Political leaders who present themselves as “grownups” while slowing the pace of climate action are pushing the world towards deeper catastrophe, a former US environment chief has warned.

“We are slowed down by those who think of themselves as grownups and believe decarbonisation at the speed the climate community calls for is unrealistic,” said Todd Stern, who served as a special envoy for climate change under Barack Obama, and helped negotiate the 2015 Paris agreement.

“They say that we need to slow down, that what is being proposed [in cuts to greenhouse gas emissions] is unrealistic,” he told the Observer. “You see it a lot in the business world too. It’s really hard [to push for more urgency] because those ‘grownups’ have a lot of influence.”

But Stern said the speed of take-up of renewable energy, its falling cost, and the wealth of low-carbon technology now available were evidence that the world could cut emissions to net zero by 2050. “Obviously it’s difficult – we’re talking about enormous change to the world economy – but we can do it,” he said.

Stern would not name any world leaders, but he said the UK was in “retrenchment” over climate issues. Rishi Sunak and Claire Coutinho, the energy secretary, made several U-turns on climate policy last year, and have repeatedly said climate policies imposed “unacceptable costs on hard-pressed British families” and that by slowing such action they were “being pragmatic and protecting family finances”.

Stern said that, in fact, delaying action to cut greenhouse gas emissions was leading to disaster, given the rapid acceleration of the climate crisis, which he said was happening faster than predicted when the Paris agreement was signed. “Look out your window – look at what’s happening,look at the preposterous heat. It’s ridiculous.”

Leaders who claimed to be grownups by saying the pace of action had to be slowed had to be honest about the alternatives, he said. Just as political leaders took swift action to prevent the spread of Covid-19 in 2020, so must they confront the consequences of slowing climate action now.

“All hard questions of this magnitude should be considered by way of a ‘compared to what’ analysis. The monumental dangers [the climate crisis] poses warrant the same kind of ‘compared to what’ argument when leaders in the political and corporate worlds balk at what needs to be done.”

He warned of the backlash against climate action by “rightwing populism” in Europe. “Hopefully, it doesn’t go very far,” he said. “If that kind of attitude gets some purchase among parts of the population, that’s not helpful.”

Stern praised Joe Biden for “an extraordinarily good first term”, including the Inflation Reduction Act, which he called “far and away the most significant climate legislation ever in the US, and it’s quite powerful”.

But he warned that if Donald Trump were to be elected this November, the US would exit the Paris agreement and frustrate climate action globally.

“He will try to reverse whatever he can in terms of domestic policy [on climate action],” he warned. “I don’t think anybody else is going to pull out of Paris because of Trump, but it’s highly disruptive to what can happen internationally, because the US is a very big, very important player. So [without the US] you don’t move as fast.”

Stern called for stronger demonstration from civil society of support for climate action. “What we need, broadly, is normative change, a shift in hearts and minds that demonstrates to political leaders that their political future depends on taking strong, unequivocal action to protect our world,” he said.

“Normative change may seem at first blush like a weak reed to carry into battle against the defenders of the status quo, but norms can move mountains. They are about a sense of what is right, what is acceptable, what is important, what we expect and what we demand.”

Stern first gave his warning in a lecture at the London School of Economics on Friday night, in honour of the British civil servant Pete Betts, who served as the EU’s chief climate negotiator for the Paris agreement. He died last year.

I never expected a later-life love affair. But a few years ago, I was commissioned to write a book on garden insects and the earth moved. All of a sudden, I realised that my garden wasn’t just full of six-legged aliens, but characters, all with stories to tell, some of which were often bizarre and others hilarious. A few metres from my backdoor a glittering new world of intrigue opened up.

Now that it is spring, this world is awakening and the stories are piling up and moving on fast. As I have become familiar with more insects, the joy of the encroaching season becomes richer still, and more entrancing. Already we have hummingbird tribute acts flying around the spring flowers, bee flies with their hovering flight and long beaks, as fluffy as a child’s toy. Soon their larvae will hatch and grow into child-killers, brutalising the nests of solitary bees.

We have spring butterflies, orange-tips that might have survived by cannibalising their peers, and brimstones, veterans of months of hibernation, now in a state of age-defying breeziness and friskiness.

The bees are out – not just the corporate honeybees, but the mid-sized bumblebee colonies and the sole-trading solitary bees. The latter are bastions of feminine power, powerhouses of pollination, founded and largely run by females. It being spring, the cuckoos are here, too. These are cuckoo bees, which like the birds mimic their hosts and lay eggs in their nests. And they make an unusually loud buzz.

The months ahead will become a blur, the insect news desk will pile up with drama. The race to survive takes strange and wonderful turns. The lacewing’s larvae tear into aphids and decorate their bodies with corpses sucked dry, as a form of camouflage. Moths get itchy feet and migrate, using the stars for navigation. Dung flies use the freshest, runniest dung as no less a romantic dancefloor than a human village hall.

Those big, glamorous dragonflies, especially the emperor, hatch out to become the world’s most dangerous apex predator, their success rate for snatching prey in midair topping 95%, the highest of any animal.

Aphids take reproduction to scarcely believable levels. By parthenogenesis, a female aphid can give birth to a youngster that is itself already pregnant; unchecked by predation, aphids would fill the earth in a few weeks.

At the same time, earwigs take time to look after their young, nurturing them in a burrow for many weeks and attending to their needs, keeping them warm and clean.

One of the great themes of insect life is parasitism. It is thought that 40% of all insect species are parasitic, many of which are parasitoids, eventually killing their hosts or their young. Some are impossibly glamorous. See a cuckoo wasp, with its lustrous iridescence, dazzling green and pink, and it will make you gasp. The glittering exoskeleton is specially thickened in case its attempt to lay eggs in a wasp’s breeding chamber is intercepted.

Another parasite, a fly, lays eggs inside snails and the larvae eat their way out while it is still alive. Another wasp turns ladybirds into the living dead. Some parasites are themselves plagued by parasites.

This is, of course, drama in miniature, but insects are also the indicators of immense problems. Many are declining, putting pollination in jeopardy and sending warning of dangers not yet known. A host of new species are making their way north and colonising Britain because of climate change, a danger only too well known. The insects’ world is our world, however peculiar these neighbours of ours can be.

In the end, the insects need be heard, and their stories need to be told. Loving them is optional.

Cast your vote for the UK invertebrate of the year here

A North Atlantic right whale has been spotted entangled in rope off New England, worsening an already devastating year for the vanishing animals, federal authorities said.

Right whales number less than 360 and are vulnerable to entanglement in fishing gear and collisions with ships. The entangled whale was seen on Wednesday about 50 miles (80km) south of Rhode Island’s Block Island, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said.

The mammal has rope coming out of both sides of its mouth but its distant location is making it difficult for rescuers to help, the NOAA said.

“Given the long distance from shore, experts were unable to safely travel to the last known location during daylight to attempt a rescue,” a statement said. “NOAA Fisheries and our partners will monitor this whale and attempt to respond … if possible, as weather and safety conditions allow.”

Several right whales have died this year off Georgia and Massachusetts, and environmental groups fear the species could be headed for extinction.

A whale found dead off Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, in January showed evidence of injury from entanglement in fishing gear. Environmental groups have called for stricter rules; however, a federal budget package passed in late 2022 included a six-year pause on new federal whale regulations.

“This is another example that entanglements are happening in US waters,” said Gib Brogan, campaign director with environmental group Oceana. “We need stronger protection[s].”

The whales were once numerous off the east coast, but they were decimated during the commercial whaling era and have been slow to recover, despite federal protection for decades.

They migrate every year from calving grounds off Florida and Georgia to feeding grounds off New England and Canada. The journey has become more perilous in recent years because their food sources appear to be moving as waters warm amid the climate crisis.

That change causes the whales to stray from protected areas of ocean and become vulnerable to entanglements and collisions, scientists have said.

A study published last year said that climate change-induced warming in the Gulf of Maine was acutely endangering the right whale.

The Associated Press contributed reporting

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are to be the executive producers of two new nonfiction Netflix series focusing on lifestyle and polo.

One show will explore “the joys of cooking, gardening, entertaining and friendship”, while the other will give “unprecedented access to the world of professional polo” and the US Open Polo Championship in Florida, Netflix said.

The shows will be made by Harry and Meghan’s Archewell Productions company, with the duchess to produce both series and the duke to work on the polo series. Both are in the early stages of production with titles and release dates to be announced in the coming months.

“Known primarily for its aesthetic and social scene, the series will pull the curtain back on the grit and passion of the sport, capturing players and all it takes to compete at the highest level,” Netflix said of the polo series.

The Sussexes have previously released three documentaries with Netflix as part of a multimillion-pound deal with the streaming giant.

Heart of Invictus, which aired last August, followed a group of service members on their road to the Invictus Games, the Paralympic-style sporting competition set up by Harry in 2014 for injured and sick military personnel and veterans.

Netflix also released the documentary series Live to Lead and the controversial six-part Harry & Meghan documentary in December 2022.

In the latter, the duke and duchess shed light on their troubled life within the royal family, accusing Kensington Palace of lying to protect William, and Charles, now king, of lying at the Megxit summit.

Archewell Productions, formed by the couple in 2020, is “dedicated to illuminating thought-provoking and diverse narratives that underscore our common humanity and celebrate community”, according to the company’s website.

Harry and Meghan moved to the US in 2020 after stepping down from royal duties.

Joe Biden has pledged to defend the Philippines from any attack in the South China Sea, as he hosted the first joint summit with Manila and Tokyo amid growing tensions with Beijing.

“The United States’ defence commitments to Japan and to the Philippines are ironclad,” the US president said on Thursday as he met the Philippines president Ferdinand Marcos and Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida.

The summit at the White House comes after repeated confrontations between Chinese and Philippine vessels in the disputed waterway that have raised fears of a wider conflict.

Biden’s pledge follows a bilateral meeting between Biden and Kishida and the upgrading of their alliance, which also drew strong condemnation from the Chinese government.

“Any attack on Philippine aircraft, vessels or armed forces in the South China Sea would invoke our mutual defense treaty,” said Biden.

The US president made a similar commitment when he hosted the Philippine president at the White House last year.

China claims almost the entirety of the South China Sea, brushing aside competing claims from several south-east Asian nations including the Philippines.

The so-called “gray-zone” harassment by China has included shining military-grade lasers at the Philippine Coast Guard (PCG), firing water cannon at vessels and ramming into Philippine ships running resupply missions near the Second Thomas Shoal, which both Manila and Beijing claim.

In 1999, Manila intentionally ran a second world war-era ship aground on the shoal, establishing a permanent military presence there.

Beijing accused the Philippines of violating Chinese sovereignty in the South China Sea on Thursday.

The foreign ministry spokesperson, Mao Ning, said China was “committed to managing the situation at Ren’ai Jiao with the Philippines through dialogue and consultation” but that the Philippines had refused to tow away the vessel. She said Beijing would “allow” the resupply missions if it was given prior notice and the ability to inspect and monitor the process.

Mao also accused Manila of ignoring a “gentleman’s agreement” made with the previous president, Rodrigo Duterte, who on Friday told the Chinese state media outlet, the Global Times, that he believed the US was directing the new Philippines government.

“When I was president of the Philippines, there was no quarrel in the South China Sea, we were able to return to normal (relations),” he told the nationalistic tabloid.

“I’m pretty sure that it’s the US that is giving instructions to the Philippines, telling the current Philippine government not to be afraid (to go for a fight) because the US will support Manila.”

Chinese coast guard ships also regularly approach disputed Japanese-controlled East China Sea islands near Taiwan, and the increasing tensions have prompted Biden to boost alliances in the region.

As they met around a horseshoe-shaped wooden table in the grand East Room of the US presidential residence, the US, Japanese and Philippine leaders hailed the meeting as “historic.”

Without mentioning China by name, they painted their alliance as a bedrock of peace and democracy in the Asia-Pacific region in contrast to authoritarian Beijing.

Marcos, seen as closer to Washington than his more China-leaning predecessor Rodrigo Duterte, said they shared an “unwavering commitment to the rules-based international order.”

Kishida said that “multi-layered cooperation is essential” and that “today’s meeting will make history.”

Biden, 81, also held separate talks with Marcos, 66, the son and namesake of the country’s former dictator.

The joint summit came a day after Biden hosted a lavish state visit for Japan’s Kishida during which he unveiled a historic upgrade in defense ties aimed at countering a resurgent China.

Directly warning of risks from the rise of China, Kishida said that Japan – stripped of its right to a military after the second world war – was determined to do more to share responsibility with its ally the United States.

China responded, saying the United States and Japan had “smeared” its reputation during Kishida’s state visit.

Beijing foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said Washington and Tokyo had “attacked China on Taiwan and maritime issues, grossly interfered in China’s internal affairs, and seriously violated the basic norms governing international relations.”

Japan and the Philippines are the latest Asia-Pacific allies to be hosted by Biden, who was joined by Kishida and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol at Camp David in August.

But Biden has also moved to manage tensions with China, holding a two-hour phone call with President Xi Jinping last week after a face-to-face meeting in San Francisco in November.

On Wednesday Biden said the major upgrade in defense ties with Japan was “purely defensive” and “not aimed at any one nation or a threat to the region.”

With Agence France-Presse and Associated Press

William Wordsworth’s best‑known poem may be addressed to daffodils, but his favourite flower in the year’s bright early succession was the lesser celandine. It’s a preference I share. On the whole, gardeners and botanists do not. Those I’ve canvassed for their opinion regard its cold-months, late-February-to-early-May profusion along verges and across lawns with something approaching disdain. I view it as our native miniature tournesol, or sunflower, following the brief sallies of sunlight, clamming up and drooping under the grey skies of a Welsh spring.

Here along the sodden vernal lanes of Radnorshire, its mounded growths of heart-shaped leaves and its vivid golden flowers on frail stems are ubiquitous, bringing a stellar texture to roadside banks and meadows. They impart and enrich the winter-grey grasses with sun‑tones before primroses and daffodils are fully in flower, then age before our eyes to a blanched drabness that still retains the charm of heart-shaped petals to complement its fleshy leaves.

There is something about the lesser celandine that resonates with our own blossoming and fading. From its gold-spangled profusion across every field, along the banks of each sunken lane at the earliest hint of spring, here’s a flower that is responsive to every climatic vagary the season can offer. Small wonder that Wordsworth thrilled to its responsiveness. He took it as correlative to his own sensitivity to nature and, in espousing its cause, defended it against an apparent disregard in English verse that paralleled the one he had suffered in that sphere.

It’s an odd flower – so delicate to be flowering in the harshest of seasons, so slight, and yet so vivid. Wordsworth actually wrote three poems to it, all of them fine and complex verses. He doesn’t mention the wealth of names bestowed on it (my favourite is “spring’s messenger”), nor does he refer to its exposed pale tubers, cabbage-scented, from which another name tells us of folk‑medicine usage: “pilewort”.

Such a wealth of cultural texture attached to this glowing early visitant! Enjoy it this year while you can, for its heliophilic brilliance is already fading, and you will have to wait till late February of 2025 to rejoice in it again.

A vast network of undocumented “ghost roads” is pushing into the world’s untouched rainforests and driving their destruction in the Asia-Pacific region, a new study has found.

By using Google Earth to map tropical forests on Borneo, Sumatra and New Guinea islands, researchers from James Cook University in Australia documented 1.37 m kilometres (850,000 miles) of roads across 1.4m sq kilometres of rainforest on the islands – between three and seven times what is officially recorded on road databases.

These ghost roads, which include bulldozed tracks through natural rainforest and informal roads on palm-oil plantations, were “almost always” an indicator of future destruction of nearby rainforests, according to the study published in the journal Nature. They are “among the gravest of all direct threats to tropical forests”, the researchers concluded.

“They’re being constructed by a range of people, including legal or illegal agriculturalists, miners, loggers, land grabbers, land speculators and drug traffickers,” said Prof Bill Laurance, a co-author of the study. “By sharply increasing access to formerly remote natural areas, unregulated road development is triggering dramatic increases in environmental disruption due to activities such as logging, mining and land-clearing.”

A team of more than 200 trained volunteers and study authors performed the analysis over a combined 7,000 hours. They estimate 640,000 hours would be required to map all of the roads on Earth.

“There are some 25m kilometres of new paved roads expected by mid-century and 90% of all road construction is happening in developing nations, including many tropical and subtropical regions with exceptional biodiversity,” Laurance said.

“Worryingly, our new findings show that the extent and length of roads in the tropical Asia-Pacific is severely underestimated, with many roads being out of government control. In these findings, nature is the big loser.”

The researchers said their findings tally with earlier studies in Cameroon, Solomon Islands and Brazil, with road building almost always preceding local forest loss.

“Informally or illicitly constructed ghost roads can be bulldozed tracks in logged forests, roads in palm-oil plantations and other roads missing from existing road datasets for various reasons,” said Laurance.

Last year, the destruction of the world’s most pristine rainforests continued at a relentless rate despite efforts to slow the loss. While there were falls in Colombia and Brazil, the world lost an area nearly the size of Switzerland from previously undisturbed forests.

The survival of rainforests is essential to meeting the goals of the Paris agreement to limit global heating to 1.5C and the Kunming-Montreal framework on biodiversity.

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 new Irish taoiseach is to meet the Spanish prime minister to discuss their joint plan to recognise Palestine as a nation state and their attempts to force the EU to assess Israel’s human rights obligations as a condition of their trade deal with the bloc.

Pedro Sánchez, who is due to arrive in Dublin on Friday, is the first foreign premier Simon Harris will meet since his promotion to the office of the taoiseach this week.

In the months since the Hamas attacks of 7 October and Israel’s offensive in Gaza, Spain and Ireland have emerged as the EU’s most pro-Palestinian member states.

On Thursday in Brussels, Harris said he had made clear Ireland’s position on the need for an immediate ceasefire, during a meeting with the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen. He also reiterated its formal request, made with Spain two months ago, to review the Israel-EU association agreement.

“I believe the European Union must use all of the levers at its disposal [to protect the Palestinian people],” Harris said.

His remarks came as he faced sharp criticism from Israel for not mentioning the hostages held by Hamas in Gaza during his debut speech to the Irish parliament as taoiseach.

Harris – who was sworn in on Tuesday – spoke on Tuesday of “the unforgivable terrorist actions of Hamas on 7 October”, as well as “the disproportionate reaction of the Israeli government”.

But Israel’s foreign ministry, in a statement released on Thursday, criticised him for neglecting to mention the hostages still being held by Hamas.

It said Ireland was also “planning to award additional prizes to terrorism” by intervening in the case taken by South Africa at the international court of justice in which it accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, and by “the possible recognition of a Palestinian state in the future”.

“After the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust … there are those in Ireland who persist on being on the wrong side of history,” the statement added, alluding to the Hamas attacks on southern Israel, which killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians.

Since then, Israel’s military offensive has killed more than 33,000 people in Gaza, mostly civilians, and created an acute humanitarian crisis.

Ireland and Spain have written a letter to the European Commission chief asking for an “urgent review” of whether Israel is complying with its human rights obligations. Neither country has had a response yet, indicating the sensitivity of the issue.

On Thursday, Harris said Sánchez was a welcome guest to Dublin. “He’ll be the first head of government that I will welcome to government buildings, and I look forward to having the opportunity to discussing with Pedro the issue of the recognition of the state of Palestine and broader matters, including that letter,” he said.

Harris said Von der Leyen pointed out there was an opportunity at the next summit of EU foreign ministers “to discuss and consider these matters”, indicating a review was in the works.

“This is not about anything other than ensuring that international human rights law is respected. And that it is followed,” he said.

You have to admire the chutzpah of Apple TV+. They’ve chosen to make an eight-part miniseries out of the towering intellectual-slash-action figure of Benjamin Franklin – the son of a Boston candlemaker, who ran away to Philadelphia at 17 and rose to become one of the US’s founding fathers, via polymathic stints as a printer, publisher, inventor, writer and scientist. And they’ve based it on what was surely one of the least televisual accomplishments of his entire storied career.

Franklin (whose eponymous hero is played by Michael Douglas) is adapted from the historian Stacy Schiff’s 2005 book A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France and the Birth of America. It tells the story of the then 70-year-old statesman’s unofficial eight-year-long series of negotiations with the Gallic great and good, beginning in 1776 as America’s losses in the revolutionary war looked set to crush the young nation before it had fairly begun. Over to Paris hops Benjamin in the hope that the – well, let’s call them longstanding contretemps – between the French and the English would help him persuade the former to provide money, weapons and other supplies to the beleaguered seekers after independence.

His teenage grandson Temple (Noah Jupe) accompanies him – not his son, William, because he is a wellknown loyalist (and the less charming Frenchmen Franklin meets like to bring this shame up from time to time). Temple learns a lot about diplomacy and even more about fashion and fornication as he is taken under the wing of the Marquis de Lafayette (later to become a hero of révolutions américaine et française and more importantly, a star in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton), played by Théodore Pellerin. Metaphors about seduction and chess abound as grandfather tries to keep the boy’s focus on their real mission.

Unfortunately for the viewer, that mission is composed mostly of meetings. Some more clandestine than others, but mostly in virtually indistinguishable chateaux with virtually indistinguishable French ministers and rich men. Those we do learn to pick out – such as the secretly sympathetic foreign minister Comte de Vergennes (Thibault de Montalembert) and the wealthy merchant Chaumont (Olivier Claverie), who decides to help fund US independence for the trading opportunities that would result – too often get sidelined by lesser characters. We spend too much time with the pawns in this monumental chess game, when we would really rather be concentrating on the alliances and treacheries among the main pieces.

Franklin is dogged by the same slight but dreary sense of worthiness that attended Apple’s other recent foray into US period drama, the meticulous Manhunt (about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the conspiracy behind it, and – almost as a distasteful afterthought – the capture and trial of his killer, John Wilkes Booth). This time, though, it doesn’t even have the background pursuit of a murderer to keep things moving. Douglas is wholly convincing as the experienced but idiosyncratic statesman and 18th-century celebrity. And he has his usual undeniable presence (so compelling but always with a hint of creepiness at the edges). But Franklin himself was wearying by this point in his illustrious career and it feels as though we are concentrating on the wrong part of his astonishing story. And when Congress becomes frustrated with Franklin’s perceived lack of progress and send John Adams (Eddie Marsan) over instead, Douglas/Franklin has to join le comte and Chaumont towards the sidelines too.

Doubtless it plays slightly better in its native land, where Franklin’s more immediately interesting and understandable accomplishments are better known. It probably feels more like a wrong being righted as an underacknowledged period of the national hero’s life is given its due. Whether this is quite enough to bring the punters in and satisfy the expectations for entertainment they have – mostly rightly – come to expect from Apple TV+, I am not nearly so sure.