An incarcerated person at California’s largest women’s prison has died amid a brutal heatwave that has left residents without air conditioning begging for relief and warning of dire consequences for their health.

A woman in the Central California Women’s Facility, located in the Central Valley city of Chowchilla, died on Saturday as temperatures in the region climbed above 110F (43.3C). The California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP), an advocacy group, said it appeared the woman suffered a preventable heat death. The woman’s daughter told the Sacramento Bee that her mother had complained about the physical toll of the summer weather for years.

Mary Xjimenez, a spokesperson for the state corrections department, said in an email that the woman was transported to a medical facility on Thursday and died on Saturday and that the “death appears to be the result of an ongoing medical condition and not heat related, but will be determined by the coroner’s office”. Tyson Pogue, the local sheriff-coroner, said it was too soon to say whether the death was due to heat and his office would conduct an autopsy.

News of the deaths comes as more than 146 million Americans were under extreme heat alerts across the nation, leaving people incarcerated in aging prison facilities without air conditioning particularly vulnerable. There have been reports of potentially fatal conditions inside jails and prisons during heatwaves across California and in Nevada, Illinois, Texas, Florida and other states this year.

The Chowchilla fatality has escalated fear and panic throughout the prison, advocates and incarcerated residents said. The cells in the overcrowded facility, which incarcerates more than 2,000 people, lack air conditioning, and residents said officials have failed to provide enough cold water and other supplies that would alleviate their suffering and reduce heatstroke risks.

“Please help us, they’re not doing anything for us,” Trancita Ponce, a Chowchilla resident, said in a statement shared by CCWP. “There is hot air blowing inside of our rooms, I have a huge migraine and I feel sick and other girls are throwing up.”

Another CCWF resident, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, told the Guardian she’s been struggling with nausea and headaches, and that she had a thermometer in her area that recently showed it was 103F (39.4C). After residents’ complaints, the facility gave out ice water on Tuesday, but residents were only given two cups each, she said: “I’ve seen people passing out. This is inhumane … You feel like you’re dirt, like you’re nothing. If we were animals, they’d be treating us better.”

Elizabeth Nomura, state membership organizer for CCWP, who has been in contact with Chowchilla residents, said the facility has swamp coolers meant to lower temperatures in the cells, but that they weren’t working properly – an issue documented by the Modesto Bee during extreme heat last year.

“My friend said: ‘Help us, we can’t breathe,’” said Nomura, who was previously incarcerated at Chowchilla. “I’ve had heatstroke before [while incarcerated] and I know what it feels like to be so dehydrated that you can’t see. They are sitting in a room, toasting in what feels like an oven. They’re all suffering.”

Nomura said the death in the institution created a “dark cloud” for residents: “It brings that harsh reality forward for so many – that they could very well die in prison. Everyone in there is frantic, locked in these death chambers. It’s nothing short of cruel.”

Xjimenez said each state prison has a “heat plan coordinator” who monitors conditions and temperatures, and that housing units have some form of “cooling relief”, typically evaporative coolers and fans. During extreme heat, prisons will sometimes provide additional access to air-conditioned areas and increased access to water and ice, she said, and when temperatures exceed 90F (32.2C), some vulnerable residents are moved to air-conditioned rooms.

At Chowchilla, staff is providing ice water to all residents and “industrial floor fans” are cooling the housing units, she said.

“The California department of corrections and rehabilitation is closely monitoring the current heat wave and is coordinating with our state partners and the leadership in each of the state’s 32 prisons to ensure there are appropriate resources and response,” she said in a statement. “We are paying special attention to medically vulnerable incarcerated people, and will be providing additional water, ice, cooling areas, and information to our staff and incarcerated population on ways to prevent heat-related illnesses throughout this heat wave.”

Maybe this is how new empires rise. Out of the ruins of the old, with fresh visions and fresh blood, a supremacy that creates its own logic as it goes, until it begins to feel inevitable. Spain have taken the hardest possible road to Berlin, conquered Italy and Croatia and Germany and now France: their longest winning streak since 2010, a first final since 2012, and perhaps the strongest indication yet that this is a team worth remembering.

Indeed to anoint Spain as worthy finalists is to damn them with crushingly faint praise. In a way they have made this tournament, perhaps even saved it: shown that amid a fatberg of low blocks and tired, malfunctioning attacks it is possible for football to express as well as extinguish. Their women are already world champions and on Sunday the men have a chance to emulate their model: a little craft, a little graft and just a sprinkling of magic.

It was also the night 16-year-old Lamine Yamal became the youngest goalscorer in the history of this tournament, a triumph not just for his own prodigious talent but for the system that produces him and trusts him to thrash in a 25-yard thunderbolt. Dani Olmo added the winner on 25 minutes and yet for all the early drama this was a game that gripped right to its finish.

Perhaps posterity will forget just how ominously France started the game, with an early goal for Randal Kolo Muani and an early yellow card for Spain’s 38-year-old makeshift right-back Jesús Navas, which is exactly what you want when you have to play 76 minutes against Kylian Mbappé. But ultimately. Didier Deschamps’s team were a flimsy disappointment, not just out-passed but out-thought, devoid of solutions and brutally taunted in the closing minutes, as Spain kept the ball to a fiesta of olés.

How, exactly, did Spain manage to turn it around? Over the coming days those five scintillating first-half minutes will be wound and rewound at great length, and yet perhaps the only real conclusion worth drawing is not in terms of tactics but mentality. A goal down, in danger of being eaten alive, Spain simply intensified their efforts: a team utterly disdainful of the idea that they could ever be second best.

This is of course a function of belief, and Luis de la Fuente’s side have this in abundance. But it is also a function of self-assurance, a well-drilled system in which everyone knows everyone else’s jobs. No Robin Le Normand, no problem: Nacho simply slots in and has a monstrous night. No Pedri, no problem: Olmo simply picks up where he left off against Germany.

And if in doubt, get it to the wingers. At which point we should be clear: for all their pace and verve, Lamine Yamal and Nico Williams are not wingers in the traditional, chalk-studded sense. Indeed both goals came when they drifted into the centre, giving their full-back a brief dilemma, narrowing the pitch, sowing confusion.

Kolo Muani opened the scoring. It had not been coming. But Ousmane Dembélé played a nice whipped pass to Mbappé, who was played onside by Navas and then allowed to cross for Kolo Muani: France’s 87th attempt of the tournament from open play, and their first goal. Navas was booked shortly afterwards. As the famous meme has it: call an ambulance… but not for Spain!

Perhaps France reckoned they could simply manage this situation. Sit back, pass it around, maybe hit on the break. And against most teams, this would probably work. But Spain keep coming. Olmo, to Álvaro Morata, back to Lamine Yamal, and suddenly the ball was sailing into the top corner: a frankly ridiculous goal, and a moment that seemed to overcome Lamine Yamal slightly, a reminder that this is still just a child with a child’s feelings, for whom this abundant gift must just feel quite weird.

Four minutes later, a cross from Navas, cleared indeterminately, and in that moment perhaps Olmo doesn’t exactly know what he wants to do with it. All he knows is that he wants the ball. Brilliant feet, brilliant determination, and an emphatic finish that clipped the heels of Jules Koundé on the way in.

Suddenly, having built a gameplan on letting Spain have the ball, France decided they actually wanted it. Half-time came and went and while there were few extrinsic signs of panic, not much was happening for them either. Nacho and Navas were doubling up on Mbappé, maskless for the first time since the opening game. Adrien Rabiot and N’Golo Kanté were both disappointing, basically traffic islands cut adrift by Spanish passing, and were withdrawn after an hour.

Spain were still intermittently creating openings of their own: Mike Maignan had to scamper 45 yards out of his goal to tackle a steaming Williams. But perhaps it was inevitable, given those tired legs, that they would begin to drop back a little, and as we reached the business end, the pace began to sag and France began to encroach with their usual mesmerising menace.

They were unfortunate that a golden chance from 12 yards fell to left-back Théo Hernandez on his weaker foot. They were unfortunate when Mbappé cut inside late on – he couldn’t, surely? – and blazed over the bar. But on the ledger of this night, and this tournament, they can have few complaints. The old empire is bloated and decadent and joyless. A new world is coming.

Labour has appointed one of the country’s foremost climate experts to lead a “mission control centre” on clean energy.

Chris Stark, the former head of the UK’s climate watchdog, will head a Covid vaccine-style taskforce aimed at delivering clean and cheaper power by 2030.

The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said the centre would work with energy companies and regulators and would be the first of its kind in Whitehall, following Keir Starmer’s plan for mission-driven government.

According to this model, ministers will focus on tackling five of the biggest challenges facing the country, one of which is clean energy.

Stark said: “Tackling the climate crisis and accelerating the transition to clean power is the country’s biggest challenge, and its greatest opportunity. By taking action now, we can put the UK at the forefront of the global race to net zero.”

Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, said: “Years of underinvestment has left our country suffering energy insecurity, with working people paying the price through their energy bills and a cost-of-living crisis. That cannot happen again.

“This new mission control centre, benefiting from the expertise and experience of Chris Stark’s leadership and bringing together the brightest and best in the national interest, will have a laser-like focus on delivering our mission of clean power by 2030.”

Stark was head of the UK’s Climate Change Committee (CCC) for six years until January. He was director of energy and climate change in the Scottish government between 2016 and 2018.

During his tenure the CCC recommended a UK net zero target for greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, which is now in law.

Stark won praise for his management of the CCC at a difficult point, when the government was briefing against many of the statutory watchdogs. Some on the right of the Conservative party would have liked to dismantle the 2008 Climate Change Act, under which the committee was set up with the mandate to advise on meeting the five-yearly carbon budgets.

Throughout his six years as chief, he maintained his steady insistence on telling the government truths it did not want to hear – on how far off-track the UK was straying from its climate goals, and how much more it would cost to delay action than to take it now.

Stark clashed with Conservative ministers at the time of his departure from the CCC earlier this year. He warned that the concept of “net zero” had turned into a political slogan used to start a “dangerous” culture war over the climate.

He said sensible improvements to the economy and people’s lives were being blocked as a result and that he would be “intensely relaxed” about losing the term.

Shaun Spiers, executive director of the Green Alliance thinktank, said the appointment would help Labour attract much-needed international investment for its plans. “This shows the government is ambitious and serious about delivering on its clean energy promises, and is really reassuring,” he said. “It’s been a very good few days [since the election] in action from Labour showing they want to get things done quickly.”

Reforms to the UK’s planning system have been a focus so far, including the lifting of an effective ban on onshore wind turbines in England, but Spiers said the government would have to look across a much wider range of issues to be successful in decarbonising electricity by 2030. “Planning is important, but it’s not the whole problem – grid connectivity is key, and there’s a need to build supply chains [for green equipment], building up skills, looking at the cost of borrowing, and attracting international investment. The appointment of Chris Stark will help with all of that.”

Renewable energy companies have begun work on new onshore windfarms in England for the first time in almost a decade after the new government reversed restrictions the Conservatives had put in place on turbines.

At least half a dozen renewables developers have begun identifying potential sites for full-scale windfarms in England after the Labour party swept to power last week with the promise to make Britain a clean energy superpower.

The new schemes are expected to renew the supply of onshore projects that are essential to the government’s plan to double Britain’s onshore wind capacity to 30GW by 2030.

Currently the only onshore windfarms in England’s planning pipeline are projects using one or two turbines, located on private property. The Guardian revealed last year that Ukraine built more onshore wind turbines than England in 2022 despite Russia’s invasion. But Labour’s decision to reform planning rules mean larger onshore windfarms could return to England by the end of the decade.

One of the UK’s biggest wind developers, Germany’s RWE, said it began identifying viable sites to develop onshore windfarms “some time ago”, in advance of Labour’s victory, and expects its pipeline of new projects to develop “quite quickly”.

Other energy companies including EDF Renewables, RES Group, Coriolis Energy and Ridge Energy have also confirmed that they are moving forward with plans for potential onshore windfarm projects in England.

Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, said: “The onshore wind ban was in place for nine years, and this government has removed it in 72 hours. We are wasting no time in investing in the clean homegrown energy that our country needs to lower bills and make Britain energy independent. We welcome investors responding to this announcement by moving forward with plans to invest in Britain’s clean energy future.”

RES Group, the Hertfordshire-based company which built England’s second ever windfarm in the early 1990s, has confirmed that it is considering a return to full-scale English projects in the future.

Ian Hunt, the global head of asset management for RES Group, said: “England is definitely a core market for us. But each project will be judged on its own merits and in light of the impact it might have on the environment and local communities.”

Trevor Hunter, a development manager from Coriolis Energy, said his company was considering half a dozen sites in England. Coriolis began undertaking bird migration surveys for sites in England “a good year ago” in anticipation of “where we believed things were going politically”, he said.

Industry sources believe that the return of onshore windfarms to England will face less opposition from local communities than prior to the Conservative government’s effective ban. This is due to technological advances which mean that fewer turbines are required to generate the same amount of clean electricity, and better financial incentives for local communities.

“There has also been a change in mindset in the last decade,” Hunt said. “People can see the effects of climate change, and they know that onshore wind can help emissions and bring down bills. There is a far greater level of public acceptance now.”

But, despite the fresh interest, industry analysts fear that the new Labour government may still struggle to meet its pledge to double Britain’s onshore wind capacity by 2030.

Energy data provider ICIS has predicted that the UK will miss its 2030 onshore wind target because it was “difficult to envisage a new government being timely enough” to improve the approval process and attract enough new projects before the end of the decade.

James Robottom, Renewable UK’s head of policy, said restarting an industry “will take time” because onshore windfarms can take up to seven years to develop, depending on their size and whether a grid connection is available.

“But we do know there is strong interest from developers, businesses and communities which are already exploring sites in England,” Robottom said. “We’ll be excited to see early community engagement and detailed environmental monitoring work on prospective sites starting soon.”

The Joe Biden re-election campaign is now a situation where you want to put your hands over your eyes even when your hands are already over your eyes. Like mine, all your sets of hands may have been clamped tightly to your lids since Biden’s franchise-killing performance in the first presidential debate 12 days ago, which his press secretary incredibly handwaved away by stating: “He had a cold”. A cold what? A cold sweat? A cold day in hell? A cold dead hand he’d like you to prise the nomination out of?

In news that launched a million grimace emojis, the answer turns out to be: all of the above. Biden is on a fightback. Yesterday he railed against “elites” in the Democratic party, proudly deploying that great Donald Trump innovation whereby the actual president is somehow not an elite. In a strongly worded letter you strongly know was worded by someone else, Biden ordered the Democrats to stop worrying and love the bomb (I lightly paraphrase). A neurologist repeatedly came to the White House last year to treat other people who work there, the White House insists, while Biden last week told a meeting of governors that he was fine, reportedly adding, “It’s just my brain”. OK! Last Friday, he gave a sit-down interview in which he was asked how he’d feel if he clung on in the race then lost to Trump. “As long as I gave it my all, and did as good of a job as I know I can do,” Biden judged, “that’s what this is about.”

Factcheck: I’m being told that is not at all what the forthcoming US presidential election is about. And listen, before we go on, please save your embossed letterhead/well-meaning digital death threats. I already know who much the worst candidate is. Furthermore – and it’s just a personal thing – I would very, very much like to see him beaten. Huge fan of American democracy here, which is to say – huge fan of the country of America having democracy. In fact, speaking of colds, you’ve probably heard the expression “When America sneezes, the world catches a cold”. Most of us in the droplet radius have zero clinical interest in discovering what the world catches when America does … whatever this is.

Which makes it somewhat painful that I am currently looking at White House-issued instruction pictures taken from the wings of various stages, about 10 footsteps from where you’d expect any occupier of those stages to make a speech – pictures with the heading: “walk to podium”. These are the leaked official templates for those guiding Biden through forthcoming events. There will doubtless be plenty on hand to claim that this is standard procedure when event planning at this level, to which the only reasonable response is: please, please tell that to the countless millions with access to televisions and the internet who have already seen Biden struggle with any number of stage entrances and exits! Please tell that to the optics! Please tell that to the vibes! In the meantime, please tell it to my subconscious because every time I look at one of these pictures it immediately rearranges itself into the image of a yawning hellchasm, beneath the heading “walk to the abyss”.

This is all more than beginning to feel like the path over the edge, which the Democratic establishment has thoughtfully plotted out by its truly timeworn tactic of hoping for the best, and in no way preparing for the worst. What’s the worst that can happen, ask people who already saw the worst happen once before. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice … autocracy? As far as Biden’s cognitive state is concerned, if only there had been different signs to all the signs there were.

Then again, only last year did the Democratic leadership in the House – which had a combined age of 973 or something – finally begin giving way to some non-thinned blood, having clung on in varying stages of decline out of … what? Selflessness? A fundamental/fundamentalist belief that they were the good guys? Forget the audacity of hope – this is the obnoxiousness of hope. The arc of history is now bending in the direction of the hellchasm. Why should it be a toss-up between Trump and a guy who in all conscience no one should say is operating without impairment? How dare this be the choice? This, alas, is the other reflection sparked by those “walk to podium” instruction manuals. Oh NOW you’re planning every last detail! Well, it’s like they say – micromanage all the tiny little things now and it absolutely won’t matter that you macro-fucked-up the big thing back when finessing a change wouldn’t have been a last-minute scramble.

Possibly the only minuscule bright spot currently are the amusing scenes in Hollywood, where starry donors are reportedly turning on Jeffrey Katzenberg, the DreamWorks co-founder-turned-Biden campaign co-chair, for supposedly concealing the president’s true state of mental fitness from them, and making them part with infinitesimal percentages of their money. As the Endeavor mogul Ari Emanuel remarked mildly last week: “We are in Fuck City”. (On the plus side for Katzenberg, the worst thing he’s ever done is no longer Quibi.)

None of this is how healthy democracies operate. Non-democracies? Oh yes. Petro-state princes are kept alive in western hospitals long after natural causes have kicked in, with their vast dependent entourages somehow unwilling to switch off the life support machine, what with it being directly connected to the cash tap. The Russians used to joke about Brezhnev that his daily routine ran as follows: reanimation, makeup, banquet, awards ceremony, clinical death. The people couldn’t do a whole lot about it, but they knew. Everyone knew. Spitting Image portrayed his successor-but-one, Konstantin Chernenko, as something kept in the freezer and only reanimated when occasion demanded. There are currently flashes of this vein of satire in every opening monologue on the US late-night TV shows.

As far as ways forward go, there are not exactly a whole load of tried and tested walks-to-podium. But the Democrats have surely exhausted the limits of irrational hope as a victory strategy. The gruelling presidential campaign has not even got fully under way. In the absence of a candidate who appears consistently rational, rational solutions must be found. In the meantime, we might prepare some simple briefing notes of our own for Biden’s strategists. You’re not going to defeat the world’s biggest “anti-elite” conman by railing against “elites” in the Democratic party. You’re not going to defeat the world’s biggest liar by being economical with your own actualité. And you’re not going to defeat the world’s biggest gaslighter by gaslighting people in your own way. There’s more than one way to be a hero. Sometimes the greatest legacy is knowing when to walk from the podium.

• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

• Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

1. If you live in France, you can watch global warming happening live on the evening news – and it’s a hit with viewers

The woman behind this landmark innovation is Audrey Cerdan of France Televisions, France’s public broadcaster.

As announced on Tuesday, Cerdan is one of three winners of a 2024 journalist of the year award by our organization, Covering Climate Now, which for the past five years has been helping hundreds of newsrooms worldwide cover the climate crisis.

At a time when extreme heat is leaving hundreds dead from Mexico to India, when a category 5 hurricane is “flattening” entire islands in the Caribbean, and when US supreme court rulings are granting corporate polluters and their political patrons unprecedented legal protections, Cerdan and 50 additional Covering Climate Now Journalism Award winners are a stirring antidote to climate despair.

Their work demonstrates that telling the climate story well helps the public understand not only that the world is on fire, but also how to put the fire out.

In March 2023, France Télévisions stopped including a traditional weather report in its 8pm newscast and replaced it with a weather-climate report: in French, a Journal Météo-Climat.

Viewers of the new weather-climate report still saw maps dotted with numbers depicting the day’s high and low temperatures in Paris, Marseilles and other cities in France. The on-camera presenter, Anaïs Baydemir, still told them whether it would rain or shine tomorrow. But now, that basic weather news was communicated in the context of climate change.

From the opening seconds of the report, stretching across the bottom of the screen was a row of blue-and-white digits. The digits depicted, to an exactitude of eight decimal points, how much hotter France was now compared to a century ago, before humans’ burning of large amounts of coal, oil and gas began trapping excessive heat in the atmosphere.

The night Journal Météo-Climat premiered, on 13 March 2023, the dashboard registered 1.18749861C above the pre-industrial level. After 37 seconds, the dashboard’s last digit clicked up a notch to 1.18749862C; then, after two minutes and 28 seconds, another notch to 1.18749873C.

That was global warming, happening and presented in real time – an explicit rebuttal of the lie that climate change is somehow a hoax.

Within weeks, France Televisions’ ratings for that part of its evening news began climbing, according to the network. Cerdan, who spearheaded the innovation, credits the ratings boost partly to the fact that most of the show’s segments included a viewer’s question about climate change, answered by a scientist. (For example: will France still have four seasons under climate change? Yes, but they will be hotter.)

In short, if journalists tell the climate story in a creative way that genuinely helps people make sense of the world around them, people will watch or read that news.

2. Members of frontline communities often tell the climate story best

For this year’s awards, CCNow’s judges evaluated more than 1,250 entries from every corner of the globe. The reporting in the places most affected by the climate crisis stood out for its urgency, its compassion, and its commitment to telling personal stories.

For example, a second CCNow journalist of the year winner is Tristan Ahtone, a member of the Kiowa Tribe who wrote a blistering expose for Grist about US universities profiting from oil and gas production on stolen Indigenous lands.

A third “Journalist of the Year” is Rachel Ramirez, a climate reporter for CNN, whose upbringing in the Northern Marianas Islands informs her reporting on climate change’s disproportionate impact on women and girls and other issues of climate justice.

3. Climate crisis is a crime story

The planet didn’t overheat itself. Some of the best climate reporting highlights who the bad guys are, what they’re trying to get away with, and how they can be held accountable. The UK-based Centre for Climate Reporting, in collaboration with the BBC, revealed how Sultan Al Jaber – the CEO of the United Arab Emirates’ state-run oil company and president of the COP28 UN climate summit – used the latter role to lobby for oil and gas. Agence France-Presse reported that the global consultant firm McKinsey & Company, which publicly supports climate action, nevertheless used Cop28 to promote its clients’ plans to continue oil and gas production for years to come.

4. There is incredible bravery in some of the best climate reporting

Sometimes that bravery means angering sources who then no longer talk to you, or stirring up the trolls on social media. Other times, bravery takes a much more serious form.

In June 2022, the British journalist Dom Phillips and Indigenous activist Bruno Pereira were killed in the Vale do Javari, the second-largest indigenous area in Brazil, apparently in retaliation for their journalism exposing the destruction of the Amazon rainforest.

In 2023, 16 news outlets around the world, led by the Paris-based network Forbidden Stories, joined together to continue Phillips’s and Pereira’s work. Forbidden Stories’ investigations revealed how illegal industry and organized crime continue to stymie protection of the Amazon, whose health is vital to its Indigenous inhabitants and the world’s climate future.

5. There is good news on the climate beat

Solar, wind, storage batteries and other pillars of the green economy are growing by leaps and bounds, as mainstream business media have reported. But less publicized are solutions emerging from the grassroots, including in some of the most climate-vulnerable locations on earth. IndiaSpend, a digital outlet in India, won its award by profiling a frontline community’s ingenious efforts to cope with drought, illustrating how local knowledge and involvement can be key to successful climate change adaptation.

Covering Climate Now has long maintained that better news coverage is itself an essential climate solution. Without it, there simply won’t be the mass awareness and public pressure to drive governments, business, and society as a whole to make the rapid, far-reaching changes required to preserve a liveable planet.

The 51 winners of 2024 Covering Climate Now Journalism awards are certainly doing their part. We hope their example inspires fellow journalists everywhere to do the same.

When the sowing began on the coastline of south-west England, conservationists warned it may take a little while for the new wildflower meadows to flourish fully.

But 18 months on, a vibrant display of blooms has popped up in north Devon, a joy for human visitors and a draw for precious birds, insects and mammals.

The idea is to create a network of flower-filled grasslands sweeping from the fringes of sandy beaches to moorland edges.

Eventually, the National Trust plans to plant up more than 1,200 hectares (3,000 acres) of land in north Devon, the charity’s largest ever wildflower grasslands project.

The first phase, 90 hectares at Woolacombe, Vention and South Hole, is being heralded a success, with oxeye daises, bird’s-foot trefoil and viper’s bugloss appearing and initial monitoring showing an increase of wildflower coverage from 2% to 40%.

There have been sightings of the brown-banded carder bee, meadow grasshopper and common blue butterfly, as well as birds such as swifts, skylarks, house martins and meadow pipits. Greater horseshoe bats dart across the meadows at dusk.

Joshua Day, a project coordinator at the National Trust in north Devon, said: “The sense of anticipation through the last two winters has been high, watching and waiting for the first successful seedlings to emerge.

“This first full bloom is an indication of success for the future of species-rich grasslands here in Devon, returning a diverse range of wild flowers to the countryside which will, in turn, benefit nature and ourselves.”

Species-rich grasslands are rare, with only 1% of flower-filled meadows remaining in the UK, and are among the most threatened habitats in Britain.

Seeds from these first meadows will be collected by rangers and volunteers to create more sites elsewhere. Every hectare harvested will provide enough seed to sow two more hectares of meadows.

By 2030, 1,275 hectares (3,151 acres) of grassland will have been planted in north Devon. Some sites are already identified, with others to be found over the coming years.

Ben McCarthy, the National Trust’s head of nature and restoration ecology, said: “As nature in the UK continues to decline, making space for flower-rich meadows in our countryside at a landscape scale will make a real tangible difference to its recovery.”

Perched atop blackened trees, howler monkeys survey the ashes around them. A flock of emus treads, disoriented, in search of water. The skeletons of alligators lie lifeless and charred.

The Pantanal, the world’s largest wetland and one of the most biodiverse places on Earth, is on fire. Huge stretches of land resemble the aftermath of a battle, with thick green shrubbery now a carpet of white ash, and chunks of debris falling from the sky.

More than 760,000 hectares (1.8m acres) have already burned across the the Brazilian Pantanal in 2024, as fires surge to the highest levels since 2020, the worst year on record. From January to July, blazes increased by 1,500% compared with the same period last year, according to the country’s Institute for Space Research.

“The impact is devastating. Animals are dying, wildfires are vanishing huge areas,” says Gustavo Figueirôa, a biologist at SOS Pantanal, a non-governmental organisation. “We expect it is only going to get worse.”

Stretching across Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay, the Pantanal covers 16.9m hectares (42m acres) and harbours rich biodiversity. It is one of the world’s main refuges for jaguars and houses a host of vulnerable and endangered species, including giant river otters, giant armadillos and hyacinth macaws. Its ecosystem is also unique. Every year its “flood pulse” sees it swell with water during the rainy season and empty throughout the dry months. But the climate crisis, droughts and weak rains have disrupted this seasonal pattern, turning the land into a tinderbox.

With the blazes starting unusually early this year – in late May and early June, before the annual fire season between July and September – experts predict 2024 will be the most devastating in decades.

“The wildfires are a signal – nature is raising a flag,” says Pierre Girard at the Federal University of Mato Grosso. “We had fires before but now thousands and thousands of hectares burn every year. We are losing the battle.”

On the banks of the Paraguay River, several hours by boat north of the nearest city of Corumbá, three children stand in their garden, their bodies intermittently concealed by smoke. Their mother, Jane Silva, 53, watches from her blue, wooden house.

“This year’s fires are really bad. There is a lot of smoke and the children are struggling to breathe,” she says. Fifty of her animals died in a recent fire, and she has received no support from the state, she says.

“The fires get worse every year – we thought this year’s fires had been extinguished, but the wind has brought them back to life. Now it is getting close again,” she says. “The Pantanal is dying, but we have nowhere to go.”

Hospitals and health centres in Corumbá are crowded with patients suffering respiratory issues, with children under five and those over 60 most affected by the smoke. But while humans can usually flee the infernos and seek medical help, animals perish in their thousands.

Reptiles and amphibians face the greatest risk, while monkeys die from smoke inhalation, and jaguars, too, have been found suffering with third-degree burns. In the 2020 fires, known as “the year of flames”, which saw almost 30% of the biome burned, 17 million vertebrates were killed.

Deep into the charred wilderness, a team of volunteer animal rescue workers search for signs of life. Luka Moraes, a 26-year-old vet, says: “In one week I have already seen hundreds and hundreds of dead animals, maybe thousands. Reptiles, snakes, frogs – all the animals that cannot run – they do not stand a chance.”

While naturally occurring blazes take place in the Pantanal, including those sparked by lightning, humans start the vast majority of wildfires. Ranchers use fires to clear land for their cattle – as they have for centuries – but those that were once contained by the wetland’s abundant water now rage out of control.

“They think that they can probably contain the fire. They have been doing it for generations. But dry matter is accumulating, and the fires spread quickly,” says Girard.

More than 90% of the Pantanal is privately owned, of which 80% is used for cattle ranching. Almost 95% of outbreaks in the first half of 2024 started in private areas, according to the National Institute for Space Research.

The wetlands have also lost 68% of their water area since 1985, and suffered a lack of rainfall over the past six months. “The Pantanal is getting drier and drier. It used to flood for six months, but now it floods only two or three months,” says Figueirôa.

Fierce winds rip across the landscape at up to 40km an hour, fuelling the flames.

André Luiz Siqueira, a director at the conservation organisation Ecoa in Brazil, explains that dead vegetation accumulates during the flood period, becoming highly combustible during the dry season. The layers of dense, built-up material “can burn underground for weeks,” he says.

Along with the important role they play for biodiversity, wetlands are also of global importance for the climate, storing 20-30% of terrestrial carbon despite covering only 5-8% of the land surface. During the 2020 fires, 115m tonnes of CO₂ were released.

Local people and experts are now calling for greater investment in fire prevention. Ivani Silva, 50, whose land in Porto Laranjeira has been thick with smoke for weeks, says she has been visited only once by authorities. “They gave us a leaflet with instructions, but that is it. They don’t help at all and do nothing to prevent it,” she says.

The government of Mato Grosso do Sul declared an emergency situation on 24 June, while the federal government has recently expanded its wildfires taskforce. The Brazilian air force airdropped 48,000 litres of water on to the burning land last weekend.

Still, the fires burn on. Underneath the nest of a jabiru stork, the tallest flying bird found in South and Central America and the symbol of the Pantanal, the firefighter Cabo Sena, 30, works to douse the flames.

“We extinguish the fire and then, after 24 hours, it starts again,” he says.

Lucineia Oliveira, 50, who was born and still lives on the banks of the Paraguay River, says the fires have changed drastically in recent years. In 2021, she narrowly survived after a burning tree set her house alight overnight, trapping her inside with her 75-year-old mother and three-year-old grandson.

“The fire was far away when we went to sleep, but then the wind became strong and carried it to us. It happened fast,” she says. “I was desperate, we were covered in ash, my grandson was crying and my mother praying. We fell to our knees and held each other.”

Oliveira worries about what their future holds. “Every year is worse, and I am afraid,” she says. “The animals and plants and the land are dying, from the bees to the jaguars. We need even the smallest animals to be able to survive. The fires are destroying the beauty of the Pantanal.”

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

At the World AI Conference in Shanghai last week, one of China’s leading artificial intelligence companies, SenseTime, unveiled its latest model, SenseNova 5.5.

The model showed off its ability to identify and describe a stuffed toy puppy (wearing a SenseTime cap), offered feedback on a drawing of a rabbit, and instantly read and summarised a page of text. According to SenseTime, SenseNova 5.5 is comparable with GPT-4o, the flagship artificial intelligence model of the Microsoft-backed US company OpenAI.

If that wasn’t enough to entice users, SenseTime is also giving away 50m free tokens – digital credits for using the AI – and says that it will deploy staff to help new clients migrate from OpenAI services to SenseTime’s products for free.

Chinese attempts to lure domestic developers away from OpenAI – considered the market leader in generative AI – will now be a lot easier, after OpenAI notified its users in China that they would be blocked from using its tools and services from 9 July.

“We are taking additional steps to block API traffic from regions where we do not support access to OpenAI’s services,” an OpenAI spokesperson told Bloomberg last month.

OpenAI has not elaborated about the reason for its sudden decision. ChatGPT is already blocked in China by the government’s firewall, but until this week developers could use virtual private networks to access OpenAI’s tools in order to fine-tune their own generative AI applications and benchmark their own research. Now the block is coming from the US side.

Rising tensions between Washington and Beijing have prompted the US to restrict the export to China of certain advanced semiconductors that are vital for training the most cutting-edge AI technology, putting pressure on other parts of the AI industry.

The OpenAI move has “caused significant concern within China’s AI community” said Xiaohu Zhu, the founder of the Shanghai-based Centre for Safe AGI, which promotes AI safety, not least because “the decision raises questions about equitable access to AI technologies globally”.

But it has also created an opportunity for domestic AI companies such as SenseTime, which are scrambling to hoover up OpenAI’s rejected users. After warnings about OpenAI’s decision circulated last month, Baidu offered 50m free tokens for its Ernie 3.5 AI model, as well as free migration services, while Zhipu AI, another local company, offered 150m free tokens for its model. Tencent Cloud is giving away 100m free tokens for its AI model to new users until the end of July. “Competitors are offering migration pathways for former OpenAI users, seeing this as an opportunity to expand their user base,” said Zhu.

One consequence of OpenAI’s decision may be that it accelerates the development of Chinese AI companies, which are in tight competition with their US rivals, as well as each other. China is estimated to have at least 130 large language models, accounting for 40% of the world’s total and second only to the US. But while US companies such as OpenAI have been at the cutting edge of generative AI, Chinese companies have been engaged in a price war that some analysts have speculated may harm their profit margins and their ability to innovate. Still, Winston Ma, a professor at New York University who writes about Chinese technology, said OpenAI’s departure from China comes “at a time when Chinese big tech players are closing on performance gap with OpenAI and are offering these Chinese LLM models essentially free”.

“OpenAI’s departure is a short-term shock to the China market, but it may provide a long-term opportunity for Chinese domestic LLM models to be put to the real test,” said Ma. Until now, Chinese companies have focused on the commercialisation of large language models rather than advancing the models themselves, he added.

Chinese commentators have been keen to brush off the impact of OpenAI’s decision. State media outlet the Global Times said it was “a push from the US to hamper China’s technology development”. Pan Helin, a digital economy researcher at Zhejiang University who sits on a government technology committee, described the development as “a good thing for China’s large-scale model independence and self-reliance”, according to Chinese media.

But there are signs that the US restrictions on China’s AI industry are starting to bite. The online video giant Kuaishou recently had to restrict the number of people who could access its new text-to-video AI model, Kling, because of a lack of computing capacity caused by a shortage of chips, according to a report in The Information. And there is now a booming hidden market for US semiconductors, as companies find ways to circumvent the sanctions. Being blocked from US software may inspire similar creativity.