England’s rivers are likely to remain in a poor state for years to come because the government is failing to put in place EU clean water laws post-Brexit, the watchdog has found.

When Britain was a member of the EU, the government was required to follow the water framework directive (WFD), standards for waterways that have been credited with cleaning up Europe’s dirty water.

Since Brexit, the UK is no longer required to match EU regulations, and has itsown watchdog, the Office for Environmental Protection (OEP).

Under the WFD, all rivers are supposed to attain “good” ecological status by 2027. In 2019, the last time full water assessments took place, just 14% of rivers were in good ecological health and none met standards for good chemical health.

A report by the OEP states that this aim will not be met at the current rate. It says: “We have seen little change in recent years, despite measures designed to improve matters. As things stand, government will not meet its ambition that most water bodies will be on the road to good condition or else already in that state by 2027.”

Dame Glenys Stacey, the chair of the OEP, has called the government’s failure “deeply concerning”, with the report finding that England is failing to put in place measures to improve the condition of rivers, lakes and oceans.

In practice, this means cleaning up pollution from sewage, agricultural waste and chemicals.

Findings include:

• Under their worst-case assessment, just 21% of surface waters will be in a good ecological state by 2027, representing only a 5% improvement on the current situation. This would break the Environment Act, which aims to improve air and water quality, protect wildlife, increase recycling and reduce plastic waste.

• There is insufficient funding to meet the targets, meaning that under the WFD ministers are being compelled by the OEP to write a new, properly funded plan to protect the country’s waters. The Environment Agency has calculated a cost of £51bn to clean up England’s waters, which would provide £64bn in monetisable benefits. However, confirmed funding of only £6.2bn is just 12% of that required.

• There is not enough monitoring taking place to find out the state of England’s waterways, making it nigh on impossible to clean them up.

Dame Glenys said: “We have found that, while the relevant law here is broadly sound, it is simply not being implemented effectively. This means it is not delivering as intended and, as a consequence, most of our open water is likely to remain in a poor state in the years ahead unless things change. This is deeply concerning.

“There is a significant need to strengthen how environmental law on water is applied to make sure it is effectively and contributing as its needs to achievinggovernment’s wider goals and targets.

“There is a particularly urgent need for additional measures to be in place and for measures to be targeted at a local level, if there is to be any hope of achieving the 2027 targets. Government must speed up and scale up its efforts to protect and improve our waters.”

While Britain was in the EU, a national chemical and ecological survey of rivers was conducted annually. After Brexit, the WFD was transposed into English law.

From 2016, the government decided to test water quality under WFD every three years rather than annually. This has now been delayed further; the government has said it does not intend to deliver a complete update until 2025, the latest permissible date under the new WFD.

The Guardian previously revealed that ministers planned to stop assessing waterways under the WFD and were instead using a new, as–yet-undisclosed methodology, which campaigners fear will not be as rigorous.

Charles Watson, the founder of the water campaign group River Action, said, “Today’s OEP’s assessment makes grim reading for our rivers and is a damning vote of no confidence in Defra’s and the EA’s ability to deliver on their statutory objectives to bring the majority of our water bodies to ‘good’ ecological condition by 2027.

“With almost all our rivers failing ecologically, it is shocking to read the OEP’s conclusion that current government plans are clearly woefully inadequate to address this environmental crisis.

“We fully echo the OEP’s demands that the secretary of state pulls put his finger out and takes urgent action to develop additional, specific, time bound and fully funded measures to address the dire condition of our rivers”.

A government spokesperson said: “We welcome this report’s recommendations to go further and will consider them in detail.

“We are confident that the river basin management plans are compliant with the current regulations and we have already committed to reforming these plans and delivering tailored long-term proposals to improve all water bodies in England.

“This is alongside our work to fast-track investment and hold water companies more accountable – including consulting on a ban on bonuses and bringing in a fourfold increase in inspections.”

Swiss mining company Glencore has been on the offensive over its controversial plans to try to inject carbon dioxide into a section of the Great Artesian Basin (GAB) – one of the world’s biggest underground water sources and a lifeblood for farmers and regional towns.

Later this month, the Queensland government is expected to decide if it will allow Glencore’s pilot carbon storage project to go ahead.

Glencore’s proposal has brought together unusual bedfellows in furious opposition to the plans – from farming and conservation groups to billionaire mining magnate Gina Rinehart’s agriculture business and One Nation and the Greens.

Queensland agricultural body AgForce is running a campaign against the plans, saying they will put the the GAB at risk, and has gone to court to try to force the federal government to fully assess the project under national environment laws (the decision not to assess the project was made by the previous Coalition government).

In the Senate, the Greens and the Coalition voted in favour of a One Nation-backed Senate inquiry into the plans. Queensland’s premier, Steven Miles, reportedly said on Wednesday he did not expect the project to pass the state’s environmental test.

What’s going on here?

Let’s start with what’s being proposed.

Glencore’s CTSCo project wants to inject about 110,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide each year for three years into an aquifer known as the Precipice Sandstone, which is more than two kilometres below ground in southern Queensland.

The liquified CO2 will be trucked 260km from the Millmerran coal power station where there is a proposed trial to capture some CO2 from the plant.

But Glencore says any emissions reductions from the project are “incidental”.

Rather, the aim of the project is, according to Glencore documents, to evaluate the “feasibility of future large-scale [greenhouse gas] stream storage within the Surat Basin”. Glencore has said the project is a “first step” towards a “large CO2 storage hub in Queensland suitable for multiple industrial users,” and has acknowledged it would need to go through a fresh approvals process.

But how big could a future project be, compared with the 330,000 tonnes it wants to store for this trial?

The company wrote last month in its finalised environmental impact statement that the Precipice Sandstone aquifer could store between 183m tonnes and 730m tonnes of carbon dioxide, “indicating its potential for a safe and cost-effective permanent CO2 storage at potential future industrial scale”.

That suggests a project that, in terms of CO2 injection, would be between 560 and 2,200 times larger than the trial.

Glencore said in a statement: “The numbers you have quoted are storage capacity estimations only and have no direct relationship to any future storage projects.”

Independently backed?

Glencore and its supporters have said repeatedly the project “has been reviewed by expert third-party institutions, including the Australian Government Independent Expert Scientific Committee (IESC), the Office of Groundwater Impact Assessment (OGIA) and CSIRO who concluded that the impacts would be local and minor.”

Only one of those three named reviews – from the IESC – are publicly available, but Temperature Check has obtained copies of the other two.

The IESC did say impacts were “expected to be minimal and manageable in both the immediate and long term” because the trial was small.

But the report also contained several criticisms. For example, the committee wrote it was “not possible to be certain of the adequacy of the regional groundwater and plume migration models” because of a lack of documentation.

Elsewhere the committee said the predicted changes to the acidity of the groundwater from adding the CO2 could lead to “mobilisation of metals” that could “limit the future usability of the groundwater”.

The CSIRO review identified several major issues with Glencore’s environmental assessment, at one point saying “a key weakness of the EIS [environmental impact statement] is that risks are not identified and presented in a structured way”.

The review also said: “The limited sensitivity and uncertainty analysis mean that potential impacts on water users in the Precipice Sandstone aquifer due to new groundwater extraction near the GHG stream injection well cannot be ruled out.”

Temperature Check asked CSIRO if Glencore’s summary of its review was fair. A spokesperson said: “Our report will be made publicly available when the Queensland government publishes its assessment report on the project. We expect this to be towards the end of May. We will be happy to discuss our report details and the nuances of our findings after this.”

Ned Hamer, an independent hydrogeologist who has looked in detail at Glencore’s plans, has read the three reports and said “none of these parties were able to ‘conclude’ anything due to the inadequate impact assessment and particularly seriously deficient modelling undertaken by CTSCo to date”.

In a statement, Glencore claimed “all the expert reviewer concerns have now been addressed and recommendations adopted and incorporated in the final EIS” and so its description of “local and minor” was appropriate.

In a previous response to Agforce’s case in the federal court, Glencore has said it would welcome a hearing, where “misleading rhetoric will be shown for what it is and measured against Glencore’s extensive scientific evidence”.

Rinehart’s Hancock Agriculture wrote in a Senate submission that its investigation found the risks of the project to agriculture were unacceptable “not just to our own operations, but more broadly, including long-term water supplies and feedlot security”. It wrote that the plan should be blocked.

Non-potable?

Glencore has also claimed the aquifer “contains non-potable water with fluoride levels six times above the safe drinking level and is not used by any agricultural producer within a 50km radius.”

But Hamer said: “It’s good quality stock water and a number of local councils would be very happy to have this quality of water available for town drinking where it would be amended or treated.

“Poorer quality GAB groundwater is used for many town drinking supplies. The water sometimes requires amendment or treatment which is not overly restrictive given the high-value use.”

He said it was common for GAB water to have fluoride levels above drinking guidelines but “the extensive experience of farmers in the GAB is that elevated fluoride levels in water don’t affect animal health”.

Rejection a ‘death knell’ for CCS?

In the Australian, one Glencore spokesperson said if the project was refused it would be the “death knell for any future onshore CCS projects in Australia”.

But the reason so many groups are concerned about Glencore’s project is not because it is “onshore” but because it is targeting an aquifer that is part of the Great Artesian Basin. According to Hamer, CTSCo is the only project in the world proposing to store CO2 in a water resource.

Carbon capture and storage research group CO2CRC, funded by industry and government, tracks current and proposed CCS projects around the country. Their latest map of 18 CCS projects (only one is operating) shows Glencore’s is the only one to target a Great Artesian Basin aquifer.

There are two other CCS projects in the southern Queensland and northern South Australia region.

One is Santos’s Moomba project, which is under construction and is expecting to store CO2 in former oil and gas reservoirs.

Another is from oil company Bridgeport, which has proposed injecting 960,000 tonnes of CO2 into one of their depleted oilfields in order to push out an extra 6.4m barrels of oil.

Joe Biden has issued a blunt warning to Israel that his administration will stop supplying bombs and artillery shells if its military pushes ahead with an offensive on the southern Gaza city of Rafah, in what could mark the start of a turning point in relations between the two countries.

The US president delivered the warning in a television interview in which he brushed aside Israeli and Republican complaints and made clear his administration would not provide the weapons for an offensive on Rafah, which the US, the UN and other aid agencies warn would trigger a humanitarian disaster.

“I made it clear that if they go into Rafah – they haven’t gone in Rafah yet – if they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities – that deal with that problem,” Biden told CNN.

The president was speaking after it was announced his administration had paused the delivery of 3,500 munitions, more than half them 2,000lb bombs, which can cause devastating damage and severe civilian casualties when dropped on densely populated areas.

“Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs and other ways in which they go after population centers,” Biden said.

Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s insistence on a Rafah offensive to destroy what Israel says is the last stronghold of Hamas in Gaza, despite repeated US warnings about the humanitarian impact on more than 1 million Gazans sheltering in the city, has brought a simmering US-Israel rift to the surface.

Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, said he did not believe the US would stop supplying arms to Israel, but called Washington’s decision to hold up some weapons shipments “very disappointing”, even frustrating.

Joe Biden “can’t say he is our partner in the goal to destroy Hamas while on the other hand delay the means meant to destroy Hamas”, Erdan told Israel’s Channel 12 News.

The hold on the munitions delivery also drew a quick response from the Republican leadership.

“Israel faces an existential and multi-front threat … and daylight between the United States and Israel at this dangerous time risks emboldening Israel’s enemies and undermining the trust that other allies and partners have in the United States,” the House speaker, Mike Johnson, and Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, wrote in a letter to the president.

The White House decision drew support from progressive Democrats, including Senator Chris Van Hollen.

“We should use the tools available to us to enforce the president’s objectives and US policy,” Van Hollen said. “A partnership must be a two-way street, not a one-way blank cheque.”

Biden stressed the US would continue to supply ammunition for Israel’s main air defence system, Iron Dome, which performed well in the face of an Iranian missile and drone barrage last month, but he said Washington would not supply offensive weapons that would be used in an offensive the US believes will be disastrous.

“We’re going to continue to make sure Israel is secure in terms of Iron Dome and their ability to respond to attacks that came out of the Middle East recently,” he said. “But it’s just wrong. We’re not going to supply the weapons and artillery shells.”

US officials made clear that the pause would not be a one-off if the Rafah offensive went ahead: other arms deliveries that have already been approved could be delayed, and shipments waiting for approval could also face obstacles, such as a pending consignment of 6,500 joint direct attack munitions, or JDAMs, which convert freefall “dumb bombs” into precision-guided weapons.

A Guardian investigation this week found a US-made JDAM was used in a March airstrike in southern Lebanon that killed seven health workers. Analysis of debris found at the site of the attack revealed shrapnel from a 500lb (227kg) Israeli MPR bomb, as well as the parts of the JDAM that connect the munition to the guidance system and remnants of its motor.

The US administration has refused to use the phrase “red line” but has stressed that Biden was serious when he told Benjamin Netanyahu in a call on 4 April that an attack on Rafah would lead to a significant re-evaluation of the relationship.

The weapons – 1,800 2,000lb bombs and 1,700 500lb bombs – had long been seen by experts as the most likely to be targeted for any potential restrictions on arms supplies to Israel given how destructive they are in urban settings.

US officials insist that the pause is not because of legal concerns, but is a policy decision. There is nervousness in the administration about making legal judgments in case they are used against Israel in legal disputes before the international criminal court and the international court of justice.

However, the Guardian understands that conversations in recent months have focused on how the Israeli military’s use of certain munitions diverges from the Pentagon’s rules on the use of such weapons in heavily populated urban settings.

Israeli troops on Tuesday took control of the Palestinian side of the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt, a vital lifeline that is now closed. Israeli officials said it was the first step towards a full-scale assault on Rafah city, an offensive Biden has been trying to head off.

Rafah’s mayor, Ahmed al-Sofi, warned that the southern city was “on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe of unprecedented proportions” in an appeal to the international community on Wednesday. “The streets of the city echo with the cries of innocent lives lost, families torn apart, and homes reduced to rubble,” he said.

The highly significant US move on arms supplies comes amid mounting international pressure on Israel to pull back from a full-scale attack after its seizure on Tuesday of Rafah’s border crossing with Egypt, and criticism of Israel’s use of large aerial munitions in areas packed with civilians.

Austin’s comments confirmed earlier briefings by unnamed officials that the weapons shipment had been held up because of Israel’s threat of a full-scale offensive in Rafah.

”We are especially focused on the end use of the 2,000lb bombs and the impact they could have in dense urban settings as we have seen in other parts of Gaza. We have not made a final determination on how to proceed with this shipment,” one US official said.

A second US official, also speaking anonymously and quoted by the Washington Post, said the decision was a “shot across the bow” intended to convey to Israel the seriousness of US concerns about the Israeli offensive in Rafah.

An Israeli military spokesperson attempted to play down the shipment delay – saying that allies resolve any disagreements “behind closed doors”. However, the move appeared to mark a significant moment in US policy.

While the US, EU, UK and other countries have pursued an escalating sanctions campaign against extremist Israeli settlers and far-right organisations, against the background of the Gaza war and settler violence on the West Bank, US attention has moved recently to the Israel Defense Forces.

The weapons hold-up comes against the background of the expected delivery of a report by the US Department of State that examines whether Israel’s war conduct is credibly in compliance with assurances that American-supplied weapons will not be used in contravention of US and international humanitarian law.

The White House and Pentagon declined to comment.

Israeli forces on Tuesday seized the main border crossing between Gaza and Egypt in Rafah, cutting off a vital route for aid into the Palestinian territory. On Monday, the Israeli army had called on 100,000 people in eastern Rafah to evacuate.

Despite the assault in Rafah, the US has said it believes a revised Hamas ceasefire proposal may lead to a breakthrough as talks resume in Cairo. Israel had previously said the terms in the proposal had been softened, but the White House spokesperson John Kirby said the new text suggested the remaining gaps could “absolutely be closed”.

The CIA director, William Burns, is to travel to Israel on Wednesday to meet Netanyahu, a source said.

The delays to US arms shipments appeared to be the first since the Biden administration offered its full support to Israel after Hamas launched its 7 October attack, in which about 1,200 people were killed and about 250 others were abducted, of whom 133 are believed to still be in captivity in Gaza, according to Israeli tallies.

Israel’s campaign to destroy Hamas has led to a seven-month military campaign that has killed 34,789 Palestinians, most of them civilians, the Gaza health ministry has said.

The House easily quashed Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene’s resolution to oust the Republican speaker, Mike Johnson, on Wednesday, as members of both parties came together in a rare moment of bipartisanship to keep the chamber open for business.

The vote on the motion to table Greene’s resolution was 359 to 43, as 196 Republicans and 163 Democrats supported killing the proposal.

Greene took to the House floor on Wednesday evening to announce her plans, prompting boos from fellow Republicans present in the chamber. Her request triggered a countdown clock, as House rules stipulated that members had to vote on the matter within two legislative days. House Republicans chose to take up the matter immediately, as the resolution was widely expected to fail.

House Democratic leaders previously indicated that they would vote to kill Greene’s resolution, and the vast majority of their caucus took the same position on Wednesday. However, 32 Democrats and 11 Republicans opposed the motion to table the resolution, and seven members voted “present”.

Speaking to reporters after the vote, Johnson thanked his colleagues for helping him to hold on to a post he has held for six and a half months.

“I want to say that I appreciate the show of confidence from my colleagues to defeat this misguided effort. That is certainly what it was,” Johnson said. “As I’ve said from the beginning and I’ve made clear here every day, I intend to do my job. I intend to do what I believe to be the right thing, which is what I was elected to do, and I’ll let the chips fall where they may. In my view, that is leadership.”

Greene’s maneuver appeared to catch many Republicans off guard, after the hard-right congresswoman spent much of the past few days meeting with Johnson to address her concerns about his leadership. She has repeatedly criticized Johnson for passing significant bills, including a government funding proposal and a foreign aid package, by relying on Democratic support.

Greene had said she would force a vote on the motion to vacate this week, but she appeared to back away from that commitment on Tuesday.

“We’ll see. It’s up to Mike Johnson,” Greene told reporters when asked if she still planned to demand the vote. “Obviously, you can’t make things happen instantly, and we all are aware and understanding of that. So now the ball is in his court, and he’s supposed to be reaching out to us – hopefully soon.”

Donald Trump, who has voiced support for Johnson in recent weeks, reportedly called Greene over the weekend, but she would not disclose details about the call to reporters.

“I have to tell you, I love President Trump. My conversations with him are fantastic,” Greene said. “And again, I’m not going to go into details. You want to know why? I’m not insecure about that.”

Even though her motion to vacate overwhelmingly failed, Greene and her allies already appear poised to turn the issue into a litmus test for fellow Republican members. Congressman Thomas Massie, a co-sponsor of Greene’s resolution, shared a picture on X of the 11 Republicans who voted against the motion to table.

“It’s a new paradigm in Congress,” Massie said. “[Former Democratic speaker] Nancy Pelosi, and most [Republicans] voted to keep Uniparty Speaker Mike Johnson. These are the eleven, including myself, who voted NOT to save him.”

The Republicans who rallied around Johnson returned the fire by accusing Greene and her allies of promoting chaos in the House. The episode came less than a year after the ouster of former Republican speaker Kevin McCarthy, which brought the chamber to a standstill for weeks until Johnson’s election.

Congressman Mike Lawler, who faces a tough reelection campaign in New York this November, told reporters on Wednesday: “This type of tantrum is absolutely unacceptable, and it does nothing to further the cause of the conservative movement. The only people who have stymied our ability to govern are the very people that have pulled these types of stunts throughout the course of this Congress to undermine the House Republican majority.”

Congressman Sean Casten, an Illinois Democrat, offered a more concise and cutting assessment. Writing on X, he said of Greene: “She is so, so dumb. And yet she keeps talking.”

Three men have been arrested and charged with sexually preying on children via Meta’s social networks in New Mexico, the state’s attorney general announced on Wednesday.

The arrests stemmed from an investigation into the potential harm to children caused by Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, codenamed “Operation MetaPhile”. Undercover agents posed as children, whom the three men solicited for sex, according to the criminal complaint. The sting operation is part of an ongoing lawsuit launched by Raúl Torrez’s office in December that alleges Meta has allowed its social media platforms to become marketplaces for child predators.

“This operation was focused on one specific point, that is the danger presented by Meta, and its social media platforms don’t just exist in the virtual world. They actually endanger children in the real world,” Torrez said at a press conference.

On Tuesday, Marlon Kellywood, 29, was arrested outside a motel in Gallup, New Mexico, and charged with child solicitation by electronic communication device and attempted criminal penetration of a minor. Earlier the same day, Fernando Clyde, 52, was arrested and charged with the same crimes.

“This is Mark Zuckerberg’s fault; this is the fault of executives of a company that has extraordinary resources at its disposal and has chosen time and time again to place profits over the interests of children,” said Torrez.

When approached for comment, Meta issued a statement: “Child exploitation is a horrific crime, and we’ve spent years building technology to combat it and to support law enforcement in investigating and prosecuting the criminals behind it … We use sophisticated technology, hire child safety experts, report content to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and share information and tools with other companies and non-profits to help root out predators across the many platforms they use.”

The men had allegedly sent “extraordinarily graphic” material that was “truly horrifying” to the undercover agents they believed to be girls as young as 12 years old using Facebook Messenger.

The third man, Christopher Reynolds, 47, is a registered sex offender and was brought into custody several weeks ago, Torrez said. Undercover investigators turned their focus to him after concerned parents reported he was targeting their 11-year-old daughter. He has been charged with child solicitation.

“They expressed quite clearly a sexual interest in children,” Torrez said. “These are individuals who explicitly used this platform to find and target children.”

The agents posing as children did not initiate conversations about sexual contact, per Torrez. Instead, they were all located and contacted by the three men charged, he said, who were able to find children through the design features on Facebook and Instagram.

Since the New Mexico lawsuit was filed in December, Torrez’s office has updated the legal filing several times to include a list of fresh allegations.

Internal Meta documents obtained by the attorney general’s office as part of its investigation have also revealed that the company estimates about 100,000 children using Facebook and Instagram endure online sexual harassment each day.

The lawsuit also alleges Facebook and Instagram have been profiting from placing corporate adverts from companies such as Walmart and Match Group next to content potentially promoting child sexual exploitation, citing internal company documents and emails.

The suit follows a two-year Guardian investigation, which revealed that the tech giant was struggling to prevent people from using its platforms to buy and sell children for sex.

In January, Torrez told the Guardian he wants his lawsuit to provide a platform to introduce new regulations that would see Meta change how it does business and “prioritize the safety of its users”. Meta has filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit.

On 14 August 2023, heavy rainfall in north India triggered flash floods and landslides, devastating the region. Kishori Lal, the sarpanch (head) of the Kothi Gehri village in the Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh, recalls the events of that day: “Our link road connecting to the state highway and a few homes along that road were completely devastated.”

Torrential downpours in nearby Rewalsar, a picturesque lake town popular with tourists, led to several water bodies bursting their banks. The subsequent flooding and landslides wrecked homes in Lal’s village, necessitating the evacuation of hamlets and severing vital links to the outside world. With roads submerged, the ensuing closure of the Mandi-Rewalsar-Kalkhar Road and link roads left scores of tourists stranded and local communities isolated.

Amid this chaos, the resilience of Nog, a village in Bilaspur district, stands out. While roads across the region, including those in and around Kothi Gehri, remained closed, the road leading to Nog was accessible in less than one week, according to officials.

The reason lies in an innovative approach: soil bioengineering.

Concrete retaining walls 10ft high are the traditional go-to solution used to protect roads from hillside slopes. However, these structures leave exposed slopes vulnerable to erosion during intense rains, exacerbating the risk of landslides.

Sanjeev Dogra, vice-president of the Nog panchayat, the local governing body, describes the threat landslides used to pose: “Our road used to suffer landslides every monsoon, which threatened villagers living nearby,” he says. Before the implementation of bioengineering measures, Nog’s road endured month-long closures on average during every monsoon season.

The turning point came in 2010, when bioengineering techniques were used to stabilise exposed slopes at two locations on the new link road to Nog, as part of the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY), the Prime Minister’s Village Roads Scheme. Launched in 2000, the flagship government programme seeks to provide reliable all-weather connectivity to unconnected rural communities across the country.

“We treated the exposed surface of the potential landslide area near Nog by covering it with wire-mesh netting, planted shrubs and grasses within the grid,” says Pawan Kumar Sharma, director of projects at Himachal Pradesh Road and Infrastructure Development Corporation Ltd (HPRIDCL). “Where landslides were triggered by erosion from a local river, we planted brush hedges and hardwood cuttings to bind the soil.”

The green infrastructure took root within a single season, gradually fortifying the slopes, which were better able to withstand the effects of last year’s deluge.

Neha Vyas, a senior environmental specialist with the World Bank, defines bioengineering as a subset of green infrastructure. This ecological engineering technique involves the strategic planting of vegetation and the incorporation of other organic materials to stabilise soil and enhance ecosystem resilience.

By harnessing the natural properties of plants and their root systems, soil bioengineering can be a sustainable and cost-effective approach to mitigate environmental hazards and promote landscape restoration, which is particularly good in fragile ecosystems.

In Himachal Pradesh, soil bioengineering has “involved the use of vegetation, both living and dead plants, such as bamboo, in conjunction with simple civil engineering structural elements such as catch drains, gabion walls and others,” says Vyas.

The Nog bioengineering initiative was the first of more than 250 mountainous road stretches treated with the World Bank’s assistance. Dalip Chauhan, president of the Jubbal panchayat, attests to its efficacy, citing reduced damage along the state highway #10 during last August’s catastrophic floods.

“If soil bioengineering is designed after due investigation and analysis, and monitored during execution, it effectively controls erosion along roadways, which is crucial to maintain the integrity of the road section and can even help during the heavy rains that are becoming more commonplace due to climate change,” says Vyas.

“Soil bioengineering can also improve the stability of slopes along roads, thereby reducing the risk of landslides, increasing safety for people and protecting assets,” she adds. “By absorbing much more water, bioengineered slopes can reduce the runoff and the ensuing erosion, water logging and damage.”

Beyond that, she reckons that choosing the right vegetation species could lead to carbon dioxide absorption, habitat creation for wildlife, increased ecosystem resilience and additional livelihood sources for local communities.

Harvesting grass planted by the roadside has saved Sonali, a 38-year-old cattle-rearing resident of Nog, many visits to the forest where the species is usually found. “Planting vegetation that can be used as fodder by the road to help protect it is doubly useful for us,” she tells Dialogue Earth. “I source about half of the fodder I need from the roadside. I wish such species were planted alongside all the roads in the area.”

Soil bioengineering can be a useful tool in combatting erosion and stabilising slopes, but the planning and maintenance is critical.

Even though they understand the need for robust vegetation growth, contractors sometimes prioritise cost over effectiveness. To maximise efficacy, experts advise a multi-pronged approach that ensures vegetation growth, with Vyas pointing out that “horticultural principles must be used along with the application of engineering design principles to build structures that will protect the plant communities as they grow to maturity and function as they would in their natural settings.”

Himachal Pradesh considers it good practice to also appoint supervisors to watch over and maintain sites, and Sharma highlights the importance of selecting low-maintenance indigenous plants “with aesthetic value, medicinal value, commercial value and grasses that can be used as forage for cattle.”

Vyas describes investments in bioengineering as “investments in safety and sustainability, which are much more cost-effective and visually more appealing than hardcore engineering and less environment-friendly structures.”

As Himachal Pradesh prepares for future climatic uncertainties, soil bioengineering emerges as a potential innovative lifeline to help protect lives and livelihoods.

“While it is impossible to defeat nature, surely we can use bioengineering and allied techniques to make roads that are as climate-resilient as possible,” says Sharma.

Steve Albini, the vocalist, guitarist and producer who was at the helm of a series of the most esteemed albums across the US alternative music scene, has died aged 61 from a heart attack suffered at his recording studio. Staff at his studio, Electrical Audio, confirmed the news to Pitchfork.

As well as fronting the bands Big Black, Rapeman and Shellac, who all pushed at the boundaries of post-punk and art-rock, Albini also produced – or, to use his preferred term, engineered – albums by Nirvana, Pixies, PJ Harvey and Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. He was noted for his DIY and punk ethos, resisting streaming services and refusing to take royalties from the recordings he produced for other artists.

Shellac were preparing their first album since 2014, To All Trains, for release next week.

Born in California in 1962, Albini’s musical inspirations came from the punk movement, chiefly the Ramones but also the weirder end of the genre with bands such as Devo and Pere Ubu. He moved to the suburbs of Chicago to study journalism, and was drawn into the fertile underground music scene in the city, contributing to zines and working for the punk label Ruthless Records.

He started his own musical project, Big Black, initially a solo endeavour that soon became a quartet. Their debut album Atomizer was released in 1986, and the second album, Songs About Fucking – characterised by its seething guitar tone and drum machine pulses – became a landmark in the decade’s US punk scene and earned an admirer in Robert Plant, who later had Albini produce his album with Jimmy Page, Walking Into Clarksdale.

Big Black had already split up by the time Songs About Fucking was released – “I prefer to cut it off rather than have it turn into another Gross Rock Spectacle”, Albini reasoned – and he founded his next band Rapeman in 1987. Named after a Japanese manga, it was perhaps the most high-profile example of Albini’s eagerness to prod and provoke, and he later expressed regret for the band name, calling it “flippant”.

Mindful of not wanting to hop between band projects, Albini has said he wanted his next band to endure – and they did. Shellac, formed in 1992, became a singular light in the US art-rock scene, playing a minimalist yet playfully rhythmic style with riveting interplay between Albini, drummer Todd Trainer and bassist Bob Weston. They released five albums, plus To All Trains coming next week.

Alongside his own music, he nurtured his craft behind the mixing desk. A prominent early credit came on Surfer Rosa, the 1988 debut by Pixies, followed by numerous others as the grunge scene flourished in the early 90s: the Jesus Lizard, Tad, the Breeders and more. He helped to define the raw sound of PJ Harvey’s Rid Of Me in 1993, and that year had perhaps his most famous credit: Nirvana’s famously forbidding In Utero, the follow-up to Nevermind. His stark presentation of the band’s bleak songs disturbed the commercially-minded label, Geffen, who Albini clashed with – the album ended up featuring two singles that were given brighter production compared with the Albini material.

Even as he occasionally freaked out the mainstream like this, Albini became adored by musicians for his unpretentious approach, foregrounding the intentions of each artist rather than bringing in a particular production flavour. He also favoured analogue techniques, brusquely announcing “fuck digital” on the sleevenotes to Songs About Fucking.

His success allowed him to set up Electrical Audio in 1995, and he appeared in the credits for numerous other landmark acts in American indie that went way beyond the noisy work he was generally known for: Joanna Newsom, Low, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and others. British artists such as Manic Street Preachers, Mogwai and Jarvis Cocker also sought his expertise.

Possessed of a gleefully scabrous sense of humour, Albini riled up plenty of artists and fans alike with insults and provocations – such as jokingly dedicating a Big Black single to fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. He became contrite in later years, saying in a viral thread on X (then Twitter) in 2021: “A lot of things I said and did from an ignorant position of comfort and privilege are clearly awful and I regret them”. In a 2023 Guardian interview, he said: “Even as the right wing became more openly fascist, we were still safe – and that’s where my sense of responsibility kicks in, like: ‘Oh yeah, I get it now. I was never going to be the one that they targeted.’”

Albini was also a celebrated poker player, winning two coveted bracelets at World Series of Poker tournaments and hundreds of thousands of dollars in winnings.

Among those paying tribute to Albini were the actor Elijah Wood, who said his death was “a heartbreaking loss of a legend”.

David Grubbs, whose band Gastr Del Sol worked with Albini, called him “a brilliant, infinitely generous person, absolutely one-of-a-kind, and so inspiring to see him change over time and own up to things he outgrew”.

Albini is survived by his wife, filmmaker Heather Whinna.

Hunger and disease are rising in Latin America after a year of record heat, floods and drought, a report by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has shown.

The continent, which is trapped between the freakishly hot Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, probably suffered tens of thousands of climate-related deaths in 2023, at least $21bn (£17bn) of economic damage and “the greatest calorific loss” of any region, the study found.

The climate chaos, caused by a combination of human-driven global heating and a natural El Niño effect, is continuing with devastating floods in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, which have killed at least 95 people and deluged swathes of farmland after the world’s hottest April in human history.

Global heat records have now been broken for 11 months in a row, causing death and destruction across many parts of the planet. Latin America and the Caribbean have experienced some of the worst effects.

In a summary of last year’s toll in this region, the WMO said disasters and climate change, along with socioeconomic shocks, are the main drivers of acute food insecurity, which affects 13.8 million people.

As the climate warms, diseases are spreading across a greater area. The WMO noted that more than 3m cases of dengue fever were reported in the first seven months of 2023, breaking the previous annual record for the region. Uruguay experienced its first cases of chikungunya and Chile widened alerts about the Aedes aegypti mosquito vector.

There were an average of 36,695 heat-related excess deaths each year in the region in the first two decades of this century. Last year’s toll has not yet been calculated, but it is likely to exceed the average given the record temperatures and prolonged heatwaves in many areas.

Mexico had a record high of 51.4C on 29 August, and many areas sweltered in a prolonged heatwave. By the end of the year, 76% of Mexico was experiencing some degree of drought. In October Acapulco was hit by the first ever category 5 hurricane to make landfall on the Pacific coastline. Hurricane Otis killed at least 48 people, damaged 80% of the city’s hotels and left damages calculated at $12bn.

Other areas of Central and South America endured unusually fierce heat and prolonged drought. The Panama Canal had 41% less rainfall than normal, causing difficulties for one of the most important conduits of world trade.

Brazil, the biggest country in Latin America, experienced record winter heat in excess of 41C and severe droughts in the Amazon rainforest, where the Rio Negro recorded its lowest level in more than 120 years of observations, fires raged around Manaus and more than 100 baiji river dolphins died in the hot, shallow, polluted waters of Lake Tefé.

The south of Brazil has repeatedly suffered deadly flooding. At least 65 people died in São Paulo in February 2023 after torrential rains and landslides. Another 48 were killed and 20,000 displaced in the state of Rio Grande do Sul in September after 300mm of rain fell in 24 hours and now the same southern state is deluged once again. Streets have turned to rivers in Porto Alegre, the capital, forcing the international airport to close while the football pitch of the Arena do Grêmio resembles a lake.

Last year, floods also took lives, disrupted business or ruined crops in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Peru and Bolivia.

Combined with drought, this has hurt agricultural production in one of the world’s most important food production regions. Wheat production in Argentina fell 30% below the five-year average, and a similar loss is expected in the harvest of the grain in the Brazilian state of Paraná and Rio Grande do Sul. Some of these losses have been offset by record maize production in other parts of Brazil, but food prices are rising. Overall, Latin America has suffered significant calorific losses, the report said. In countries that are also experiencing political and economic problems, such as Venezuela, Haiti and parts of Colombia, this is creating a food crisis.

The costs in human lives, lost food production and economic damage are expected to rise for as long as humans continue to burn gas, oil, coal and trees, which emit heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere.

“Sadly, this is probably only the beginning,” said Prof José Marengo, the lead author of the WMO report and director of the Brazil National Center for Monitoring and Early Warning of Natural Disasters. “Extreme events are becoming more frequent and the period of return is becoming shorter.”

I have Jane Fonda to thank for my fitness “discovery” in the late 1980s. Still in my teens, I wore through the carpet doing her workout videos in front of the TV. I also spent hours ploughing up and down the pool at the local leisure centre and honing my muscles at the gym.

I always regarded fitness as my superpower. Something that I worked hard at, for sure, but something that gave me kudos. Keeping fit – I mean, really fit – seemed to me an admirable and noble pursuit. I could fit into nice clothes easily. I could push my body and trust it not to fail. Whatever other qualities I didn’t possess, whatever I wasn’t good enough at, I could walk into a gym or toe a start line for a race and pass muster.

I trained to be a personal trainer, so I could guide others to their “fitness goals”. But it was running that really got me, quickly becoming part of my identity. I ran my first marathon aged 22 – and went on to become a coach, write books about running and host running retreats.

Running may look like freedom, but it can also be about control. Distances must be covered, paces maintained, pounds shed, personal bests (PBs) bettered. I now see that latching on to the pursuit of fitness so young was a way of imposing control on my body, of searching for approval and bringing order to my unravelling family life. It worked, too. But it also became a habit.

Like a magic suit, a fit body protects you from others’ scorn, as well as worries about the usual concerns of ageing, such as weight gain and failing health. But it takes time, energy and discipline to achieve and maintain such a body, requiring rules and restraint that can be life-limiting and reek of patriarchal control.

I was in thrall to fitness for three decades. But, when lockdown happened, when gyms, athletics tracks, swimming pools and running clubs closed, when sporting events were cancelled, when I was limited to solitary runs, a feeling crept over me. What was it all for?

One day, in that endlessly glorious spring, I was running along the riverbank. Running had begun to feel joyless and unusually laboured. That point, a few miles in, when you can step aside from the physicality of the endeavour and just let it happen was proving elusive. I was present, every jarring, heavy-footed step of the way, my cadence spelling out what for, what for, what for? I tried to push through it – until, suddenly, neither my body nor my brain could find a reason to carry on. I slowed to a walk. I stopped my watch. I sat down and had a little cry, the sweat drying on my back. Then I walked home.

It wasn’t a one-off. While I continued to go through the motions, my dedication to fitness felt increasingly hollow. And, frankly, shallow. As Sarah Donaghy said, when I interviewed her about Food Bank Run: “Running can be a solitary – even selfish – endeavour, with its focus on individual performance and PBs.”

While I struggled on throughout that summer, squeezing myself into running like a garment that no longer fitted, I began to regard it as a ball and chain, a drain on my resources. This was a big inconvenience for someone whose career was largely built around running.

Eventually, I could no longer ignore the questions my body and mind were raising. My search for answers led me to reconsider not just my attitude to my body and to running, but to life itself. To finding meaning and purpose, to achievement and ageing and to that ultimate finish line, mortality.

Ageing, without doubt, played its part in this shift. I turned 50 in 2019, and I was beginning to realise that the absence of new PBs wasn’t some kind of temporary blip – it was terminal. Try as you might, you cannot compete with the 30-year-old you, or the 40-year-old you. If running is no longer about improvement, achievement, what can it be, I wondered. What am I getting out of it? What am I putting in? Is there something else I should be doing instead?

For many, this is the point where age grading comes to the fore – many people get great pleasure from being “good for your age”. A part of me has great admiration for the 80- to 90-year-olds training for Masters competitions and pursuing every possible marginal gain. But, as the planet and its human and non-human inhabitants face climate breakdown and all the injustice, inequality, exploitation and loss that comes with it, I can’t help wondering if all that energy could be put to better use.

I stopped running altogether for a while, and was appalled when I could no longer fit into some of my clothes. The shame of my expanding, softening body almost lured me back in, but, once again, my body rebelled, voting, quite literally, with its feet. “Don’t want to slip back into being governed by running,” I wrote in my diary. “Do you really want to be the same person you were a year ago, five years ago, instead of moving forward?”

Four years on, I am less fit than I was. I cannot assume the same protective benefits of fitness on my health. I can’t automatically pick up size 10 garments, nor assume that I can do parkrun in under 22 minutes. Not being able to do these things any longer feels uncomfortable – as uncomfortable as having a visible tummy. But there are benefits, too. All that energy I poured into fitness for three decades is mine again. I think more, I notice more, I write more, I have wider interests. I finished a part-time MA last year, and I volunteer in conservation work. I am more aware of the world around me, good and bad.

In his essay How to Live With Dying, the philosopher and lifelong avid runner John Kaag writes how a cardiac arrest, minutes after finishing a punishing treadmill run, changed his perspective on life. “At a certain point, going the extra mile does not make you a better athlete. It just makes you an idiot,” he says.

There’s still the odd pang for my old fitness level, my former body – and even for the rigours of the pursuit itself. But, whatever I may have lost, I’ve gained so much more. “In the end,” writes Kaag, “most of us wish we’d spent less time on the treadmill, whatever form it might take.”

Hundreds of children identified as potential victims of trafficking are being abandoned by the Home Office and left vulnerable to exploitation, new data reveals.

Released following a freedom of information (FoI) request, figures show that in 2022, 1,871 children identified as possible victims of trafficking or modern slavery dropped off the UK government system conceived to support them once they turned 18.

To access comprehensive help in the UK, suspected victims are assessed under the National Referral Mechanism (NRM). About half of the children who fell out of the NRM when they turned 18 were British.

In total, 70% of the 2,634 children who turned 18 while waiting to be formally identified as a trafficking victim disappeared from the NRM. Half of them had their cases “suspended” by the Home Office as a result of them not giving their consent to stay in the system, while another 20% actively withdrew from the scheme.

Many children do not realise they need to give consent to remain listed on the NRM. Some are not even aware that they have been referred to it.

Anti-trafficking charities described the figures as “alarming”, urging sweeping reforms to protect young victims.

Eleonora Fais, coordinator of the Anti-Trafficking Monitoring Group, a coalition of 17 UK-based anti-trafficking organisations, said: “This data is a wake-up call. We urgently need to improve our services, so that children can receive the support they need.”

Patricia Durr, chief executive of the children’s rights charity ECPAT UK, said: “We are deeply troubled by this alarming data.

“The findings underscore the urgent need for systematic reforms to ensure that young victims of trafficking are not left vulnerable and unsupported as they transition into adulthood,” she added.

The improvements being called for include the rolling out of independent child trafficking guardians – someone who advocates on the youngster’s behalf – to all councils in England and Wales.

The data, which is the latest available, revealed that only 6% of children who turned 18 in the NRM went on to receive support under the government’s modern slavery victim care contract, which is designed to help victims.

Rachel Medina, chief executive of the Snowdrop Project, a Sheffield-based charity that provides long-term support to survivors of modern slavery, which submitted the FoI requests, said: “Worryingly, hundreds of children are falling through gaps in the systems that are meant to protect and support victims of modern slavery.

“The government must take responsibility to ensure that no child’s right to support is overlooked.”

A Home Office spokesperson said: “The targeting, grooming and exploitation of children is deplorable and we remain firmly committed to working with the police and with delivery partners to tackle this horrific crime.
“We have introduced the independent child trafficking guardianship services across England and Wales, which provide an additional source of advice and support for potentially trafficked children. The modern slavery victim care contract provides support to consenting adults in England and Wales.”
A source added that the NRM is consent-based for adults and that if a child becomes an adult after being referred, their consent is required for the process to continue.