A Ukrainian strike using American-made missiles to hit targets deep inside Russia using American-made weaponry, has prompted renewed fears of reprisal through “hybrid warfare” – a chaotic tool of conflict that muddies borders and broadens the scope of a frontline.

Over recent years, European nations have witnessed a spate of incidents – cyber-attacks, arson, incendiary devices, sabotage and even murder plots. The aim of such episodes, security officials believe, is to sow chaos, exacerbate social tensions among Ukraine’s allies and disrupt military supplies to Kyiv.

Mark Rutte, the Nato secretary general, has warned that Russia’s “intensifying campaign of hybrid attacks” highlights the way in which Moscow is quickly shifting the frontline from Ukraine “to the Baltic region, to western Europe and even to the high north”.

Such efforts to spread mayhem have taken many forms: even before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Moscow was linked to broad disinformation campaigns during the 2016 US election and the Brexit referendum, meant to sow discord and confusion among the electorate through social media.

But the strategy can also narrow to a tighter focus: Estonia fended off a hacking campaign by Russia in 2022, the same year Norwegian police arrested several Russian nationals equipped with drones and cameras who were located near oil and gas infrastructure.

“What is new about attacks seen in recent years is their speed, scale and intensity, facilitated by rapid technological change and global interconnectivity,” Nato said in June. “Counter-hybrid support teams” would provide assistance, but it was primarily up to individual countries to protect themselves.

On Tuesday, Matthew Miller, US state department spokesperson, said Washington was “incredibly concerned” about the threat of hybrid warfare and that American diplomats were in close contact with European allies.

Recent incidents have included several conspiracies that could apparently have led to murder or even mass casualties. Over the summer, US and German intelligence reportedly foiled a Russian plot to assassinate European defense industry executives, including the CEO of the leading German arms manufacturer, Rheinmetall.

Last month, British counter-terror police revealed that they had been investigating a suspected Russian sabotage plot involving incendiary devices hidden on a plane to the UK that may also have been a dry run for a similar attack on the US and Canada.

But some of the plots appear to have been crude and amateurish: French intelligence officials believe that a group of Moldovans were recruited to carry out a low-budget antisemitic graffiti campaign using star of David stencils across Paris, in an attempt to amplify societal divisions against the backdrop of the Israel-Gaza war.

And the challenge in fending off hybrid attacks lies in the vast array of possible targets – which could include military bases, transport and telecoms infrastructure – and the plausible deniability of the attacks.

In January, a group called the Cyber Army of Russia Reborn infiltrated a water tower in Texas, releasing tens of thousands of litres of water before state officials halted the attack.

“Disabling cyber-attacks are striking water and waste-water systems throughout the United States,” Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, and Michael Regan, the EPA administrator, wrote in a letter to state governors earlier this year. “These attacks have the potential to disrupt the critical lifeline of clean and safe drinking water, as well as impose significant costs on affected communities.”

In many cases, the most vulnerable infrastructure is also poorly protected. A recent cyber-attack on a Canadian facility that treats the wastewater of 1.2 million people avoided catastrophe because the hackers were only able to breach “a limited component of the digital systems”. But the incident exposed the deep weakness of water-treatment facilities across the country.

Ken McCallum, the head of MI5, warned in October that Russian GRU military intelligence was engaged in a campaign to “generate mayhem on British and European streets” using proxies that “further reduces the professionalism of their operations”.

Donald Trump has nominated Mehmet Oz, best known globally as Dr Oz, to serve as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) administrator.

“Our broken Healthcare System harms everyday Americans, and crushes our Country’s budget,” wrote Trump in his announcement of Oz’s nomination.

“Dr Oz will be a leader in incentivizing Disease Prevention, so we get the best results in the World for every dollar we spend on Healthcare in our Great Country. He will also cut waste and fraud within our Country’s most expensive Government Agency, which is a third of our Nation’s Healthcare spend, and a quarter of our entire National Budget.”

Trump emphasized that he plans to have Oz work closely with Robert F Kennedy Jr, his nominee for health and human services secretary, “to take on the illness industrial complex, and all the horrible chronic diseases left in its wake”.

Kennedy is an anti-vaccine activist who ran as an independent in the 2024 presidential race and adopted a slogan of “make America healthy again”, an offshoot of Trump’s “make America great again”.

The combination of Kennedy and Oz in leading health policy roles will receive significant pushback from health organizations. Oz’s role does not require Senate confirmation, while Kennedy’s does.

Oz previously praised Kennedy’s appointment, saying: “Americans need better research on healthy lifestyle choices from unbiased scientists, and @RobertKennedyJr can help as HHS secretary.” Oz’s most recent post on X promotes a multivitamin and supplement store.

The move comes after Oz ran for Senate in Pennsylvania in 2022, losing to John Fetterman but securing Trump’s endorsement.

Fetterman said of Oz’s nomination: “Well, I’ve been very, very clear if Dr Oz agrees to protect and preserve Medicaid and Medicare, I’m absolutely going to vote for the dude,” according to news outlet Notus.

Before his Senate run, Oz was the eponymous host of the Dr Oz Show and a frequent guest on Oprah Winfrey’s show, where he often provided medical advice. He is a cardiothoracic surgeon who co-founded a cardiac care center earlier in his career and taught at Columbia University. Like Trump, he gained national attention through reality television.

His advice has proven so controversial that a 2014 British Medical Journal study declared half of it “baseless or wrong”. A year later, in 2015, a sizable group of doctors wrote to Columbia’s dean of medicine, criticizing the school’s partnership with him and calling it “unacceptable”.

Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, Oz promoted malaria drugs including hydroxychloroquine to treat the coronavirus in an appearance on Fox News, calling the discredited treatments a “gamechanger”. His comments on the drug captured Trump’s attention, CNN reported at the time.

Is Elon Musk the dinner party guest from hell? It sure seems that way. Not only is the man desperate for people to laugh at his crass jokes, he reportedly has a weird habit of trying to donate his sperm at every opportunity – including, according to an October New York Times report, an incident where he offered some spermatozoa, as casually as you might pass the salt, to a married couple “he had met socially only a handful of times” during a Silicon Valley dinner party.

Musk has denied offering sperm to strangers over supper. But it would be in keeping with his creepy breeding fetish: Musk is desperate for people in developed countries to have more children and has himself fathered at least 12 children with three women. (One of the children has since sadly died.) He’s become one of the most famous faces of a growing pro-natalist movement – one with an unsettling overlap with eugenics and deeply misogynistic ideas.

Musk is obviously entitled to his obsessions. The problem is, now that he’s Donald Trump’s BFF, he actually has the opportunity to embed his obsessions into policy. While much has been said about Musk’s role in the proposed Department of Government Efficiency, it seems likely that the billionaire wants influence over more than just budgets. He seems to want a say in Americans’ sex lives as well. On Sunday, Musk replied to a tweet about declining birthrates by tweeting: “Instead of teaching fear of pregnancy, we should teach fear of childlessness.”

What sort of lessons would that entail? Teaching people that while a woman dies every two minutes due to pregnancy or childbirth – and maternal mortality rates are increasing in the US – it’s childlessness you should be afraid of? It’s easy for Musk, who will never have to carry any of the children he’s so keen on having, to be blase about pregnancy risks: he can outsource them all. Still, you’d think he might be more sensitive to the issue considering the musician Grimes, with whom he shares three children, almost died during her pregnancy with son X Æ A-12. That led Grimes and Musk to use a surrogate for their next child.

What else would Musk tell young people to instil a fear of childlessness? That, should they choose not to procreate, they’ll be saddled with more disposable income than they might otherwise have? And they won’t have to fret about the fact the US is the only industrialised country without a national paid parental leave policy? Or should he really put the fear of God in them and explain that they’ll miss out on being woken up at 5am and having to listen to the Frozen soundtrack for the millionth time? Look, I love my child (I’ve even grown to love the Frozen soundtrack), but parenthood can be difficult and it’s not for everyone. There are plenty of ways to live a fulfilling life that don’t involve raising a mini-me.

I’ll tell you one lesson that I wish Musk would learn: being a sperm donor is very different from being a parent. While Musk has been parading various children of his through Mar-a-Lago for photo opportunities recently, he seems to leave most of the hard work of parenting to others. I mean, come on, he has six children under the age of six, runs a bunch of major companies and spends all his time hobnobbing with politicians: it’s logistically impossible for him to be an involved father to all his children. He’s also estranged from his transgender daughter Vivian Wilson, and has publicly declared – on at least two occasions – that she is “dead – killed by the woke mind virus”.

But Musk’s parenting skills aren’t the real issue here. The real issue is that the billionaire, and his breeding obsession, are part of an incoming administration that wants to roll back reproductive rights and usher in a world where women are forced to give birth. It would be nice to be able to ignore every stupid thing that Musk tweets, but we don’t have that luxury any more. He seems intent on worming his way into our wombs.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

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Honking tractors carrying young farmers and a sea of people clad in tweed and wellies signalled the countryside had come to the capital on Tuesday to demand the scrapping of Labour’s budget changes to inheritance tax on agricultural businesses.

It would have taken more than plummeting temperatures and sleet to put off the thousands of food producers, many used to working in all conditions, from travelling from across the UK to Westminster.

Many had jumped on buses which forced their way through snow, while others had travelled the previous night and were quietly gossiping about Jeremy Clarkson, the Top Gear presenter turned farming celebrity, joining them for dinner.

The volume of attenders was unexpected, given the rarity of farmers taking a day off, let alone in such numbers. The Metropolitan police estimated there were 13,000 participants at the peak of the rally, leading them to prevent the crowd from marching down Whitehall for safety reasons.

Many farmers came with donations for the City Harvest food bank. Farmer Andrew Ward, one of the organisers of the rally, said it amounted to “tonnes and tonnes of food”.

Limited to a procession around Parliament Square, many protesters clutched signs criticising “Farmer harmer Starmer” as they waited to hear from politicians and Clarkson.

Despite the mainly good-spirited nature of the rally, there was gloom in the air as farmers discussed their deaths or those of their parents. Many feared that could be followed by the demise of their family farm.

“It’s a way of life,” said Penny Fortescue, 69, a sheep and arable farmer in Cambridgeshire. “We put up with the hassle every day because it’s our way of life, because we care about providing food. We wouldn’t do it otherwise, there isn’t any money in it really.”

Deluged by recent heavy rain, Fortescue now fears her way of life cannot be passed down to her daughter and son-in-law, if an inheritance tax bill eats up all their profits.

“I have cancer, my partner has cancer. I don’t know how long we are going to live. And if we try to hand the farm over within seven years, we can’t afford to live because it’s our pension,” she said. “We aren’t allowed to take money out of the business once it’s been handed over – so what are we supposed to do?”

Matt Swales, her son-in-law, said: “We are going to have to sell a portion of our land to pay the inheritance tax. That’s the reality of it.”

The message from the speakers was one of unity, amid a disagreement over whether the Treasury’s figures were accurate and worries that even medium-sized farms are at risk.

Spotting a political opportunity, the new Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, brought her shadow environment, food and rural affairs team on stage to say they were the people who would “fight” for farmers. She called on those assembled to vote for her at the next election to reverse the tax changes. “Farming is not just a business,” she said. “It’s a way of life.”

The vast bulk of those in attendance were farmers, their families and supporters, but conspiracy theorists and far-right activists were present on the fringes. A contingent of activists from the Homeland party, a far-right group, appeared with a banner saying “Our Homeland needs Farmers” and posed for photos at the Cenotaph.

Many farmers attending the rally had spent some of their morning at the mass lobby event arranged by the National Farmers’ Union (NFU), and had booked meetings with their local MPs, many of whom are newly elected Labour parliamentarians.

Gary Yeomans, who farms goats near Abergavenny in Monmouthshire, met Catherine Fookes, the MP for Monmouthshire, along with eight other local farmers.

“She was sympathetic. Everyone had their say and kept their cool,” Yeomans said. “She said she wasn’t prepared to vote against the government, but said a group of 40 rural Labour MPs had got together.”

Others were left disappointed after they missed meeting with their MPs, either due to a large queue to get into the building where they have offices, or because their representative was not available.

Chris Robinson, a beef and sheep farmer from the Derbyshire dales, waited in vain for over an hour and a half to get into Portcullis House to meet his MP.

Meanwhile, Tom Rees from the Vale of Glamorgan in Wales, was frustrated to have been told in advance that his MP, Labour’s Kanishka Narayan, was away from Westminster on the day.

“I’m angry,” Rees said, adding that the newly elected Narayan is the parliamentary private secretary to the environment secretary, Steve Reed. “He needed to front up to this.”

China and India should no longer be treated as developing countries in the same way as some of the poorest African nations are, according to a growing number of poor country delegates at the Cop29 UN climate talks.

China should take on some additional responsibility for providing financial help to the poorest and most vulnerable, several delegates told the Guardian. India should not be eligible for receiving financial help as it has no trouble attracting investment, some said.

Balarabe Abbas Lawal, Nigeria’s environment minister, said: “China and India cannot be classified in the same category as Nigeria and other African countries. I think they are developing but they are in a faster phase than states like Nigeria.

“They should also commit in trying to support us. They should also come and make some contribution [to climate finance for poorer countries].”

China and India are regarded as developing countries at the Cop29 climate talks, using classifications that date back to 1992 when the UN framework convention on climate change (UNFCCC) was signed. That means they have no formal obligation to cut their greenhouse gas emissions or to provide financial help to poorer countries, and technically are eligible to receive climate aid, though China chooses not to do so.

“Those that actually deserve this support are African countries, poor Asian countries and small island states that are facing devastating climate change issues,” Lawal said.

His views were echoed by two other representatives from developing countries at the talks. An African negotiator said: “China, India, South Africa, Egypt: those countries should not be on the list of developing countries. In the framework, they have conditions to access funds, much more than us. They should be contributing.”

Susana Muhamad, the environment minister of Colombia, said: “The developed and developing country categories are obsolete. These categories should be changed. The problem is that the Paris agreement and the UNFCCC are negotiated on these categories.”

Nearly 200 governments are gathered in Azerbaijan for the second week of fortnight-long climate talks that are focused on how to give poor countries access to the $1tn a year they need to cut greenhouse gas emissions and cope with the impacts of extreme weather.

Progress has been slow as developed nations have been reluctant to put forward the cash needed, and rows have erupted over the global commitment to “transition away from fossil fuels”.

China is the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter and second biggest economy but is classed alongside some of the poorest countries in the world at the UN talks, and carries no obligation to provide financial help to the developing world.

India is now the world’s fifth largest economy by some measures but is still entitled to receive climate finance.

China and India have long been seen as leaders of the developing world at the annual climate summits, called conferences of the parties (Cops) under the UNFCCC, the parent treaty to the 2015 Paris agreement.

This year, however, questions over which countries are still developing have been thrown into sharp focus by the goal of this year’s talks, which is to forge a “new collective quantified goal” on climate finance.

Li Shuo, the director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute, a thinktank, said that for any countries to try to push China into contributing to climate finance on the same basis as developed countries would be counterproductive. “That would risk harming trust, and reinforcing divisions,” he said. “What we need is unity, and unity is starting to emerge at these talks.”

Vaibhav Chaturvedi, a senior fellow at India’s Council on Energy Environment and Water, another thinktank, rejected the suggestion that India could contribute to climate finance. “Our per-capita income is $2,800 a year; in the US, it’s $35,000. No one should be saying India should be paying climate finance – we should be receiving.”

If India did not receive such assistance, he said, speeding up the transition to a green economy would be impossible. “An acceleration without climate finance is unthinkable for India,” he said. “India will also defend the principle of responsibility [for cutting emissions and providing climate finance] based on historic emissions.”

However, China’s historic emissions are now greater than those of the EU, according to research from Carbon Brief.

According to the World Resources Institute, China provided nearly $4.5bn a year in climate finance to poorer countries from 2013 to 2022. But much of this money appears to come with strings attached. Developing countries spent nearly $300bn in 2022 just on servicing their debts to China.

Rich countries are concerned that China releases too little information on its financing activities to allow for a clear view. “It’s a black box,” said Germany’s lead negotiator, Jochen Flasbarth.

Avinash Persaud, a former economic adviser to Barbados’s prime minister, Mia Mottley, and now a special adviser to the president of the Inter American Development Bank, pointed out that China and India were also indirectly contributors to climate finance through their shareholdings in regional multilateral development banks.

He said: “Around half of developed countries’ contributions to the current $100bn target come from their shareholdings in multilateral development banks, which currently spend around $75bn on climate to developing countries. China and, to a smaller extent, India are also significant shareholders and will want their share of that international climate finance to be considered as well.”

A newborn baby girl will have to go through life with the wrong sex on her birth certificate after a registrar’s error, which her parents have been told they cannot change.

Grace Bingham and her partner, Ewan Murray, were excited to register their first child at the Mansfield Registration Office in Nottinghamshire last week. But, after nights of broken sleep, they failed to notice the registrar had written the wrong sex on the birth certificate until after it had been submitted.

“We were horrified but assumed that, as we saw the mistake just a few seconds after it had happened, correcting it would be an easy matter,” said Murray. “But although the registrar apologised for her mistake – and the area manager also apologised – it turns out that birth certificates can’t be changed.”

The General Register Office (GRO), which is responsible for administering all civil registration in England and Wales, and the Home Office have both confirmed that Lilah’s birth certificate cannot be reissued, although an amendment can be made in the margin of the original document.

But Bingham said this is not enough. “People reading a birth certificate might easily miss a tiny note in the margin – which means that Lilah could be regarded as male when she applies for school, her passport, for jobs – for everything that she needs a full birth certificate for.”

“Even if people do notice the correction, they’ll assume our daughter is transgender – which isn’t an issue if that’s what she wants to be when she’s older, but it’s not the case now,” she added.

“Lilah might also not believe she was born a girl, but that there was a strange, biological thing that went on when she was born,” Bingham said. “I just feel so guilty. I’m in tears all the time. I’m completely torn up over it.”

The family complained to the GRO but was told the mistake was their responsibility and could not be fully rectified.

“The duty to ensure that information recorded in any particular entry is true is the responsibility of the person providing the information and not of the registrar general or the registrar recording the birth,” the GRO said.

“By law, a full certificate must be an exact duplicate of the registration to which it relates.

“There is currently no facility in law that allows for correct certificates to be issued that show the correct information only, without reproduction of the marginal note,” they added.

The Home Office also confirmed that there was no flexibility under the law. “Legal advice has confirmed that issuing a certificate without including the marginal note following a correction to the entry in the birth register is not compliant with the law,” they stated.

Murray is furious. “I just don’t think a correction in the margin is good enough,” he said. “It’s horrifying that my daughter’s got to have male on her birth certificate when she’s a biological female. I can’t believe this accident is irreversible.”

Lee Anderson is the couple’s MP. He has written to the children’s minister, Janet Daby, to request a meeting to discuss changing the law.

“There’s obviously something wrong with the system,” he said. “Where’s the common sense in this? I can’t think of any other form you can fill out anywhere in this country that can’t be changed. This little girl is going to have male on her birth certificate for the rest of her life under the law as it stands and that’s just ridiculous.”

Daby’s office has confirmed that she is open to meeting with Anderson to discuss the issue.

In a twist to the tale, Sarah Power, who registered her baby daughter at the same register office – with the same registrar – in October last year, had a similar experience.

“The registrar read back all the details correctly – including that our daughter was female – and then asked us to check the spellings of the name,” she said. “We checked the spelling but not the gender, because the registrar had already said it to us correctly.”

“It was only when we got outside the office door that we looked at the certificate and realised that our daughter had been registered as male.”

Power, however, was able to get a new, corrected birth certificate for her daughter after the registrar directed her to a GPO form. The Home Office, however, say this is no longer an option. ‘The local registration service was advised earlier this year not to issue [corrected] certificates in this way,” they said.

The London 2012 race regarded as one of the dirtiest in history has expunged yet another name from the record books after Tatyana Tomashova was stripped of her women’s Olympic 1500m silver medal. The Russian becomes the fifth out of 12 finishers in the final to be disqualified for retrospective doping offences.

The race was questioned almost immediately with Britain’s Lisa Dobriskey telling the BBC straight after the race: “I’ll probably get into trouble for saying this, but I don’t believe I’m competing on a level playing field.” History, though, has slowly proven Dobriskey correct.

Tomashova is the latest athlete to be punished after analysis of her data held in the Moscow anti-doping laboratory showed she had been taking banned drugs. The Russian had finished fourth but was moved up after the first two in the race, Turkey’s Asli Cakir Alptekin and Gamze Bulut, were banned for blood doping and had their results annulled in 2015 and 2017 respectively. Belarus’s Natallia Kareiva, who came seventh, and Russia’s Yekaterina Kostetskaya, who was ninth, were also banned for doping offences.

The loss of Tomashova’s medal was confirmed by the Athletics Integrity Unit, who said she had decided not to appeal against a 10-year ban imposed on her by the Court of Arbitration for Sport in September.

“Tomashova’s sanction stemmed from AIU charges based on historical data, showing evidence of doping in Russian athletics, from the Laboratory Information Management System at the former Moscow Laboratory,” CAS said. “The International Olympic Committee may now proceed with the reallocation of medals and the update of the IOC database.”

The Ethiopian-born Swedish athlete Abeba Aregawi, who was fifth in London, moves up to silver while the American Shannon Rowbury takes a belated bronze medal. Dobriskey and her fellow Briton Laura Weightman have been moved up to fifth and sixth respectively.

In 2016, Dobriskey, who won a world championship silver medal in 2009, remembered the hurt she felt after the race. “I wanted to cry and I needed to get out of the stadium,” she said. “It should have been a joyous moment in front of my home crowd but I felt humiliated. I just wanted the ground to swallow me up. I felt I had to apologise for my performance to my family and friends. I felt I’d let people down.”

Hundreds of lobbyists for industrial agriculture are attending the Cop29 climate summit in Baku, analysis shows.

They include representatives from some of the world’s largest agribusiness companies including the Brazilian meatpacker JBS, the animal pharmaceuticals company Elanco, and the food giant PepsiCo, as well as trade groups representing the food sector.

Overall, 204 agriculture delegates have accessed the talks this year, analysis by DeSmog and the Guardian reveals. While the total number has dropped compared with the record highs at Cop28, the figures show climate Cops remain a top priority for businesses working in agriculture, a sector that accounts for up to a third of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Food sector lobbyists remain highly influential, and have travelled to Baku as part of country delegations from Brazil, Russia and Australia, among others. This year, nearly 40% of delegates travelled to the summit with country badges, giving them privileged access to diplomatic negotiations, up from 30% at Cop28, and just 5% at Cop27.

Delegates from the meat and dairy sector sent 52 delegates to the summit this year, with 20 travelling with Brazil’s government, the analysis found. They outnumbered the delegation of the Caribbean island of Barbados, which in July was devastated by Hurricane Beryl, a disaster linked to climate breakdown.

Meat and dairy producers are coming under greater scrutiny due to increasing pollution from cattle and sheep, which emit about a third of the global output of methane. Farming also relies on synthetic fertilisers that are both fossil fuel-based and emit greenhouse gases, and drive deforestation.

But while studies point to the need for a drastic drop in meat and dairy production and a shift to climate-friendly farming, the agribusiness industry has lobbied hard against tougher environmental laws, in the EU, the US and at climate summits.

An Lambrechts, a senior campaign strategist from Greenpeace International, said there was a clear “conflict of interest” between big agriculture’s presence at the talks and the need for climate action.

“We see the same conflict of interest with the fossil fuel industry and how they act to drive the world away from the scope of actions and solutions that are needed to fight climate change and address its impacts,” she said.

Wanun Permpibul, from Climate Watch Thailand, said: “When Big Agriculture dominates the discussion, the voices of frontline communities – especially smallholder farmers, Indigenous peoples, women, and local food producers – are systematically excluded. Yet these are the people who have been living in harmony with nature for generations, using traditional knowledge to manage ecosystems, preserve biodiversity, and sustain local food systems.”

Those present on the ground from the agriculture industry include JBS, the world’s largest meat company, which sent three delegates to Baku. The world’s largest global food company, Nestlé, and the world’s second largest pesticides company, Bayer, have also sent delegates.

Brazil, the host of next year’s climate summit, was a major funnel for agricultural giants this year. That has sparked concerns over the sway agribusiness may hold over Cop30, which many see as an opportunity for ambitious food systems reform.

The Brazilian government brought in 35 agriculture lobbyists, including more than 20 representatives of the meat companies JBS, BRF and Marfrig, as well as powerful industry groups such as the Association of Brazilian Beef Exporters.

Russia brought the second largest number of big agriculture lobbyists, with 13 delegates from the fertiliser industry. Synthetic fertilisers are the leading driver of nitrous dioxide emission, a greenhouse gas that is 200 times more powerful than carbon dioxide and which is rising at unprecedented levels in the atmosphere.

Australia was next in line, with five representatives of the National Farmers Federation, which has publicly opposed measures to curb methane from animal agriculture.

Permpibul was concerned by the findings. “By bringing in a large contingent of lobbyists from Big Agriculture, Brazil is sending a message that protecting corporate interests takes precedence over addressing the climate crisis,” she said.

“The presence of these lobbyists raises serious concerns about whether the upcoming Cop will prioritise real, community-led solutions or continue to push for market-based ‘fixes’ that do little to address the root causes of climate change.”

Many of the agribusiness delegates who attend climate summits will speak on panels and hold events to promote their positions. At these side events, industry leaders from meat, dairy, pesticides and fertiliser companies promote technical solutions to bring down the sector’s emissions, although authoritative studies have found efficiency measures will only ever be able to reduce a small portion of agricultural emissions, and must be accompanied by demand-side reductions, such as lower consumption of meat in rich countries.

Pesticides and fertilisers – much of which are used to support the growth of crops for industrial animal agriculture – are often derived from fossil fuels and have had major negative impacts on biodiversity, soil and water health.

Arnold Padilla, the deputy executive director of Pesticide Action Network Asia Pacific, said big agriculture was promoting “false solutions” designed to sustain and expand harmful farming practices. Instead, he said, the focus should be on “small farming communities that champion sustainable practices that avoid climate-harming chemicals and protect biodiversity”.

“These are the real solutions that are essential for cutting greenhouse gas emissions and tackling the climate crisis,” he said.

The analysis comes amid growing concerns over the outsized access corporate lobbyists have to climate summits, which has promoted calls for reform.

Earlier this month, DeSmog also recorded a large jump in lobbyists from big food companies attending the UN biodiversity talks, which ended without a strong deal for nature on 2 November.

Last Friday, Cop veterans and leading diplomats argued that the Cop process was no longer “fit for purpose”. Food systems experts have also called for reform.

Teresa Anderson, the global lead for climate justice at the development non-profit ActionAid, said she thought Cops were swayed in favour of corporate interests.

“Big agribusiness has all the money to spend on flying, wining and dining, unlike the smallholder agroecological farmers who are busy doing the actual work of feeding communities and protecting the climate,” Anderson said. “What ends up happening is that the real answers to the climate crisis aren’t being heard over the corporate cacophony.”

The sores were unlike anything veteran anglers had seen before. Black, swollen and blister-like, they started appearing on fish being caught in the River Severn in early summer.

For anglers who spend many hours on the banks of the Severn around Shrewsbury, the blistering skin was yet another warning that the river, and its wildlife and habitats, are suffering.

Phil O’Callaghan, an angler, noticed the blisters on the first day of the season as he fished the Severn at Bicton Heath, north-west of Shrewsbury, this summer. “I have seen these sores in person and they look really nasty.

“I am not a scientist, I am just someone who has spent my life on the river, as an angler, a canoeist and a swimmer. I have seen it change for the worse; the river doesn’t clear any more, you cannot see the gravel, there is no weed, and at the near margins the bottom is covered in a horrible, black, smelly silt. These sores are just the latest thing we are seeing, and they are another cause for serious concern.”

O’Callaghan is one of an army of anglers, swimmers and river lovers who are working together in an attempt to stop the decline of the Severn. They have seen the devastating decline of the neighbouring Wye and they are trying to stop the same fate happening to the Severn as it, like the Wye, is subjected to excessive nutrient pollution from intensive poultry farming and record levels of raw sewage discharges from Severn Trent facilities.

Over the last two years, O’Callaghan has joined 68 other anglers along the river who dedicate hundreds of hours to monitoring the water. They have taken more than 970 samples from 70 sites to record phosphate, nitrate, dissolved oxygen, turbidity, ammonia and temperature, which they send to Bristol University for analysis. Images of the sores on fish have been sent to the Environment Agency.

Results of the Angling Trust’s 2024 water-quality monitoring report on the Severn have been shared with the Guardian. Glyn Marshall, who coordinates the monitoring, said: “The state of water in the catchment has not improved. If anything, it has got worse.

“My most recent phosphate sample in Worcester was one of the highest I have recorded. When there are periods of dry hot weather, I can see the algae blooms in the river and the bed of the river is still covered in the horrible brown gunge. The biodiversity of all the waterways is being totally compromised and we need to make sure that the health of the rivers and streams in the Severn catchment is improved for future generations.”

Analysis of the results from 52 sites for the report shows 61.5% had phosphate levels above the upper limit in the EU-derived Water Framework directive, part of Environment Agency regulations, compared with 42% in 2022-23.

Thirty-one areas, or almost 60%, had a mean average for nitrate exceeding 5ppm (parts per million) – considered the acceptable upper limit – an increase from 35% in 2022-23.

High levels of phosphate and nitrate pollute rivers. This triggers eutrophication, where the excessive plant and algal growth creates high levels of bacteria which reduces oxygen levels and kills plants and wildlife. Sewage pollution and agricultural runoff are both causes, their impacts varying from urban to rural areas.

On the Severn, sewage pollution has soared. In the three years to 2023, there were 53,072 discharges of raw sewage into the river, more than 48 each day, according to data compiled by the trust. Their duration was 429,365 hours, more than 392 hours a day.

In more rural areas, it is agricultural runoff from intensive farming that is considered to make up 70% of the excess phosphate going into the river.

Alison Caffyn, who lives in Shropshire, is a member of the volunteer army attempting to protect the Severn. She has become an expert in intensive poultry units (IPUs) after discovering a dearth of data on the impact of mega farms in the Severn valley.

“Over the years, intensive poultry units were cropping up all over Herefordshire and Shropshire and I realised there was nothing known about the issue and indeed very little research had been done, in the UK at least, about the wider impacts of intensive livestock units,” she said.

Caffyn spent years researching the units for a PhD, which saw her trawling back through Shropshire council planning records and then doing the same to track the scale of IPUs in Herefordshire, cross-referencing with satellite imagery and Environment Agency permit data.

When she turned to examine documents held by Powys council – to create a dataset for the main three counties in the Severn and Wye valleys – she discovered other researchers were doing similar work. Dr Christine Hugh-Jones and Margaret Tregear, both members of the council for the protection of rural Wales, had also been head down in planning records going back several years.

When the three women combined their research, they created an unprecedented and comprehensive dataset on the number of chickens being housed in industrial-style units in the three counties across the Severn and Wye valleys, which they update regularly. The latest data, shared with the Guardian, reveals more than 51m chickens are housed at any one time in intensive poultry units in Powys, Herefordshire and Shropshire.

Caffyn is using her research to bring a judicial review against Shropshire council’s decision to grant planning permission to another intensive poultry unit, housing 230,000 birds on nine hectares of land at Felton Butler, north of Shrewsbury.

The new intensive unit is 400 metres from an existing IPU, which appears to be in breach of Defra biosecurity regulations that there should be a 3km buffer zone between high-density poultry units.

Shropshire council approved the planning permission after the applicants promised they would transfer the manure to a third-party anaerobic digestion unit. But Caffyn says the processing of manure at an off-site anaerobic digestion unit will not cut nitrate and phosphate groundwater pollution. She points to research which says the digestate still contains all the nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium which was in the manure, and will have a negative impact when it is spread on farmland.

“We feel enough is enough. We simply cannot allow the creation of more of these giant clusters of polluting poultry units or, before we know it, the River Severn will be suffering the same pollution load as the neighbouring Wye,” she said.

Severn Trent said it had started a £450m programme to cut spills from storm overflows into the river, which was progressing at pace.

Neerja Upadhyay, head of river health enhancement at Severn Trent, said: “Since kicking off only a few months ago, our teams have been making some radical improvements that we’re already seeing benefits from.

“Increased storage on sites, repurposing existing parts of the network, installing valves and making network enhancements is all helping us make progress to reduce spills and improve river health, which is exactly what we and our customers want.”