Jeremy Paxman has said Parkinson’s disease “makes you wish you hadn’t been born” as he delivered a list of recommendations about the condition to Downing Street.

The former University Challenge and Newsnight presenter and fellow members of the Movers and Shakers podcast – which discusses the challenges of living with the disease – marked World Parkinson’s Day by presenting the “Parky Charter” and a petition with tens of thousands of names to No 10 on Thursday.

Paxman, 73, criticised the government’s response to the disease after delivering the charter, which has five key recommendations: swift access to specialists under the NHS; the introduction of a Parkinson’s UK pamphlet for enhanced awareness and support; the implementation of a Parkinson’s passport granting automatic entitlement to specific benefits; improved comprehensive care, including regular consultations with a Parkinson’s nurse; and increased government funding for research for a cure.

The prime minister, Rishi Sunak, praised the charter, saying he is “very supportive of the excellent work that the Movers and Shakers do and the charter will rightfully receive the attention it deserves”.

However, Paxman said he believes the charter and petition will have “no effect whatsoever” on the government.

He told the PA Media news agency: “The fact that they (the government) have ignored all their responsibilities to date indicates to me that they’re not going to get any better. And I suspect that the form of words devised by the Ministry of Health will confirm that.

“I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere. You feel like you’re banging your head against a brick wall.”

One in 37 people in the UK will be diagnosed with Parkinson’s in their lifetime, according to the charity Parkinson’s UK.

In the UK, about 153,000 people are living with the neurological condition.

Paxman also expressed his frustration with the public’s treatment of people with Parkinson’s. The Leeds-born broadcaster said: “You want to say, get the fuck out of the way, that’s what you want to say.”

In May 2021, the former BBC presenter announced he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s and stepped down as the host of University Challenge.

Paxman, who began his broadcasting career on the BBC’s graduate trainee programme in 1972, added: “(Parkinson’s) may not kill you but it will make you wish you hadn’t been born. There’s nothing in it for the drug companies, it’s just more money for them.”

Movers and Shakers began in February 2023 and also features former BBC journalist Rory Cellan-Jones, the broadcaster’s former Europe and North America editor Mark Mardell, correspondent Gillian Lacey-Solymar, the late Diana, Princess of Wales’s divorce barrister Sir Nick Mostyn, and Vicar of Dibley co-writer Paul Mayhew-Archer.

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: “We want a society where every person with a neurological disease, along with their families and carers, receives high-quality, compassionate care – and having a better understanding of diseases like Parkinson’s is vital in making sure we can provide the right care at the right time.

“That’s why we committed to spend at least £375m in research into
neurodegenerative diseases over five years, so that we can better understand these conditions and improve outcomes for patients.”

Anfield was shorn of its flags and Liverpool lost all of their powers. A thumping first home defeat in 34 matches, against a highly accomplished Atalanta, left the Europa League favourites needing another stirring comeback to resurrect Jürgen Klopp’s chances of signing off with a Dublin final. A manager responsible for so many unforgettable European nights during his Liverpool reign is at risk of exiting quietly.

Gianluca Scamacca, the former West Ham disappointment, scored twice as Atalanta displayed the cutting edge, tactical discipline, physical power and defensive might that Klopp’s subdued team lacked all night. It was Liverpool’s first loss at Anfield in 26 games this season and their joint heaviest home defeat in European competition. There were no excuses. Klopp admitted his side “lost the plot” tactically and the overall performance level represented a low point in the campaign.

Liverpool failed to come to terms with the Italians’ man-marking system and the visitors would have recorded a more comprehensive victory but for glaring second-half misses from Scamacca and Teun Koopmeiners. Not that Atalanta’s threats merited any criticism. Together with Charles De Ketelaere they ran the Liverpool defence ragged. Liverpool’s European pedigree, and greater resources compared to their Europa League rivals, ensures a recovery in Bergamo next Thursday cannot be discounted but that is a distant prospect on this evidence. Atalanta relished their defensive duties as much as Scamacca enjoyed proving a point. Liverpool had no answers.

Flags were conspicuous by their absence on the Kop as fans staged a simple but effective protest against Liverpool’s decision to raise ticket prices by 2% next season. The displays, organised by supporters group Spion Kop 1906, have become an established feature of European nights at Anfield and create an image that is a marketing dream for the club. This was an exception. Only one banner was unfurled before kick off after Spion Kop withheld its services for the night. It read: “No to ticket price increases”.

The lack of colour, but not noise, was not the only unusual aspect of a European quarter-final at Anfield. Liverpool were apprehensive and vulnerable throughout as Atalanta took them on at their own pressing game and prospered.

It was a performance that showed why Gian Piero Gasperini’s side are unbeaten in 11 Europa League away fixtures, a sequence stretching back six years.

Mario Pasalic should have put the visitors ahead in the opening minutes when Virgil van Dijk’s awkward clearance struck De Ketelaere and rebounded into his path. The midfielder was five yards out and unmarked in front of goal but his snap-shot struck Caoimhín Kelleher in the face and deflected out for a corner. A busy, mixed night for the Liverpool goalkeeper was under way.

Alexis Mac Allister swept a good chance over the bar from a Harvey Elliott pull back and Darwin Núñez, sent clean through by Curtis Jones, poked a clearer opportunity wide with only goalkeeper Juan Musso to beat. That was wasteful, but there was also misfortune for Liverpool when Kostas Tsimikas’s free-kick landed at Elliott’s feet on the far side of the penalty area. The attacking midfielder started in place of Mohamed Salah and produced a Salah-esque curler that sailed over Musso only to strike both the underside of the bar and the inside of the far post before bouncing clear.

The chances did not signify any Liverpool dominance, however. Atalanta continued to cut through with Davide Zappacosta a constant outlet. The right wing-back created the opener when released down the wing by Koopmeiners. With time and room to pick his spot, Zappacosta found Scamacca arriving unmarked in the area and the striker swept a low finish under Kelleher. The keeper appeared to have Scamacca’s shot covered only to allow the ball to slip under his arms.

Kelleher atoned for his lapse by preventing Koopmeiners doubling Atalanta’s advantage on the stroke of half-time. Klopp delivered his judgment on Liverpool’s tame first half display at the interval. Tsimikas, Elliott and Jones did not reappear for the second half and were replaced by Andy Robertson, Salah and Dominik Szoboszlai respectively. The trio initially injected some much-needed urgency and bite into Liverpool’s game, with Salah forcing Musso into a sharp save from close range.

Atalanta were finally under a sustained spell of pressure but, just when it appeared another Liverpool recovery was on, the visitors struck again. Their second goal also came from creating space on the right and another precise cross. De Ketelaere was the provider with a first-time delivery that exposed the home defence. Scamacca, left completely alone by Ibrahima Konaté, cushioned a delightful finish into the bottom corner.

Klopp went for broke by introducing Diogo Jota into a four-man attack but a mistake by Szoboszlai presented Atalanta with their third. Scamacca seized on the midfielder’s loose pass and played in Ederson expertly. Kelleher saved from the midfielder but the rebound fell perfectly for former Chelsea player Pasalic to convert and point Liverpool towards an unexpected European exit.

A banquet room replete with well preserved frescoes depicting characters inspired by the Trojan war has been unearthed among the ruins of Pompeii in what has been described as one of the most striking discoveries ever made at the southern Italy archaeological site.

The 15-metre-long, six-metre-wide room was found in a former private residence in Via di Nola, which was ancient Pompeii’s longest road, during excavations in the Regio IX area of the site.

The “black room”, so-called because of the colour of its walls that were probably intended to mask the soot from burning oil lamps, was a “refined setting for entertaining during convivial moments”, experts said.

Its walls are adorned with artworks featuring mythical Greek characters, including one of Helen of Troy meeting Paris, prince of Troy, for the first time. The fresco includes a dog and a Greek inscription that reads “Alexandros”, the prince’s other name. According to Greek legend, the pair’s elopement triggered the Trojan war in the 12th century BC.

Another fresco depicts the Greek god Apollo trying to woo the priestess Cassandra. In his efforts to seduce her, Apollo had bestowed upon her the power to foresee the future, but when she rejected him he cursed her so that nobody would believe her predictions. As a result, she was unable to thwart the tragic events of a battle she had prophesied. After being raped during the capture of Troy, Cassandra ended up enslaved.

Gabriel Zuchtriegel, the director of Pompeii’s archaeological park, said the mythological figures had the explicit function of entertaining guests and providing talking points during feasts.

“The mythological couples provided ideas for conversations about the past, and life, only seemingly of a merely romantic nature,” he said. “In reality, they refer to the relationship between the individual and fate: Cassandra who can see the future but no one believes her, Apollo who sides with the Trojans against the Greek invaders, but being a god, cannot ensure victory, Helen and Paris who, despite their politically incorrect love affair, are the cause of the war, or perhaps merely a pretext.”

He added: “People would meet to dine after sunset; the flickering light of the lamps had the effect of making the images appear to move, especially after a few glasses of good Campanian wine.”

The artworks are “third style”, or ornate style, and dated between 15BC and AD40-50.

“It’s always difficult to judge quality but what we see is a high degree of care for detail, expression and shadows,” said Zuchtriegel. “This is very striking, as is the topic of the works.”

Meanwhile, the room’s sophisticated mosaic floor contains more than a million tiny white tiles.

The room opens on to a courtyard with a long staircase leading up to the property’s first floor, beneath which a huge pile of building materials was found. On the arches of the staircase, someone had drawn in charcoal two pairs of gladiators and what archaeologists said in a statement “appears to be an enormous stylised phallus”.

Excavations in Regio IX, a district of the city that had hosted a cluster of homes and workshops, have yielded plenty of other discoveries since beginning in February last year, including a home containing a cramped bakery where enslaved people were believed to have been imprisoned and exploited to produce bread.

The remains of three victims of the AD79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius were found in one of the bakery’s rooms. A still-life fresco resembling a pizza was also found on a wall in the home’s hallway. In December, 13 Nativity-style statuettes were found in an upright position on what was probably a shelf in the hallway of a home. Archaeologists said the figurines provided evidence of pagan rituals in Pompeii before the city was destroyed by Vesuvius.

“Pompeii is truly a treasure chest that never ceases to surprise us and arouse amazement because, every time we dig, we find something beautiful and significant,” said the Italian culture minister, Gennaro Sangiuliano.

The Pompeii ruins were discovered in the 16th century, with the first excavations beginning in 1748. Pompeii is the second most-visited archaeological site in the world.

Farmers who have their entire cropping land submerged underwater have found they are ineligible for a government flooding hardship fund – because their farms are too far from a major river.

According to the Met Office, 1,695.9mm of rain fell from October 2022 to March 2024, the highest amount for any 18-month period in England since the organisation started collecting comparable data in 1836. Scientists have said climate breakdown is likely to cause more intense periods of rain in the UK.

Agriculture organisations said earlier this week that food production was down in the UK because so much cropland was underwater after the floods.

The government this week opened a farming recovery fund scheme, under which eligible farmers can access grants of between £500 and £25,000 to return their land to the condition it was in before exceptional flooding owing to Storm Henk in January.

But farmers have said they have had funding applications refused because they do not meet criteria such as being located near a designated major river.

John Charles-Jones is an arable farmer based in Nottinghamshire. He said he was six miles from the nearest river and not eligible for the fund. His farm has been waterlogged since Storm Babet in October, with most of his topsoil washed away, making it unviable for cropping.

His losses are expected to go into six figures as he planted a third of his planned crops in the autumn before the rain hit, and only 10%-15% of that planted crop will be viable.

Charles-Jones pointed out the farming minister, Mark Spencer, was himself from a farming background in Nottinghamshire, one of the worst-affected counties, but that farmers in the area had been blocked from the fund.

“The eligibility criteria for recipients are completely flawed,” he said, “How could anyone take so long to come up with such nonsense? I don’t think I have ever witnessed such an ill-thought-out scheme. It is difficult to know quite where to start in picking it all to pieces. For once I had higher hopes, with farming minister Mark Spencer actually living and farming in one of the worst-affected counties.”

Andrew Naish, also from Nottinghamshire, said he had faced the same problem. “Whilst grants are technically available, it looks like you will have to have walked on the moon to qualify,” he said. “We, like many farmers, have suffered flooding and large financial losses this winter but fail to meet the criteria for claiming because the government has set the parameters at unachievable levels.”

Henry Ward, an arable farmer based in Short Ferry, east of Lincoln, is perhaps one of the most recognisable growers who have been hit by recent floods. His farm has been shown on news programmes over the past few months as it is entirely underwater, with his farmhouse sitting on what resembles an island in the middle of murky water.

His application for the hardship fund has been refused, despite the fact his farm has been underwater for six months. This is because his nearby river, the Barlings Eau, does not count as a major river in the scheme. Ward told the BBC: “If I’m not eligible, then who on earth is? I’m sure everyone is sick of seeing the pictures in the news as much as I am – but our farmhouse and yard is literally an island in the middle of a 500-acre [202-hectare] lake.”

Ward said his losses were about £100,000, and that he was eligible to claim £3,000 for a small piece of land away from the main farm that was close to the River Witham, but not able to claim any funding for the main farm, which was responsible for the bulk of his losses.

Rachel Hallos, the vice-president of the National Farmers’ Union, said: “It has very quickly become clear that there are major issues with the newly announced farming recovery fund, which aimed to help farmers devastated by Storm Henk in January.

“We are hearing from numerous members who have suffered catastrophic impacts who have been told they are not eligible for the fund because some of their affected areas are more than 150 metres from ‘main’ rivers. These include members with 90% of their land saturated or underwater, and huge damage to buildings and equipment.

“We are taking this up with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs urgently. I cannot believe this is what ministers intended when they launched the fund, which was a welcome and well-intentioned development, which seems to have been fundamentally let down in the detail. While the impact of the weather goes far beyond Storm Henk, this could have been a good start but, as it stands, it simply doesn’t work.”

Defra has been contacted for comment.

Staff at one of the world’s leading climate-certification organisations have called for the CEO and board members to resign after they announced plans to allow companies to meet their climate targets with carbon offsets.

They fear that companies will use the offsets for greenwashing, while avoiding making the necessary cuts in greenhouse gas emissions – without which the world faces climate catastrophe.

The UN-backed Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), which certifies whether a company is on track to help limit global heating to under 1.5C, has validated hundreds of net zero plans from companies including J Sainsbury plc, John Lewis and Maersk. Until now, the SBTi has ruled out the use of carbon offsets, instead emphasising the importance of deep greenhouse gas emissions cuts.

But on Tuesday, the SBTi board of trustees released plans to allow carbon credits in their net zero standard by permitting companies to use them to offset emissions from their supply chains, known as scope 3 emissions.

The board said there was “ongoing healthy debate on the subject”, but that “when properly supported by policies, standards and procedures based on scientific evidence”, the use of offsets in supply chains could be “an additional tool to tackle climate change”, and so it had decided to extend their use. They said a draft of the new rules would be published by July.

The announcement was met with fury by many SBTi staff and advisers, who say they were not consulted on the decision and that the move is not based on science.

In a letter to management seen by the Guardian, they called for the statement to be withdrawn, and for the resignation of CEO Luiz Fernando do Amaral and any board members who supported the decision.

The statement read: “We stand ready to support any efforts aimed at ensuring that the SBTi does not become a greenwashing platform where decisions are unduly influenced by lobbyists, driven by potential conflicts of interest and poor adherence to existing governance procedures. In the event that our concerns are not addressed, SBTi staff will have no choice but to take further action.”

The SBTi did not respond to request for comment.

The announcement from SBTi’s board of trustees was widely celebrated by carbon market proponents, who say the move could increase demand for offsets. Advocates for carbon markets say that a scaled-up system could help generate much-needed finance for the global south to fund climate-change mitigation and adaptation.

But scientific studies into popular offsetting schemes have found that, in practice, many do almost nothing to limit global heating. It is often unclear how much money from the sale of offsets makes it to communities on the ground.

Ben Rattenbury, a policy analyst at data provider Sylvera, said the move was “a very big deal” for the carbon markets.

“The world can’t afford this transition without carbon credits, so it’s very encouraging to see SBTi open the door for companies to be able to use them for a proportion of their scope 3 emissions reductions targets – while respecting the mitigation hierarchy,” he said.

Reacting to the move, Johan Rockström, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told the Guardian that while there was little to no room for offsetting, he did not think that the SBTi decision was so dramatic.

“I do appreciate the SBTi challenge of how to incentivise companies to take responsibility for scope 3 emissions. In a transition phase, I can see that allowing for offsetting may be the only options as long as scope 1 and 2 emissions follow the carbon law of fossil-fuel phaseout and if the offsets are truly robust – preferably focused on ‘like for like’,” he said.

“SBTi companies are generally engaged in trying to be carbon neutral as fast as possible, and they are leading their sectors when they quantify scope 3 emissions, so giving some opening for how to deal with this in the short run – say, the next five years – is acceptable,” he added.

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

The shrill carder (Bombus sylvarum) is the bookmakers’ early favourite for invertebrate of the year. (I’m picturing a smooth, charming worm giving it the bookies’ patter and an embittered elderly grasshopper totting up the odds, disgruntled because his kind wasn’t nominated.)

Here flies one of our smallest bumblebees, a distinctive greyish-green and straw-hued species which is named after the high-pitched buzz it makes when airborne.

Bees, in particular bumblebees, are our most popular insects. We identify with their communal lifestyles, admire their industry, enjoy their association with sunny days and flowers and, increasingly, appreciate their importance as pollinators – for crops, for us, for all life on Earth.

Despite our love for the shrill carder, it is being pushed to extinction in Britain. Once common in the lowlands, it vanished from most places during the 20th century. It is now found in fragmented populations in pockets of Kent, Essex, Somerset, Wiltshire, and south and west Wales that include wetlands, dry grasslands, dunes and brownfield sites.

What these varied places have in common is that they are not intensively farmed. One of its most significant sites in the south-east is the brownfield nature reserve at Canvey Wick, another demonstration of the importance of brownfield sites and why they must not be the default choice for new development.

The shrill carder has declined for much the same reason as has much abundance and biodiversity in Britain: intensive farming practices that have destroyed 98% of flower-rich meadows in England and Wales over the past century.

The shrill carder comes late to the season, with its queens not usually emerging from hibernation until May. Research suggests the bees do not forage as far from the nest as many other species, so it needs flower-rich habitats and undisturbed nesting grounds. It nests in rough, tussocky grassland, within clumps of grass or just below ground.

Colonies are small, with only about 50 workers in a mature nest, and males and daughter queens emerge late, too, at the end of August or September. So the species needs late-flowering plants – plentiful supplies of nectar in September – to ensure the next generation goes into hibernation well fed.

Unfortunately, the intensification of farming has meant the traditional annual hay-cut in July – which enabled some plants to flower again in September – has been replaced with multiple cuts for silage throughout the growing season, reducing the supply of late flowers. And previously untidy, uncut field margins – another source of late nectar and nesting grounds – have been cultivated. It means there is no space for the shrill carder.

Saving this bumblebee is a British conservation priority. Jenny Jones, a Green party member in the Lords, even got a tattoo of the shrill carder to raise awareness of its plight, and there have been plenty of schemes over the past 15 years to boost flower-rich habitat in the areas where it survives.

We excel at saving species on the brink of extinction, but we are less good at changing the big picture. An increasing number of farmers are showing how to produce food and make space for nature, but most farms are still run on intensive lines and will continue to be as long as government rules ensure that is the best and easiest way to make a living.

So vote shrill carder, vote for change and vote for a future for our pollinating insects – and a future for us.

• Welcome to the Guardian’s UK invertebrate of the year competition. Between 2 April and 12 April we are profiling the incredible invertebrates that live in and around the UK. At midnight on Friday 12 April, voting will open to decide which is our favourite invertebrate – for now – with the winner to be announced on Monday 15 April

Schools evacuated due to toxic gas. Smelly tap water at home. Tourist operators and fishers struggling to stay in business. Job losses. Power outages affecting tens of thousands of people at a time. Dangerous health problems. Even lives lost.

Such crises were some of the consequences of sargassum seaweed in the islands of the Caribbean in 2023, which have become common in the region since 2011, when massive blooms began inundating the shorelines in the spring and summer months.

On 18 April 2023 in Guadeloupe, the air-quality monitoring agency Gwad’Air advised vulnerable people to leave some areas because of toxic levels of gas produced by sargassum. Six weeks later, about 600 miles to the north-west, it blocked an intake pipe at an electricity plant at Punta Catalina in the Dominican Republic. One of the facility’s units was forced to temporarily shut down, and a 20-year-old diver named Elías Poling later drowned while trying to fix the problem.

In Jamaica, during the months of July and August, fishers found themselves struggling through another season as floating sargassum blocked their small boats and diminished their catch.

“Sometimes, the boats can’t even come into the creek,” said Richard Osbourne, a Jamaican fisher. “It blocks the whole channel.”

In the British Virgin Islands (BVI), most of Virgin Gorda’s 4,000 residents had to deal with sporadic water shut-offs and odorous tap water for weeks after sargassum was sucked into their main desalination plant last August.

And in Puerto Rico, a highly unusual late-season influx inundated the beaches of the Aguadilla area for the first time, leaving residents such as Christian Natal out of work for a week when it shut down businesses, including the jetski rental company where he works.

These people were among the thousands affected by sargassum blooms last year alone in the Caribbean, where about 70% of the population of about 44 million lives near the coast, according to the World Bank.

Scientists have blamed the explosive growth of the seaweed on global pollution, climate breakdown and other international problems that Caribbean islands did little to cause and lack the political power to resolve.

“Seaweed must be seen as an impact of global warming, with the opening up of the right to compensation on the grounds that we are small, vulnerable islands,” said Sylvie Gustave-dit-Duflo, the vice-president of the Guadeloupe region in charge of environmental issues and president of the French Biodiversity Office.

She added that the countries of the Caribbean Community (Caricom) – which include 15 member states and five associate members that are territories or colonies – recorded economic losses of about $102m due to sargassum in 2022 alone.

“These figures do not take into account the losses recorded in all the other Caribbean countries, including the French islands,” she said. Nor do they take into account yearly costs of beach cleaning estimated to be as high as an additional $210m.

Gustave-dit-Duflo and other experts say the global problem requires a global response. But so far, the Caribbean has failed to coordinate even a region-wide strategy and the international community has largely turned a blind eye. National-level responses, which in most Caribbean countries include a draft management strategy that has not been officially adopted or adequately funded, have done little to take up the slack.

Most sargassum influxes are predictable, and the worst impacts are often preventable. But again and again Caribbean governments have waited to react until the crisis stage. And even then the responses have often focused on protecting the tourism industry while other groups, such as local communities or fishers, are left behind.

As a result, the health, livelihoods and natural environment of residents have been endangered, and hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on reactive emergency responses that experts said could have been better spent on prevention, planning and mitigation.

At the conference of the parties to the UN framework convention on climate change (Cop28) last December in Dubai, Gustave-dit-Duflo helped to unveil a French proposal for the sort of international response she said was urgently needed. It included forming a global coalition to better understand the problem, ensuring that sargassum is on the agenda of major international forums, and continuing previous work in partnership with the EU, among other measures.

But to implement the proposal, governments in the Caribbean and further abroad will have to overcome hurdles that have previously stymied cooperation, including political and legislative differences, funding shortages and debate about whether to prioritise health, the environment, the economy or other areas.

In the meantime, sargassum has already started to arrive on the Caribbean’s shores once again. And once again, the region is not ready.

The ‘great Atlantic sargassum belt’

Sargassum is not a bad thing in itself. Nor is it new to the Caribbean, where it has always washed ashore in modest quantities in the spring and summer, providing habitat for marine life and helping build beaches as it decays.

But in 2011 sargassum suddenly swamped shorelines without warning. It piled several feet high on some beaches. It stank like rotten eggs as it decomposed and shut down resorts, dealing a major blow to a tourism sector in some areas of the Caribbean that were still struggling to recover from the 2008-2009 global recession. It gave coastal residents headaches, nausea and respiratory problems. It disrupted turtle nesting sites and threatened reefs and mangroves.

As sargassum continued to flood the Caribbean and the western coast of Africa 8,000 miles away, scientists made a surprising discovery. Historically, most of the seasonal influx in the Caribbean had come from a 2-million-square-mile gyre in the northern Atlantic Ocean: the Sargasso Sea.

“The Sargasso [Sea] has been around for hundreds of thousands of years, and it’s an ecosystem that was perfect, so to speak,” said Elena Martínez, an oceanographer based in the Dominican Republic. “It was there, surrounded by four oceans gyres – or currents – that kept it perfect.”

But scientists soon learned that most of the new Caribbean influx was not coming from the Sargasso Sea any more: it was coming from a new sargassum ecosystem that had formed in the southern Atlantic Ocean.

The area, named “the great Atlantic sargassum belt” in a 2019 article in Science is now visible from space, and its length often exceeds 5,000 miles, according to scientists who use satellites to track it.

Its cause is still debated. Dr Brian Lapointe, a sargassum researcher, sees the Atlantic belt as a global version of a smaller bloom he witnessed in 1991 that shut down a nuclear power plant and other electricity facilities along the Florida coast.

Since the 1980s the world population has nearly doubled, explained Lapointe, a professor at Florida Atlantic University. This in turn has led to a massive increase in the sargassum-boosting nutrients washing out of major rivers such as the Mississippi in the US, the Amazon and Orinoco in South America, and the Congo in Africa.

“To grow that world population we’ve used these fertilisers, we’ve deforested along all the major rivers in the world,” he said. “The nitrogen has gone up faster than the phosphorus from all these human activities, including wastewater; sewage from the increasing human population.”

Another likely culprit is climate breakdown. Martínez said warming waters may have disrupted the giant gyre that held the Sargasso Sea in place for thousands of years, releasing sargassum to float south and form the new belt.

The new belt also receives additional nutrients from the Sahara dust that frequently blows across the Atlantic, which itself could be exacerbated by climate impacts such as the expansion of deserts as temperatures rise. Some scientists also argue that warming oceans provide a more sargassum-friendly growing environment.

Experts tend to agree that the great Atlantic sargassum belt is here to stay – and that it is a global problem that needs a global response.

That much was clear by 2018, when the belt grew to a record size that was estimated to weigh 22m tonnes and much of the Caribbean saw its worst-ever inundation. The season spurred increasing calls for a collaborative international response.

But broad international action has not materialised. Despite a growing patchwork of studies and projects across the region, various attempts by the UN and others to coordinate a Caribbean-wide response have been largely stalled by funding shortages, geopolitical issues, the Covid-19 pandemic and other factors.

No Caribbean strategy is in place, and a region-wide warning and monitoring centre proposed in 2019 has not been established.

In 2022, the Saint Lucian sargassum researcher Dr Bethia Thomas produced videos about the village of Praslin Bay and two other nearby communities as part of her doctoral thesis. In each video, several residents listed complaints ranging from breathing problems to the destruction of fisheries to corroding jewellery.

“It affects how I breathe, and I also think it affects the children and the way that they function, because sometimes they’re so moody and they cannot sit and do the activities because it’s so awful,” a teacher said in the Praslin Bay video. “And I think it’s affecting us mentally.”

In the absence of a regional strategy, national sargassum management plans have been developed in most countries and territories in the Caribbean, including Saint Lucia, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, the BVI, Anguilla and Montserrat.

But few have been officially adopted at the government level, and even fewer are adequately funded or closely followed.

“Sometimes the small communities get left behind,” Thomas said. “Maybe not intentionally, but in small island developing states with limited resources, you have to prioritise. And perhaps other things – like building a new hospital and constructing new roads, new schools – might take precedence over developing a sargassum management plan.”

Negligible investment from polluting countries

As residents experience health and economic consequences, Caribbean leaders have often complained about a shortage of money to deal with the crisis. Local funds, they said, are tied up with many competing priorities, including handling climate-related impacts such as hurricanes, droughts and flooding.

They also said the cost of the sargassum crisis should be shouldered in part by the larger countries mostly responsible for it, but that accessing international climate financing for the purpose was not easy.

A lack of funding and regional coordination has also stymied efforts to monetise the seaweed by finding a large-scale sustainable use for it.

“Even though there are so many things you can make with sargassum, the actual amount of sargassum that is used for products is still very low,” said Dr Franziska Elmer, a researcher based in Mexico.

Sargassum and Cop28: invasion starts to garner attention

The 2023 sargassum bloom in the Caribbean had mostly abated by 2 December when Gustave-dit-Duflo stood at a podium 8,000 miles away during a side event at the Cop28 meeting in Dubai.

As dignitaries looked on, she issued a stark warning about sargassum. “It is a very invasive and aggressive phenomenon, and through all the Caribbean it affects tourism, and all the economies of the region are based on biodiversity and tourism,” she told those gathered at the French pavilion on the sidelines of the conference. “The Caribbean has a lot of hotspots of biodiversity. So if we don’t act, in 20 years this marine biology, including the reef, will disappear from our coast.”

She said the French government wanted the issue to be discussed on one of the high-level panels of the United Nations conference on the oceans to be held in Nice, France, in June 2025.

“We manage sargassum at a local level, but this is not a phenomenon of an island,” she said. “It is the whole basin of the Caribbean and a part of the Atlantic. This is why all the countries that are impacted, we need to create an international coalition to be able to find means and ways to act.”

As countries work to establish an international response, time is of the essence for residents of the coastal Caribbean.

Shortly after Cop28 drew to a close, scientists at the University of South Florida estimated the sargassum floating in the tropical Atlantic Ocean at about 5m metric tonnes, compared with a December average of about 2m. By February, the mass had increased to about 9m tonnes – the second-highest quantity ever recorded for the month.

In other words, another record-setting sargassum season could have just started.

• This article, coordinated by the Puerto Rico Center for Investigative Journalism and produced by the BVI Beacon, RCI Group Guadeloupe, América Futura, El País América, Television Jamaica and the Virgin Islands Daily News, is published here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now. Reporters Rafael René Díaz Torres (Centro de Periodismo Investigativo), and Mariela Mejía (Diario Libre) collaborated in this investigation. This investigation is the result of a fellowship awarded by the Center for Investigative Journalism’s Training Institute and was made possible in part with the support of Open Society Foundations.

Joe Biden has vowed that US commitment to defend Israel against Iran was “ironclad” as concerns rose in Washington that a “significant” Iranian strike could happen within days, in retaliation for the bombing of an Iranian consular building in Damascus.

US and allied officials fear that a strike is imminent and could come in the form of a direct missile launch from Iran, rather than an attack through a proxy like Hezbollah in Lebanon. Israel has vowed to respond in kind to such a direct strike, raising the prospect of a regional war, which US officials now believe is more likely than at any point since the beginning of the Gaza conflict on 7 October.

Biden’s pledge of support to Israel at the White House, intended as a deterrent, came a few hours after Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, repeated a threat to strike back against Israel over the Damascus bombing that killed 12 people, including Gen Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a senior figure in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and six other guard members.

“When they attacked our consulate area, it was like they attacked our territory,” Khamenei said, in remarks broadcast by Iranian state TV. “The evil regime must be punished, and it will be punished.”

Israel’s foreign minister, Israel Katz, responded in a post on the X social media platform, vowing that: “If Iran attacks from its territory, Israel will respond and attack in Iran.”

Israel has not formally taken responsibility for the 1 April bombing, but Israeli and US officials have made clear it carried out the strike.

Israel and Iran have been trading blows in Lebanon and Syria for months, but Biden administration officials fear that the 1 April Damascus bombing on an Iranian diplomatic building, which Tehran considers its own territory, has significantly raised the threat of the Gaza war widening into a broader conflict.

Since the Damascus bombing, Tehran has sent Washington messages attributing ultimate blame for the attack on the US and warning the US to stay out of its confrontation with Israel.

Biden’s pledge to Israel on the White House lawn, in a joint appearance with the Japanese prime minister, Fumio Kishida, appeared to be a response to that warning, insisting the US would not stay on the sidelines.

“We also want to address the Iranian threat to launch a significant – they’re threatening to launch a significant attack in Israel,” Biden said. “As I told Prime Minister Netanyahu, our commitment to Israel’s security against these threats from Iran and its proxies is ironclad. Let me say it again, ironclad. We’re gonna do all we can to protect Israel’s security.”

The Biden administration is seeking to head off a direct Iranian attack by messaging that Tehran cannot assume that US forces in the region, reinforced significantly since the start of the Gaza war, would stay out of a conflict with Israel.

“We’ve been clear that we do not want this conflict to escalate or spread further in the region. We’ll continue to undertake diplomatic efforts to ensure that remains the case,” the spokesperson said. “We also retain a military presence in the region to deter those who seek to take advantage of the conflict.”

Secretary of state Antony Blinken reiterated that message on Wednesday in a call with Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant, in which he made clear the US would stand with Israel against any threats by Iran, the state department said.

Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli diplomat and adviser to prime ministers Ehud Barak and Shimon Peres, said: “The prevailing conventional wisdom is that because the attack in Damascus was directly against Iran, then that means that Iran will have to respond to retaliate directly, rather than via a proxy.

“From what I’m hearing here, the most telling sign is that Khamenei has mentioned the need to retaliate twice in the last week in his sermons or whatever,” Pinkas said. “Usually, they don’t do that. Usually they are much more opaque and only commit to a response one day at the right moment and in the right place.”

Among the possible targets are Israeli embassies around the world, and they have been taking extra security precautions in the wake of the Damascus bombing, but US officials also believe that a direct strike on military or government targets on Israeli territory is also a significant possibility.

The US and Israeli militaries and intelligence agencies are in constant contact about the threat. Axios reported that the head of US Central Command, Gen Erik Kurilla, is due in Israel on Thursday to discuss coordination with his Israeli counterparts and the defence minister, Yoav Gallant.

The ability of the Biden administration to rein in an Israeli response to an Iranian attack would very much depend on the specifics. If Iranian retaliation comes in the form of an assault on an Israeli embassy, or if an incoming Iranian missile or drone is intercepted, it may be possible to prevent escalation, officials said, but if an Iranian strike caused multiple casualties inside Israel, it would be very much harder.

The world’s coal power capacity grew for the first time since 2019 last year, despite warnings that coal plants need to close at a rate of at least 6% each year to avoid a climate emergency.

A report by Global Energy Monitor found that coal power capacity grew by 2% last year, driven by an increase in new coal plants across China and a slowdown of plant closures in Europe and the US.

About 69.5 gigawatts (GW) of coal plant capacity came online last year, of which two-thirds were built in China, according to the report. There were also plants built in Indonesia, India, Vietnam, Japan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, South Korea, Greece and Zimbabwe.

Meanwhile, a slowdown in coal plant shutdowns in the US and Europe led to more than 21GW retiring last year. This resulted in a net annual increase of almost 48.5GW for the year, the highest since 2016.

The authors of the report said coal plants needed to shut at a faster pace, and that China needed to adopt stricter controls on its expansion of capacity.

Flora Champenois, a Global Energy Monitor analyst, said: “Otherwise we can forget about meeting our goals in the Paris agreement and reaping the benefits that a swift transition to clean energy will bring,.”

Climate scientists have said all coal plants should be shut by 2040 – unless they are fitted with effective carbon-removal technology – if governments hope to limit global heating to within 1.5C of pre-industrialised levels.

This would require an average of 126GW of coal plants to retire from the current fleet of 2,130GW every year for the next 17 years, according to the report, or the equivalent of about two plants a week.

Champenois described last year’s coal plant expansion as an “anomaly” as more signs point to it “reversing course”. “But countries that have coal plants to retire need to do so more quickly, and countries that have plans for new coal plants must make sure these are never built.”

Research by Capital Economics suggests China’s appetite for coal power may reduce as low-carbon options accelerate.

The report found that a resurgence in hydropower this year, combined with China’s expansion of wind, solar and nuclear power, could mark the start of a steady decline in its coal demand.

Coal plant retirements were expected to pick up speed across Europe and the US this year, and fewer countries were beginning construction of new plants, Champenois said.

The report found that construction started on less than 4GW of new projects outside China last year, a quarter of the annual average between 2015 and 2022 for the same set of countries.