The violence that erupted on Amsterdam’s streets last week has triggered a political crisis in the Netherlands, with the ruling coalition in turmoil over alleged racist remarks made by government officials during a closed-door meeting to discuss the events.

Nora Achahbar, the Moroccan-born secretary for benefits from the centre-right New Social Contract (NSC) party, part of the ruling coalition, is expected to announce her resignation over allegedly inflammatory and racist remarks by colleagues about Dutch citizens from ethnically diverse backgrounds. Other NSC members are also considering resigning in protest, the Dutch state broadcaster NOS reported.

The heads of the four rightwing ruling parties are now gathering for crisis talks amid speculation that the government may collapse.

Tensions have been high in The Hague days after Amsterdam was gripped by what Femke Halsema, its mayor, described as “a toxic cocktail” of hooliganism, antisemitism and anger over the war in Gaza. The left-leaning opposition has accused the Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders, whose PVV party holds the largest number of seats in government, of exacerbating tensions by calling for the revocation of Dutch citizenship and deportation for those convicted of involvement in the attacks.

Earlier in the day, Amsterdam city council adopted a motion calling for immediate action to address the “real and imminent” risk of genocide in Gaza, in what was described as an attempt to address last week’s unrest.

“These tensions are not going away,” said Sheher Khan, whose leftwing Denk party was one of the main backers of the motion. “I suspect – and I think we all agree – that if we do not tackle the root causes then we will see those tensions again, conflicts will keep happening.”

The motion, backed by 35 of the council’s 45 members on Thursday, calls for action “as soon as possible” to halt what it describes as “the real and imminent genocide in Gaza”. It cited the January interim decision by the UN’s international court of justice that stated there was “a real and imminent risk that irreparable prejudice” would be caused to the rights of Palestinians in Gaza under the genocide convention.

The motion also calls on the city to support relief organisations offering aid to Gaza as well as put pressure on the Dutch state to comply with international law and prevent Israel from committing possible genocide in Gaza.

The motion was approved exactly a week after the violence that followed the match between Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv.

As officials scrambled to piece together what had happened, an emergency ordinance banned protests and demonstrations for a week. Even so, more than 250 pro-Palestinian protesters were detained on Wednesday after gathering in defiance of the ban. Dutch authorities later said they were investigating reports of police violence after footage appeared to show police in riot gear beating protesters with batons after breaking up the protest.

In an interview on Friday, Khan said the continuing protests had reinforced the need for the motion. “Despite the state of emergency, people continue to demonstrate,” he said. He added that this was “not because people like to demonstrate” but because of the images emerging daily from Gaza.

He pointed to the demonstrations that greeted the Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, when he arrived in March to open the country’s first Holocaust museum, as well as pro-Palestinian student protests that had led to more than 150 arrests in March. “It has been happening all year,” he said. “This is going to happen again.”

Several of the city’s councillors refused to back the motion, some expressing concerns about the use of the word genocide and how it would be received in a city still raw from the events of the past week. “I fear that it will cause polarisation in the city,” Itay Garmy, of Volt Netherlands, told the Dutch newspaper Het Parool.

Last week’s unrest appears to have involved local people and visitors. Maccabi fans were linked to an attack on a taxi driver, the tearing down and burning of a Palestinian flag, and were filmed chanting racist, anti-Arab slogans, while the city’s mayor said there had been violent “hit and run” attacks on Israeli supporters. Witness accounts and screenshots of text messages suggest some specifically targeted Jews, asking people if they were Israeli or to show their passports.

Days later, many people in Amsterdam are still reeling, with Jewish and Muslim people speaking of heightened fears.

Renewable energy is now “unstoppable”, and no government can prevent the shift to a global low-carbon economy, UK energy secretary Ed Miliband has said.

He said the UK was acting out of national self-interest by taking a global lead on cutting greenhouse gas emissions and boosting financial help available to poor countries at crunch UN climate talks this week.

“No one government or one country can stop this transition happening,” he told the Guardian at the Cop29 summit. “That’s because people see the economic advantages of making this transition. And because countries are being affected daily by the climate crisis. It’s the reality facing countries across the world.”

The Cop29 talks, which began in Azerbaijan on Monday and will continue for another week, have been overshadowed by the re-election of climate-denying Donald Trump as US president. He has vowed to withdraw the US from the Paris climate agreement when he takes office in January, and reverse policies on cutting greenhouse gas emissions and promoting clean energy.

Miliband’s comments came as leading climate experts wrote to the UN asking for the Cop process to be overhauled, saying it should in future be held more frequently and only in countries supportive of climate action. This year’s host, Azerbaijan, is a major fossil fuel producer and before the conference one member of the organising team was filmed appearing to offer help striking fossil fuel deals.

In another blow to the talks, Argentina’s populist president, Javier Milei, ordered the dramatic withdrawal of the country’s Cop delegation on Wednesday night, a move regarded as a tribute to Trump. No more countries are expected to follow, but many at the talks fear it could embolden those who would stymy progress.

Miliband rejected this analysis. “There is determination here that this transition is going to happen now. It’s got to happen in the right way, and it’s got to happen with the urgency that’s required. But it’s happening, and it’s unstoppable,” he said.

Falling prices for renewable energy, and its advantages over volatile fossil fuels, would ensure the shift to a low-carbon economy continued, he said. “It’s only going in one direction. How quickly it goes is partly the job of government. It’s not going fast enough.”

Miliband has taken personal charge of the negotiations at Cop29, in contrast to his Conservative predecessors who mostly delegated the task to junior ministers and officials. This year’s talks are focused on providing financial help to poor countries, to help them cut their greenhouse gas emissions and cope with the impacts of climate-driven extreme weather.

Developing countries want $1tn a year in climate finance. Nicholas Stern, an economist, said it was “absolutely possible” for developed countries to meet such a pledge if about half the total came from the private sector, a quarter from the World Bank and its fellow institutions, and the remainder from a mixture of overseas aid from rich countries, and potential new taxes such as a frequent flyer levy and a charge on shipping.

The UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, who attended the world leaders’ segment of the Cop earlier this week, announced fresh commitments on cutting carbon that were widely hailed as strong and ambitious, and confirmed the UK’s £11.6bn pledge to developing countries.

For the UK to take a lead on climate action, and help the poorest, made sense for British taxpayers, Miliband said.

“We need developing countries to take the low-carbon path, because otherwise we’ve got no chance of keeping global warming to 1.5C or even 2C [above preindustrial levels]. Getting finance to developing countries so that they can is absolutely in our national self-interest,” he said. “Otherwise we’re going to have climate breakdown and future generations will hold us in infamy, and rightly so.”

Spending money on aid was “hard, because our public finances are really stretched”, he admitted. “That is the unavoidable context of these negotiations.”

But the consequences of failure would be dire for the UK. “Poorer countries are on the frontline of this crisis. If states cannot cope with what the climate is throwing at them, it produces massive global instability,” he said. “So from every point of view this is the right thing to do.”

Under Rishi Sunak, the Tories were threatening to drop the UK’s climate finance pledge to the poor world, and the new leader, Kemi Badenoch, has previously called the pledge to reach net zero emissions by 2050 “unilateral economic disarmament”, arguing that the UK should hang back as other countries have bigger carbon footprints.

Miliband rejected those positions. “The last government used to say we’re only 1% of global emissions, as if it was an excuse for inaction. In fact, it’s an instruction for global action. We’re only going to keep a future generation safe if we work with others to show leadership and it will be an absolute betrayal of future generations not to turn up, not to lean in, not to be part of this,” he said.

“Wherever I go, people are relieved that Britain is back, is leading, they want to see British leadership. It consists of doing the right thing at home for Britain, which is what we’re doing, then using that as a platform to persuade others to act,” he said.

For many climate campaigners, Trump’s re-election set the seal on climate failure, killing hopes of limiting heating to 1.5C above preindustrial levels, the goal of the Paris agreement. But Miliband says other countries carried on tackling the climate crisis without the US during Trump’s last stint in the White House. “My overwhelming message to people is, don’t despair. Despair gets you nowhere and it’s not the right response, because it’s not the reality,” he said.

Politicians must find ways, at Cop29 and beyond, to ensure the transition to a low-carbon world happens as swiftly as possible, in the interests of the UK and the rest of the world, he said. “I’m still in politics because I care so much about this issue. Because I think we are going to be judged on these existential questions.”

China is facing crucial decisions on its climate policies as its hard-won relationship with the US on tackling the crisis looks set to founder during Donald Trump’s second presidential term.

World leaders and heads of delegations from many countries gathered at the Cop29 UN climate summit are trying to salvage commitments that China has made during Joe Biden’s term, which ends in January.

Alden Meyer, a senior associate at the thinktank E3G, said: “They’re already trying to do that. China have said they are committed to the Paris agreement and in favour of the multilateral regime, so regardless of what the US does they should press ahead. It’s in their own interests to do so.”

But countries seeking concrete action from Beijing may face an uphill task as China could now be more wary of converting its previous intentions into robust policy measures until the incoming US president has revealed more of his plans.

Under Biden, the US and China have had a testy relationship on most issues, particularly trade and tariffs, but on the climate they have enjoyed rare accord, fostered carefully since Biden took office. At a series of meetings, the two countries have reaffirmed joint commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, especially methane, a particularly potent gas whose emissions have risen rapidly.

The US delegation to Cop29 will be made up of Biden officials including John Podesta, the senior adviser to the president for international climate policy. Neither Biden nor Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, are attending the conference in Baku, but China’s top climate official, Liu Zhenmin, is there. Liu has met Podesta several times, including for dinner at Podesta’s home in Washington DC, and they are said to get on well.

Bernice Lee, a research director for futures at the Chatham House thinktank, said the loss of the core US-China relationship in the climate talks was not insurmountable. “Even if official US-China collaboration proves difficult, alternative pathways exist – through business, people-to-people exchanges, and subnational partnerships,” she said. “Climate is ultimately the only bridge. China also has a chance to step up, supporting renewable energy in developing nations. This would not only address global climate needs but also create new markets for its products, regardless of US manoeuvres.”

China is the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases by a long way, with close to a third of all global carbon dioxide output – greater than those of all developed countries combined – and it is the second biggest economy. The US is the biggest economy and biggest exporter of gas, and one of the largest producers of oil.

One of the main issues on which the US and China were aligned is methane, a gas scores of times more powerful than CO₂ in its warming effect, and which comes from coalmining, oil and gas production and animal husbandry. Scientists argue that reducing methane is one of the most sensible actions governments can take in the short term to stave off the worst impacts of global heating.

Adair Turner, a former chair of the UK’s Climate Change Committee and now chair of the Energy Transitions Commission thinktank, said: “There will be a step back [by the US] from things like [controlling] methane emissions, a rollback of limits on flaring and leaks from oil and natural gas facilities. That’s a disaster. Methane leakage is a major issue. US shale gas leaks a lot far more, for instance, than North Sea oil.”

China also has huge methane emissions, in part from its coalmining, but despite positive words it has been slow to take any action to reduce them. Paul Bledsoe, a former Bill Clinton White House climate adviser, said: “While China has offered absolutely no commitments to methane reductions or even phase-downs of any type, they have routinely put out self-serving communiques about their methodologies and metrics. It’s been infuriating. Clearly Podesta is desperately lobbying them for cuts, since the Biden administration has prioritised domestic and international methane mitigation.”

Trump’s electoral triumph made such firm commitments much less likely, Bledsoe said. “This is just an early microcosm into a Trump presidency of climate nihilism and extreme climate consequences,” he said. “In fact, Trump will attempt to roll back US methane regulations even though most in US industry say they can readily achieve them.”

Finance is also an important issue at Cop29, as developing countries are demanding $1tn (£790bn) a year in funding by 2035 to help them cut greenhouse gas emissions and cope with the impacts of climate breakdown. Rich countries are obliged under the 1992 UN framework convention on climate change, the parent treaty to the Paris agreement, to provide such finance to the poor world.

China is not, as it is still classed as a developing country. The government is reluctant to rescind that status and will not accept obligations to provide finance, though on a voluntary basis it already lends billions to smaller developing countries, some of it for fossil fuels and some for clean energy.

Rich countries will not agree to increase their contributions unless more contributors are brought onboard, with China a key target. It is possible that a compromise may be found in which China’s current financing can be recognised.

Nevertheless, that may require a degree of scrutiny that could be uncomfortable for China. Beijing’s current lending to poor countries comes with costly strings attached: developing countries spent nearly $300bn in 2022 just on servicing their debts to China. These costs are pushing some of the world’s most vulnerable nations further into poverty.

Trump may also ignite a trade war with China, as he is keen to impose tariffs. That is something other countries keen to have a relationship with China should avoid, according to Li Shuo, director of the China climate hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute. He said it was futile for developed countries to carry on trying to blame China for its focus on renewable energy and green technology. Instead, they should use cheap Chinese products to cut their own greenhouse gases. Li said: “You can carry on finger-pointing, but what’s the point?”

• Location São João das Missões, Brazil

• Disaster Xakriabá Indigenous territory drought, 2013-24

José Fiuza Xakriabá grew up in the Xakriabá Indigenous territory and is now an influential Xakriabá leader. That region was previously watered by an extensive network of rivers. But the only stream that still flows in the surrounding area is now the Itacarambi. The trend of increasing drought in Minas Gerais state started in the 1970s and is caused by rising temperatures. Scientific research has shown that droughts have been the worst in at least 700 years and are mostly the result of human-caused global heating.

I never gave up on my land, which for me is the world where I was born and raised. My father is from here; my mother is from here. The first tiled-roof house we lived in is here, next to me. Before, we lived in houses made of straw, grass thatch, garlic tree bark, wood. That’s how it always was.

Until the 1960s, it rained a lot. The times were good. We ate a lot. Wild game, fish. There were plenty of rivers. But since then they’ve been drying up. If I tried to count the springs that have already dried up, I’m not sure I could.

Our land isn’t just this ridge . We were fenced in. Our elders had the banks of the São Francisco River to walk along, and the way in was at Remanso and Fabião, where they created Jacaré. Some call it Jacaré, others Gandu, but today, it’s Itacarambi.

It was only in 1979 that this little piece of land here was demarcated. Even now, you can see in the areas around us that the non-Indigenous people don’t believe this land is ours. Their land is registered, and we respect that. But we can’t go in there even to pick a single leaf from a tree.

We’re living through a drought that has lasted more than 10 years. There is very little rain. It seems that it’s getting less every year. Our little piece of land is no longer enough for us to survive. Today we have to work even harder on the land because we often get nothing from it. Sometimes, someone gets lucky with their planting and gets something from it, but it’s been hard. This year, I’ve already sown my land but got nothing. We must wait for it to rain, sow again, and raise a chicken or a pig.

Of course, we can buy processed food, but that’s sick food. Coffee is sick, sugar is sick, rice is sick, beans are sick – everything we consume today is sick. Until a few years ago, we only knew about the poison they used in farming on the outside. But today, we’re being forced to use it ourselves with some plants, because everything is so much harder.

This very hot, dry weather brings us a thousand and one health problems. We go out into the bush, where we get medicine, and see the oldest trees dying: the pequi, the favela trees, the pau-terra, the jatoba, the sucupira.

When an Indigenous person was in charge of the São João das Missões region, it helped a lot. They built a well and a dam. But it still wasn’t enough. The water in the dam is very low. We are drilling everywhere to find water. And we’ve told our young people there’s a risk that we’ll drill in the ground and not find any more water.

There has been rationing because there is very little water to consume. There are days when the school closes because the children don’t have water to drink, and when women have to go down to the Itacarambi River to wash clothes and bathe. There’s very little water, but it’s something. The springs at the headwater of the reserve, the Pindaíba, the Pedrinha,and the Lagoinha, have dried up. There’s only a dry river.

Even Chico is dying. But it’s not the fault of the Xakriabá. It’s the fault of the big businessmen, whose only thought is to destroy the land, to wipe out the forests, believing the land will survive without them. But it won’t survive. The earth is dying because man himself is killing it.

Our dream was to get back at least a little piece of our river, the São Francisco, to try to bring the water from there to the uplands here, to at least part of the reserve. Our children believe they could die of thirst at any moment, sometimes, when they can’t find anything to eat or drink. Many young people think about committing suicide. I believe that, with the river, they’d think: “OK, we’re thirsty here, but let’s go down to the banks of the São Francisco. There’s water and fish there.”

We hope that Tupã [ an Indigenous god] has never died and never will. And that he can still make the weather better. But man needs to do his part, to stop so much deforestation, to stop the war, to stop killing the innocent, because in Brazil, it’s the Black and Indigenous people who die most often, because they’re innocent.

My father used to say: “We only stop fighting or battling for what is ours when we die.” The Indigenous heritage is a fight, and we won’t stop fighting for what is ours. We have to live.

• Edited by Ricardo Garcia, Cristine Gerk, Aldyn Chwelos, Sean Holman. Translated by James Young. Design and development by Harry Fischer and Pip Lev

Santos misled investors by positioning itself as a “clean fuels company” with a credible net zero plan, the Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility (ACCR) has alleged in closing remarks to a world-first greenwashing case.

Noel Hutley SC, representing ACCR, said the case was about protecting the public interest by “ensuring that commitments by Australian companies regarding climate change are reasonably based and not misleading”.

The landmark case, which began on 28 October in the federal court, was the first to challenge the veracity of a company’s net zero emissions plan, and would determine whether companies could be held legally accountable for their climate reports and strategies.

When Santos used terms like “clean energy” and “clean fuel” in its 2020 annual report, it conveyed the impression to investors that the end use, or combustion, of natural gas had only minor emissions, Hutley said in a closing statement on Friday.

That was misleading, as gas was not clean, Hutley said, given evidence that burning the gas produced in Australia in 2020 would create about 100 megatonnes of CO₂.

Several elements of Santos’ reports were also false and misleading, he said, particularly the company’s use of the term “zero emission hydrogen” and its decision to hold baseline emissions associated with oil and gas production flat between 2025 and 2040, among other assumptions.

As a result, emissions from hydrogen production, and expected growth in emissions from oil and gas exploration were not disclosed in a 2021 climate change report, which outlined the company’s plans to reduce emissions by 26% to 30% by 2030 and reach net zero emissions by 2040.

Santos repeatedly referred to hydrogen produced from gas with carbon capture and storage, as “zero emissions” in that report, even though the company knew this terminology was false, Hutley said.

Internal company estimates presented during the case indicated hydrogen production emissions associated with producing 800 tonnes per day of hydrogen were “material”, resulting in an additional 600,000 tonnes of CO₂ emitted per year, roughly equivalent to 10% of the company’s annual emissions.

Santos represented its roadmap to net zero by 2040 as clear, credible and tangible, Hutley said, but evidence presented had revealed that key details and assumptions were being figured out “literally on the fly” as the plans were being finalised, at the chief executive’s request and direction.

ACCR was asking the court to make declarations that Santos had engaged in misleading or deceptive conduct, and for injunctions prohibiting Santos from engaging in deceptive conduct in future and forcing it to issue a corrective notice about the environmental impacts of its operations.

Santos was expected to deliver its closing arguments on 3 December, with judgment to follow.

A rare and pristine example of gladiator memorabilia found in the River Tyne is to go on display, shining light on a 2,000-year-old culture of celebrity and sex appeal.

English Heritage said the copper alloy figurine would have been a decorative handle on a folding knife. Found near Corbridge, Northumberland, it provides proof that the superstar status of gladiators extended to the far edges of the Roman empire.

“It is amazing, it’s absolutely pristine,” said Frances McIntosh, English Heritage’s collections curator for Hadrian’s Wall. It is rare to find any example of gladiator memorabilia in Britain but “to find such a well-preserved and interesting piece is remarkable”.

“This beautifully made knife handle is a testament to how pervasive this celebrity culture was, reaching all the way to Hadrian’s Wall at the very edge of the Roman empire.”

McIntosh said successful gladiators became celebrities and had sex appeal. “There are lots of rumours that you see of high society women falling in love with gladiators,” she said. “Often a slur on somebody was that they had been fathered by a gladiator, that they were the son of a gladiator because their mother was … you know.”

The handle will go on display in 2025. The news coincides with the release this week of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II, 24 years after the original, starring Russell Crowe.

The new film, starring Paul Mescal, has divided critics, with the Guardian calling it “thrilling” and the Times calling it “dreary”.

For some Roman history experts, however, it is a question of accuracy, with some bridling at scenes such as a gladiator riding a rhino – “suicidal” – and the Colosseum being filled with water and sharks. “The Romans were not at all familiar with the shark as a beast,” the classics academic Kathleen Coleman told the BBC.

Nor would they always fight to the death, said McIntosh. “Training a gladiator is a huge investment. They can’t be dying every time.”

The Tyne knife handle depicts a gladiator known as a secutor, a muscular fighter who carried heavy equipment including a large shield, a heavy helmet with limited visibility, and a sword.

A secutor was trained to fight a gladiator called a retiarius, a more nimble and unencumbered fighter who carried a net, a trident and a dagger. A retiarius fought without his face covered, which meant the best-looking men were often chosen for the role.

The gladiator fighting would usually complete a day of entertainment which began with animal hunts and was followed by prisoner executions.

The Tyne object shows someone who is left-handed, which is unusual as it was regarded as bad luck.

“It could be that it is a very specific gladiator because gladiators were celebrity culture in the Roman world,” said McIntosh. “Gladiators were big and individual gladiators, if they won multiple bouts, then they become better known.”

How the souvenir ended up in the river is a mystery. “You always wonder,” said McIntosh. “Did it fall out of someone’s pocket? Did someone throw it in? This is probably a one-off commission and you would be pretty annoyed if you lost it.”

English Heritage said it planned to display the souvenir at Corbridge Roman Town in 2025 along with other finds from the Tyne.

As Donald Trump secured victory in the US presidential election, an unexpected phenomenon began trending on social media: young American women declaring their commitment to “4B”, a fringe South Korean feminist movement advocating the rejection of marriage, childbirth, dating and sex.

The movement has sparked intense global interest, with millions of views on TikTok and viral X posts heralding it as a women’s rights revolution.

Yet within South Korea itself, the picture is more complex and in some places the feminist movement is under attack.

“I had never heard of 4B until recently,” says Lee Min-ji, an office worker in Seoul who was surprised at all the international attention. “I understand where all the anger comes from, but I don’t think avoiding all relationships with men is the solution.”

Park So-yeon, a publishing professional in Seoul, says she does not date because she is prioritising her professional life.

“Like me, most of my female friends are more focused on their careers than dating right now, but that’s not because of 4B, it’s just the reality of being a young professional in Korea,” she says.

Pushing back against an unequal society

The 4B name stems from four Korean words beginning with “bi” (meaning “no”): bihon (no marriage), bichulsan (no childbirth), biyeonae (no dating), and bisekseu (no sex). As with past “separatist” feminist movements, 4B represents a rejection of heterosexual relationships as a means of resisting patriarchal structures.

The movement emerged in the mid-2010s amid growing online feminist activism in South Korea, a country where women face the widest gender pay gap among OECD nations and persistent discrimination.

Several high-profile incidents have galvanised feminist activism in recent years. In 2016, a woman was murdered near Gangnam Station by a male stranger who said he did it because women had “ignored” him. The case sparked nationwide protests against misogyny-driven violence.

Digital sex crimes have further fuelled the feminist movement, from widespread illegal filming through hidden cameras to the latest epidemic of AI-generated deepfake pornography targeting young women.

Online activists have also challenged South Korea’s demanding beauty standards. In 2018, some young women began posting videos of themselves destroying makeup products and cutting their hair short in what became known as the “escape the corset” movement.

But there has been a backlash, to the point where the word “feminism” itself has virtually become a slur in South Korea, carrying connotations far removed from western views of gender equality advocacy.

“Unlike the west’s long history with feminist movements, Korea is experiencing these changes in a very compressed way,” says Gowoon Jung, assistant professor of sociology at Korea University. “This has led many to view feminism only in its most radical form.”

President Yoon Suk Yeol, who took office in 2022, partly rode to victory on anti-feminist sentiment, courting disgruntled young male voters by denying the existence of structural gender discrimination and promising to abolish the country’s gender equality ministry.

“4B is more of a feminist statement that represents young digital feminists’ grievances and frustration about Korean society,” explains Minyoung Moon, a sociology lecturer at Clemson University who studies online feminism in South Korea. “However, its radical nature has contributed to serious backlash, with many young men and some women equating all feminists with man-haters, which deepens societal divisions.”

Lee Jeong-eun, who lives in Busan, says that openly feminist women face backlash on and offline. “You’re treated like the devil,” she says.

This fear isn’t unfounded: last year, a female convenience store worker in Jinju was violently attacked by a man who assumed she was a feminist simply because she had short hair, leading to a court ruling that recognised misogyny as a hate crime motive for the first time.

This hostile environment has led many young Korean women to practise what scholars like Moon and Jung term “quiet feminism”– embracing feminist principles privately while avoiding public identification with the movement.

An impact that is hard to measure

South Korea’s digital landscape plays a crucial role in the 4B movement’s expression. Anonymous online forums and social media serve as protected spaces for feminist discourse that might be difficult to voice openly. The online nature of the movement, however, makes it nearly impossible to measure 4B’s true scale or impact.

Within South Korea itself and before Trump’s victory, 4B had received relatively little mainstream attention, though internationally some media coverage has attempted to link 4B to South Korea’s record-low birthrate, which hit 0.72 children per woman in 2023. That can be problematic, says Moon.

“The low fertility rate in Korea is a complex issue, and you cannot simply argue that Korean women boycotting men leads to a low birthrate,” Moon says.

The birth rate has been dropping for decades and is frequently attributed to factors like the economic burden of child rearing, high housing costs, intense educational competition, and shifting priorities. “Women’s distrust and frustration with Korean society may have some cultural relation to it, but there is no proven correlation,” Moon says.

For Jung, the global attention on 4B reflects a shift in how feminist movements travel globally. “Many Asian social movements have historically been influenced by the west, as we saw with the #MeToo movement,” she says.

“Now we’re seeing movements that originated in Korea potentially influencing western societies.”

At least 1,773 coal, oil, and gas lobbyists have been granted access to the United Nations climate talks in Baku, Azerbaijan, a new report has found, raising concerns about the planet-heating industry’s influence on the negotiations.

Those lobbyists outnumber the delegations of almost every country at the conference, the analysis from the Kick Big Polluters Out (KBPO) coalition shows, with the only exceptions being this year’s host country, Azerbaijan, next year’s host Brazil, and Turkey.

The finding comes during week one of the climate summit, known as Cop29. Days before the talks kicked off, Elnur Soltanov, Azerbaijan’s deputy energy minister and chief executive of Cop29, was caught on film agreeing to facilitate oil deals at the negotiations.

Sarah McArthur, an activist with the environmental group UK Youth Climate Coalition, which is a member of the KBPO coalition, said: “Cop29 kicked off with the revelation that fossil fuel deals were on the agenda, laying bare the ways that industry’s constant presence has delayed and weakened progress for years. The fossil fuel industry is driven by their financial bottom line, which is fundamentally opposed to what is needed to stop the climate crisis, namely, the urgent and just phaseout of fossil fuels.”

The 10 most climate-vulnerable nations have only a combined 1,033 delegates at the negotiations. “Industry presence is dwarfing that of those on the frontlines of the climate crisis,” the analysis says.

Many fossil fuel lobbyists were granted access to Cop29 as part of trade associations, primarily from the global north. The International Emissions Trading Association brought the largest number, with 43 representatives hailing from oil majors like TotalEnergies and Glencore.

Other lobbyists are attending as part of national delegations. Japan brought a representative from coal giant Sumitomo, while Canada brought representatives from Suncor and Tourmaline, and Italy brought employees of energy companies Eni and Enel. The UK alone brought 20 lobbyists, the report says.

“The fossil fuel industry has long manipulated climate negotiations to protect its interests while our planet burns,” said Dawda Cham of the grassroots groups Help Gambia and the Africa Make Big Polluters Pay coalition, who is also a member of the KBPO coalition.

The analysis also says the major oil producers Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, Shell and Eni, which brought a combined total of 39 lobbyists to Cop29, are “linked to enabling genocide in Palestine” because their operations supply oil to Israel.

For the analysis, climate campaigners pored over the UN’s list of registered Cop29 attenders and noted their disclosed affiliations.

Last year’s climate talks in Dubai were attended by 2,456 fossil fuel lobbyists – a record number which represented nearly 3% of the 85,000 total attenders. This year, turnout is lower, with about 70,000 people granted access, of whom 1.5% are fossil fuel-linked lobbyists.

Though the analysis covers only fossil fuel-linked lobbyists, it notes that representatives from other polluting sectors such as agribusiness and transit are also present.

Activists have for years urged the UN to ban representatives of polluting industries from climate talks. Last year, officials imposed a new rule requiring registrants to disclose their affiliations; they were previously able to attend without formally disclosing these relationships.

The US hosted a senior representative from the world’s second largest oilfield services company in its Cop29 pavilion on Thursday. In a panel about “industry climate solutions for global partners,” a Baker Hughes vice-president said “we’re not looking to tear down infrastructure” but rather were interested in “incremental change” in the fossil fuel industry.

Baker Hughes provides services and products for geothermal power and carbon capture and storage, yet its main business is providing products and services for onshore and offshore oilfield operations.

Coal, oil and gas are the top contributors to the climate crisis. To avert the worst consequences of global heating, the world must swiftly phase them out, top climate scientists have long warned.

UN climate negotiators did not agree to “transition away” from fossil fuels until their 28th summit in Dubai last year.

Future UN climate summits should be held only in countries that can show clear support for climate action and have stricter rules on fossil fuel lobbying, according to a group of influential climate policy experts.

The group includes former UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, the former president of Ireland Mary Robinson, the former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres and the prominent climate scientist Johan Rockström.

They have written to the UN demanding the current complex process of annual “conferences of the parties” under the UN framework convention on climate change – the Paris agreement’s parent treaty – be streamlined, and meetings held more frequently, with more of a voice given to developing countries.

“It is now clear that the Cop is no longer fit for purpose. We need a shift from negotiation to implementation,” they wrote.

This year’s talks, known as Cop29, are nearing their halfway mark in Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku.

Azerbaijan is a controversial host for the conference, as it is a major fossil fuel producer, with oil and gas making up half of its exports. Last year’s conference was also held in a petrostate, the United Arab Emirates, and the president of that edition, Sultan Al Jaber, kept his main job of heading the country’s national oil company, Adnoc.

Before Cop29 opened, one of the key members of the Azerbaijan government’s organising team was filmed appearing to offer help striking fossil fuel deals. Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev, also remarked at the opening ceremony that his country’s oil and gas were “a gift of God”.

“We need strict eligibility criteria to exclude countries who do not support the phase-out/transition away from fossil energy. Host countries must demonstrate their high level of ambition to uphold the goals of the Paris agreement,” the group wrote.

Figueres said: “At the last Cop, fossil fuel lobbyists outnumbered representatives of scientific institutions, Indigenous communities and vulnerable nations. We cannot hope to achieve a just transition without significant reforms to the Cop process that ensure fair representation of those most affected.”

At least 1,773 coal, oil and gas lobbyists have been granted access to Cop29, according to data analysed by the Kick Big Polluters Out activist coalition. That is more than all but three countries (Azerbaijan, Brazil and Turkey), and considerably more than the 10 nations most vulnerable to the climate crisis, who have a combined 1,033 delegates.

Al Gore, the former US vice-president, also took aim at fossil fuel influence at the conference, particularly from Azerbaijan.

Gore said: “There’s an old country song from Nashville called Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places. For a long time, lots of people bought the line that as the fossil fuel industry caused [the climate crisis] they would solve it for us. But they are not going to solve it for us. The global community has to organise a far more effective way to run these Cops [than to host them in petrostates]. The UN secretary general ought to have a role in who’s going to be host.”

The focus of Cop29 is how to supply enough cash to poor countries to help them cut greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate-driven extreme weather.

Poor countries will need about $1tn a year by 2030 to fulfil the aims of the Paris agreement and limit global temperature rises to 1.5C above preindustrial levels. Close to a third of that should come from developed countries, either through development banks such as the World Bank, or through direct funding, according to a report by leading economists, while most of the rest should come from the private sector.

But there is still little agreement from developed countries on how much they are willing to provide and on what terms, or over which other countries – including petrostates and major emerging economies such as China – should be asked to contribute to such funding.

Campaigners who took over the outside areas of the Cop venue – the Olympic Stadium in Baku – were in no doubt who should provide the money. “Make polluters pay” read the giant banner unfurled over the conference, as campaigners chanted the slogan.

The core talks on a new climate finance settlement – called the “new collective quantified goal” – moved slowly on Thursday, with a new draft text called “unworkable” by some countries. Negotiations will continue throughout next week, and are scheduled to finish next Friday evening.

Outside the negotiating rooms, some countries are looking for new sources of finance to plug the gaps. A report by a taskforce led by Laurence Tubiana, a former French diplomat and the current chief of the European Climate Foundation, found that new “global solidarity levies” could raise large sums towards the climate finance needed for the poor world.

Levying a charge on cryptocurrencies – which are energy-intensive to create – could be one option, the report found. Charging just $0.045 per kWh for the energy would produce $5bn, it said.

A plastics production levy, charged on producing plastics from polymers rather than from recycled material, could yield $25bn-$35bn a year if set at $60 to $90 a tonne. Even more effective would be a 2% wealth tax, an idea championed by Brazil, which could yield $200bn-$250bn a year.

Taxing frequent flyers and business class airline tickets could generate up to $164bn a year, depending on the design of the scheme.

Tubiana said: “One of the founding pillars of the Paris agreement is financial solidarity between developed and developing countries. Such solidarity makes it possible for all countries to gradually raise their national ambitions to achieve the goal of limiting temperature rise to 1.5C. However, there can be no climate justice without fiscal justice, as all countries are facing the same challenge: how to fund the transition while ensuring that those with the greatest means and the highest emissions pay their fair share.”

She will present the final report of the taskforce, led by the governments of France, Barbados and Kenya, before next year’s Cop.