More than 200 of the nation’s hazardous chemical plants will be mandated to reduce toxic emissions linked to cancer, the Biden administration announced on Tuesday.

The long-awaited rule finalized by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will strengthen protections for communities living near industrial sites, especially along the Gulf coast.

The new update focuses on ethylene oxide, used to produce antifreeze, pesticides and sterilizing agents, as well as chloroprene, which is used to make synthetic rubber for shoes and wetsuits.

“President Biden believes every community in this country deserves to breathe clean air,” said the EPA administrator, Michael Regan, highlighting communities such as St John the Baptist parish in Louisiana. “We promised to listen to folks that are suffering from pollution and act to protect them. Today we deliver on that promise with strong final standards to slash pollution, reduce cancer risk and ensure cleaner air for nearby communities.”

Last time the government updated the pollution limits from chemical plants was 2006. The strengthened rule would lower toxic pollutants by 6,200 tons a year, and slash ethylene oxide and chloroprene emissions by 80%. The new update under the Clean Air Act would also require fence-line monitoring of six toxic air pollutants: ethylene oxide, chloroprene, vinyl chloride, benzene, 1,3-butadiene and ethylene dichloride.

“This shows the administration’s commitment to the issues of environmental justice,” said Adam Kron, a senior attorney with Earthjustice. “This rule will reduce a lot of hazardous air pollutants. There will be less cancer based on these emissions, there will be lives saved.”

There is only one facility in the US that produces the pollutant chloroprene, which is operated by the Japanese chemicals giant Denka and is situated in St John the Baptist parish in the heart of the heavily industrialised region in Louisiana known as “Cancer Alley”.

The EPA lists chloroprene as a likely human carcinogen and has long suggested a safe lifetime exposure limit of 0.2 micrograms per cubic metre. The agency has been monitoring the air around the Denka facility since 2016 and readings have regularly exceeded this limit by dozens of times.

Denka, a Japanese company that bought the former DuPont rubber-making plant in 2015, said it “vehemently opposes” the EPA’s latest action.

If elegance is your thing then consider the ash-black slug. Its nightly forays through the forest in search of fungi are the epitome of grace, a stately glide not only along the woodland floor but up and along the mossy branches of trees.

If size is your thing, then the ash-black slug must get your vote. Britain’s biggest slug is one of the largest land slugs in the world. The ash-black slug can grow up to 30cm (11.8in) in length, although most measure up at a still impressive 10-20cm.

This magnificent gastropod (meaning “belly-foot”) is a keeled slug with a pale-coloured ridge running along its back contrasting with its dark-grey colouration. It has a pale stripe along its foot as well.

Slugs are disliked for devouring gardeners’ lettuces but the ash-black slug is not a garden pest but an ancient woodland dweller. Here it feeds on fungi, algae and lichen and lives for an unusually long time, up to five years.

The ash-black slug’s elegance in motion turns into something stranger when it is mating time.

Ash-black slugs are hermaphrodites, so each individual is male and female at the same time. They can reproduce alone but prefer to find a partner, attracting them with a trail of scented slime as they glide up into the trees.

When they find a partner, the pair perform a twirling dance, eventually suspending themselves with mucus from a branch. A striking pale blue corkscrew-like appendage unfurls from the side of each slug’s head. Each corkscrew is actually its penis, and it is as long as the slug’s body.

The slugs pass a package of sperm to each other, and fertilise it themselves. Eggs are laid in the damp woodland floor and young emerge anytime from autumn to spring.

African savannahs may have their “big five” charismatic beasts but on Dartmoor national park there is a “little five” including the ash-black slug. The wet woodlands on the fringes of Dartmoor are a stronghold for the creature.

Threats include natural ones such as the blue ground beetle, which is Britain’s largest ground beetle. Its 3cm size is tiny compared with the slug but it ferociously attacks the bigger animal.

The ash-black slug is not endangered but unfortunately appears to be in decline, possibly because increased air pollution is reducing the ubiquity of sensitive lichens that are a key part of its diet.

So do different, vote slug.

• Welcome to the Guardian’s UK invertebrate of the year competition. Every day between 2 April and 12 April we’ll be profiling one of the incredible invertebrates that live in and around the UK. Let us know which invertebrates you think we should be including here. And 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.

Weak government climate policies violate fundamental human rights, the European court of human rights has ruled.

In a landmark decision on one of three major climate cases, the first such rulings by an international court, the ECHR raised judicial pressure on governments to stop filling the atmosphere with gases that make extreme weather more violent.

The court’s top bench ruled that Switzerland had violated rights of a group of older Swiss women to family life, but threw out a French mayor’s case against France and that of a group of young Portuguese people against 32 European countries.

“It feels like a mixed result because two of the cases were inadmissible,” said Corina Heri, a law researcher at the University of Zürich. “But actually it’s a huge success.”

The court, which calls itself “the conscience of Europe”, found that Switzerland had failed to comply with its duties to stop climate change. It also set out a path for organisations to bring further cases on behalf of applicants.

The Swiss verdict opens up all 46 members of the Council of Europe to similar cases in national courts that they are likely to lose.

Joie Chowdhury, an attorney at the Centre for International Environmental Law campaign group, said the judgment left no doubt that the climate crisis was a human rights crisis. “We expect this ruling to influence climate action and climate litigation across Europe and far beyond,” she said.

The facts of the three cases varied widely, but they all hinged on the question of whether government inaction on climate change violated fundamental human rights. Some of the governments argued that the cases should not be admitted, and that climate policy should be the subject of national governments rather than international courts.

The plaintiffs attending the hearing in the court in Strasbourg, some as young as 12, celebrated after a member of a panel of 17 judges read out the verdicts. The climate activist Greta Thunberg joined a gathering outside the court before the hearing to encourage faster action.

The KlimaSeniorinnen, a group of 2,400 older Swiss women, told the court that several of their rights were being violated. Because older women are more likely to die in heatwaves – which have become hotter and more common because of fossil fuels – they argued that Switzerland do its share to stop the planet heating by the Paris agreement target of 1.5C (2.7F) above preindustrial levels.

The court ruled that Swiss authorities had not acted in time to come up with a good enough strategy to cut emissions. It also found the applicants had not had appropriate access to justice in Switzerland.

But it also rejected the cases of four individual applicants who had joined the KlimaSeniorinnen.

“I’m very happy,” said Nicole Barbry, 70, a member of the KlimaSeniorinnen who had come to Strasbourg. “It’s good that they’re finally listening to us.”

The Portuguese children and young people – who because of their age will see greater climate damage than previous generations – argued that climate-fuelled disasters such as wildfires and smoke threatened their right to life and discriminated against them based on their age.

The court did not admit the case, deciding that the applicants could not bring cases against countries other than Portugal and adding that they had not pursued legal avenues in Portugal against the government.

“Their [the Swiss] win is a win for us, too,” said Sofia Oliveira, a 19-year-old applicant in the Portuguese case. “And a win for everyone.”

The French case, brought by the MEP Damien Carême, argued that France’s failure to do enough to stop climate change violated his rights to life and privacy and family life. Carême filed the case when he was the mayor of Grand-Synthe, a coastal town vulnerable to flooding. The court did not admit the case because Carême no longer lives there.

The ECHR rejects about 90% of all applications it receives as inadmissible but fast-tracked the three climate cases to its top bench because of their urgency. It delayed hearings on six more climate cases to get a result on the rulings on Tuesday.

The rulings will influence three other international courts that are examining the role of government climate policy on human rights.

Charlotte Blattner, a researcher at the University of Berne who specialises in climate law, said the court had delivered a bold judgment in favour of a viable future. “The nature and gravity of the threat of climate change – and the urgency to effectively respond to it – require that governments can and will have to be held accountable for their lack of adequate action,” she said.

Opinion on Stoney Middleton is divided. Henry Salt, an animal rights campaigner and friend of Gandhi, relied on the village for his wildflower fix when he lived near Chesterfield. He regularly walked seven miles across the moors to get to Stoney’s dramatic gorge, the nearest limestone within his reach. But it was not, he decided, “one of the pleasantest of Peakland villages”. Though “naturally beautiful”, he wrote, it was also “sadly deformed”.

Knowing something of its rich human history – the highwaymen, thwarted lovers, crystal meth cooks and Hollywood stars – I reckon the village can look after itself. Approaching Middleton Dale, on the other hand, a little to the west, I could appreciate Salt’s perspective. Centuries of quarrying tore chunks from this valley, and blasting out a turnpike in the early 19th century bequeathed the village a busy main road that must annoy those living near it. (In better news, the turnpike’s tollbooth, now a listed building, has been a notable fish and chip shop for the best part of a hundred years.)

Nature has done her best to heal the damage. When the fish and chip shop opened in 1926, the dale’s scars were more obvious. Now they’re cloaked in scrubby woodland, which in early summer is warmly vibrant. This spring, though, after weeks of unseasonable cold, upper branches have remained bare, while trunks have been wreathed in dark ivy, only somewhat lightened by emerging drifts of dog’s mercury – classic ground cover on a limestone woodland floor. Dropping into the dale from above can provoke a chill foreboding as the walls close in.

Today, though, the dale seemed lit up. Rafts of rock cress, having found a toehold in cracks and on ledges on the gorge’s rock faces, were now in blossom, smothering the bulging limestone buttresses with drifts of white flowers. It was so startling that I pulled off the road to marvel at this glorious transformation. The plant’s leaves were freshly green, snag-toothed and narrowing to the stem, the flowers’ cruciform petals arranged around lemon yellow anthers, the whole arrangement filling the void above my head to light the way.

England could produce 13 times more renewable energy than it does now, while using less than 3% of its land, analysis has found.

Onshore wind and solar projects could provide enough electricity to power all the households in England two and a half times over, the research by Exeter University, commissioned by Friends of the Earth (FoE), suggested.

Currently, about 17 gigawatt hours of electricity comes from homegrown renewables on land. But there is potential for 130 GWh to come from solar panels, and 96GWh from onshore wind.

These figures are reached by only taking into account the most suitable sites, excluding national parks, areas of outstanding natural beauty, higher grade agricultural land and heritage sites.

Some commentators have argued that solar farms will reduce the UK’s ability to grow its own food, but the new analysis suggests there is plenty of land that can be used without impairing agricultural production. More land is now taken up by golf courses than solar farms, and developers can be required to enhance biodiversity through simple measures such as maintaining hedgerows and ponds.

Onshore windfarms were in effect banned in 2015 by the then prime minister, David Cameron. Rishi Sunak last year claimed to make moves towards lifting the ban, through small changes to the planning regulations, but campaigners say they were ineffectual and real planning reform is needed. No plans were submitted for new windfarms in England last year, and few new developments are coming forward, despite high gas prices, rising bills and onshore wind being the cheapest form of electricity generation.

The calculations of the land needed exclude rooftop solar panels. Ministers have resisted calls for solar panels to be made mandatory on new-build housing. Kitting out a new-build home with renewables, high-grade insulation and other low-carbon features costs less than £5,000 for a housing developer, but retrofitting it to the same standard costs about £20,000, with the cost borne by the householder. Housing developers are among the largest donors to the Conservative party.

FoE has produced a map that shows potential sites for onshore wind and solar generation. North Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and the East Riding of Yorkshire show particularly good potential. The sites total about 374,900 hectares (926,400 acres), or about 2.9% of the available land in England.

Tony Bosworth, climate campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said: “Unleashing the UK’s immense potential to generate cheap, clean homegrown renewables is essential to bring down our energy bills for good and meeting the UK’s vital international target to reduce carbon emissions by two-thirds by 2030. But the current government’s record on boosting our energy security through renewables is woefully inadequate and has left the UK lagging far behind in the global race to a zero-carbon economy. Meanwhile, Labour is looking increasingly shaky on climate after rolling back its planned investment in green growth.”

He called on all the main parties to commit to lifting restrictions on onshore windfarms in England; for local authorities to identify suitable areas for renewable development; for upgrades to the electricity grid to enable the vast expansion of renewable energy; and for tougher requirements on renewable developers to protect biodiversity.

Local communities can also be helped to benefit from renewable developments, for instance through being offered cheaper power or a share in the development.

Bosworth said: “We urgently need our political leaders to pull their heads out of the sand and produce a strong, ambitious and fair new climate plan that lifts the barriers to onshore wind and solar power and secures investment in the infrastructure needed to support the switch to renewables. These are win-win policies for creating long-term jobs, boosting our ailing economy and protecting our planet for future generations.”

A Department for Energy Security and Net Zero spokesperson said: “Onshore wind power capacity has almost quadrupled since 2010 and renewables account for nearly half of our electricity, up from just 7%. We’ve also streamlined planning rules in England to make it easier for councils to identify suitable land for onshore wind. Our latest renewables auction has its largest ever budget of £1bn, including a record £800m pot for offshore wind, to further strengthen our world-leading clean energy sector, supporting a range of renewables from onshore wind to solar.”

The world’s biggest economies have continued to finance the expansion of fossil fuels in poor countries to the tune of billions of dollars, despite their commitments on the climate.

The G20 group of developed and developing economies, and the multilateral development banks they fund, put $142bn (£112bn) into fossil fuel developments overseas from 2020 to 2022, according to estimates compiled by the campaigning groups Oil Change International (OCI) and Friends of the Earth US.

Canada, Japan and South Korea were the biggest sources of such finance in the three years studied, and gas received more funding than either coal or oil.

The G7 group of biggest economies, to which Japan and Canada belong, pledged in 2022 to halt overseas funding of fossil fuels. But while funding for coal has rapidly diminished, finance for oil and gas projects has continued at a strong pace.

Some of the money is going to other developed economies, including Australia, but much of it is to the developing world. However, richer middle income countries still receive more finance than the poorest.

The most recent G7 pledge, in the study, is to phase out all overseas fossil fuel funding by the end of 2022. The OCI study concentrates on the period from the beginning of the fiscal year of 2020-21 for each country, to the end of the fiscal year of 2022-23.

However, the researchers also found that Japan had continued to make new fossil fuel investments overseas in the past few weeks, up to mid-March 2024, exploiting loopholes in its promise to end fossil fuel funding.

The World Bank provided about $1.2bn a year to fossil fuels over the three-year period, of which about two-thirds went to gas projects.

The US, Germany and Italy also provided billions in funding a year to overseas fossil fuel projects before the end of 2022-23, according to the report published on Tuesday. The UK supplied about $600m a year on average.

Canada supplied just under $11bn a year on average, in the 2020-22 period studied, while South Korea put forward $10bn and Japan about $7bn.

Over the same three-year period, the G20 economies put about $104bn into clean energy developments overseas, according to the report.

Claire O’Manique, a public finance analyst at OCI, said: “While rich countries continue to drag their feet and claim they can’t afford to fund a globally just energy transition, countries like Canada, Korea, Japan and the US appear to have no shortage of public funds for climate-wrecking fossil fuels.

“We must continue to hold wealthy countries accountable for their role in funding the climate crisis, and demand they move first and fastest on a fossil fuel phase-out, to stop funding fossil fuels, and that they pay their fair share of a globally just transition, loss and damage and adaptation finance.”

Makiko Arima, a senior finance campaigner at OCI, called on Japan particularly to stop supporting fossil fuels. Japan has lobbied behind the scenes to stop G7 countries adopting a stronger stance on fossil fuels, and in favour of some key projects.

Arima said: “Japan is derailing the transition to renewable energy across Asia and globally. Despite its G7 commitment to end fossil fuel financing, its public financial institutions like the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC) continue to support new fossil fuel projects, including the Scarborough gasfield in Australia and gas power plants in Mexico.

“JBIC is currently investigating a claim that it failed to follow its social and environmental safeguards in developing the Philippines’ first LNG [liquefied natural gas] terminal in Batangas. Japan needs to put people and planet over profit, and shift its finances from fossil fuels to renewables.”

The director general of the National Trust, Hilary McGrady, is correct when she says that “the benefit of ensuring access to nature is plain to see but there is unequal access to it” (Three-quarters of children want more time in nature, says National Trust, 1 April). Sadly, evidence shows that this situation is also reflected in our schools.

Over the last 20 years, Ofsted reports have shown that school fieldwork has been declining. And a survey of geography teachers in 2023 indicated that since Covid, up to 40% of secondary schools may have cut their provision of fieldwork. This trend affects smaller schools and those serving disadvantaged pupils the hardest.

A combination of costs, Covid catch-up and other administrative hurdles are limiting the work of many geography teachers who want to offer their pupils high-quality fieldwork.

So as well as trips that might take place farther afield, at the Geographical Association we are supporting teachers to explore local, low-cost fieldwork – whether investigating carbon storage in a local wood, soil infiltration in the school grounds or the health of a local stream.

Regardless of the weather, it is in the field where young people encounter the messy, complicated real world and develop a deeper understanding of how our human and natural worlds interact. It will be this understanding that is essential if young people are to become the future custodians of our environment.
Steve Brace
Chief executive, Geographical Association

The “15-minute city” has become a toxic phrase in the UK, so controversial that the city of Oxford has stopped using it and the transport minister has spread discredited conspiracy theories about the urban planning scheme.

But while fake news spreads about officials enacting “climate lockdowns” to “imprison” people in their neighbourhoods, across the Channel, Parisians are enjoying their new 15-minute neighbourhoods. The French are stereotyped for their love of protest, so the lack of uproar around the redesign of their capital is in stark contrast to the frenzied response in Oxford.

Carlos Moreno, a jovial and owlish professor at the Sorbonne University, came up with the phrase “15-minute cities” and has been quietly getting on setting them up in Paris. He has a bemused air when asked about how his modest proposal for a more enjoyable urban life has caused such vile conspiracy theories, and takes it all in good humour despite the death threats and other abuse he has received.

Moreno says: “We don’t have the conspiracy mongers, because it is impossible to say in Paris that Moreno wants to create a new Paris lockdown. This is impossible to say that I am Pol Pot or that I am Stalin – because we live in Paris, I can invite guests to visit me and they see this is impossible.

“We have created a lot of new districts and they have been popular. The opposition in Paris is not the same that you have in the UK, because nobody can say in Paris we want to create an open jail – this is evident that it is not the case. We have beautiful new green spaces and areas to live.”

Moreno has been working with the Paris mayor, Anne Hidalgo, to make its arrondissements more prosperous and pleasurable to live in. He says there are 50 15-minute cities up and running, with more to come.

“We have an outstanding mayor, who is committed to tackling climate change. She said the 15-minute city will be the backbone for creating a new urban plan. The last time Paris had a new urban plan was in 2000, so this road map will be relevant for the next 10 or 15 years at least,” he explains.

“I said to Hidalgo, the 15-minute city is not an urban traffic plan. The 15-minute city is a radical change of our life.”

Moreno has written a new book, The 15-Minute City, about his theory, which is being implemented in cities from Milan to Buenos Aires. In it, he explains his theory, which is quite simple. When many modern cities were designed, they were for men to work in. Their wives and family stayed in the suburbs, while the workers drove in. So they have been designed around the car, and segmented into different districts: the financial district (think Canary Wharf), the cultural area (for example, the West End) and then the suburbs. They have also often been segmented into wealthier and poorer areas; in the less prosperous area to the north-east of Paris, Moreno says up to 40% of homes are social housing. In the wealthier west of Paris, this drops below 5%.

“My idea is to break this triple segregation,” he says.

Moreno thinks this segregation leads to a poorer quality of life, one designed around outdated “masculine desires”, so his proposal is to mix this up, creating housing developments with a mixture of social, affordable and more expensive housing so different social strata can intermingle. He also wants to bring schools and children’s areas closer to work and home, so caregivers can more easily travel around and participate in society. He also thinks office should generally be closer to homes, as well as cultural venues, doctors, shops and other amenities. Shared spaces such as parks help the people living in the areas to form communities.

An example of this is the new Îlot Saint-Germain development in one of Paris’s most chic neighbourhoods. It is situated in the old defence ministry, and flats with sweeping views of the Eiffel Tower go for a social rent of €600 (£515) a month.

Moreno says there was some “aggressive” opposition to this, not from conspiracy theorists but from wealthy Parisians who did not want lower-income people living in their district.

“It was a scandal for the richest to have the working class living here in the 7th arrondissement. They said we will have a reduction in the price of our real estate, there will be more crime. The local mayor of the arrondissement opposed it. But now, it is so, so beautiful with increased quality of life, the development has won awards, it is a desirable place to live.”

The city has also been regenerating the Clichy-Batignolles district in the less prosperous north-west of Paris to have a green, village-like feel. About a quarter of it is taken up by green space and a new park.

“As a 15-minute district, it is incredible,” says Moreno. “It is beautiful, it has proximity, social mixing, 50% of the inhabitants live in social housing, 25% in middle class and 25% own their homes.”

Many of his proposals are dear to the culture of the French. In a large, wealthy metropolis such as Paris, it is easy for small shops to be choked out by large chains. The city of Paris, in its new plan, has put measures in to stop this.

“We have a commercial subsidiary of the city of Paris which has put €200m into managing retail areas in the city with rates below the speculative real estate market. This is specifically to rent to small shops, artisans, bakeries, bookstores. This is not only a good investment because it creates a good economic model, but it keeps the culture of the city of Paris,” says Moreno. This is in keeping with the 15-minute city plan as it keeps local shops close to housing, so people can stroll down from their apartment to pick up a fresh baguette from an independent baker. “It creates a more vibrant neighbourhood,” he adds.

Hidalgo inevitably faced a large backlash from the motorist lobby. Stroll down the banks of the Seine today in the new protected parks and outdoor bars, and it is hard to imagine that it was recently a traffic-choked highway. But with the guidance of Moreno, this became a reality.

In London, there has been a furore around the expansion of the ultra-low emissions zone in London, and attempts to pedestrianise Oxford Street, the city’s busiest shopping district, have failed. So how did Hidalgo do it?

“The drivers were radically very noisy, saying that we wanted to attack their individual rights, their freedom. The motorist lobby said she cannot be elected without our support, that they are very powerful in France,” Moreno says. But Hidalgo called their bluff: “She often says ‘I was elected two times, with the opposition of the automotive lobby’. In 2024, nobody requests to open again the highway on the Seine, no one wants the Seine urban park to be open for cars.”

In his book, Moreno talks about the concept of a “giant metronome of the city” which causes people to rush around. He wants to slow this down, to allow people to reclaim their “useful time” back from commuting and travelling to shops and cultural areas.

Moreno says this is happening with or without him; after the Covid crisis many offices are selling up their large spaces in the financial district and moving closer to residential areas. People are choosing jobs they can work remotely from or that are situated closer to their homes.

“I bet for the next year, for the next decade, we will have this new transformation of corporation real estate,” he says. “Businesses are choosing multi-use areas with housing, schools, shops for their office space now. The time of the skyscrapers in the masculine design is finished.”

The 15-Minute City is out on 7 May..

Lobbyists for the world’s biggest meat companies have lauded a better than expected outcome at Cop28, which they say left them “excited” and “enthusiastic” for their industry’s prospects.

US livestock bosses reflected on the conference’s implication for their sector on a virtual panel, fresh from “sharing US agriculture’s story” at the climate summit in December.

Campaigners and climate scientists had hoped the summit, which was billed as a “Food Cop” because of its focus on farming, would result in governments agreeing to ambitious action to transform food systems in line with the goals of the Paris climate agreement.

But while more than 130 governments vowed to tackle agriculture’s carbon footprint, a slew of announcements and initiatives failed to set binding targets, or to broach the question of reducing herds of ruminant livestock such as cattle and sheep, which are agriculture’s largest driver of emissions.

In the online discussion, which was hosted by the trade publication Feedstuffs, meat lobbyist groups made it clear they felt Cop28 resulted in a positive outcome.

The three representatives all said there had been widespread recognition at the Dubai summit that agriculture was a “solution” to the climate crisis, despite livestock accounting for more than 30% of anthropogenic methane emissions.

Outcomes at the summit were characterised as “far more positive … than we anticipated” by Constance Cullman, the president of the Animal Feed Industry Association (AFIA), a US lobby group whose members include some of the world’s biggest meat and animal feed producers.

She added that this was the first time she had “felt that optimistic” after a “large international gathering like this one”.

Cullman also praised the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO)’s “Global Roadmap” to tackle the climate crisis and end hunger, which she described as “music to our ears”, saying she particularly welcomed the report’s emphasis on “production and efficiency” over “looking at reduced consumption of animal protein”.

Academics described the FAO report’s failure to recommend cuts to meat-eating as “bewildering” in a March submission to the journal Nature Food.

According to a March paper, which surveyed more than 200 environmental and agricultural scientists, meat and dairy production must be drastically reduced – and fast – to align with the Paris agreement.

The report concludes that global emissions from livestock production need to decline by 50% during the next six years, with “high-producing and consuming nations” taking the lead.

The FAO said in a statement that its roadmap took a “balanced” approach to animal agriculture, saying that its report had “acknowledged the importance of livestock for poor people in traditional agrifood systems” and referred to the need for dietary shifts.

“We believe that some comments on the change in diets and the role of animal products in them are either misinformed because people have not properly read the roadmap report, or deliberately disingenuous for the sake of feeding vested interests narratives,” it said.

Another industry panellist, Eric Mittenthal, had attended Cop28 on behalf of lobby group the Meat Institute (formerly the North American Meat Institute, or Nami). He emphasised the importance of sharing the message that animal agriculture was necessary for nutrition and sustainability.

The Meat Institute represents hundreds of corporations in the meat supply chain, including the meat sector’s three largest companies, JBS, Cargill and Tyson Foods, which together have emissions equal to a major oil company on the scale of BP or Shell.

Sophie Nodzenski, a senior campaign strategist on food and agriculture at Greenpeace International, said it was “unsurprising” that industrial meat producers felt positively about Cop28’s outcomes “given that their interests essentially took the central stage there”.

The number of lobbyists for big meat and dairy companies tripled at Cop28, as revealed by DeSmog and the Guardian, amid rising scrutiny of the food sector’s climate impact, while smallholders and family farmers at the summit said they felt “drowned out”.

“Cop28 has rightly put the spotlight on the link between food production and the climate crisis, but the sheer number of Big Ag lobbyists present gave them an outsized influence,” Nodzenski said.

Documents seen by DeSmog and the Guardian show that the meat industry was poised to “tell its story and tell it well” before and during the Dubai conference, which it described as a “notoriously challenging environment”.

Cop28 had promised to increase action on food systems transformation, but campaigners and experts said its declarations and reports fell far short of what was needed.

On the second day of the summit, the leaders’ declaration on sustainable food systems, which was signed by more than 130 countries, committed to food systems transformation.

But while it was praised for moving food up the global climate agenda, the International Panel of Experts on Food Systems co-chair Lim Li Ching criticised the declaration for its “vague language” and noted the lack of any reference to “reducing overconsumption of industrially produced meat”.

The long-awaited FAO roadmap followed. While it proposed a 25% reduction in livestock methane emissions by 2030 to put the agriculture sector on track to reach global climate goals, it again failed to explicitly recommend a cut to meat and dairy consumption.

A reduction in “excess meat eating” – which is prevalent in high-income countries such as the US and UK – is a key recommendation of major scientific bodies, and has appeared in reports from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the recommendations of the EAT-Lancet commission.

The third Cop28 agreement that failed to tackle food system emissions was the “Global Stocktake”, in which agriculture was mentioned only in the context of adaptation to climate impacts, not mitigation, despite food systems making up around a third of greenhouse gas emissions overall.

Jamie Burr, a representative of the US Pork Board who spoke on Feedstuff’s panel, said he was “excited to see” the roadmap recognise efficiency as the best pathway to emissions reduction, going on to describe US agriculture as the “most efficient in the world”.

Industrial meat companies emphasise emissions intensity and efficiency over absolute cuts to emissions, or dietary shifts that would lead to a drop in production.

This is especially true in the US, where livestock methane emissions as reported to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change have increased by about 5% since 2010 according to the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, and have increased about 20% since 1990.

Cullman also welcomed the FAO’s proposals – including its plug for the role new technologies could play in bringing down methane emissions.

Numerous assessments have found that there is a role for efficiency and innovation to cut livestock emissions, although many technologies are unproven at scale. But to be effective, they should also be accompanied by a shift away from meat in diets, and, researchers caution, should not be used to delay demand-side policy.

Scrutiny of the FAO’s relationship with industry has grown in recent years. Last autumn, former officials said their work on livestock emissions had been censored because of pressure from industry and diplomats from large producer countries. Experts have called on the FAO for greater transparency, querying the lack of authors on the roadmap.

The FAO said: “The Global Roadmap has been developed with reference to and based on existing scientific and peer-reviewed publications. In no stage of the development of the roadmap were livestock industries consulted, or any inputs received from them.”

AFIA, Nami and the US Pork Board did not respond to a request for comment.

The meat lobbyists, whose industry enjoyed many routes to influence at the summit, also celebrated the cut-through of their message that industrial animal agriculture has an important role to play in addressing global hunger.

Cullman said that she was pleased to see there had been a “strong recognition” at Cop28 that animal products “had a real role in meeting the nutritional needs of folks around the globe”.

Burr added that Cops provided an opportunity for US agriculture groups to demonstrate how they “feed the world”, while Mittenthal said the Meat Institute had showcased how agriculture can be a “solution” for “healthy people and a healthy planet”.

A spokesperson for the Global Alliance for the Future of Food said the argument that industrial agriculture is “critical to address hunger” is one of the greatest “myths” shared by the industry.

As well as helping to drive global heating, which is undermining food security worldwide, the meat industry is also the leading driver of deforestation and ecosystem loss, while the overconsumption of animal products has been linked to a greater likelihood of developing illnesses such as heart disease.

The eyes have it. If you’re a sucker for a charismatic gaze, an impressive name and great rarity, then the distinguished jumping spider should get your vote.

But this acrobatic, spectacular-looking tiny spider with two large black forward-facing eyes is not merely a pretty face. It is a powerful environmentalist and mighty representative of the value of often-derided, seemingly desolate post-industrial landscapes.

The spider was only discovered in Britain in 2003 and is today only found in two locations: West Thurrock marshes and Swanscombe peninsula. Both are “brownfield” sites in the Thames Gateway, the largest area designated for new development in Europe.

Politicians from both right and left are queueing up to build on brownfield because it seems – and sounds – so much better to place new buildings on the footprint of old rather than concrete over the luscious greenbelt.

But life isn’t that simple, and most brownfield sites, particularly those in the warm, dry south-east, are far more biodiverse than farmers’ fields. Some are the most biodiverse sanctuaries in the land. The abandoned oil refinery at Canvey Wick, for instance, is home to nearly 2,000 invertebrate species. Many thrive because the old concrete and rubble create dry, sheltered and warm microclimates where species at the northern edge of their natural range can thrive.

The distinguished jumping spider is one such denizen of the rubble, liking old coal heaps and dry and salty terrain where relatively few plants survive.

Its name was given during a Victorian dispute over similar species. Like the other 37 jumping spider species found in Britain, it does not spin webs but uses its excellent eyesight (the best of any invertebrate except for cephalopods) and ability to leap 10 times its body length to catch prey. The male of the species also uses its keen eyes to assess the receptiveness of females during their mating dance, and making a quick exit to avoid getting eaten if his dance does not go down well.

The spider has been at the forefront of opposition to ambitious plans to build Britain’s “Disneyland” on Swanscombe peninsula and although plans have been withdrawn, the spider’s home and site of special scientific interest (SSSI) is still earmarked for development.

So vote distinguished, vote for treasuring our smallest creatures, and vote for leaving some brownfield sites alone. The spider’s success shows that our restless abandonment of yesterday’s industries opens up niches that wild nature is always ready to rapidly exploit. Which is well worth celebrating.

• Welcome to the Guardian’s UK invertebrate of the year competition. Every day between 2 April and 12 April we’ll be profiling one of the incredible invertebrates that live in and around the UK. Let us know which invertebrates you think we should be including here. And 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.