Category: Environment

The US says it is “reasonable to assess” that the weapons it has provided to Israel have been used in ways that are “inconsistent” with international human rights law, but that there is not enough concrete evidence to link specific US-supplied weapons to violations or warrant cutting the supply of arms.

In a highly anticipated report to Congress, the state department said that the assurances given by Israel and a handful of other countries under scrutiny that they had been using US-supplied weapons in accordance with international humanitarian law (IHL) were “credible and reliable”.

In Israel’s case, the report expresses deep misgivings about Israeli compliance but says the US does not have sufficient evidence about individual cases to recommend that US arms supplies be suspended.

The report is mandated by a national security memorandum (NSM-20) signed by Joe Biden in February to assess whether recipients of US arms are complying with human rights law.

The state department report found that: “Given Israel’s significant reliance on US-made defence articles, it is reasonable to assess that defence articles covered under NSM-20 have been used by Israeli security forces since October 7 in instances inconsistent with its IHL obligations or with established best practices for mitigating civilian harm.”

A senior administration official said that while that assessment reflected a general view of Israel’s conduct in its war in Gaza, the state department has yet to find definitively that a US weapon was used in a specific incident, in which the intent or the level of negligence constituted a war crime.

Multiple incident reviews have been under way in the state department for months, but if there have been any findings, the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has yet to make them public.

The NSM-20 report said: “Although we have gained some insight into Israel’s procedures and rules, we do not have complete information to verify whether US defense articles covered under NSM-20 were specifically used in actions that have been alleged as violations of IHL or international human rights law during the period of the report.”

Similarly, the US found shortcomings in Israel’s provision of humanitarian assistance in Gaza.

“During the period since October 7, and particularly in the initial months, Israel did not fully cooperate with United States government efforts and United States government-supported international efforts to maximize humanitarian assistance flow to and distribution within Gaza,” it said.

However, the report also claimed that Israel had “significantly increased humanitarian access”. The senior administration official argued that the period under consideration ran up to the end of April, so did not cover the subsequent closure of entry points into Gaza as a result of the Israel offensive on Rafah.

More details soon …

The UN general assembly has voted overwhelmingly to back the Palestinian bid for full UN membership, in a move that signalled Israel’s growing isolation on the world stage amid global alarm over the war in Gaza and the extent of the humanitarian crisis in the strip.

The assembly voted by 143 to nine, with 25 abstentions, for a resolution called on the UN security council to bestow full membership to the state of Palestine, while enhancing its current mission with a range of new rights and privileges, in addition to what it is allowed in its current observer status.

The highly charged gesture drew an immediate rebuke from Israel. Its envoy to the UN, Gilad Erdan, delivered a fiery denunciation of the resolution and its backers before the vote.

“Today, I will hold up a mirror for you,” Erdan said, taking out the small paper shredder in which he shredding a small copy of the cover of the UN charter. He told the assembly: “You are shredding the UN charter with your own hands. Yes, yes, that’s what you’re doing. Shredding the UN charter. Shame on you.”

The Palestinian envoy, Riyad Mansour, pointed out the vote was being held at a time when Rafah, the southernmost town that is last haven for many Gazans, faced attack from Israeli forces.

“As we speak, 1.4 million Palestinians in Rafah wonder if they will survive the day and wonder where to go next. There is nowhere left to go,” Mansour said. “I have stood hundreds of times before at this podium, often in tragic circumstances, but none comparable to the ones my people endured today … never for a more significant vote than the one about to take place, a historic one.”

Friday’s resolution was carefully tailored over the past few days, diluting its language so as not to trigger a cut-off of US funding under a 1990 law. It does not make Palestine a full member, or give it voting rights in the assembly, or the right to stand for membership of the security council, but the vote was a resounding expression of world opinion in favour of Palestinian statehood, galvanised by the continuing bloodshed and famine caused by Israel’s war in Gaza.

Even before the vote in the assembly on Friday morning, Israel and a group of leading Republicans urged US funding be cut anyway because of the new privileges the resolution granted to the Palestinian mission.

The US mission to the UN, which voted against the resolution, warned that it would also use its veto again if the question of Palestinian membership returned to the security council for another vote.

“Efforts to advance this resolution do not change the reality that the Palestinian Authority does not currently meet the criteria for UN membership under the UN charter,” the mission’s spokesperson, Nathan Evans, said. “Additionally, the draft resolution does not alter the status of the Palestinians as a “non-member state observer mission”.

The other nations which voted against the resolution were Argentina, Czechia, Hungary, Israel, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau and Papua New Guinea. The UK abstained.

According to the resolution, the Palestinian mission will now have to right to sit in the general assembly among other states in alphabetical order, rather than in its current observer seat at the back of the chamber. Palestinian diplomats will have the right to introduce proposals and amendments, they can be elected to official posts in the full chamber and on committees, and will have the right to speak on Middle Eastern matters, as well as the right to make statements on behalf of groups of nations in the assembly.

But the resolution also makes plain that “the state of Palestine, in its capacity as an observer state, does not have the right to vote in the general assembly or to put forward its candidature to United Nations organs.”

Richard Gowan, the UN director at the International Crisis Group, said: “In essence, it gives the Palestinians the airs and graces of a UN member, but without the fundamental attributes of a real member, which are voting power and the right to run for the security council.”

The general assembly resolution was crafted to fall short of the benchmark set in a 1990 US law that bans funding of the UN or any UN agency “which accords the Palestine Liberation Organization the same standing as member states”.

The main faction in the PLO, Fatah, now controls the Palestinian Authority, which the Biden administration is backing to take up governing Gaza after the war is over.

Despite the wording in the resolution making clear Palestine would not have a vote, Israel called on the US to cut funding for the UN because of the resolution, and a group of Republican senators announced they were introducing legislation to do that.

“The US should not lend credibility to an organization that actively promotes and rewards terrorism. By granting any sort of status at the UN to the Palestine Liberation Organization, we would be doing just that,” Senator Mitt Romney said in a written statement. “Our legislation would cut off US taxpayer funding to the UN if it gives additional rights and privileges to the Palestinian Authority and the PLO.”

On Thursday night, Israel’s security cabinet approved a “measured expansion” of Israeli forces’ operation in Rafah, following the stalling of ceasefire talks in Cairo. The US adamantly opposes the Rafah offensive, and has paused the delivery of a consignment of US bombs, and Joe Biden has threatened further restrictions on arms supplies if Israel presses ahead with the attack.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, vowed to defy US objections, saying that Israel would fight on “with its fingernails” if necessary. On Monday, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) took control of the Palestinian side of the Rafah crossing, after ordering civilians in the east of Rafah city to evacuate. Since then more than 110,000 people have fled the area. On Friday, the UN reported intense clashes between the IDF and Palestinian militants on the eastern outskirts of the city. The fighting has cut off aid supplies into Gaza, at a time of spreading famine.

Jan Egeland, the head of the Norwegian Refugee Council, said on the X social media site that he had been told by NRC workers in Rafah that “the IDF assault is intensifying with continuous, massive explosions. There is no fuel, transportation, nor safe evacuation areas for most of the remaining 1,2 million civilians.”

“A massive ground attack in Rafah would lead to [an] epic humanitarian disaster and pull the plug on our efforts to support people as famine looms,” the UN secretary general, António Guterres, warned during a visit to Nairobi, adding that the situation in the southern Gaza city was “on a knife’s edge”.

The official motto of the 68th edition of Eurovision is “united by music”, but as the continent’s beglittered and sequined masses descended on the Swedish city of Malmö for Saturday’s grand final, music’s ability to heal and bridge divides was looking in serious doubt.

In the run-up to the song contest’s main event, the Netherlands’ performer Joost Klein missed his slot in the dress rehearsals after being put under investigation by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) due to an unexplained “incident”.

At a press conference on Thursday night, several performers, including Klein, had signalled their frustration that the debate around the inclusion of Israel – guaranteed after the singer Eden Golan qualified at the semi-finals – was likely to overshadow the world’s largest live music event.

Klein, who is due to perform just before Dolan on Saturday night, was asked at a press conference if his gabber-infused pop anthem to free movement, Europapa, could live up to the competition’s unifying motto. He said pointedly: “I think that’s a good question for the EBU.”

In March, the association of broadcasters ruled that Israel was allowed to compete as long as it changed the lyrics to its entry, then called October Rain, about the trauma of the Hamas massacre on 7 October.

The EBU has defended its decision by saying Eurovision is “a non-political music event” and “not a contest between governments”.

Golan, 21, had been ordered by Israel’s national security agency to stay in her hotel room between performances and was ushered to dress rehearsals in a convoy of cars. At the lineup of semi-finalists, she cut a forlorn figure near the stage exit, not least because the other participants did not appear willing to volunteer gestures of solidarity.

When a Polish journalist asked Golan if she had considered that her presence at the contest might be endangering the other acts and the attending fans, there were murmurs around the auditorium and the host intervened to say she did not have to answer the question if she did not want to. “Why not?” interjected Klein, who sat next to her, a Dutch flag draped over his head.

The Greek performer Marina Satti also appeared to mimic falling asleep when Golan was asked a question by Israeli press.

Klein was absent from Friday’s dress rehearsal in spite of having briefly appeared during the flag parade at the beginning.

Eurovision’s organisers said: “We are currently investigating an incident that was reported to us involving the Dutch artist. He will not be rehearsing until further notice.”

In the run-up to the song contest, pro-Palestinian activists had unsuccessfully urged participating artists to boycott the five-day event.

As fans from across Europe, dressed in colourful suits, sequined dresses and draped in national flags, made their way to the venue on Thursday, about 5,000 protesters gathered at Malmö’s Stortorget square with Palestinian flags, black-and-white keffiyeh scarves and banners reading “Boycott Israel”.

One of them was Christofer Kibbon, 19, who attended the protest as a member of Fridays for Future Sweden. “Israel is using the ESC to ‘pink-wash’ themselves,” he said. The fact that Israel was asked by the broadcasters’ union to modify its entry, he said, “shows they are trying to spread their message”.

In the city centre, many of the official posters and banners have been graffitied over to read “United by genocide”. More protests are expected on Saturday.

At a smaller rally in Malmö’s Davidshall neighbourhood on Thursday evening, heavily guarded by police, about 120 people waved Israeli and Swedish flags, sang Golan’s Hurricane and danced the horah to a previous Israeli Eurovision entry.

“Golan was coming to very hateful surroundings [in Malmö] and we absolutely did not like that,” said Jehoshua Kaufman, one of the gathering’s organisers. “We wanted to welcome her and have a tribute to the people murdered at the Nova festival on 7 October.

“There is such a fear of having different opinions in this city. You can probably walk around Malmö with a kippah, but not with an Israeli flag.”

Shortly before making his comments, a woman walked up to Kaufman’s congregation shouting “genocide” and “murderers”, before being escorted away by police.

France famously called Eurovision a “monument to drivel” when it declined to send an entry in 1982. Yet even drivel is rarely apolitical.

Originally conceived of as an experimental vehicle for new cross-border broadcasting techniques, the song contest’s ethos of European unity was “almost an unintended consequence of the political context in postwar Europe”, said Paul Jordan, a cultural historian who was part of the international jury for the French national selection for Eurovision in 2019.

The bridges that the contest is able to build are nonetheless real. There are not many events in Europe where Swiss non-binary singers make friends with Greek dancers, acerbic Estonians dance behind the stage with bubbly Armenians dress in folk dresses, or where young Turkish fans cheer on Greece, its longstanding rival in the Aegean Sea.

The Greek singer Marina Satti welcomed her new fans with open arms on Thursday night: “We really love Turkey,” she said at the press conference after the second semi-final, while also commemorating the absence of Romania and Bulgaria and insisting that the musical traditions of the eastern Mediterranean region go deeper than the national boundaries of today.

Owing to Eurovision’s supposedly apolitical status, even simple messages are often articulated in a veiled way, which has given the proceedings around the contest a surreal air this year.

“We are the only country in the world that is in the shape of a butterfly,” said the Latvian singer Dons after progressing to the finals. “A butterfly symbolises hope and freedom because to be a butterfly, you have to fly and you have to be free. And every country in the world deserves to be free.”

Was he talking about Latvia and its fellow Baltic states in the post-Soviet space? Ukraine? Palestine? At a song contest as highly charged with political debates as this year’s, it’s unlikely to be the last talking point.

Two Just Stop Oil protesters have smashed the glass around Magna Carta at the British Library.

The Rev Sue Parfitt, 82, and Judy Bruce, 85, a retired biology teacher, targeted the protective enclosure with a hammer and chisel on Friday morning.

Just Stop Oil said the pair then held up a sign reading “The government is breaking the law” and glued themselves to the display.

The Metropolitan police said two people had been arrested on suspicion of criminal damage and were in custody.

Parfitt said: “The Magna Carta is rightly revered, being of great importance to our history, to our freedoms and to our laws. But there will be no freedom, no lawfulness, no rights, if we allow climate breakdown to become the catastrophe that is now threatened.

“We must get things in proportion. The abundance of life on Earth, the climate stability that allows civilisation to continue, is what must be revered and protected above all else, even above our most precious artefacts.”

Bruce said: “This week 400 respected scientists – contributors to IPCC reports, are saying we are ‘woefully unprepared’ for what’s coming: 2.5 or more degrees of heating above pre-industrial levels. Instead of acting, our dysfunctional government is like the three monkeys: ‘see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing,’ pretend we’ve got 25 years. We haven’t. We must get off our addiction to oil and gas by 2030 – starting now.”

Bruce was referring to a Guardian survey published on Wednesday that showed hundreds of leading climate scientists expect global temperatures to rise to at least 2.5C (4.5F) above pre-industrial levels this century.

Almost 80% of the respondents, all from the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), foresee at least 2.5C of global heating, and almost half anticipate at least 3C (5.4F). Only 6% thought the internationally agreed 1.5C (2.7F) limit would be achieved.

The Guardian approached every contactable lead author or review editor of IPCC reports since 2018. Almost half replied – 380 out of 843. The IPCC’s reports are the gold-standard assessments of climate change, approved by all governments and produced by experts in physical and social sciences.

Numerous experts said in the survey that they had been left feeling hopeless, infuriated and scared by the failure of governments to act despite the clear scientific evidence provided.

Contractors curious about an extension cord on the roof of a Michigan grocery store made a startling discovery: a 34-year-old woman was living inside the business sign, with enough space for a computer, printer and coffee maker, police said.

“She was homeless,” said Brennon Warren, an officer with the Midland police department. “It’s a story that makes you scratch your head, just somebody living up in a sign.”

The woman, whose name was not released, told police she had a job elsewhere but had been living inside the Family Fare sign for roughly a year, Warren said. She was found on 23 April.

Midland, best known as the global home of Dow Inc, is 130 miles (209km) north of Detroit.

The Family Fare store is in a retail strip with a triangle-shaped sign at the top of the building. The sign structure, probably 5ft (1.5 meters) wide and 8ft (2.4 meters) high, has a door and is accessible from the roof, Warren said.

“There was some flooring that was laid down. A mini desk,” he said. “Her clothing. A Keurig coffee maker. A printer and a computer – things you’d have in your home.”

The woman was able to get electricity through a power cord plugged into an outlet on the roof, Warren said.

There was no sign of a ladder. Warren said it’s possible the woman made her way to the roof by climbing up elsewhere behind the store or other retail businesses.

“I honestly don’t know how she was getting up there. She didn’t indicate, either,” he said.

A spokesperson for SpartanNash, the parent company of Family Fare, said store employees responded “with the utmost compassion and professionalism”.

“Ensuring there is ample safe, affordable housing continues to be a widespread issue nationwide that our community needs to partner in solving,” Adrienne Chance said, declining further comment.

Warren said the woman was cooperative and quickly agreed to leave. No charges were pursued.

“We provided her with some information about services in the area,” the officer said. “She apologized and continued on her way. Where she went from there, I don’t know.”

The director of a local non-profit that provides food and shelter assistance said Midland – which has a population of 42,000 – needs more housing for low-income residents.

“From someone who works with the homeless, part of me acknowledges she was really resourceful,” said Saralyn Temple of Midland’s Open Door. “Obviously, we don’t want people resorting to illegal activity to find housing. There are much better options.”

How did the adder cross the road? It didn’t – it was too scared.

Now, however, road-shy populations of the increasingly endangered snake are being given a helping hand with the construction of Britain’s first adder tunnels.

The two tunnels, which run beneath a road bisecting Greenham and Crookham Commons in Berkshire, have been designed to appeal to the heat-seeking reptiles.

Britain’s only venomous snake has vanished from central England over the last decade because of persecution, habitat fragmentation and the growth of pheasant shoots, with non-native pheasants predating the small vipers.

“We’ve got a biodiversity crisis. We need to be doing new and innovative things,” said Tom Hayward, of the Berks, Bucks and Oxon Wildlife Trust (BBOWT). “We need to be thinking outside the box as to how we benefit these species.”

The snake has has not been seen in Buckinghamshire since 2014 and is now virtually extinct in Oxfordshire. Greenham Common, which became a nature reserve 24 years ago after the closure of the RAF nuclear weapons base, is one of its last strongholds in the region.

The tunnels opened for snakes this spring after radio-tagging studies showed two adder populations on the commons were not mixing because of the road. The populations need to meet each other to breed and boost their genetic diversity.

Debbie Lewis, the head of ecology for BBOWT, said: “The aim is to enable them to mix and become more resilient in the future. At the moment they are isolated populations and genetics is very important in their survival.

“It’s a species that’s hanging by a thread and it would be tragic if it disappeared.”

The roads are an obstacle because adders avoid open ground, where they are vulnerable to predation from birds. If an often slow-moving adder does cross a road it is likely to be hit by a car.

BBOWT’s tunnels project, funded with £113,000 from Natural England’s species recovery programme, has created winding corridors of adder-friendly brash (cut branches) through the commons, with 100 metres of low, solid sheet-metal fencing to funnel the snakes to each tunnel entrance.

Once inside the concrete-type resin tunnel, the snakes encounter a thick floor of large pebbles which they can grip on to and which are warmed by the sun shining through a metal grill roofto create an appealing temperature.

“We could’ve put heating in but then the danger is the snakes would’ve never left the tunnels,” Hayward said.

Similar tunnels have been built in the Netherlands and Canada, where a variety of reptiles and amphibians have been filmed using them.

Adders are vanishing because they are persecuted by people who are afraid of the snake or do not want their pet dogs to be bitten, and by enthusiasts seeking photographs who lift up tin sheets put down to provide warm homes for the adders.

Adders can live for up to 30 years but females do not breed every year, rarely move, and are particularly vulnerable to disturbance.

The fragmentation of habitats has also reduced numbers but conservationists are concerned about the impact of non-native pheasants, of which more than 31 million are released into the countryside each year.

Lewis said: “The problem is we’ve filled our country with pheasants and in spring, when adders are moving around, wildlife organisations cannot control [shoot] pheasants because there is a close-season. Pheasants have an instinct to peck adders’ eyes out to protect their young.”

Camera traps will be fitted inside the tunnels, which are unlikely to be used immediately by the snakes because there is not yet enough plant cover on the areas leading to them. Adders will be radio-tagged and monitored for three years as part of the project.

Roger Stace, the West Berkshire land manager for BBOWT, said: “It would be really nice if this could be a showcase and we get other land managers interested in what we’ve done, replicating it and improving it.”

The National Farmers’ Union lobbied to increase the amount of pesticides allowed in the UK’s drinking water and to allow farmers to spread manure more frequently as part of a post-Brexit loosening of environmental regulations, it can be revealed.

Nick von Westenholz, the director of strategy for the lobby group, met Timothy Elliot-Murray-Kynynmound, the Earl of Minto, who is the minister of state for regulatory reform, last year and asked him to review EU-derived environmental protections.

The Guardian revealed earlier this year that the UK’s EU-derived environmental regulations were being eroded following Brexit.

According to government minutes released to Unearthed, the journalism arm of Greenpeace, after a freedom of information request, Von Westenholz told Minto in July last year: “Thresholds for pesticide residues are tiny. Burden on farmers and water companies on the amount they have to invest in systems to meet negligible requirements.”

He added: “Opposition to relaxation of standards is around the greater use of pesticides. But [there is] no evidence that increasing thresholds would do any harm.”

The NFU said the statement made during the meeting did not mean it wanted the thresholds increased, just that it wanted them reviewed. A spokesperson said: “He explained the NFU’s stated policy position, which questions whether the strict, historic limits on pesticide residues in water are based on up-to-date science. These limits can prevent farmers from accessing important products in tackling pests and diseases. The NFU advocates for a review of the effectiveness of the DWD [drinking water directive] and its impact on farming, but has no policy on the details of any reform or amendment to the regulation.”

Von Westenholz and Minto agreed that the current pesticide level standards for drinking water, which are in line with the EU’s, are derived from EU legislation and could therefore be changed due to Brexit.

The NFU also asked Minto if the government would loosen key EU-derived rules to allow farmers to spread manure more frequently. When too much manure is in rivers, lakes and other waterways, it increases the levels of nutrients including phosphates and nitrates within. These cause an overgrowth of algae and other plant life, which chokes aquatic life. There is already a significant problem with additional nutrients from human sewage in the UK’s waterways.

The notes show Von Westenholz said the EU’s nitrates directive “puts restrictions on farms and how they store and spread manure. All done by date. Farmers should be allowed to be sensible to make decisions as to when to fertilise.”

An NFU spokesperson said: “Mr Von Westenholz stated that reformed regulation could allow farmers more flexibility in when they spread manures while still achieving the same level of environmental protection of watercourses.”

Officials’ notes say the NFU had identified nine pieces of EU-derived legislation as “priorities for replacement”, including three directives affecting water: nitrate pollution, pesticide approvals and the water framework directive (WFD) – the central plank of European water protection legislation. Officials wrote in the memo that reform of the WFD “aligns well with where Defra considers there to be opportunity for review”.

The Guardian revealed last year that ministers told stakeholders they were planning to scrap or change the EU’s WFD.

Another EU regulation Von Westenholz said was causing farmers problems was the habitats directive. He told Minto the directive was “obstructive for development for farmers” because “new units require planning consent, offsetting requirements”.

Michael Gove, the levelling up secretary, last year tried to remove the responsibilities under the directive not to increase pollution in sensitive waterways, in order to decrease the cost of building homes. After an outcry over the intention to allow yet more human waste in rivers, and opposition from the Liberal Democrats and Labour, the government scrapped the plans.

Ben Reynolds, the executive director of the Institute for European Environmental Policy UK, said: “The suggestion that pesticide residues in water should be allowed to increase is very concerning, particularly at a time when much of our freshwater is already in very poor condition, not least from agricultural runoff.

“The idea that diverging on environmental policy would not affect trade is questionable, as the first dispute being brought by the EU through the trade and cooperation agreement mechanisms is based on just that.

“The farming sector is under huge and varying pressures at the moment, but lowering environmental standards will only exacerbate those problems as it impacts on the natural habitat with which it is inextricably intertwined and depends.”

Richard Benwell, the chief executive of Wildlife and Countryside Link, a coalition of environmental charities, said: “Raising thresholds for pesticide contamination in drinking water would leave people and wildlife more exposed to the risks of pesticide pollution. Scientists are only just beginning to understand the human health and ecological effects of chronic chemical pollution, particularly when rivers become mixing pots for lots of different toxic substances. In some cases, the current limit on pesticide pollution may not be protective enough.”

A spokesperson for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said: “We are clear in our commitment to uphold environmental protections and continue to engage with a wide range of organisations and stakeholders to achieve our ambitions for water and the environment. We have provided additional budget to the Environment Agency allowing them to carry out more than 4,800 farm inspections last year, helping farmers to meet their environmental obligations. We continue to work with the EA to hold anyone who pollutes our rivers to account on a scale never seen before.”

“I had the hormonal urges,” said Prof Camille Parmesan, a leading climate scientist based in France. “Oh my gosh, it was very strong. But it was: ‘Do I really want to bring a child into this world that we’re creating?’ Even 30 years ago, it was very clear the world was going to hell in a handbasket. I’m 62 now and I’m actually really glad I did not have children.”

Parmesan is not alone. An exclusive Guardian survey has found that almost a fifth of the female climate experts who responded have chosen to have no children, or fewer children, due to the environmental crises afflicting the world.

Such decisions were extremely difficult, they said. Dr Shobha Maharaj, an expert on the effects of the climate crisis from Trinidad and Tobago, has chosen to have only one child, a son who is now six years old. “Choosing to have a child was and continues to be a struggle,” she said.

Maharaj said fear of what her child’s future would hold, as well as adding another human to the planet, were part of the struggle: “When you grow up on a small island, it becomes part of you. Small islands are already being very adversely impacted, so there is this constant sense of impending loss and I just didn’t want to have to transfer that to my child.”

“However, my husband is the most family-oriented person I know,” Maharaj said. “So this was a compromise: one child, no more. Who knows, maybe my son will grow up to be someone who can help find a solution?”

The Guardian approached every contactable lead author or review editor of all reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since 2018. The IPCC’s reports are the gold standard of climate knowledge. Of the 843 contacted, 360 replied to the question on life decisions, a high response rate.

Ninety-seven female scientists responded, with 17, including women from Brazil, Chile, Germany, India and Kenya, saying they had chosen to have fewer children. All but 1% of the scientists surveyed were over 40 years old and two-thirds were over 50, reflecting the senior positions they had reached in their professions. A quarter of the respondents were women, the same proportion as the overall authorship of the IPCC reports.

The findings were in response to a question about major personal decisions taken in response to the climate crisis by scientists who know the most about it, and who expect global temperatures to soar past international targets in coming years. 7% of the male scientists who responded said they had had either no children or fewer than they would otherwise have had.

Most of the female scientists interviewed had made their decisions about children in past decades, when they were younger and the grave danger of global heating was less apparent. They said they had not wanted to add to the global human population that is exacting a heavy environmental toll on the planet, and some also expressed fears about the climate chaos through which a child might now have to live.

The role of rising global population in the destruction of nature and the climate crisis has been a divisive topic for decades. The publication of The Population Bomb by Prof Paul Ehrlich in 1968, mentioned by several of the scientists in their survey responses, was a particular flashpoint. The debate prompted past allegations of racism, as nations with fast-rising populations are largely those in Africa and Asia. Compulsory population control is not part of today’s population-environment debate, with better educational opportunities for girls and access to contraception for women who want it seen as effective and humane policies.

Parmesan, at the CNRS ecology centre in France, said: “When I was making my choice, it was very clear in the ecological community that human population growth was a problem: preserving biodiversity was absolutely dependent on stabilising population.”

Prof Regina Rodrigues, an oceanographer at the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Brazil, who also chose not to have children, was influenced by the environmental destruction she saw in the fast-expanding coastal town near São Paulo where she grew up.

“The fact of the limitation of resources was really clear to me from a young age,” she said. “Then I learned about climate change and it was even more clear to me. I’m totally satisfied in teaching and passing what I know to people – it doesn’t need to be my blood. [My husband and I] don’t regret a moment. We both work on climate and we are fighting.”

Prof Lisa Schipper, an expert on climate vulnerability at the University of Bonn in Germany, chose to have one child. She said that coming from the global north, where each person’s carbon footprint is much bigger than those living in the global south, there is a responsibility to think carefully about this choice.

“It is honestly only now that I am starting to panic about my child’s future,” she said. “When she was born in 2013, I felt more optimistic about the possibility of reducing emissions. Now I feel guilty about leaving her in this world without my protection, and guilty about having played a part in the changing climate. So it’s bleak.”

An Indian scientist who chose to be anonymous decided to adopt rather than have children of her own. “There are too many children in India who do not get a fair chance and we can offer that to someone who is already born,” she said. “We are not so special that our genes need to be transmitted: values matter more.”

She said rich people who choose to have large families were “self-centred and irresponsible in current times”, citing low infant mortality and the huge gap between the emissions of the rich and the poor.

The links between environmental concerns and fertility choices are complex and research to date has found little consistency across age groups and nationalities. According to a recent review, choosing to have fewer or no children for environmental reasons could be the result of fears about the future, population levels or not having the resources needed to raise the children.

A study of Americans aged 27 to 45 – younger than the IPCC scientists surveyed – found concern about the wellbeing of children in a climate-changed world was a much bigger factor than worries over the carbon footprint of their offspring. However, a focus group study in Sweden across all ages found few had changed or would change their plans for children owing to climate fears.

There has been almost no research in the global south. Many researchers noted that some women do not have the freedom or ability to choose if they have children, or how many.

On the debate on the role of population growth in environmental crises, Schipper said: “How many people we have is irrelevant if only a small percentage are doing most of the damage.” Parmesan disagreed, saying the total impact is the combination of people’s level of consumption and the total number of people: “Don’t cherrypick half of the equation and ignore the other half.”

A mass planting of marsh violets across England’s Shropshire Hills is to take place to try to prevent further decline of the small pearl-bordered fritillary or Boloria selene, a rare UK butterfly.

The small pearl-bordered fritillary’s distribution across the UK has plunged 71% since the mid 1970s and the species is now listed as vulnerable, according to the 2022 state of UK butterflies report.

It is hoped the planting will help increase habitats for the butterfly and other increasingly uncommon species including snipe, curlew and devil’s bit scabious flowers, the National Trust said.

Thought to have been plentiful until the 1950s, small pearl-bordered fritillary populations are believed to have been decimated by a combination of factors including global heating, which pushed colonies north and west in search of cooler climes, wetland drainage, which shrank habitats, and changing management techniques that allowed rushes to push out marsh violets, said Charlie Bell, a project manager at the National Trust.

Small pearl-bordered fritillary caterpillars are lovers of marsh violet leaves, Bell said. The adults lay eggs on the plant’s leaves. “The caterpillars hatch out into a ready-made buffet, they don’t really need the flowers.” The butterflies ignore the flowers too, feeding instead on nectar from other plants such as brambles, marsh thistles and ragged robin flowers, she said.

By planting the violets close to existing small pearl-bordered fritillary colonies, the project was aiming to increase the caterpillars’ food supply and reconnect isolated groups, she said. “There might be a few populations … then one gets wiped out and the distance between the remaining populations is too great for them to mix.” That situation left individual colonies isolated and vulnerable to extinction. “Ideally, there’d be lots of small populations and movement between them to keep them healthy.”

It was possible the butterflies might start laying this June or July, Bell said, but realistically it would probably be next summer before the insects would be seen using the new marsh violets.

The National Trust-led initiative aims to plant 20,000 marsh violets this year, with about 3,000 going into the ground today and more after the summer. “We are trying to see what works and learn lessons from this spring planting. We will be monitoring the plants so we can tweak our technique if we need to, for the autumn planting,” Bell said.

Others involved in the project are the Shropshire Wildlife Trust, Natural England, and the Shropshire Hills National Landscape Partnership, as well as landowners and volunteer planters.

Dave Wainwright, head of conservation for England at the charity Butterfly Conservation, welcomed the project, saying it was “on a scale that it needs to be, to really make a difference for the small pearl-bordered fritillary”. The trick, he said, was to find the conditions that suited the marsh violets and allowed them to survive. “This idea of connecting patches in the landscape is really crucial so if one patch becomes unsuitable then the butterflies have an alternative habitat,” he added,

John Tilt, of the West Midlands Butterfly Conservation group, also welcomed the project. “It’s a butterfly that’s quite common in Scotland but is now lost from the Malvern Hills and some of the rest of the West Midlands more generally. They are a very beautiful species,” he said.

Previously, he said, the fritillary species was helped by the once common practice of coppicing, or felling of some woodland trees, which let light in and helped to leave bare ground where marsh violets could thrive. The practice died out in the 1940s and 1950s, he added.