A long walk in the mountains last weekend brought sudden perspective to just how heavily the shoutiness and anger was weighing.

Suddenly there was only birdsong, the rustling tree canopies, the gentle burbling of the Snowy River and the wind whispering through the trunks of ancient ghost gums. This was anything but a quiet quietness. But it was the sound of a serenity that only nature can gift – a noise of extreme unplugged-ness if you like.

In recent years, probably since the pandemic lockdowns, I’ve been a big advocate of walking with my own silence. That is, while being unconnected to the cybersphere. So, no news or music or even audiobooks or phone calls. My rhythmic breath and the dogs’ panting a beat along with their padding paws beside me, the cawing gulls and, of course, the sounds of my environment – aircraft, ferry horns, traffic, people talking.

It is an urban soundtrack of never pristine silence. But in it I could always salvage catharsis, an elusive calm, a restorative balm for an occasionally anxious mind that is easily drawn to the pain of others of which, distressingly, there’s no global shortfall.

This was intensive thinking time. Sometimes it was even non-thinking time. I often found I could walk for an hour-and-a-half in a state of tuned-out meditative stasis, reaching home with a sense of emotional and creative renewal after which I’d sometimes have to remind myself of the route taken.

This was a good thing.

And, so, I’d stuck to this pattern of walking offline for a few years. But something changed in late June. It was in a hotel room while on holiday in Arizona that we watched the first presidential election debate. Until then, I’d not been following United States presidential politics too closely despite the magnitude of its implications. But watching the calamitous performance of the incumbent, it was as if I was immediately rewired into a state of cyber-hypervigilance (this, I know, happened to many others too).

There were never enough podcasts or polls or hot takes or newsbreaks or predictions. My concentration for anything else was all but shredded. I found myself reading foreign news sites at 3am, sieving through the murk of punditry for shards of hope America would not teeter into a fascism, vengeance and chaos embodied by the 45th and now soon-to-be-sworn in 47th president, and foreshadowed no more presciently than on 6 January 2021.

The recent 5 November presidential election and its aftermath still seems like the most consequential in recent global history, and certainly of my life – and that of my children and grandchildren.

Across the world the political and social right (including in Australia) is high-fiving, of course, emboldened by the domestic possibilities of drawing from and transplanting elements of the politics of hate and derision.

Meanwhile, longstanding authoritarian fascists (none more so than in Russia, whose dictator must delight in watching the next US presidency do the Kremlin’s work for it by voraciously eating its country’s once-revered democratic institutions from the inside while nurturing oligarchy, public-private conflicts and potential kleptocracy) must smirk with the irony of it all.

The election has been done and dusted for a few weeks. But up until last weekend I was still bingeing on pods, tuning into the Democratic party recriminations, and not least trying to reconcile Kamala’s assurance that it’s “going to be OK’’ with her wholly credible campaign message the would-be 47th president was a madman/existential threat to democracy.

And then, last Saturday, I disconnected in the mountains. A few hours without the shoutiness and the anger and the triumphalism. This was the reset I needed.

Autocracy and its twin of subverted democracy blossom amid silence and exhausted, depleted opposition. So I’m not, by any means, proposing a permanent zone-out or to turn my back on informed knowledge about how it might impact globally and domestically. What has just happened in the US will have profound implications for Australia in a forthcoming election year on everything from the tone of political discourse to foreign affairs and defence, climate change, emissions targets, renewable energy, fossil fuels and immigration – and the rights of minorities.

The cultural/political trolling embodied by the very foreshadowed appointment of the next US cabinet and the symbolism of reactionary, spiteful initiatives already vowed against the marginalised, and how they might enable would-be replicants elsewhere, demand extreme watchfulness.

But effective vigilance also requires energy and strength, mental and emotional recharge and balance.

Now – in the interregnum before January’s inauguration – is the time to reset. To re-embrace the peace and quiet to be found in unpluggedness, so that the aural wonders of life and nature might give strength against the bellicosity and anger of a vastly changed, ever more dangerous world.

The coronation of King Charles in May 2023 cost taxpayers at least £72m, official figures have revealed.

The cost of policing the ceremony was £21.7m, with a further £50.3m in costs racked up by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

About 20 million people in Britain watched Charles crowned at Westminster Abbey on TV, substantially fewer than the 29 million Britons who had watched the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II in 2022.

The coronation ceremony was attended by dignitaries from around the world, and a star-studded concert took place at Windsor Castle the following night.

The annual report and accounts of DCMS, the lead department in Rishi Sunak’s government that worked with the royal household on the coronation, stated that the department “successfully delivered on the central weekend of His Majesty King Charles III’s coronation, enjoyed by many millions both in the UK and across the globe”.

It described the coronation as a “once-in-a-generation moment” that enabled the “entire country to come together in celebration”, as well as offering “a unique opportunity to celebrate and strengthen our national identity and showcase the UK to the world”.

Republic, which campaigns to replace the monarchy with an elected head of state and more democratic political system, described the coronation as an “obscene” waste of taxpayers’ money.

“I would be very surprised if £72m was the whole cost,” the Republic CEO, Graham Smith, told the Guardian.

As well as the Home Office policing and DCMS costs included in the figures, he said the Ministry of Defence, Transport for London, fire brigades and local councils also incurred costs related to the coronation, with other estimates putting the totalspend at between £100m and £250m.

“But even that kind of money – £72m – is incredible,” Smith added. “It’s a huge amount of money to spend on one person’s parade when there was no obligation whatsoever in the constitution or in law to have a coronation, and when we were facing cuts to essential services.

“It was a parade that Charles insisted on at huge expense to the taxpayer, and this is on top of the huge inheritance tax bill he didn’t [have to] pay, on top of the £500m-a-year cost of the monarchy.”

Under a clause agreed in 1993 by the then prime minister, John Major, any inheritance passed “sovereign to sovereign” avoids the 40% levy applied to assets valued at more than £325,000.

Smith added: “It was an extravagance we simply didn’t have to have. It was completely unnecessary and a waste of money in the middle of a cost of living crisis in a country that is facing huge amounts of child poverty.

“When kids are unable to afford lunches at school, to spend over £70m on this parade is obscene.”

Poor countries may have to compromise on demands for cash to tackle global heating, a former UN climate envoy has said, as UN talks entered their final hours in deadlock.

In comments that are likely to disappoint poorer countries at the Cop29 summit, Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland and twice a UN climate envoy, said rich country budgets were stretched amid inflation, Covid and conflicts including Russia’s war in Ukraine.

“It’s finance, and it’s absolutely vital, and it’s the responsibility of the developed world,” she told the Guardian in an interview. “But you can’t squeeze what isn’t squeezable.”

Rich countries have yet to make any formal offer of finance to the poor world as of Thursday night, even as two weeks of talks stretched into their final official day on Friday. The summit is focused on finding $1tn (£790bn) a year for poor nations to shift to a low-CO₂ economy and cope with the impacts of extreme weather.

But the rich world is expected to offer only about $300bn a year at most in public finance, far less than many developing countries hoped for. The developed world is likely to argue that the remainder of the $1tn can be made up from other sources, including private sector investment, carbon trading and potential new sources such as taxes on fossil fuels.

Robinson said $300bn should be “a minimum” and developed countries must also take steps to ensure that poor countries can access private sector finance and loans much more cheaply than at present, by “de-risking” finance for them. That could include giving guarantees for loans, which costs developed countries nothing but can make a big difference to gaining access to investment for the poor.

Many poor countries are asking for a much higher proportion of the $1tn to come from rich country’s budgets, rather than from the private sector or new taxes. The least developed countries bloc, for instance, said they wanted $900bn of the total to come from public finance.

Robinson said those ideas were “fine in principle, but not in the reality of government budgets”.

She conceded that this view would be controversial. “I think probably developing countries would say that’s too low,” said Robinson. “But in my view, with the other parts – the solidarity levies [such as fossil fuel taxes], the World Bank, and the private sector, you can get up to $1tn. That’s the point.

“That’s the world we live in. Budgets are stretched. The UK is playing a really good role, but they don’t have the money. We know it, you know, we all know. There’s no point trying to squeeze what is not squeezable.”

A core of finance from public sources of about $300bn, surrounded by other sources such as new taxes, carbon trading and private sector investment, is in line with an influential academic paper published by Nicholas Stern and other leading economists last week. TheIndependent High-Level Expert Group on Climate Finance found that about $500bn a year should come from private sector investment as part of $1tn for developing countries by 2030 and $1.3tn by 2035.

Developing countries were reluctant to comment as the negotiations are entering a crucial phase. Nevertheless, several civil society groups told the Guardian that developing countries should stick to their demands for more of the money to come from public sources.

Thato Gabaitse, a climate justice advocate for the Botswana chapter of the campaign group We, the World, said: “African countries have been clear on their $1.3tn ask. Out of that, $600bn would be provision and the rest mobilisation. Global north countries are showing a willingness to tip the scales, putting even more lives at risk in the global south and eroding the goodwill of global south countries. Keeping the process alive also means delivering finance without undermining the fundamentals of the Paris agreement. There is fatigue from the global south with the lack of ambition from rich countries. It’s time for the developed countries to put a future on the table and negotiate in good faith.”

Charlene Watson, a research associate at the ODI group, said developed countries should offer at least $500bn. “While less than what developing countries are asking for, a solid commitment of $500bn in highly concessional public finance – not in grant-equivalent terms, as the draft text suggests – could be the ‘landing zone’ we need to finalise the negotiations,” she said. “$500bn is robust enough – and enough of a statement – to mobilise the remainder up to that important $1tn mark.”

Robinson also said that China and other major economies still classed as developing must also pay towards climate finance. “It’s also the responsibility of the rich so-called developing countries [such as] China to take their responsibility properly. I know China does support developing countries, mainly with loans, but it needs to become more part of the way forward … in a way that’s transparent.”

Rich countries must also fulfil their responsibilities by agreeing deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, Robinson said. Only by doing so, as well as providing clear guarantees they will deliver the cash they promise, could they rebuild trust with the poor world, she said.

Relations between rich and poor nations were also strained, she said. “The trust is very fragile at the moment. There’s an anger, because the impacts of climate are much worse in the developing world,” she said. “The impact in poor countries is so devastating.”

On Thursday morning, the host country, Azerbaijan, published draft texts covering important aspects of the talks, but they were widely criticised as inadequate. The texts on a global financial settlement, called a new collective quantified goal, did not contain vital numbers such as the amount developed countries would be willing to contribute.

Other texts failed to reaffirm a vital commitment made last year to “transition away from fossil fuels”. Saudi Arabia and some of its allies have been pushing to remove such a reaffirmation from the outcome of Cop29.

New drafts of these texts, with the finance numbers included, are not expected until Friday afternoon. This is likely to push the conclusion of the talks into the weekend and into a race against the clock, as many developing country delegations are planning to leave.

There is pressure to conclude these finance talks in Baku, because Joe Biden is still in the White House until January. When Donald Trump takes office, he is expected to be hostile to all aspects of cooperation on the climate crisis.

Matt Gaetz, the former Florida congressman, withdrew from consideration to serve as Donald Trump’s attorney general on Thursday, amid intense scrutiny of allegations of sexual misconduct, ending the brief nomination of one of Trump’s most controversial cabinet picks

After meeting with senators on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, Gaetz determined that his nomination was “becoming a distraction to the critical work” of the new Trump administration, he explained on X.

“There is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle, thus I’ll be withdrawing my name from consideration to serve as Attorney General. Trump’s [justice department] must be in place and ready on Day 1,” Gaetz said.

“I remain fully committed to see that Donald J. Trump is the most successful President in history. I will forever be honored that President Trump nominated me to lead the Department of Justice and I’m certain he will Save America.”

The announcement comes a little more than a week after Trump said he was nominating Gaetz to be attorney general, the chief law enforcement officer of the United States.

A staunch Trump ally disliked by some fellow Republicans in Congress, Gaetz always faced an uphill battle to be confirmed. He came under intense scrutiny last week over allegations he had sexual relations with a 17-year-old girl.

The justice department declined to charge Gaetz last year as part of a sex-trafficking investigation. But details of his encounter and relationships were beginning to seep out. Just before he announced he was withdrawing his nomination, CNN reported that the 17-year-old woman he is alleged to have had sex with told the House ethics committee there had been a second sexual encounter with Gaetz.

ABC News and the New York Times reported earlier this week on records of Venmo transactions connecting Gaetz to women who said that he paid them for sex.

Gaetz’s announcement comes one day after the House ethics committee deadlocked over releasing its report on the allegations. At least one House Democrat on the committee, Representative Sean Casten of Illinois, said on Thursday he would continue to push for the full release of the Gaetz report.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump, who had reportedly been calling senators to lobby for Gaetz’s confirmation, said that “Matt has a wonderful future”.

“I greatly appreciate the recent efforts of Matt Gaetz in seeking approval to be Attorney General,” he wrote. “He was doing very well but, at the same time, did not want to be a distraction for the Administration, for which he has much respect. Matt has a wonderful future, and I look forward to watching all of the great things he will do!”

A staunch Trump ally known for theatrics such as wearing a gas mask on the house floor, Gaetz resigned from Congress the day Trump announced his nomination. It’s unclear who Trump will now pick to lead the justice department, which Trump has pledged to use to prosecute his enemies.

Gaetz’s withdrawal comes as his pick to lead the Department of Defense, Pete Hegseth, faces accusations of sexual assault. A police report made public this week contains allegations from a woman regarding a 2017 encounter with Hegseth in which she says he took her phone, blocked her from leaving his hotel room, and sexually assaulted her. Hegseth has denied the allegations.

“Matt Gaetz was a ridiculous, horrible and dangerous AG selection. That Republican senators were not willing to rubber stamp his nomination is a hopeful sign that a modicum of sanity persists in Washington,” said Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, a watchdog group, in a statement. “But Gaetz was not the only Trump nomination threatening America and there’s every reason to worry about who Trump will appoint in Gaetz’s stead.”

The United States and India have made the greatest progress among the world’s top 20 economies in implementing climate policies since the 2016 Paris Agreement, a study commissioned by the Guardian has found.

The data underscores the importance of political leadership and international coordination, both of which are coming under intense pressure ahead of the inauguration of Donald Trump, who has threatened to pull the US out of the United Nations climate treaty.

Over the past nine years, the G20 group of the world’s biggest economies have together introduced policies that are likely to reduce CO2 discharges by 6.9 gigatons by 2030, the report by Climate Action Tracker shows.

Although this is not enough to keep global heating within the Paris target of 1.5C to 2C above preindustrial levels, the authors of the study say it is a substantial improvement on what was forecast in 2015, showing the Cop process – despite its many flaws – has had some effect in reducing the climate dangers facing the world.

Instead of emissions increasing by 20% between 2015 and 2030, as was predicted at the start of that period, the new policies – mostly to support renewable energy and phase out high-polluting power plants – adopted by most countries mean that CO2 emissions are now projected to return to 2015 levels by the end of this decade. This change in the policy scenario has contributed to avoided warming of about 0.9C since Paris.

“This is nothing to brush off. This is a major improvement in the group of countries covering more than 80% of global emissions,” said Leonardo Nascimento, an analyst at Climate Action Tracker, who compiled the statistics. “There is progress at the international level. I completely disagree that Cop is a useless process.”

There are, however, concerns that this already insufficient progress is stalling: Firstly because recent Cop agendas have been dominated by host nations that plan to expand fossil fuel production, including Egypt (Cop27), the United Arab Emirates (Cop28), Azerbaijan (the ongoing Cop29), and Brazil (next year’s Cop30). Prominent critics have said the process needs reform because it is “not fit for purpose.”

The other major threat comes from Trump, who will take power in January. Once again, by taking the world’s most powerful nation out of the Paris Agreement negotiations. Conservative supporters urge him to go further and entirely remove the US from the Cop process and roll back the renewable incentives introduced during the administration of Joe Biden.

This is a worry for two reasons. Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which supports solar, wind, electric vehicles and energy efficiency, is the main reason the US leads the G20 in projected CO2 reductions from 2015 to 2030. It accounts for two gigatons, far ahead of second-place India with 1.4Gt, and third-place European Union, and the UK with 1.1Gt. Depending on how far Trump goes with his rollback, these gains could be lost.

The other reason is the message this sends to the world. Different countries may be less inclined to accelerate the energy transition and provide funds for mitigation, adaptation and compensation for developing nations if the biggest economy steps back.

With global emissions still rising despite two years of record heat, frustrations with Cop are growing. Climate Action Tracker says current policies put the temperature rise on track for 2.7C by the end of the century, which would be calamitous.

Analysts said it was essential for nations to step up rather than back.

Relative to their size, many smaller countries have made greater progress than the US in trimming emissions. And some large emerging economies are moving in the right direction. China – the world’s biggest emitter – has invested heavily in renewables and is forecast to hit some of its 2030 climate targets six years early and perhaps peak its CO2 output next year. “It is not just developed countries that are doing a lot, it is also developing nations with big populations and big inequality,” Nascimento said.

The analyst said that under the most optimistic projections, global emissions may finally peak next year – though this long-awaited moment has been wrongly predicted on multiple occasions in the past. The key, he said, is to maintain the political momentum behind the technological and business trends that have made wind and solar cheaper than coal, oil and gas.

“Fossil fuels are growing in a linear fashion, while renewables are growing exponentially. The displacement is happening faster than expected,” he said. “But we must not underestimate the impact of Trump. If the US, the world’s second-largest emitter, were to permanently walk away from its commitment to reach net zero emissions by 2050, our optimistic scenario for global temperature could increase by a few tenths of a degree, which would be very significant. It also depends on whether countries continue to pursue climate action in the light of cheap renewables and whether other leaders like EU, China, Brazil and others step up and remain united.”

“Despite improvements in global climate policy, the overall direction of travel remains bleak,” Nascimento said. “Countries need to substantially scale up past efforts to keep any chance of meeting the 1.5C goal. The pace of improvement is simply not enough.”

The UK environment secretary has promised to reform the food system to ensure farmers are paid fairly for the food they produce, after many filled the streets of Westminster to campaign against inheritance tax changes.

Speaking at the Country Land and Business Association (CLA) conference, Steve Reed said: “I heard the anguish of the countryside on the streets of London earlier this week. We may not agree over the inheritance tax changes, but this government is determined to listen to rural Britain and end its long decline.”

Reed added he was going to No 10 to tell Starmer about the gulf between the rural and Labour communities, which he said needed to be bridged urgently. CLA figures show the rural economy is 16% less productive than the national average.

Thousands of farmers demonstrated in central London on Tuesday to protest against changes to agricultural property relief, which mean farms worth more than £1m that are passed on to the family when the owner dies will have to pay a 20% tax on the remainder of the value.

But many, including the president of the National Farmers’ Union, Tom Bradshaw, said this change was the “final straw” after decades of neglect. After many years of being squeezed by supermarkets to the point where farmers receive just 1p for every loaf of bread or block of cheese sold, and seeing their subsidies disappear after Brexit, farmers are desperate, he said. Incomes have plummeted as extreme weather hits yields, and now farmers also fear being unable to pass on a viable business to descendants.

To address this, Reed announced the government would consult on a new 25-year farming roadmap and said he would make changes to the supply chain to ensure farmers got a fair price for their produce. “I’m not prepared to let so many farmers keep working so hard for so little,” he said.

Of the roadmap, he added: “This will be the most forward-looking plan for farming in our country’s history, with a focus on making farming and food production more profitable in the decades to come.”

Reed said the plan would be about “supply chain fairness”, meaning farmers would be paid fairly by those to whom they sell produce.

Reed said: “Across the whole supply chain, the producers, the farmers, the growers, get relatively little of the money that a product is sold for. And if there’s ever a problem in the supply chain – let’s say a contract is agreed and then energy prices shoot up – it’s quite often the producer or the farmer that has to bear the cost of that, and sometimes they end up selling their produce below the cost of producing it, and that’s not sustainable.”

Speaking at the conference, the president of the CLA, Victoria Vyvyan, accused the government of “taxing us out of existence” and embroiling rural people in a “stupid row about numbers”.

She said she felt she had been “marginalised and condescended to, told to calm down” and that farmers were “fearful of losing everything that they’ve worked for, borrowed for and hoped for”.

Reed said he hopes his plan would regain the countryside’s confidence, adding: “This isn’t just about one thing. It is something much wider, and we have basically a proportion of rural Britain out on the streets of London telling us, telling politicians and politics, that they feel ignored, alienated and disrespected, and that’s what they want to change … I think it’s not just about a single tax issue. It’s much, much, much bigger than that.”

Hopes of a breakthrough at the deadlocked UN climate talks have been dashed after a new draft of a possible deal was condemned by rich and poor countries.

Faith in the ability of the Azerbaijan presidency to produce a deal ebbed on Thursday morning, as the draft texts were criticised as inadequate and providing no “landing ground” for a compromise.

Instead of setting a global goal for at least $1tn in new funds for developing countries to tackle the climate crisis, the text contained only an “X” where numbers should have been.

Oscar Soria, a director at the Common Initiative thinktank, said: “The negotiating placeholder ‘X’ for climate finance is a testament of the ineptitude from rich nations and emerging economies that are failing to find a workable solution for everyone.

“This is a dangerous ambiguity: inaction risks turning ‘X’ into the symbol of extinction for the world’s most vulnerable. Without firm, ambitious commitments, this vagueness betrays the Paris agreement’s promise and leaves developing nations unarmed in their fight against climate chaos.”

The governments of almost 200 countries are meeting in Azerbaijan to thrash out a new global settlement on climate finance, to channel funds to developing countries to help them shift to low-carbon economies and cope with the impact of extreme weather.

Ministers and high-ranking officials have embarked on intense shuttle diplomacy as the two weeks of fraught talks enter their final days. The Cop29 summit is scheduled to end on Friday night, but on Thursday morning the various positions of developed and developing countries looked as far apart as ever.

The long-awaited draft texts, published shortly after 7am local time, covered all the main aspects of a possible deal at Cop29. Chief among them was a text on the “new collective quantified goal”, which should set out the amount of money developing countries can expect in climate finance, and the proportion of that which should come directly from rich world governments.

Developing countries want at least $1tn a year in climate finance, a large proportion of which should come directly from the rich in the form of grants, with some loans and potentially some private sector finance making up the remainder.

But instead of clear numbers, the new collective quantified goal (NCQG) text contained two options that were described by insiders as “extreme positions” with little compromise.

Some countries privately say that Saudi Arabia and the two blocs through which it acts at Cops – the Arab Group and the Like-Minded Developing Countries – are trying to wreck prospects of a deal.

One of the texts published on Thursday covers “mitigation”, which in UN parlance always means curbing greenhouse gas emissions. Last year, at the Cop28 summit in Dubai, countries passed a resolution to “transition away from fossil fuels”, the first time in 30 years of talks that such a commitment had been made.

That was opposed by Saudi Arabia, which has since attempted to unpick the commitment, alleging it was “an option” rather than a goal. Last week, in the early stages of this “conference of the parties” (Cop), Saudi Arabia and its allies tried to sideline a planned reaffirmation of this commitment, in a fight over what should be on the agenda for the meeting.

In the “mitigation” text, the “transition away from fossil fuels” is absent. This is unacceptable to many developed and developing countries, which want to build on the hard-won progress made last year rather than have it reversed.

Questions are being asked inside the negotiating halls over whether Azerbaijan is exerting enough control over the negotiations, or leaning too far towards the countries that do not want a robust deal.

Many civil society groups laid the blame on developed countries. Joseph Sikulu, the Pacific director of 350.org, said: “We hoped to see a draft text today that would show rich nations putting their money where their mouth is and responding to the demands from the global south.

“What we got is a text with no clear grant-based core money. Nothing less than $1tn in grants per year will be enough to see those most impacted by climate change on a just transition towards a safe, equitable future. Rich countries must stop dithering, and start delivering – this is not charity, it’s time for them to pay their debt.”

Developed countries are likely to offer a much lower amount in direct financial assistance, probably about $200bn to $300bn, with the remainder of the $1tn to be made up of new forms of funding, such as fossil fuel taxes and private sector investment.

They are also insisting that countries such as China, with a robust economy and large greenhouse gas emissions, and petro-states, such as Saudi, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, should contribute to the financial assistance for poorer countries. Those countries are still classed as developing under the Paris agreement, based on divisions set out in its parent treaty, the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, meaning they are eligible to receive climate finance funds, with no obligation to contribute towards them.

The EU climate commissioner, Wopke Hoekstra, said the draft text was “clearly unacceptable as it stands”.

Last summer, the western Arctic was uncomfortably hot. Smoke from Canada’s wildfires hung thick in the air, and swarms of mosquitoes searched for exposed skin. It was a maddening combination that left researchers on Qikiqtaruk, an island off the north coast of the Yukon, desperate for relief.

And so on a late July afternoon, a team of Canadian scientists dived into the Beaufort Sea, bobbing and splashing in a sheltered bay for nearly two hours. Later, as they lay sprawled on a beach, huge chunks of the island they were studying slid into the ocean.

“The land was giving us hints of what was to come,” says Richard Gordon, a senior ranger “Days before, we found all these puddles of clear water. But it hadn’t rained at all in days; you look up and see nothing but blue sky.

“Now we know: all of that ice in the permafrost had melted. The signs were there. We just didn’t know.”

Over the next two weeks, the landslides happened again and again. Throughout the small island, the tundra sheared off in more than 700 different locations. Some collapses were quick, soil ripping from the land with a damp thunderclap. Others were slow, with land “rippling and rolling like a carpet” down the slope, says Isla Myers-Smith, an ecology professor at the University of British Columbia.

In one case, the team was devastated to learn that one of their monitoring sites, where the data they collected had given a three decade-long glimpse into the island’s shifting ecology, had vanished into the ocean.

“Each time you lose a dataset, you lose understanding of how the island is changing,” says Myers-Smith. “It’s hard not to get emotionally invested in the work you do and in this place because you know you’re studying and witnessing irreversible changes.”

For more than a decade, Myers-Smith and her “Team Shrub” graduate students have studied those dramatic changes unfolding on Qikiqtaruk (also known as Herschel Island).

Armed with a fleet of drones and working closely with Indigenous Inuvialuit rangers, the team has revealed a rapid reshaping of the tundra with little precedent. As they race to understand what those changes might mean, a combination of rising seas, landslides and flooding mean the landscape is literally collapsing around them, making it harder to study an island that reflects the tumultuous future of the western Arctic.

Lying just off the Canadian mainland, Qikiqtaruk is a mass of sediment and permafrost piled up during the last ice age. Despite its small size, the island is packed with immense ecological richness, with waters teeming with beluga whales and trout-like Dolly Varden char. On land, it is one of the few places on Earth where black, grizzly and polar bears cross paths. Musk ox and caribou browse the lichen. The land is thickly carpeted with more than 200 species of wildflowers, grasses and shrubs.

For the Inuvialuit, the island continues to be a hunting and fishing ground that for nearly a thousand years sustained communities through dark and bitter winters.

When they negotiated a land claim agreement with the Canadian government in 1984, Inuvialuit elders used their new powers to protect Qikiqtaruk by establishing the Herschel Island–Qikiqtaruk territorial park, fearful that industry and outsiders would destroy a place that held deep cultural value.

When he was a child, Gordon’s family would make the multi-day trek to Qikiqtaruk in a small boat, crossing hundreds of kilometres of brackish delta. He spent summers on the island, running through the remains of weather-beaten buildings, built during the region’s whaling era at the turn of the last century.

Returning with a cohort of elders before the agreement, he saw “how meaningful the land was, how intertwined it was with our oral histories, our culture; I understood the power it had”, Gordon says. “I understood why they wanted so much for it to be protected.”

While the elders envisioned a space protected from destructive outside forces, in two decades as park ranger at Herschel Island–Qikiqtaruk territorial park, Gordon has watched as the island has morphed into something unrecognisable.

In early August the first faint blush of autumn is visible in the shrubs of the tundra. Taking advantage of a brief window of favourable weather, Myers-Smith and a group of researchers pile into a helicopter, to be dropped off throughout Qikiqtaruk to monitor its changes, deploying trail cameras, scouring wetlands and piloting drones. The work is tiring and often pushes late into the night. They sometimes eat dinner close to midnight, enjoying the pink hues of a sky where the sun does not fully set.

The team’s research has shown an island ecosystem in rapid flux: the tundra is “greening” at an incredible rate as shrubs such as willow push north and grow taller. In doing so, they push out the cottongrass, mosses and lichens that take hundreds – sometimes thousands – of years to grow.

Buoyed up by higher temperatures and lengthened growing seasons, the number and diversity of plants will keep growing, Myers-Smith says. This is seemingly a bright spot amid a global biodiversity crisis: more plants and animals are making the tundra their home.

And yet a lush, greening Arctic will come at a cost: upending the lives of animals that rely on seasonal rhythm and predictability. Herds of caribou are among the most likely casualties, as bare spots on the tundra, favoured by the lichen that they like to eat, are overtaken by shrubs. The American golden plover, a shorebird that flies yearly from the Arctic to the southern reaches of South America, will find its habitat disappearing as plants grow thicker, crowding out the bald patches of land it prefers.

“It’s one thing to think about what the changes mean to us, but I can’t imagine the fear and stress the animals feel as everything changes so fast,” says Gordon. “We’re supposed to be the guardians of the land. But we’ve let them down.”

Qikiqtaruk is now pockmarked with half-moon shaped craters. Known as thaw slumps, they occur when the underlying permafrost has melted to the point that it can no longer support the soil and the ground collapses.

Permafrost thaws across the globe are destroying housing and infrastructure, and disrupting ecosystems. These slumps are also harbingers of a cascading environmental catastrophe: there is twice as much carbon locked up in permafrost as in the atmosphere.

One of the world’s largest thaw slumps is Slump D, on Qikiqtaruk. Inside it, bumblebees bounce between mastodon flowers (also known as marsh fleawort). The whine of mosquitoes reaches the same pitch as the research drones overhead. Melt water gurgles through silty channels, creating a viscous mud that has claimed many rubber boots from Team Shrub. Every few hours, a lump of earth tears away from the overhanging cliff and falls to the ground below.

Increasingly, chunks of land hundreds of metres wide will rip away – a phenomenon known as active layer detachment. Unlike other types of permafrost, with high levels of rock or soil, Qikiqtaruk’s permafrost is disproportionately made of ice, making it uniquely susceptible to immense and powerful geological forces when that ice melts.

“It feels like we’re at the frontier of change on this island, where the fabric of the landscape itself is tearing apart,” says Ciara Norton, a Team Shrub research assistant. “These massive permafrost disturbance events are going to continue to happen – and yet we don’t really know what that means.”

One thing is clear: the constant landslides are the latest in a string of challenges that have made studying the island increasingly difficult. Bush planes cannot land on Qikiqtaruk when puddles of seawater are present – and they have become a near-constant presence on the low-lying gravel airstrip. Fog smothers the cove and grounds helicopters for days. Unpredictable storms keep boats away. In mid-August this year, Team Shrub was trapped on the island for an extra 12 days.