“Ideas are bulletproof”. Three words, stamped out in multicolour tiles above a doorway, represented one of the last vestiges of Hong Kong’s once vibrant literary spaces. On 31 March, Mount Zero, a beloved independent bookstore in Hong Kong, closed its doors for the final time. Hundreds of Hongkongers came to say goodbye.

The bookshop, which opened in 2018, took its slogan from the 2005 film V for Vendetta; the eponymous antihero’s Guy Fawkes mask occasionally appeared during Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests.

Mount Zero’s closure, which was announced after what the owner said was repeated inspections from the authorities, came as Hongkongers are coming to terms with a new reality of life with not one but two national security laws, which critics say are being used to crush dissent.

“People are quickly adjusting to the idea that the old days of public expression are no more,” says Bao Pu, the founder of New Century Press, a publishing house.

The pro-democracy protests that rocked Hong Kong in 2019 and 2020 feel like an increasingly distant memory. Where 2 million people once flooded the streets to oppose the government’s plans to establish closer links with mainland China, an individual can now be jailed for wearing a “seditious” T-shirt.

The quietening is largely because of a national security law that Beijing imposed on Hong Kong in June 2020. Authorities say the law was necessary to restore stability; critics say the vaguely worded crimes of secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces effectively criminalise dissent.

Considering the millions of people who took to the streets in 2019 and 2020, relatively few people have actually been arrested under the law: 292 as of 31 January.

“That is intentional,” says Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a professor of Chinese history at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink. More than 800 people have been arrested for rioting, while nearly 300 people have been targeted using a colonial-era sedition law. Protesters have been targeted with more than 100 different types of offences. “It is hard for people to realise how much things have changed when you see these divided-up numbers,” Wasserstrom says.

And now the authorities have another tool in their arsenal: Article 23, a homegrown national security law that covers newly defined acts of treason, espionage, theft of state secrets, sedition and foreign interference.

The government has been on the offensive in condemning what it calls “scaremongering” about the new legislation. A spokesperson said it “only targets an extremely small minority of people who endanger national security”.

The legislation has been decades in the making. It comes from a provision in Hong Kong’s 1997 Basic Law. But a previous attempt to implement it in 2003 prompted 500,000 people to protest, causing the bill to be shelved. In 2024, the streets were silent.

“The children of the [2003] protesters are now going to suffer through what their parents fought against,” says Mark Sabah, director of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation.

Both of those generations have been swept up in a mass trial of pro-democracy figures who are waiting – most of them in jail cells – for judges hand-picked by the chief executive to decide their guilt or innocence. The prosecution of the Hong Kong 47, as they’ve come to be known, includes well-known figures such as Joshua Wong and Benny Tai and has been extensively criticised by foreign governments, human rights groups and the defendants’ lawyers.

First arrested in 2020, they were accused of plotting to bring down the government by holding informal pre-election primaries. The formal charge is “conspiracy to subvert state power”. The arrests themselves were labelled politically motivated.

The 10-month trial ended in December. A verdict would normally be expected within six months, but given the complexity and size of the proceedings – 16 of the 47 pleaded not guilty, with the remainder awaiting sentencing – many expect it to be delayed. The accused have already spent more than 1,000 days behind bars and face sentences of up to life in prison.

And while observers wait for that verdict, there are also concerns about the ongoing trial of Jimmy Lai, a British citizen and former medial mogul who has been detained since December 2020. His trial for colluding with foreign forces is expected to end in May, having been plagued by accusations that it is politically motivated and that one of the witnesses was tortured. The 76-year-old faces spending the rest of his life in prison.

Outside the courts, the government is keen to give the impression that life continues as normal. There are dozens of major events planned for the first half of this year, a lineup the government says will attract locals and tourists to “participate and experience Hong Kong’s unique glamour”. More than 75,000 people attended this year’s Art Basel, according to its organisers, despite calls to boycott the art fair because of concerns about censorship.

And despite the widespread feeling among activists that Hong Kong is becoming like any other Chinese city, differences remain. The territory still has an open internet. It is still possible to buy materials that are banned in mainland China, although the number of vendors is dwindling. Bao’s New Century Press recently published a biography of a senior Chinese Communist party official who played an important role in the Cultural Revolution. A Chinese buyer despaired when the book was confiscated on three separate occasions as he tried to take it into the mainland.

“And so far nobody has kidnapped me,” Bao jokes. “Not yet.”

But the chipping away of civil society continues. On 10 April, a representative from the NGO Reporters Without Borders was detained for several hours at Hong Kong International airport and then deported, as she attempted to travel to the city to monitor Lai’s trial. In March, Radio Free Asia, a US-funded media outlet, closed its Hong Kong bureau, citing fears for staff safety because of Article 23. A journalist at the South China Morning Post went to Beijing in October for a defence conference and disappeared. At least 90 NGOs and 22 media groups have closed since the 2020 national security law, according to the Centre for Asian Law at Georgetown University.

“If we really want Hong Kong to go back to a prosperous, safe and free city, I think we need to have a rapprochement, a dialogue with some people,” says Emily Lau, a veteran pro-democracy politician and former legislator. “Most people here accept that we are part of China. They’re not going to use violence to overthrow the government, but they would like the freedom to express their views … like they have been doing for decades.”

On 11 April, Mount Zero posted photographs of its final day on Instagram. “People came one after another, a few young people asking each other, what exactly are we going to do?” the caption reads. “No one knew the specific answer.”

Additional research by Chi Hui Lin

Donald Trump and the House speaker, Mike Johnson, plan to push for a bill to ban non-citizens from voting, the latest step by Republicans to falsely claim migrants are coming to the country and casting ballots.

Voting when a person is not eligible – for instance if they lack US citizenship – is already illegal under federal law. It is unclear what the bill Johnson and the former president will discuss in their Friday press conference at Mar-a-Lago will do to alter that. But it is one more way for the former president to focus on election security and to ding the Biden administration over the situation at the US-Mexico border, a key issue for likely Republican voters this November.

Like the other claims Trump makes about the 2020 election being stolen, the talking point about migrant voting does not have facts to back it up.

There is no evidence of widespread non-citizen voting, nor are there even many examples of individual instances of the practice, despite strenuous efforts in some states to find these cases. A large study by the Brennan Center of the 2016 election found that just 0.0001% of votes across 42 jurisdictions, with 23.5m votes, were suspected to be non-citizens voting, 30 incidents in total.

One review in Georgia found about 1,600 instances of non-citizens registering to vote from 1997 to 2022. In these instances, safeguards in the process worked: none of these attempts led to someone being allowed to register, because they did not submit proof of citizenship needed to be added to the voter rolls.

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank, has a database of voter fraud cases across the country, which, according to the Washington Post, includes just 85 cases of non-citizen voting since 2002.

Some of the isolated instances of non-citizens voting in the last decade have involved people who were confused about their eligibility and did not do so intentionally.

In general, people who are undocumented avoid scenarios that could leave them vulnerable to deportation, such as voting illegally.

The lack of prosecutions over migrant voting has not stopped Trump from making claims on the campaign trail that it will somehow steal the election from him, or that it has already happened in other elections in which he was on the ballot.

“I think they really are doing it because they want to sign these people up to vote. I really do,” Trump said in Iowa in January. “They can’t speak a word of English for the most part, but they’re signing them up.”

Trump is not the only one spreading this falsehood – it’s part of a longstanding Republican line of attack on immigration and Democrats. Now, the myth is also being pushed by Elon Musk, the owner of X, and the prominent Trump-aligned figure Cleta Mitchell, who has been circulating a two-page memo laying out “the threat of non-citizen voting in 2024”, according to reporting by NPR, which obtained the memo.

Because this is a concern Republicans consistently bring up, some states have added new laws to try to remove non-citizens from voter rolls or undertaken audits of their voters to assess citizenship status.

But, voting rights advocates have warned, these often run the risk of ensnaring naturalized citizens and other people who are eligible to vote and booting them from the voter rolls. One attempt in Texas in 2019 led the then secretary of state to send letters to nearly 100,000 people, including US citizens who were erroneously warned they might not be eligible to vote.

Widespread voter fraud, in general, does not exist in the US. There are instances of voter fraud prosecuted across the US every election, but even statewide taskforces have been unable to uncover large numbers of cases, and certainly nothing close to the scale that could swing elections.

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.