Neuralink’s first attempt at implanting its chip in a human being’s skull hit an unexpected setback after the device began to detach from the patient’s brain, the company revealed on Wednesday.

The patient, Noland Arbaugh, underwent surgery in February to attach a Neuralink chip to his brain, but the device’s functionality began to decrease within the month after his implant. Some of the device’s threads, which connect the miniature computer to the brain, had begun to retract. Neuralink did not disclose why the device partly retracted from Arbaugh’s brain, but stated in a blogpost that its engineers had refined the implant and restored functionality.

The decreased capabilities did not appear to endanger Arbaugh, and he could still use the implant to play a game of chess on a computer using his thoughts, according to the Wall Street Journal, which first broke the news of the issue with the chip. The possibility of removing the implant was considered after the detachment came to light, the Journal reported.

Arbaugh’s implant began running into problems in late February, according to Neuralink’s blogpost, when an undisclosed number of the chip’s threads “retracted from the brain, resulting in a net decrease in the number of effective electrodes”. This decreased the device’s bits per second, which is essentially a gauge of how well the implant could perform its tasks.

Neuralink, which Elon Musk owns and which was valued at about $5bn last year, has widely touted the success of its first implant, positioning itself as a world leader in brain-chip technology. Although the device is still in its early stages, the company’s disclosure brings more attention to the untested and complicated nature of the experimental procedure.

Neuralink’s implants function by embedding a small container in the skull that houses a processing chip and battery, along with 64 fine threads that connect with the brain tissue and interact with the neural signals it sends out. Arbaugh, who is quadriplegic, can control computer devices like a keyboard or mouse cursor with his implant.

Arbaugh praised the implant during a demonstration in March and said that it had “already changed his life”, while also stating that it had not been perfect and they “have run into some issues”.

Before Neuralink conducted its first human implant, it extensively experimented for years on animals including sheep, pigs and monkeys. Regulators have launched several investigations into the company’s practices at those animal testing labs, earlier this year saying that they found quality control and recordkeeping problems at one California research facility.

One night, I was preparing steak for dinner and mistakenly reached for the wrong white granulated substance. Instead of salting my steak to create a brown crust by searing, I created a brown crust with notes of caramel.

Ethan Frisch, co-founder of Burlap & Barrel, an artisanal spice company that works with small producers worldwide, laughed wryly when he heard this story over Zoom. “This is the first time in history anyone could make that mistake. Refined, white-bleached sugar is a very modern development in the centuries-old sugar industry. Sugar is brown! It’s only white when you do a lot of work to remove the brownness.”

His co-founder, Ori Zohar, elaborated: “The whole sugar industry is focused on this pure white chemical that is so far away from being a plant: a shelf-stable, consistent, interchangeable ingredient. None of those qualities make for good food,” though it makes an item that can be traded around the world for similar base prices.

Many of us only know white, granulated sugar that comes packaged with no information about its sugarcane or beet origins – much less its geographical origins – on its package. But sugar is diverse. White, processed sugar makes up the largest segment of the global market, but sugar also comes in liquid and brown forms. About 80% of the world’s production comes from sugarcane, but some comes from beets. Even sugarcane itself is not a monolith; though most sugar is derived from the Saccharum officinarum species and its hybrids, there are hundreds of varieties which have adapted (or been adapted through human intervention) to their specific ecosystems.

Zohar and Frisch are on a mission to “do to sugar what has been done to salt” in the last few years. You can now buy specialty salts from specific places and have specific characteristics: a black Himalayan salt that has a sulphurous funk or Burlap and Barrel’s Pearl salt from Tanzania’s Swahili coast, with its surprisingly spherical crystals.

Saltverk, which sells hand-harvested salt from Iceland, has been riding this wave. Founder Björn Steinar Jónsson said, “People want to know where the products they’re buying are from. We’ve seen this as a gradual growth in the salt industry, and really, we’re only at the beginning stages of where people understand what’s going into their salts. As a staple ingredient used by most of the world, sugar could follow a similar path.”

This is not just marketing. A sugar’s texture and taste can be as individual as coffee beans from a corner of Ethiopia or wine grapes grown on a chilly slope in the Pacific north-west.

Brown sugar from Okinawa in Japan is a favorite of pastry chef Salvatore Martone of Le Jardinier in New York. He said: “Okinawa brown sugar (kokuto) is produced on eight remote Japanese islands. Each island produces sugar that has a slightly different taste. The sugar is sold in small irregular lumps, and the flavor is rich minerally smokiness with an earthy undertone and a hint of bitterness.” He uses it for ice-cream.

Burlap & Barrel’s founders want to introduce consumers to sugars connected to a specific place and that have a distinctive flavor born of the environment that produced them. The company’s work expands the market for traceable sugar, focusing on sourcing from communities using traditional processing methods.

It’s introduced panela, a traditionally unrefined cane sugar from Boyacá, Colombia. In June, the company is launching two other single-origin sugars, jaggery from Satara district, India, and a granulated sugar from Portvale, Barbados. When the company uses the term “single-origin”, it doesn’t merely refer to a country of origin, but a single farm or producer.

Had I reached for their sand-textured panela in making my steak, I could not have mistaken it for salt. Its soft, irregular granules are the color of milk caramel, with which it shares similar aromas. A spoonful is like sucking on sweet cinnamon toffee. It melts on the tongue, leaving a trace of floral spice, as if I took a shot of ginger juice.

The jaggery has the varied, irregular texture and look of crushed peanuts, and opening it fills my apartment with the scent of fresh squeezed sugarcane. It comes from Dr Shashikant Salunkhe, who has grown turmeric for Burlap & Barrel as part of a regenerative agricultural system. A local refiner filters the raw sugarcane juice with wild okra, whose gel collects any floating impurities. The jaggery is granulated and then stone ground, ancient methods that are worlds away from industrial filtration and mechanized refinement.

The Barbadian sugar’s crystals are startlingly angular and crunch loudly between one’s teeth.

“Barbadian sugar has to de-commoditize if they’re going to compete globally,” said Frisch. This means that the country’s producers need to embrace their sugar as a specialty product and divert it from being blended with other sugars before it reaches supermarket shelves where it will be simply labeled “cane sugar”. Frisch wants people to understand what makes Barbadian sugar so good – the terroir of its coral island, flavors enhanced by molasses, cane fed by rainwater and not irrigation like in most industrial practices, and its history.

Sugar production has an ugly past. About 5 million slaves were brought to the Caribbean, most to toil on sugar plantations starting in the mid-1500s. The slave trade reached its height in the 1700s, and Barbados, known as Sugar Island, was its crown jewel. Abolitionists in Europe and the US waged boycotts of sugar, a slave-derived good that represented abhorrent working conditions.

Centuries later, Frisch and Zohar want consumers to demand sugars that retain their individual, nuanced flavors. “Home cooks and chefs have huge buying power,” said Zohar, which could advance more sustainable and equitable production. Sugarcane farms are responsible for massive deforestation. Added to innumerable food products, sugar drives the global obesity epidemic. Sugar from the Dominican Republic’s Central Romana corporation, which is often supplied to and sold as Domino brand, has been banned from the US since November 2023 due to allegations about exploitative work conditions and forced labor among its largely Haitian migrant workforce.

But as of the moment, it’s difficult to know exactly where your sugar comes from. Non-alcoholic beverage company Everleaf goes to extraordinary lengths to source botanicals. Founder Paul Mathew is a conservation biologist, and his company has tracked down “cherry blossoms, hand-picked in the Shizuoka region of Japan between May and August” and gum acacia, used for mouthfeel, from the Sahel region of Africa.

That wasn’t possible with sugar, which Mathew said is all being “hoovered up into a commodity-based industrial system”. The UK-based company is currently switching from fair-trade sugar derived from sugarcane to beet sugar from the UK, prioritizing a lesser carbon footprint.

One way for a company to know where its sugar comes from is for that business to grow it themself. This is what Copalli Rum in Belize chooses to do. The majority of rum is made from molasses, produced when sugarcane juice is boiled multiple times in sugar’s refining process and sucrose is removed. But new agricole-style rums, which are made from fermenting fresh sugarcane juice, like Copalli, are emerging from former commodity sugar plantation fields, from Hawaii to Belize. Copalli uses red and black cane instead of yellow cane engineered over many years to produce commercial sugar in Belize.

Wil Maheia, the philanthropy services advisor for Copalli, has tended to this area his entire life. His great-grandparents worked the land when it was a sugarcane plantation and he helped organize Belize’s first debt-for-nature swap (a transaction where a country’s debt is exchanged for environmental conservation commitments).

He’s proud to say: “We have never cut any rainforest to plant cane.” To the contrary – Copalli is cultivating 220 acres of sugarcane on old citrus orchards rather than reaching into 12,000 acres of rainforest. As the largest employer in southern Belize, it’s creating jobs that do not rely on the logging industry and deforestation.

British farmers are considering walking away from their farms as the recent record run of wet weather has left the sector “on the brink”, rural bodies have warned.

The Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) and the Soil Association raised concerns over the perilous situations facing many in their industry, with profits being squeezed and extreme weather driven by the climate crisis putting financial and mental strain on farm owners.

Helen Browning, the chief executive of the Soil Association, said: “A lot of farmers are really considering their options, and thinking about walking away from their farms, as they could make far more money doing something else.”

Browning, who runs a livestock and arable farm in Wiltshire, added: “If you were economically rational, you wouldn’t farm.”

The trade bodies’ comments came during a briefing on Thursday run by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) thinktank ahead of the second annual Farm to Fork summit being hosted by Rishi Sunak at No 10 next week.

The summit is expected to discuss the UK’s future food security against the backdrop of extreme wet weather that has affected four in five farms in the past 12 months.

The UK has been hit by 11 named storms since September, and experienced the wettest 18-month period since records began in 1836.

Tom Clarke, a board member at the AHDB, said the biggest effect on farms this year had been the poor weather, with many farms planting fewer crops, or no crops at all, due to fields being flooded. “It’s been a hell of a year, I think farmers across the UK are really on the brink, not only mentally, but financially and ecologically as well.”

Clarke, who farms wheat, sugar and other combinable crops in Cambridge, said the rain meant some of his fields had no crops for the first time in decades, while a large percentage of those planted were in bad condition.

The AHDB’s arable crop report for April showed that only 45% of winter wheat was rated as being in good or excellent condition in the month, well below the 88% in the same period last year.

Clarke also pointed to the phasing out of EU basic payment scheme subsidies as another challenge faced by farmers. The payments were supposed to be replaced by the UK government’s sustainable farming incentive subsidies, but the rollout of these has been delayed.

“This means that there is less money in the system for farmers, that affects the viability of farming economics in this country,” he said.

Last week, the National Farmers’ Union annual survey revealed that farmers’ confidence had hit its lowest level in at least 14 years, with 16% of respondents saying their farms were not profitable and may not survive – the highest percentage ever recorded.

Thursday’s ECIU briefing also heard from the Food Foundation charity, which warned that the climate crisis in the UK and overseas was leading to price volatility and many British households were unable to cope with soaring costs.

Anna Taylor, the charity’s executive director, said: “Inflation may be out of the news but a basic food basket remains 25% higher than it was two years ago and wages have not kept pace.

“The result is 8 million adults and 3 million children living in food insecurity and struggling to put food on the table.”

What is the most effective action individuals can take?

Most experts (76%) backed voting for politicians who pledge strong climate measures, where fair elections take place. The recommendation is powerful in a year when voters in countries including the US, UK, India, the EU, Mexico and South Africa and more all go to the polls.

“I feel the reason behind the lack of response to date is the nervousness of politicians,” said Prof Bill Collins, at the University of Reading in the UK. “Polls suggest voters are actually more willing for governments to take stronger climate action.” Another expert highlighted the danger of a second Donald Trump presidency to climate action.

The survey sought the view of every contactable lead author and review editor of reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since 2018, with 380 of 843 responding. Overall the scientists were extremely pessimistic about the prospects of holding global temperature rises below internationally agreed targets.

“The science is there, but the lack of will of politicians worldwide is retarding climate change [action],” said Prof Alexander Milner, at the University of Birmingham in the UK.

What about reducing flying?

The second choice for most effective individual action, according to the experts, was reducing flying and fossil-fuel powered transport in favour of electric and public transport. This was backed by 56%, and two-thirds said they had cut their own number of flights.

Flying is the most polluting activity an individual can undertake and makes up a large part of the carbon footprint of the rich. Globally it is a small minority of people who drive aviation emissions, with only about one in 10 flying at all. Frequent-flying “super emitters” who represent just 1% of the world’s population cause half of aviation’s carbon emissions, with US air passengers having by far the biggest carbon footprint among rich countries.

Can eating less meat help?

Meat production has a huge impact on the environment. Most people in wealthy countries already eat more meat than is healthy for them and more than 60% of the scientists said they had cut their own meat consumption. Almost 30% of the experts said eating less meat was the most effective climate action, while a similar proportion backed cutting emissions from heating or cooling homes, by installing heat pumps, for example.

Is protesting an effective form of climate action?

Almost a quarter of the scientists said they had participated in climate protests, as citizens who are deeply worried about global heating. This included scientists from every continent, including those from the US, Argentina, Germany, Bangladesh, Kenya and Australia.

What else?

Having fewer children was backed by 12% of the experts but many made further suggestions. Everyone should “talk about climate as the leading existential threat to societal stability”, said one. Shifting savings or pension funds away from fossil fuel investments and towards green ones was also mentioned by multiple experts.

Prof Vanesa Castán Broto, at the University of Sheffield in the UK, suggested a blunt action for one particular group: “Stop working for the fossil fuel industry.” And a scientist from Cameroon advocated avoiding products responsible for deforestation, such as some beef, timber and cocoa.

Can individual action really help?

Many of the experts were clear on the limits. “It can only go so far. Deep, rapid cuts in carbon emissions from oil and gas, as well as other sectors such as transport, are needed, which are outside the control of the average individual,” said Dr Shobha Maharaj, a climate impacts scientist from Trinidad and Tobago.

“Individual action can only amount to a drop in the bucket – only systemic changes will be sufficient,” said Prof David Wrathall, at Oregon State University in the US. But Prof Hiroyuki Enomoto, at Japan’s National Institute of Polar Research, said that while individual actions have a small impact, they are important in increasing collective awareness of the problem.

Are the scientists walking the talk themselves?

Yes. Many foresee catastrophic levels of global heating and are shifting their focus away from the physics of the climate system towards action that slows global heating and work that protects people against the climate impacts they now see as unstoppable.

“I work more on projects with vulnerable communities so they improve their adaptation to climate change, whose impacts we already experience and which will increase in the future,” said Prof Carolina Vera at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina.

Numerous scientists said they had given their time as expert witnesses in legal cases on climate change and others said they were helping groups to develop new climate policies.

Maharaj now chooses to spend at least half her time turning science into action, as the science director of a company implementing responsible reforestation. “There are so many people on the ground who care and who want to make a difference; that is truly encouraging and really drives me,” she said.

A cruise ship has journeyed into New York City’s harbor bearing a gruesome cargo in the form of a huge, dead whale sprawled across its bow.

The incident happened on Saturday, according to local US media reports, and the event is being held by some as further evidence of the unfortunate impact on sea life that large vessels can have.

The 44ft-long whale corpse was an endangered sei whale and was caught on the ship’s bow when it arrived at the Port of Brooklyn, according to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration fisheries spokesperson, Andrea Gomez.

The boat involved was the Meraviglia, which docked in New York before sailing on a journey to ports in New England and Canada. It is owned by Geneva-based MSC Cruises.

“We immediately notified the relevant authorities, who are now conducting an examination of the whale,” officials with the cruise line said in a statement, who added that the company had regulations in place to avoid collisions with whales and other animals at sea.

“We are deeply saddened by the loss of any marine life,” the statement said.

The whale is now the subject of a necropsy to try and determine how it died, notably if it was already dead when hit by the cruise ship. Sei whales are one of the largest whales and are a protected species.

To say the images of Andreas Heide during his working day are dramatic is an understatement: a freediver deep underwater in a black wetsuit, his lean silhouette enhanced by powerful bladed fins, looking up towards a group of orcas; or standing on an ice sheet next to a small sailboat in the Arctic, amid a sea full of dangerous looking ice floes in poor visibility.

But for the marine biologist and adventurer, plunging into freezing waters with orcas or embarking on a 4,500-mile sailing expedition from the Arctic north to the UK and back, documenting whale behaviour and their dramatic encounters with polar bears, whales and walruses, is all part and parcel of storytelling that he hopes can ultimately change human behaviour. He works with scientists and conservationists, photographers and drone pilots, to underline the importance of conservation in the extreme north, under challenging conditions.

“There is a question we all ask ourselves, as environmentalists and journalists, which is, why, when as humans we are aware of climate change and plastic pollution, do we fail to act collectively to do something about it?” says Heide. “Part of that reason is a lack of knowledge.

“Imagine a photo of the moon from the moon’s surface. But then, imagine the moon’s surface with an astronaut on it, it’s completely different. It has an emotional response. That’s what we want to convey.”

Heide, 45, is one of eight people to be nominated for the Shackleton medal for the protection of the polar regions, which recognises individuals putting everything on the line to protect the Arctic and the Antarctic. The winner of the award, judged by the explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes and the historian and presenter Dan Snow, among others, will be announced on 10 May.

Born in the Norwegian coastal town of Stavanger, Heide spent his childhood close to the water. He began freediving at the age of 10, and had his first boat at eight or nine. He spent two years in the military as a parachutist, working with helicopters and submarines, to build up the skills needed to navigate the Arctic.

He says he wants to share knowledge and create an emotional connection with the marine environment. “To make people understand what they do matters for the Arctic ecosystem, including the polar bears and the blue whales and the orcas.”

He works with whales, he says, because they are the “ultimate ambassador for the ocean and spark an emotional connection among people”. “The larger an animal is, the more you connect with it. That’s human psychology.”

He accepts that being freezing cold is part of his job, however painful. “Sometimes when I come to the surface, I struggle to speak because my lips are numb with the cold. I use a wetsuit often, because it is faster in the water. Speed is everything if you want to keep up with a whale. But sometimes we use drysuits which allow you to stay down for longer – you can stay in the water for half an hour with a drysuit.”

Heide believes his method of navigating the often treacherous Arctic conditions in a small sailing boat, Barba, helps him better connect with nature and people.

“If we were there in a €5m [£4.3m] state-of-the-art expedition vessel, it would be less impactful. In a small boat, you have to connect with nature and your life is governed by nature. You get sea spray in your face.

“Ernest Shackleton and his crew were out pushing the boundaries with the means they had at their disposal, with an adventurous spirit and a willingness to explore.”

After Blackbird, the traumatising spy-thriller bankrolled by and starring Irish dancer Michael Flatley, filmgoers thought they were safe – for a while – from bizarre and eccentrically acted dramas set in luxury paradises. But now, at the age of 22, actor and model Damian Hurley has written and directed a softcore erotic mystery drama set in the Caribbean starring his sexy mum, Elizabeth Hurley … to whom he gives a full-on sapphic love scene with a nightclub singer. As this woman’s head slinks south after a lingering kiss, Mr Hurley brings his camera very candidly indeed to what could only be described as an imminent moment of oral pleasure. We know the phrase Too Much Information … but what about Too Much Content? Too Much Freud? Or just … Too Much?

Hurley plays Lily, a woman both in mourning and in skimpy beach attire – or sometimes in a revealing athleisure two-piece, accessorised with diaphanous wrap. Lily’s daughter took her own life the previous year, drowning while in a bikini. Cue: upsetting flashback. But now Lily invites all the departed’s young friends to hang out at her palatial beachside hacienda along with her other daughter. This will bring healing. This will bring closure. This will bring gorgeous swimwear. But all these pouting people have awful sex-related secrets which may or may not reveal something about this woman’s terribly sad demise.

As for Liz herself, she brings serious décolletage energy to every scene and an overwhelming embonpoint dynamic to her husky line-readings. Once you get to the big reveal, you feel like you’ve sat through a hundred episodes of a saucy daytime soap with the saucy bits cut out. They could franchise out a sequel: Strictly Confidential in Dubai.

The mid-ocean ridge is where the Earth creates its outer skin. It’s called the boundary of creation. We knew there was life on the bottom of the ocean but not entire ecosystems supporting large animals until our expedition went down there in 1977.

First, we sent down an unmanned vehicle called Angus, which was essentially a camera system and strobe lights within a two-tonne steel cage. It was going down in the eternal darkness, slaloming back and forth like a skier down a mountain.

We were exploring the longest mountain range on Earth – the mid-ocean ridge. We were looking for heat, and we theorised that there would be vents in the ridge, but we never expected to see large concentrations of life. After 12 hours of taking thousands of photos, Angus came back up.

When we studied the photos we found that at about 2,500 metres deep, where we had detected a sudden increase in temperature, the water got cloudy. Then we suddenly saw clams – giant clams the size of dinner plates – and tube worms that were two or three metres tall.

It was like finding an oasis of life in the Sahara; it was like a rose garden. The room exploded with excitement onboard the ship when we saw the images. Scientists become children when they discover something – it was like we never left middle school.

The discovery solved the mystery of how life got a foothold on the planet, and it has led people to believe there is even more likely to be life elsewhere in our solar system. But we were not expecting to find a large ecosystem of life – we were all geologists.

We invited biologists but they didn’t want to go because they said there’s nothing going on there. We constantly remind them they weren’t there when we made this historic biological discovery; we have to rub it in.

The next morning, three people went down in a submersible to the spot where we had photographed the clams the day before to bring up samples. The pressure hull within the deep diving vehicles we used was tiny. Ours was about two metres in diameter and we stuffed three people in there. It was like working inside a Swiss watch.

When we brought the clams up to the surface, we realised they were functioning like no other organism we had seen before. When we opened them, we found that they had human-like blood. They looked more like beef than a clam – they weren’t white but red, full of haemoglobin and fleshy on the inside.

You’d expect this blood to be circulating nutrients and other resources between organ systems, and yet, unlike most clams, they had no internal organs, no mouths. It was a mystery how they were feeding themselves.

We looked under the microscope and found this very ancient bacterium, which wasn’t even named at the time, living inside their bodies. It turned out the clams were being fed by the bacterium. I called a friend and tried to describe to him what we were seeing, and he said: “That’s impossible.” I said: “I’m holding it in my hand.”

It was really funny because scientists usually talk constantly, and no one was talking. Everyone was trying to process it, thinking: “I don’t know what I just saw.” It was dumbfounding.

We didn’t really start to understand what was going on until we opened our water sample back on the ship. It was so strong in hydrogen sulphide – a corrosive gas that smells of rotten eggs – we had to open the portholes. We realised what we had found at the bottom of the ocean was a hot spring that had a chemistry that triggered life.

We were always taught that life had to live in a very narrow pH, and all of a sudden we were finding life in a very acidic environment. We realised that these clams and tube worms were actually ingesting the chemistry of the vents, using it as fuel. Their bacteria were harnessing the energy of hydrogen sulphide to fix carbon.

That just blew the socks off science because we had been told that all life on Earth of any major megafauna was due to photosynthesis. It proved that life can exist in much more hostile environments than we thought.

Underwater exploration has been my life’s work – I’ve done more than 170 deep-sea expeditions over a career of more than six decades.

I was born in Kansas. I’m the first of 13 generations of my family in America to go to college. When I discovered the Titanic in 1985, I became a big celebrity and went on all the talkshows. Days later my mom called and said: “We watched you on all the TV shows, and all the neighbours are calling, but son,” she said, “It’s too bad you found that rusty old boat. You discovered hydrothermal vents, but they’re only going to remember you for finding that old boat.”

And moms are never wrong … finding hydrothermal vents beats the hell out of finding the Titanic.

It helped us understand how life got a grip on this planet and how it could be elsewhere too. It opens the doors to life and intelligent life throughout the universe. When you look up at the galaxies, wave, because they’re waving back at you. Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus have oceans far larger than ours. There should be life in those oceans. I hope we can get over there, but it would not be a place you want to live. There is no plan B for the human race.

As told to Phoebe Weston

• Robert Ballard is a professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island, president of the Ocean Exploration Trust and explorer-at-large at the National Geographic Society. The expeditions he has led include the discovery of the RMS Titanic in 1985.

England’s rivers are likely to remain in a poor state for years to come because the government is failing to put in place EU clean water laws post-Brexit, the watchdog has found.

When Britain was a member of the EU, the government was required to follow the water framework directive (WFD), standards for waterways that have been credited with cleaning up Europe’s dirty water.

Since Brexit, the UK is no longer required to match EU regulations, and has itsown watchdog, the Office for Environmental Protection (OEP).

Under the WFD, all rivers are supposed to attain “good” ecological status by 2027. In 2019, the last time full water assessments took place, just 14% of rivers were in good ecological health and none met standards for good chemical health.

A report by the OEP states that this aim will not be met at the current rate. It says: “We have seen little change in recent years, despite measures designed to improve matters. As things stand, government will not meet its ambition that most water bodies will be on the road to good condition or else already in that state by 2027.”

Dame Glenys Stacey, the chair of the OEP, has called the government’s failure “deeply concerning”, with the report finding that England is failing to put in place measures to improve the condition of rivers, lakes and oceans.

In practice, this means cleaning up pollution from sewage, agricultural waste and chemicals.

Findings include:

• Under their worst-case assessment, just 21% of surface waters will be in a good ecological state by 2027, representing only a 5% improvement on the current situation. This would break the Environment Act, which aims to improve air and water quality, protect wildlife, increase recycling and reduce plastic waste.

• There is insufficient funding to meet the targets, meaning that under the WFD ministers are being compelled by the OEP to write a new, properly funded plan to protect the country’s waters. The Environment Agency has calculated a cost of £51bn to clean up England’s waters, which would provide £64bn in monetisable benefits. However, confirmed funding of only £6.2bn is just 12% of that required.

• There is not enough monitoring taking place to find out the state of England’s waterways, making it nigh on impossible to clean them up.

Dame Glenys said: “We have found that, while the relevant law here is broadly sound, it is simply not being implemented effectively. This means it is not delivering as intended and, as a consequence, most of our open water is likely to remain in a poor state in the years ahead unless things change. This is deeply concerning.

“There is a significant need to strengthen how environmental law on water is applied to make sure it is effectively and contributing as its needs to achievinggovernment’s wider goals and targets.

“There is a particularly urgent need for additional measures to be in place and for measures to be targeted at a local level, if there is to be any hope of achieving the 2027 targets. Government must speed up and scale up its efforts to protect and improve our waters.”

While Britain was in the EU, a national chemical and ecological survey of rivers was conducted annually. After Brexit, the WFD was transposed into English law.

From 2016, the government decided to test water quality under WFD every three years rather than annually. This has now been delayed further; the government has said it does not intend to deliver a complete update until 2025, the latest permissible date under the new WFD.

The Guardian previously revealed that ministers planned to stop assessing waterways under the WFD and were instead using a new, as–yet-undisclosed methodology, which campaigners fear will not be as rigorous.

Charles Watson, the founder of the water campaign group River Action, said, “Today’s OEP’s assessment makes grim reading for our rivers and is a damning vote of no confidence in Defra’s and the EA’s ability to deliver on their statutory objectives to bring the majority of our water bodies to ‘good’ ecological condition by 2027.

“With almost all our rivers failing ecologically, it is shocking to read the OEP’s conclusion that current government plans are clearly woefully inadequate to address this environmental crisis.

“We fully echo the OEP’s demands that the secretary of state pulls put his finger out and takes urgent action to develop additional, specific, time bound and fully funded measures to address the dire condition of our rivers”.

A government spokesperson said: “We welcome this report’s recommendations to go further and will consider them in detail.

“We are confident that the river basin management plans are compliant with the current regulations and we have already committed to reforming these plans and delivering tailored long-term proposals to improve all water bodies in England.

“This is alongside our work to fast-track investment and hold water companies more accountable – including consulting on a ban on bonuses and bringing in a fourfold increase in inspections.”

Swiss mining company Glencore has been on the offensive over its controversial plans to try to inject carbon dioxide into a section of the Great Artesian Basin (GAB) – one of the world’s biggest underground water sources and a lifeblood for farmers and regional towns.

Later this month, the Queensland government is expected to decide if it will allow Glencore’s pilot carbon storage project to go ahead.

Glencore’s proposal has brought together unusual bedfellows in furious opposition to the plans – from farming and conservation groups to billionaire mining magnate Gina Rinehart’s agriculture business and One Nation and the Greens.

Queensland agricultural body AgForce is running a campaign against the plans, saying they will put the the GAB at risk, and has gone to court to try to force the federal government to fully assess the project under national environment laws (the decision not to assess the project was made by the previous Coalition government).

In the Senate, the Greens and the Coalition voted in favour of a One Nation-backed Senate inquiry into the plans. Queensland’s premier, Steven Miles, reportedly said on Wednesday he did not expect the project to pass the state’s environmental test.

What’s going on here?

Let’s start with what’s being proposed.

Glencore’s CTSCo project wants to inject about 110,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide each year for three years into an aquifer known as the Precipice Sandstone, which is more than two kilometres below ground in southern Queensland.

The liquified CO2 will be trucked 260km from the Millmerran coal power station where there is a proposed trial to capture some CO2 from the plant.

But Glencore says any emissions reductions from the project are “incidental”.

Rather, the aim of the project is, according to Glencore documents, to evaluate the “feasibility of future large-scale [greenhouse gas] stream storage within the Surat Basin”. Glencore has said the project is a “first step” towards a “large CO2 storage hub in Queensland suitable for multiple industrial users,” and has acknowledged it would need to go through a fresh approvals process.

But how big could a future project be, compared with the 330,000 tonnes it wants to store for this trial?

The company wrote last month in its finalised environmental impact statement that the Precipice Sandstone aquifer could store between 183m tonnes and 730m tonnes of carbon dioxide, “indicating its potential for a safe and cost-effective permanent CO2 storage at potential future industrial scale”.

That suggests a project that, in terms of CO2 injection, would be between 560 and 2,200 times larger than the trial.

Glencore said in a statement: “The numbers you have quoted are storage capacity estimations only and have no direct relationship to any future storage projects.”

Independently backed?

Glencore and its supporters have said repeatedly the project “has been reviewed by expert third-party institutions, including the Australian Government Independent Expert Scientific Committee (IESC), the Office of Groundwater Impact Assessment (OGIA) and CSIRO who concluded that the impacts would be local and minor.”

Only one of those three named reviews – from the IESC – are publicly available, but Temperature Check has obtained copies of the other two.

The IESC did say impacts were “expected to be minimal and manageable in both the immediate and long term” because the trial was small.

But the report also contained several criticisms. For example, the committee wrote it was “not possible to be certain of the adequacy of the regional groundwater and plume migration models” because of a lack of documentation.

Elsewhere the committee said the predicted changes to the acidity of the groundwater from adding the CO2 could lead to “mobilisation of metals” that could “limit the future usability of the groundwater”.

The CSIRO review identified several major issues with Glencore’s environmental assessment, at one point saying “a key weakness of the EIS [environmental impact statement] is that risks are not identified and presented in a structured way”.

The review also said: “The limited sensitivity and uncertainty analysis mean that potential impacts on water users in the Precipice Sandstone aquifer due to new groundwater extraction near the GHG stream injection well cannot be ruled out.”

Temperature Check asked CSIRO if Glencore’s summary of its review was fair. A spokesperson said: “Our report will be made publicly available when the Queensland government publishes its assessment report on the project. We expect this to be towards the end of May. We will be happy to discuss our report details and the nuances of our findings after this.”

Ned Hamer, an independent hydrogeologist who has looked in detail at Glencore’s plans, has read the three reports and said “none of these parties were able to ‘conclude’ anything due to the inadequate impact assessment and particularly seriously deficient modelling undertaken by CTSCo to date”.

In a statement, Glencore claimed “all the expert reviewer concerns have now been addressed and recommendations adopted and incorporated in the final EIS” and so its description of “local and minor” was appropriate.

In a previous response to Agforce’s case in the federal court, Glencore has said it would welcome a hearing, where “misleading rhetoric will be shown for what it is and measured against Glencore’s extensive scientific evidence”.

Rinehart’s Hancock Agriculture wrote in a Senate submission that its investigation found the risks of the project to agriculture were unacceptable “not just to our own operations, but more broadly, including long-term water supplies and feedlot security”. It wrote that the plan should be blocked.

Non-potable?

Glencore has also claimed the aquifer “contains non-potable water with fluoride levels six times above the safe drinking level and is not used by any agricultural producer within a 50km radius.”

But Hamer said: “It’s good quality stock water and a number of local councils would be very happy to have this quality of water available for town drinking where it would be amended or treated.

“Poorer quality GAB groundwater is used for many town drinking supplies. The water sometimes requires amendment or treatment which is not overly restrictive given the high-value use.”

He said it was common for GAB water to have fluoride levels above drinking guidelines but “the extensive experience of farmers in the GAB is that elevated fluoride levels in water don’t affect animal health”.

Rejection a ‘death knell’ for CCS?

In the Australian, one Glencore spokesperson said if the project was refused it would be the “death knell for any future onshore CCS projects in Australia”.

But the reason so many groups are concerned about Glencore’s project is not because it is “onshore” but because it is targeting an aquifer that is part of the Great Artesian Basin. According to Hamer, CTSCo is the only project in the world proposing to store CO2 in a water resource.

Carbon capture and storage research group CO2CRC, funded by industry and government, tracks current and proposed CCS projects around the country. Their latest map of 18 CCS projects (only one is operating) shows Glencore’s is the only one to target a Great Artesian Basin aquifer.

There are two other CCS projects in the southern Queensland and northern South Australia region.

One is Santos’s Moomba project, which is under construction and is expecting to store CO2 in former oil and gas reservoirs.

Another is from oil company Bridgeport, which has proposed injecting 960,000 tonnes of CO2 into one of their depleted oilfields in order to push out an extra 6.4m barrels of oil.