majority of residents in British Columbia support ending open-net salmon farming, while more than 120 First Nations in the province have shown support for land-based closed containment fish farms.

The First Nation Wild Salmon Alliance welcomed the announcement. “This date will serve the longer-term needs of protecting wild Pacific salmon from the impacts of the open-net pen fish farm industry, and is a positive step in that regard,’ said Bob Chamberlin, its chairman.

The Hungary manager, Marco Rossi, accused the referee Danny Makkelie of a “double standard” after a controversial Jamal Musiala goal was allowed to stand in their 2-0 defeat by Germany.

Rossi and his players were furious that Ilkay Gündogan was not pulled up, either by Makkelie or VAR, in the buildup for what they felt was a shove on the centre-back Willi Orban. In truth contact had been light and, on balance, the decision seemed correct. But it set Hungary on the way to a defeat that leaves their participation beyond the group stage at Euro 2024 in grave doubt and Rossi pondered whether bigger-name sides might have been treated differently.

“What the referee did tonight, it’s a double standard,” said Rossi, citing an incident in the second half when the Germany midfielder Robert Andrich tumbled in his own box and was given a foul. “From my perspective Germany would have won anyway, they’re stronger than us, but the referee was the worst on the pitch.

“Germany didn’t need help from the referee, especially against a team like Hungary. When they play against someone like France, let’s see if a foul will be given or not.”

Hungary, who have two defeats from two, must beat Scotland to have any chance of a place in the last 16. “We will try everything to win,” Rossi said. “Our fans want to see on the pitch that we are spitting blood. I don’t ask our guys to win, to score goals. I just ask them to give their maximum.”

Gündogan had a different view of the opener. “I was quite surprised that the Hungarian player and his teammates were angry about it,” he said. “I don’t know what it looked like on TV but I played in the Premier League for seven years and if you gave that in the Premier League as a foul I think everyone would have been laughing on the floor.”

Julian Nagelsmann, whose team have reached the knockout stage with a game to spare, urged Germany to finish the job by topping Group A. “We want to be first in our group and then we will see,” he said. “For today I’m happy with the result. It was a tough game and we’ve qualified.”