Politicians, conservationists and business people from around the world met last week to discuss how to save nature at the Cop16 biodiversity conference in Cali, Colombia.

For those working on the ground, however, it is the most dangerous country in the world to fight for the environment. A third of the 196 environmental defenders killed last year were Colombian. Here, four conservationists give us a glimpse into their working lives and the dangers they face.

‘I am just a small woman trying to save monkeys’: Ángela Maldonado

When I was 28 years old, I went to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia’s (Farc) controlled area in Vista Hermosa to look for an endemic Colombian species of woolly monkey. A lot of people said I was completely nuts, but I needed to deal with the Farc to get into the area where the monkeys are.

I went to talk to the Farc commander. His nickname was Smurf, because he was very short. He was also very dangerous – people told me five days before I met him he had killed someone. From the very beginning he was nice to me, and I always think even the worst people have a good side.

He told me where to find the monkeys and contacted other Farc commanders so I could enter their towns. I was always on my own. I don’t represent a threat to anyone – I’m 160cm tall and weigh 52kg. To these people I am just a small woman trying to save monkeys. That was in 2001 – I have spent more than 20 years working in the Amazon, fighting the trafficking of wildlife, focusing on monkeys. I have managed to establish hunting bans for woolly monkeys in southern Amazonas, at the border between Colombia, Peru and Brazil.

I hope the international community supports a peace agreement with all the illegal armed groups we have. Once the rights of local people are respected, we can move forward for making peace with nature.
Ángela Maldonado is the founder of Fundación Entropika

‘I had to bring a bodyguard and wear a bulletproof jacket’: Fernando Trujillo

When I was five, I went to the Orinoco River with my grandfather and saw river dolphins for the first time. It is amazing to be in a tropical forest with toucans and at the same time see dolphins in the water. For people in the Amazon, they are like the jaguars of the water – they believe the dolphins have cities underwater and live like humans.

Pollution is one of the greatest threats to river dolphins in the Amazon. Goldminers use mercury to extract the precious metal from river silt, dumping it in rivers and lakes. I found out my own levels of mercury were far above safe thresholds, probably because I had eaten fish in the Amazon for so many years. It can cause damage to your central nervous system – I am lucky I have not been affected.

In 2016, my life was threatened because I provided analysis of mercury in an Amazonian fish that led to the Colombian government banning it being sold. When I went into the Amazon I had to bring a bodyguard and wear a bulletproof jacket. It was a very sad moment in my life. I was very worried for my daughters and stopped bringing them to the Amazon for some years. In the Amazon there are more than 500,000 people working in organised crime – they are handling gold, cocaine, timber and animal trafficking. The main protection from armed groups comes from being onside with local communities, and that is how we work.

I have surveyed more than 84,000km (52,000 miles) of waterways in seven countries looking for river dolphins. Almost one year ago, we got 11 countries from across Asia and South America to sign a landmark treaty to protect river dolphins. At Cop16 we were promoting a resolution for dolphins to be protected in 29 key sites in Asia and South America.
Fernando Trujillo is the founder of Fundación Omacha

‘There are people who have no scruples in ending a life’: Sandra Bessudo

Malpelo is an island 500km off Colombia’s Pacific coast. The first time I went there in 1987 I fell totally in love with it. The life underneath the surface of its sea is incredible: the island is surrounded by a spectacle of hammerhead sharks, snappers, barracudas, rays and moray eels. When I was there I saw large tuna boats with their decks full of dead sharks, dropping their anchors on the coral – it was devastating to see.

After that, the only thing I wanted to do was to go back and do everything in my power to get the government to protect it. I started petitioning the president, and thanks to my work, Malpelo has been protected since 1995. There is a “no take” area of 47,000 sq km around it.

I have faced difficult moments, with threats made against me and my team because of my work. When I started to fight against illegal fishing, I was up against several large boats, not only Colombian but also from other countries. There weren’t any protocols about how to proceed, so I literally got on board the boats, explained to them what they were doing wrong and made them swear before God that they would not enter again. I was a young woman at the time, and somewhat naive, but I always approached them in a respectful and friendly manner. We did receive threats, and the Colombian navy eventually told me to be more careful and not to be so trusting.

Today, unfortunately there are people who have no scruples in ending the life of another person. I hope no other environmental activist loses their life for defending life.
Sandra Bessudo is the founder of Fundación Malpelo

‘Don’t take sides and never discuss politics’: Rosamira Guillen

I have made it my mission to save cotton-top tamarin monkeys, which weigh just one pound and are about the size of a squirrel. They have a shock of white hair that sticks out like Einstein, and little warrior faces – they’re very territorial. When I first saw one I thought, holy cow, this is a special little monkey.

I was director of Barranquilla zoo when I started working on the conservation of these monkeys, but when I started seeing them in the wild, I realised that is what fills my soul – being in the forest. Five decades of civil unrest in our country displaced farmers, who chop down the forest where these monkeys live to make space for traditional cattle ranching and agriculture. We are creating protected areas and discouraging hunting within the forest. It is slow progress: you can cut down a hectare of forest in a day but it takes at least 20 years to create.

The areas where we work were “red zones” in the past, meaning they were run by illegally armed groups, until the signing of the peace agreement in 2016. It’s that kind of landscape where illegally armed groups can hide. We heard a lot of stories from the people living there about how terrible it was: in the middle of the night they would cut the power off and come to your house and take random people, and you would never hear from them again. Sometimes, their bodies would be found. It was fear and silence in these communities.

Cop16 was important because it created opportunities for raising funds for organisations such as ours, which are small and grassroots, and very much need the support to continue their conservation efforts.

We have already protected more than 5,000 hectares (12,400 acres) of land for the monkeys. Safety remains a concern for us. We try to stay in the margins, politically speaking. We don’t take sides, to avoid being labelled as sympathising with one side or another. We never discuss politics in our conversations, to avoid accidentally treading on someone else’s foot. Just do your work and have fun, that’s what I tell my team.
Rosamira Guillen is co-founder of Fundación Proyecto Tití

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

There is nothing but bad news for Europe in Donald Trump’s US election victory. The only question is just how bad it will get. Europeans stand to suffer strategically, economically and politically from his “America first” policies, as well as from his unpredictability and transactional approach to global affairs. The undermining of Nato, the emboldening of illiberal nationalists everywhere, a transatlantic trade war, and a battle over European regulation of US social media platforms, AI and cryptocurrencies are just some of the major risks of a second Trump presidency.

Moreover, Europe is at risk of being squeezed in a deepening US-China trade conflict, with the prospect of coming under severe pressure from Washington to curtail economic ties with Beijing, while facing a potential flood of cheap Chinese goods diverted by prohibitive tariffs from the US market.

The prospect of severely strained transatlantic relations catches Europe at a moment of great fragility. European economies are lagging behind the US and China in innovation, investment and productivity. Germany and France are weakened by political crises. Rightwing populists, playing on fears of globalisation and migration, are on the rise across Europe, too. And Russian troops are slowly grinding forward against Ukrainian defenders, while the west is not delivering enough support for Kyiv to prevail.

It is far from clear whether EU countries will be able to unite in defence of common interests if a Republican administration presses ahead with threatened tariffs on all European goods – or if Trump tries to throw Ukraine under a bus and cut a deal with Russian president Vladimir Putin to end the war on terms humiliating for Kyiv. History is not encouraging.

The Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, one of the EU’s few strong centre-right leaders, declared at the weekend that “the era of geopolitical outsourcing is over”. Europe, he said, needed to finally grow up and believe in its own strength. He is not alone in wishing that Trump’s victory would jolt Europeans into doing more collectively for their defence, and building a stronger European pillar of Nato. France has long been pushing for such “strategic autonomy”, but many EU countries remain wary of anything that could weaken the transatlantic bond.

EU countries conduct trade policy together, so the European Commission has had a back-room team preparing for a possible Trump return for weeks, readying ways to hit back fast and hard if necessary in any tariff dispute. But it is far from clear whether Ursula von der Leyen will be able to marshal the 27 EU states behind a common line. There could be a repeat of the unseemly scramble to Washington we saw during Trump’s last term to curry favour with the White House and try to secure better terms for individual European countries, perhaps in exchange for buying more US weapons.

Von der Leyen reminded Trump in a congratulatory message that “millions of jobs and billions in trade and investment on each side of the Atlantic depend on the dynamism and stability of our economic relationship”. But the incoming US president is obsessed with the imbalance in goods trade with Europe, and especially with German cars.

Strategically, Trump’s win is bound to revive uncertainty over the future of Nato, which he threatened to quit during his first term in the White House. While Congress has since enacted a law making it harder for the US to withdraw from the alliance, nothing can prevent the president from undercutting its credibility by making clear he would not come to European countries’ defence against Russian aggression. Trump said as much earlier this year, asserting that he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” with Nato allies that did not pay enough in defence spending.

Trump’s supporters say his tough approach in his first term shocked European allies into finally increasing defence spending – and that he is right to question why American taxpayers should go on subsidising the security of wealthy European countries that free-ride on US protection. Fiona Hill, his former White House Russia adviser, told me Trump simply did not understand the value of alliances or allies. His approach to security is purely transactional.

The impact of a second Trump presidency on Europe’s internal politics may be just as damaging as on trade and international relations. One veteran former EU official said Trump would not only embolden national populist leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Slovakia’s Robert Fico and Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić to form a sort of “illiberal internationale”, but his influence could also pull mainstream European conservatives further to the right on migration and gender issues, weakening Europe’s liberal values.

Among Trump’s billionaire backers were libertarian US tech entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, who are counting on him to allow a free-for-all on social media, artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency. Musk has been defiant in the face of EU and UK efforts to regulate hate speech and disinformation on his X social media platform.

The tech barons’ quest for unfettered power to build their empires beyond the reach of governments and central banks is bound to set up a confrontation during a second Trump term with European legislation regulating the internet, AI and electronic currencies. This is another transatlantic crisis in the making.

Given such a bleak outlook, the EU and the UK ought to be proactively preparing for the worst, and moving closer together to defend their many common interests and values. Sadly, there’s little sign of that in the timid foreplay between the two so far.

If Donald Trump’s previous administration taught us anything, it’s that women’s bodies do not matter. The autonomy of those bodies, the frequent injustices and abuses inflicted on them, are of little consequence to a far-right misogynist administration that is – unbelievably to some – back in power after an all too brief period of reprieve, if not change. Women’s bodies are also of little consequence to the people who voted for Donald Trump.

Shortly after Trump was elected in 2016, I saw Regina Spektor playing at the Royal Festival Hall. She sat down at a piano and sang her song Ballad of a Politician. “A man inside a room is shaking hands with other men,” it opens: “This is how it happens / Our carefully laid plans.” The almost physical weight of sadness in Spektor’s performance, and that of the women in the audience, is something I have never forgotten.

Women across the world are today experiencing the visceral, secondhand body horror of another Trump administration, and that is nothing compared with the all-too-real feeling of peril that many American women will be having as I write. We hold fear, tension and trauma in our bodies, and though that is the kind of idea that strongmen such as Trump and their acolytes would snigger at, it’s well documented that, to quote the psychiatrist and author Bessel van der Kolk, the body keeps the score. It is a complete tragedy that yet more American women are facing the prospect of their reproductive rights being curtailed even further.

This body horror will be felt by the many others on Trump’s hitlist of undesirables: immigrants, gay and transgender people, disabled people, protesters. Anyone capable of empathy. Yet in the context of the assault on reproductive rights, and being a woman myself, it is women I am writing about today.

I am thinking particularly of three women. Candi Miller died at home in bed with her three-year-old daughter next to her after being too afraid to seek medical care because of Georgia’s abortion ban. She had a son as well as a daughter. Amber Nicole Thurman, also in Georgia, died after taking abortion pills at home and being made to wait 20 hours in agony for the dilation and curettage procedure that would have saved her life. She had a six-year-old son. And Josseli Barnica, who died when she was 17 weeks pregnant after doctors in Texas delayed treating her miscarriage for 40 hours. She had a young daughter. There are many more women, children and their families who have suffered profoundly as a result of the Republican-led rollback of women’s reproductive rights.

The outcome of this election is not surprising. After last time, I didn’t believe America’s hatred of women could be overestimated; why should it elect one? The hatred all too evidently runs deep. Increasingly, its currents run separately to the mainstream: on podcasts, in the “manosphere” and on our online news feeds.

Kamala Harris announcing that she was running for president coincided with my social media algorithms bombarding me with Christian “tradwife” content about the importance of serving and obeying one’s husband, and not working outside the home. This alternative reality isn’t a side of America that many Europeans had seen. You might be dimly aware that historically the country was founded by religious fundamentalists deemed too extreme for European sensibilities, but there’s something about seeing quite how unhinged and retrograde the content is that really brings the ideological disconnect home. Naturally, many people living in the US are just as horrified by the rise of these sorts of ideas, not to mention how they intersect with online misogyny and white supremacy, but their prevalence is less of a surprise because they have been exposed to them to some degree their entire lives.

At the same time, “childless cat lady” discourse was dominating the political debate, as if things weren’t already feeling medieval enough. Having researched and written a book, The Year of the Cat, that is partly about childless cat ladies – and where the sexist myths about them come from – I found it as predictable as the “burn the witch” rhetoric deployed against Hillary Clinton. It’s easy to laugh at the ridiculous notion that women who have not given birth are bitter, rageful harpies without a stake in the country they live in, and even easier to spin it into a clever “Cat Ladies for Kamala” campaign, but this fear of childless women is an old, old form of misogyny. That it was being deployed, especially in the context of global panic about the birthrate, did not bode well.

And, of course, there were yet more rape and sexual assault allegations to add to the pile – which barely seemed to make a dent in the election debate, despite the alleged involvement of the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Many of us have been left wondering what exactly Trump would have to do to a woman that would be deemed sufficiently beyond the pale to prevent his return to power. If women didn’t matter in 2016, we seem to matter even less in 2024.

There is good news for American women to cling to, with Missouri and Arizona voting to expand abortion rights, and Colorado, New York, Maryland, Montana and Nevada all passing measures to protect them. Yet misogyny can be catching: in Europe, governments must take steps to protect our own laws (Labour must urgently decriminalise abortion here in the UK after the legislation fell by the wayside earlier this year).

I know I am not alone in saying that I had never experienced such profound physical revulsion as I did during the Trump years, whenever that man tweeted or went on television. When Trump was last in office, I had not ever been pregnant or given birth. I was, though, a survivor of assault, and found the “grab them by the pussy” rhetoric and the treatment of Christine Blasey Ford particularly sickening. You don’t need to have been assaulted, or raped, to feel that revulsion, just as you didn’t need to have had an IUD fitted to empathise with all the women who were suddenly rushing to get theirs. You don’t need to have had an abortion, to have been pregnant or given birth to understand the trauma of being forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term.

The body keeps the score, and that feeling of horror is back.

A coalition of conservation and animal welfare groups are urging Iceland’s president to step in and stop any plans the prime minister has to issue a whaling licence to Europe’s last whaler before the Icelandic election at the end of the month.

Earlier this year, the country granted a one-year licence to Hvalur to kill more than 100 fin whales this hunting season, despite hopes the practice may have been stopped after concerns about cruelty led to a temporary suspension in 2023.

Hvalur is run by Kristján Loftsson, who is in his 80s and is the last hunter of fin whales in Europe. The company has now applied for an indefinite whaling licence.

International groups including OceanCare, Whale and Dolphin Conservation, Orca, the Captain Paul Watson Foundation and the Environmental Investigation Agency have written to Halla Tómasdóttir, the president, to express deep concern over the issue. Making a decision on whaling during this transition period would run counter to the spirit of democratic governance, particularly when polling shows the majority of Icelanders are against it, they say.

Tómasdóttir has said previously that the role of the temporary government is primarily to maintain stability until an elected government is in place.

Prime minister and Independence party chair Bjarni Benediktsson announced in an interview two weeks ago that Hvalur’s request would be reviewed by Jón Gunarsson, whom he appointed his special representative at the Ministry for Food, Agriculture and Fisheries.

When asked if a whaling licence will be issued, Benediktsson responded: “If there is time, it can happen.”

Gunarsson, an Independence party MP, was one of the most vocal critics of a temporary whaling ban announced in June 2023 by then minister of fisheries Svandís Svavarsdóttir, of the Left-Green party. Svavarsdóttir suspended whaling after a report concluded that the 2022 hunt did not comply with the country’s animal welfare legislation as the whales took too long – up to two hours – to die. The ban was later ruled unlawful by the parliamentary ombudsman.

Iceland has been governed since 2021 by a coalition of the conservative Independence party, led by Benediktsson, the centre-right Progressive party, and the leftwing Left-Green movement. The coalition was dissolved in early October after policy disagreements.

While the granting of a whale licence is technically an administrative task, the issue is highly contentious.

In their letter to Tómasdóttir, the international groups cited the recent decision by Iceland to abstain from key votes at the International Whaling Commission, which it said was seen by international allies as a signal of a re-evaluation of whaling practices.

“We respectfully urge you to consider the potential impact that a hasty decision may have on Iceland’s environmental legacy and its relationship with the global community” it read. “Deferring the decision on any new whaling licences until a fully mandated government is in place would honour Iceland’s democratic processes and uphold the country’s reputation as a responsible steward of marine ecosystems.”

Fin whales, the second-largest mammal in the world, are listed as vulnerable to extinction on the red list of the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Their numbers have recovered after bans on hunting were introduced in many countries since the 1970s.

In May, Japan announced that fin whaling could resume.

It is “virtually certain” that 2024 will be the hottest year on record, the European Union’s space programme has found.

The prognosis comes the week before diplomats meet at the Cop29 climate summit and a day after a majority of voters in the US, the biggest historical polluter of planet-heating gas, chose to make Donald Trump president.

Trump has described climate change as a “hoax” and promised to roll back policies to clean up the economy.

The report found 2024 is likely to be the first year more than 1.5C (2.7F) hotter than before the Industrial Revolution, a level of warming that has alarmed scientists.

“This marks a new milestone in global temperature records and should serve as a catalyst to raise ambition for the upcoming climate change conference,” said Dr Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service.

The scientists found global temperatures for the past 12 months were 1.62C greater than the 1850-1900 average, when humanity started to burn vast volumes of coal, oil and gas.

In their monthly climate bulletin, they said October 2024 was the second-warmest October on record, behind only October 2023, with temperatures 1.65C greater than preindustrial levels. It was the 15th month in the past 16 to be higher than the 1.5C mark.

World leaders promised to stop the planet from heating 1.5C by the end of the century but are on track to heat it by roughly double that.

Scientists say a single year above the threshold does not mean they have missed the target, as temperature rise is measured over decades rather than years, but warn that it will force more people and ecosystems to the brink of survival.

“Our civilisation never had to cope with a climate as warm as the current one,” said Carlo Buontempo, the director of Copernicus. “This inevitably pushes our ability to respond to extreme events – and adapt to a warmer world – to the absolute limit.”

The Copernicus findings are based on billions of weather measurements from satellites, ships, aircraft and weather stations. The temperature analyses in the ERA5 dataset on which the bulletin relies differ slightly from other prominent datasets used by climate scientists in the US and Japan.

The scientists also found that Arctic sea ice had reached its fourth-lowest monthly level for October, at 19% below average, while Antarctic sea ice extent hit its second-lowest for October, at 8% below average.

They pointed to heavier-than-normal rains that hit large parts of Europe, including Spain, where flash floods killed more than 200 people as they ripped through villages and swamped homes with mud.

Last week, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) found the concentration of planet-heating pollutants clogging the atmosphere had hit record levels in 2023. It found carbon dioxide was accumulating faster than at any time in human history, with concentrations having risen by more than 10% in just two decades, heating the planet and making extreme weather more violent.

“The most effective solution to address the climate challenges is a global commitment on emissions,” said Buontempo.

The New South Wales police has won its legal challenge against a protest planned to blockade coal exports in Newcastle, with the judge citing the interruption to the port as an “imposition”.

Organised by a group called Rising Tide, the protest would have involved activists paddling into the Port of Newcastle on kayaks and rafts to stop coal exports from leaving Newcastle for 30 hours.

The group called the protest the “People’s Blockade of the World’s Largest Coal Port” and was planned to take place in late November. The four-day “protestival” was expected to attract 5,500 demonstrators and was scheduled to take place alongside the blockade, and include music performances from John Butler and Angie McMahon.

Police launched a challenge against the organiser’s Form1 application – which would protect them from prosecution while blocking the waterway – in the supreme court last week. They cited safety concerns, the interference with other members of the public’s right to use the space, and the disruption to the coal industry.

Last year, the organiser’s held the same protest for the same amount of time. The police accepted the organiser’s Form1 application to blockade the port for 30 hours.

However, during this protest, the group continued to blockade the port beyond the agreed deadline, leading to 109 arrests. This drew international media attention, with a 97-year-old church minister among those charged.

Justice Desmond Fagan sided with police and issued a prohibition order, saying the evidence showed it was “highly likely, to the point of near certainty” that the protesters had planned to stay beyond the agreed deadline again to draw maximum attention to their cause.

In his judgement, he also expressed safety concerns for the participants and said the impact on others was “excessive”.

“A 30-hour interruption to the operations of a busy port is an imposition on the lawful activities of others that goes far beyond what the people affected should be expected to tolerate in order to facilitate public expression of protest and opinion…,” Desmond said.

If the activists decide to still carry out the blockade despite the prohibition order, they will not be protected from prosecution.

Police assistant commissioner Dave Waddell told the court during the proceedings that if this happened the police would arrest the protesters as soon as they entered the channel.

Neal Funnell, the lawyer for Rising Tide, had argued during the proceedings that the organiser’s had put adequate safety precautions in place, and that the organisers had planned to advise protesters to leave the water once the 30-hours was up to avoid arrest.

The organiser’s had planned to blockade the port for 50 hours, but revised this down to 30 hours during the police’s legal challenge.

Rising Tide had organised the protest to demand the government immediately cancel all new fossil fuel projects and end all coal exports from Newcastle by 2030.

They were also calling for the government to tax fossil fuel export profits at 78%, and to put that money towards community and industrial transition away from fossil fuels.

The mood was calm and sober on the Howard University campus as people waited to hear vice-president Kamala Harris’s concession speech on Wednesday afternoon. An area that is usually the central hub of campus life, the Yard, was mostly filled with Harris campaign staff, media and members of the public.

Harris appeared about 25 minutes after her scheduled time and opened with a message on unity, building community and coalitions. “My heart is full today,” Harris said. “Full of heart for my country, and full of resolve.

“Hear me when I say that the light of America’s promise will always burn bright. As long as we never give up and as long as we keep fighting.”

Harris encouraged young people to acknowledge their power and to believe in the impossible. “At this time, it’s necessary that people not become complacent,” she added, “but to commit to organizing and mobilizing.” Harris encouraged her supporters to embrace “the light of optimism” and of service.

“Hear me when I say that the light of America’s promise will always burn bright. As long as we never give up and as long as we keep fighting.”

Harris’s supporters expressed shock, grief and disillusionment as they reflected upon the harrowing hours since the election was called for Republican candidate, Donald Trump. Instead of feeling galvanized to build resistance movements, voters said that they needed time to rest and reset before thinking of next steps after the election.

“It revealed to me the heart of us as a nation,” 47-year-old Janeen Davis, a county government employee said. “It’s taking my pride away. Being an Indigenous person, it hits me hard. Our democracy is built upon our Indigenous ancestors … and so much has been torn from the Indigenous community, and so now that that’s at stake, it’s like there’s nothing left.” Davis said that she was in fear of political violence from Trump supporters if his opponents resist his presidency now. “My personal opinion is because of how the transition happened last election,” Davis said. “The best thing that we can do is be still right now.”

Patricia McDougall, a 63-year-old staff member at Howard University, said that she felt sad. She believed that, had she won, Harris would have supported immigrants and helped fight for women’s reproductive rights. “As an immigrant myself [from Belize], I feel bad about the people who are going to be left behind,” McDougall said. “I thought that she was going to move the needle and help people.”

As an ambassador for the United Nations, McDougall expressed anxiety about Trump’s foreign policy moves in the future, adding that his “mouth destroys him.

“We are all on edge to see what he’s going to do and how he’s going to do.”

Davis was similarly concerned that Trump’s presidency may spell disaster for foreign relations. Since exit polls revealed how divided the electorate is, Davis warned: “A divided nation can’t stand, so it’s going to make us more susceptible to outside threats.”

Despite her defeat, voters said that they were proud of Harris and her campaign team for what they accomplished in the months since inheriting Joe Biden’s campaign after he dropped out of the race during the summer. Nadia Brown, a political science professor at Georgetown University and a fellow Howard University alumna, had watched the election results pour in from the campus on election night. Returning to the scene after Harris’s crushing defeat was sobering, but she was in a place of acceptance and didn’t feel sadness.

For Brown, she said that the election results posed “larger questions to ask around what the Democratic party needs to do to maintain the core voting bloc”. She observed that the concerns of young people and progressives who opposed Israel’s war on Gaza where more than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed since last October were not taken seriously. Brown also called into question the Democratic party’s strategy, saying: “The base was not shored up before moving to swing voters, which were the Republicans who were never Trumpers.”

Looking toward the future, Brown said that the Democratic party must reconsider its outreach strategy. “Black women in particular did a great job. I have no regrets or hard feelings about the way that Black women showed up,” she said. “But now it’s how [does the party] reach some of the other folks.”

Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

Democrats across the country were left in disbelief and searching for answers as they confronted the reality of another Donald Trump presidency.

Trump’s victory was announced early on Wednesday morning, marking a significant political comeback that has sent shockwaves around the world.

As Kamala Harris’s chances of winning dwindled, the vice-president decided not to address her supporters gathered at Howard University in Washington DC on Tuesday night, instead scheduling an address for 4pm ET on Wednesday.

In the meantime, Democratic operatives and strategists and others filled the void, expressing their disappointment and already beginning to pick apart what went wrong for Harris and the Democratic party.

The Democratic pollster Paul Maslin argued that Harris did as well as she could have, given the environment and circumstance. Harris “did a really good job”, Maslin told Politico, but ultimately “this race was unwinnable”.

“Trump, rightly or wrongly, his persona and his fundamental attack line against the condition of the country, the Biden-Harris administration and frankly the Democratic party, was in the end unbeatable,” he said.

CNN’s national political correspondent Alex Thompson noted that a former adviser to Joe Biden criticized the Harris campaign, asking: “How do you spend $1bn and not win?”

Others, Thompson said, have suggested that Biden should have exited the race sooner.

He said one longtime Democratic operative told him the party “sleepwalked into disaster” on Tuesday night, adding that “swapping the pitcher in at the sixth inning wasn’t enough, and that Kamala Harris did as good of a job as she could have done”.

Mark Longabaugh, a veteran Democratic strategist who previously advised Senator Bernie Sanders, also said Harris was handed the reins “too late”, adding that it was a “tough environment” according to Politico.

The moderator of NBC’s Meet the Press, Kristen Welker, also mentioned the potential impact of the timing of Biden’s decision to step down after the presidential debate and not before.

“There was so much discussion, even over the summer, about potentially having an open primary and having that fight play out within the Democratic party,” Welker said. “So I think it’s one of the big questions moving forward.”

Others, such as Lindy Li, a senior Democratic official in Pennsylvania, are questioning whether the outcome would have been different if Harris had chosen a different vice-presidential candidate, such as the governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro.

Li argued to Fox News that the moderate Shapiro would have conveyed to American voters that Harris is not the “San Francisco liberal” Trump portrayed her to be. “But she went with someone actually to her left,” Li said, referring to the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, whom Harris chose as her vice-presidential pick.

Li also criticized the Harris campaign for not distinguishing Harris enough from Biden, a point that has been echoed by other operatives and commentators in the last few weeks.

Some pointed to Harris’s appearance on the talkshow The View, when she was asked if there was anything she would have done differently than Biden and responded: “There is not a thing that comes to mind.”

Those comments were quickly seized upon by the Trump campaign and Republicans, who used it as an opportunity to try to tie Harris to Biden’s unpopularity and blame her for the administration’s challenges related to immigration, inflation and more.

On MSNBC on Tuesday night, the commentator Joy Reid expressed disappointment at white women in North Carolina for not coming out to vote for Harris and contributing to the Democrat’s loss in the swing state.

“In the end, they didn’t make their numbers, we have to be blunt about why,” Reid said. “Black voters came through for Harris, white women voters did not. That is what appears happened.”

In the run-up to election day, Van Jones, a CNN contributor and former Barack Obama adviser, had criticized the celebrity appearances at the Harris campaign’s rallies, arguing that they were not the best use of supporters’ time.

“I don’t think people understand, working people sometimes have to choose: am I going to go to the big, cool concert and pay for babysitting for that, or am I going to figure out a way to get to the polls?” Jones said. “I don’t like these big star-studded events.

“I don’t want people going to concerts. I want people out there knocking on doors, I want people out there fighting for this thing,” he added. “I’m just nervous, nervous, nervous.”

David Sirota, who was a senior adviser for Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, described Tuesday night as a “very bad night”.

“Some of us spent years warning Dems to take working-class politics more seriously & to not tout neocons,” he said. “We did so in hopes of avoiding this & yet we were vilified as traitors by Dem elites & liberal pundits.

“There’s a lesson here.”

Another former Sanders staffer, Jeff Weaver, told Politico that the Democratic party now needed to “re-establish its relationship with the working-class people”.

As of Wednesday morning most Democratic lawmakers remained silent about the election outcome, perhaps waiting until Harris addresses the nation, which she is expected to do on Wednesday afternoon.

Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

Ursula von der Leyen’s decision to miss the Cop29 climate summit is “a fatal signal” and raises questions about Europe’s commitment to the climate crisis, observers have said.

The European Commission confirmed on Tuesday that its president would not attend the UN climate talks in Baku, which start on Monday. “The commission is in a transition phase and the president will therefore focus on her institutional duties,” a spokesperson said.

Also skipping the “world leaders’ climate action summit” on Tuesday and Wednesday are France’s Emmanuel Macron and the outgoing US president, Joe Biden. The Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, cancelled his participation due to a head injury, Reuters reported. The leaders of China, South Africa, Japan and Australia are expected to miss the talks as well.

Mohammed Chahim, a Dutch socialist and the vice-chair of the European parliament’s delegation to the Baku talks, described von der Leyen’s absence as “regrettable”, but said it did not imply a lack of EU commitment.

He said: “The climate crisis does not wait for ideal conditions to act, and neither can we. After the re-election of [Donald] Trump, the EU must now take a stronger leadership role, both to sustain momentum and to counterbalance the US stance.”

Michael Bloss, a German Green MEP, also in the delegation, said it was “a fatal signal” that Europe’s most powerful woman, along with other leaders, had chosen not to attend.

Referring to Azerbaijan’s strongman president, Ilham Aliyev, Bloss said: “By leaving the stage to autocrats like Aliyev, we risk turning the conference more and more into a greenwashing spectacle for self-promotion rather than genuine climate action.”

Von der Leyen is preparing for her second term in office, expected to begin on 1 December after European parliament hearings with her top team conclude.

The commission will be represented at Cop29 by its climate commissioner, Wopke Hoekstra, and the energy commissioner, Kadri Simson, and a team of negotiators.

WWF said von der Leyen’s non-attendance was disappointing. Shirley Matheson, a climate specialist at the charity, said her absence, along with other world leaders, raised “serious questions” about European and international commitment to fighting the climate crisis. “We cannot afford for climate action to move down on Europe’s agenda,” she added.

Von der Leyen has attended every high-level Cop meeting since she became commission president in 2019. In her successful pitch for re-election by MEPs, she highlighted the importance of Europe’s role in international climate talks: “I want Europe to remain a leader in international climate negotiations.”

The head of the UN environment programme said last month that “huge cuts” in carbon emissions were needed to steer the world off a path of catastrophic temperature rise, in a report urging countries to act at the climate summit in Baku.

Sven Harmeling, head of climate at the Climate Action Network Europe, said he did not see von der Leyen’s non-attendance as “not showing interest”, but added it was important she ensured the EU “is able to speak up and convey its ambition for climate leadership”.

“Stronger EU participation is always important to signal leadership, but for me it really comes down to how they use diplomatic channels,” he said, highlighting the bloc’s role at the G20 summit in Brazil on 18-19 November, where leaders of the world’s largest economies will discuss financing the climate transition.

On Wednesday, the commission said: “Our leadership is demonstrated by our consistent actions domestically and internationally. We are always a leading voice for ambition at Cops and that will not change this year.”