A toddler told her mom that “monsters” were in her closet. But in fact, there were more than 50,000 bees there.

A mother of three children under four years old was met with a “terrifying” surprise after she and her husband investigated why a handful of bees had flown into the attic of the couple’s North Carolina home.

After a visit by a pest control company and multiple beekeepers, a thermal camera finally revealed where the bees had gone – to a massive hive they had built inside the wall of her daughter’s room, where the girl was convinced she had heard a monster of some kind lurking.

“At first, I thought it was a body,” Ashley Massis Class told People magazine recently. “I was like, ‘What is that?’ And he says he thinks it’s a hive.”

For roughly eight months, a swarm of endangered honeybees had been building a hive inside the wall of her daughter’s room.

The beekeeper “didn’t even have his bee gear on yet, but he took a hammer and knocked into the wall”, Massis Class recalled. “Bees came swarming out like a horror movie.

“There were streams of bees, and the wall where he hit was oozing honey. But it looked like blood because it was really, really dark, running down my daughter’s pink walls. It looked really strange.”

Beekeepers ultimately removed tens of thousands of bees over several extractions, and a honeycomb weighing more than 100lb.

The bees were relocated to a bee sanctuary. Massis Class first documented the experience on TikTok, where her story went viral and caught the attention of news outlets.

After the extractions, Massis Class reassured her daughter that “Mr Monster Hunter”, as the toddler called the beekeeper, was removing all the bees. She also reassured her daughter that, after many months, the family now believed her.

There was, in fact, a kind of monster in her wall.

In addition to the work to remove the bees, there will also be repairs to Massis Class’s home. The bees and their oozing honey caused about $20,000 worth of damage to electrical wires, which the family homeowner’s insurance will not cover.

The timing of their bee encounter was a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand, Massis Class and her husband had a baby before discovering the bees.

Yet Massis Class told People that meant the couple was on leave from work.

“I’m really thankful my husband and I are on leave right now and that we can deal with this situation,” she remarked. “But at the same time, hearing the sound of humming bees on the other side of a door is kind of terrifying.”

Tyson Foods dumped millions of pounds of toxic pollutants directly into American rivers and lakes over the last five years, threatening critical ecosystems, endangering wildlife and human health, a new investigation reveals.

Nitrogen, phosphorus, chloride, oil and cyanide were among the 371m lb of pollutants released into waterways by just 41 Tyson slaughterhouses and mega processing plants between 2018 and 2022.

According to research by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), the contaminants were dispersed in 87bn gallons of wastewater – which also contains blood, bacteria and animal feces – and released directly into streams, rivers, lakes and wetlands relied on for drinking water, fishing and recreation. The UCS analysis, shared exclusively with the Guardian, is based on the most recent publicly available water pollution data Tyson is required to report under current regulations.

The wastewater was enough to fill about 132,000 Olympic-size pools, according to a Guardian analysis.

The water pollution from Tyson, a Fortune 100 company and the world’s second largest meat producer, was spread across 17 states but about half the contaminants were dumped into streams, rivers, lakes and wetlands in Nebraska, Illinois and Missouri.

The midwest is already saturated with nitrogen and phosphorus from industrial agriculture – factory farms and synthetics fertilizers – contributing to algal blooms that clog critical water infrastructure, exacerbate respiratory conditions like asthma, and deplete oxygen levels in the sea causing marine life to suffocate and die.

Yet the UCS research is only the tip of iceberg, including water pollution from only one in three of the corporation’s slaughterhouses and processing plants, and only 2% of the total nationwide.

The current federal regulations set no limit for phosphorus, and the vast majority of meat processing plants in the US are exempt from existing water regulations – with no way of tracking how many toxins are being dumped into waterways.

“There are over 5,000 meat and poultry processing plants in the United States, but only a fraction are required to report pollution and abide by limits. As one of the largest processors in the game, with a near-monopoly in some states, Tyson is in a unique position to treat even hefty fines and penalties for polluting as simply the cost of doing business. This has to change,” said the UCS co-author Omanjana Goswami.

The findings come as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) must decide between robust new regulations that experts say would better protect waterways, critical habitat and downstream communities from polluting plants – or opt for weaker standards preferred by the powerful meat-processing industry.

A 2017 lawsuit by environmental groups has forced the EPA to update its two-decade-old pollution standards for slaughterhouses and animal rendering facilities, and the new rule is expected by September 2025. The agency has said that it is leaning towards the weakest option on the table, which critics say will enable huge amounts of nitrates, phosphorus and other contaminants to keep pouring into waterways.

“The current rule is out of date, inadequate and catastrophic for American waterways, and highlights the way American lawmaking is subject to industry capture,” said Dani Replogle, an attorney at Food and Water Watch. “The nutrient problem in the US is at catastrophic levels … it would be such a shame if the EPA caves in to industry influence.”

The meat-processing industry spent $4.3m on lobbying in Washington in 2023, of which Tyson accounted for almost half ($2.1m), according to political finance watchdog Open Secrets. The industry has made $6.6m in campaign donations since 2020, mostly to Republicans, with Tyson the biggest corporate spender.

“We can be sure Tyson and other big ag players will object to efforts to update pollution regulations, but the EPA should listen to communities whose wells, lakes, rivers and streams have been contaminated and put people over corporate profits,” said Goswami.

“Meat and poultry companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars to comply with EPA’s effluent limitations guidelines,” said Sarah Little from the North American Meat Institute, a trade association representing large processors like Tyson. “EPA’s new proposed guidelines will cost over $1bn and will eliminate 100,000 jobs in rural communities.”

Tyson did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

The American Association of Meat Processors said the EPA’s one-size-fits-all approach could put its small, family-owned members out of business.

Nebraska is a sparsely populated rural state dominated by agriculture – an increasingly consolidated corporate industry which wields substantial control over the economy and politics, as well as land and water use.

Millions of acres in Nebraska are dedicated to factory farming, with massive methane-emitting concentrated animal feeding operations (Cafos) scattered among fields of monocropped soybean, corn and wheat – grown predominantly for animal feed and ethanol. Only a tiny fraction of arable land is dedicated to sustainable agriculture or used to grow vegetables or fruits.

Tyson’s five largest plants in Nebraska dumped more than 111m lb of pollutants into waterways between 2018 and 2022, accounting for a third of the nationwide total. This included 4m lb of nitrates – a chemical that can contaminate drinking water, cause blood disorders and neurological defects in infants, as well as cancers and thyroid disease in adults.

Tyson’s largest plant is located in Dakota City on the Missouri river – America’s longest waterway which stretches 2,300 miles across eight states before joining the Mississippi. It’s a sprawling beef facility, which generates a nauseating stench that wafts over neighboring South Sioux city, known locally as sewer city, where many plant workers live. (Another beef processing plant is located next to Tyson.)

Earlier this month, the Guardian saw multiple trucks waiting to offload cattle for slaughter – after which the carcasses are rendered, processed and packaged in different parts of the facility. The plant produces vast quantities of wastewater which is stored (and treated) in lagoons on the riverbank, before being released into the Missouri river which provides drinking water for millions of people.

The Dakota City plant is a major local employer and Tyson’s single largest polluter, dumping 60m lb of contaminants into waterways between 2018 and 2022, according to UCS analysis.

“This Tyson plant helped put me through college and supports a lot of migrant workers, but there’s a dark side like the water and air pollution that most people don’t pay attention to because they’re just trying to survive,” said Rogelio Rodriguez, a grassroots organizer with Conservation Nebraska, which is part of a coalition pushing for stronger state protections for meat processing plant workers.

“If regulations are lax, corporations have a tendency to push limits to maximize profits, we learnt that during Covid,” said Rodriguez, whose family works at the plant. A deadly Covid outbreak at the Dakota City plant in April 2020 sickened 15% of the workforce and led to substantial community spread.

A few miles south of the Dakota City Tyson plant, the Winnebago tribe is slowly recuperating and reforesting their land, as well as transitioning to organic farming.

“We’re investing a lot of money to look after the water and soil on our lands because it’s the right thing to do, yet a few miles north the Tyson plant lets all this pollution go into the river. Water is our most important resource, and the Missouri river is very important to our culture and people,” said Aaron LaPointe, a Winnebago tribe member who runs Ho-Chunk Farms.

The water problem – and lack of accountability – goes beyond Tyson.

Last year Governor Jim Pillen, whose family owns one of America’s largest pork companies, was widely criticized for calling a Chinese-born journalist at Flatwater Free Press a “communist” after she exposed serious water quality violations at his hog farms. Earlier this month, the Nebraska supreme court ruled that the state environmental agency could charge the same investigative news outlet tens of thousands of dollars for a public records request about nitrates.

Big ag’s influence on state politics is “endemic”, according to Gavin Geis from Common Cause Nebraska, a non-partisan elections watchdog.

“The big money spent on lobbying and campaigns by corporate agriculture has played a major role in resisting stronger regulation – despite clear signals such as high levels of nitrates in our groundwater and cancers in rural communities that we need more oversight for farmers across the board,” said Geis.

“We’ve created a system with no accountability that doesn’t protect our ecosystem – which includes the land, water and people of Nebraska,” said Graham Christensen, a regenerative farmer and founder of GC Resolve, a communication and consulting firm. “The political capture is harming our rural communities, we’re in the belly of the beast and need help from federal regulators.”

Indigenous Americans lived and farmed sustainably along the Missouri River until white colonial settlers forcibly displaced tribes, and eventually dammed the entire river system – mostly for energy and industrial agriculture. Today, major river systems like the Missouri River – and its communities – face multiple, overlapping threats from dams, the climate crisis, overuse and pollution.

Oxygen depleting contaminants like nitrogen and phosphorus from Tyson plants in the midwest have been shown to travel along river-to-river pathways, causing fish kills and contributing to dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico. When the river is drier due to drought or high temperatures, pollutants become more concentrated and can form sediments – which are then dislodged during floods and taken miles downstream.

Global heating is making extreme weather increasingly common, and as droughts dry up underground aquifers, tribes will probably need to turn to the Missouri for drinking water, according to Tim Grant, director of environmental protection for the Omaha tribe. “We’re very concerned about what’s in the river, it’s an important part of our culture and traditions,” said Grant, who has started testing the fish for toxins.

The UCS research also found Tyson plants located close to critical habitats for endangered or threatened species – including the whooping crane, the tallest and among the rarest birds in North America.

There are currently only 500 or so wild whooping cranes – up from 20 birds in the 1940s – which stop to feed and rest along a shallow stretch of the Platte River, a tributary of the Missouri in central Nebraska, as they migrate between the Texas Gulf coast and Canada. The majestic white birds feed in the cornfields that surround the Platte River, outnumbered by the slate gray sandhill cranes that also migrate through Nebraska each spring.

Tyson’s sprawling Lexington slaughterhouse and beef processing plant is situated less than two miles from the Platte River – among four federally designated critical habitats considered essential to conservation of the whooping crane.

“The cumulative effects of exposure to these industrial toxins could pose a long-term threat to the cranes’ food sources, reproductive success and resilience as a species,” said George Cunningham, a retired aquatic ecologist and Missouri River expert at Sierra Club Nebraska.

“Poor environmental regulation is down to the stranglehold industrial agriculture has on politics – at every level. It’s about political capture.”

Australia’s south-west is suffering through a historic dry stretch. Perth had the lowest rainfall on record in the six months to March, and trees in eucalyptus forests and scrubland across a 1,000 kilometre stretch are dying in shocking and spectacular fashion, with spillover effects through the ecosystems that rely on them.

The climate signal – the impact of rising atmospheric greenhouse gases, largely due to the burning of fossil fuels – in this part of the world has been clear for a while. Winter rainfall has fallen up to 20% since the 1970s in what scientists have for years described as one of the earliest examples of the climate crisis having a measurable influence.

This was one of the backdrops as Woodside Energy – Australia’s biggest oil and gas company, with multi-billion dollar developments in the works at home and in Africa and the Gulf of Mexico – held its annual general meeting in the Western Australian capital last week.

Across four hours, Woodside’s chairman, Richard Goyder, and chief executive, Meg O’Neill, made the company’s case and took questions from shareholders and their proxies. Many related to climate change.

A handful of the shareholders couldn’t understand what the fuss was about, argued CO2 from burning fossil fuels was airborne plant food and called the climate-concerned idiots.

But the overwhelming sentiment from investors was that the company was failing to address their concerns, and not living up to its rhetoric that it aimed to have net zero emissions by 2050. They lodged a 58% protest vote against Woodside’s climate report, the strongest against a listed company anywhere across the globe.

It was a remarkable result, reached after a concerted campaign by shareholder activist groups, and public rebukes by global pension and Australian super funds. Goyder, who has had a torrid recent time as the chair of both Woodside and Qantas, ended the meeting by saying the company took the non-binding feedback seriously, and would consider it as it reviewed its approach to climate change.

They were the words he had to say after an embarrassing slap down, but there was little else at the meeting to back them up. The message was internally contradictory. On the one hand: we’re listening, we hear you and we’re open to change. But also: we reject what you say. And we have some giant fossil fuel developments to be getting on with so we can reward your financial investment.

Standard 21st century operating procedure for a fossil fuel company, in other words.

The disconnect between Woodside’s rhetoric and climate reality echoed throughout the AGM, but crystallised in a few moments. Some were throwaway – Goyder saying it was good to have a question “on the business” when discussion veered away from the ecological impact of its operations – but others were more telling.

One shareholder, referring to the state’s drought, asked whether 2.7m seedlings the company planted in the state last year to offset some of its emissions had survived. Another asked if Woodside believed it had moral and financial culpability for the impact of the climate crisis on local farmers.

Goyder acknowledged the underlying issue – “It’d be nice to get some rain in the agricultural regions of Western Australia sooner rather than later” – but said it was “a pretty long bow” to consider Woodside “responsible for the climate conditions in the agricultural parts of Western Australia”, and “nonsense” to even suggest it might be given the scale of global emissions.

On one level, this is just a truism. Woodside is not uniquely or solely responsible for the growing force of climate change being felt in the state. No one suggests it is.

On another level, it is an argument about responsibility that would not pass muster in most other walks of life. You’re only part of the cause of the problem? Ah well, keep doing more of that then.

This is, of course, the climate conundrum. The problem can be solved only if everyone, or nearly everyone, does their bit. China is often singled out as a climate villain, and not without cause. But even if it stopped polluting tomorrow that would leave about two-thirds of carbon pollution unaddressed.

Not everyone is equally responsible to make rapid and immediate emissions cuts and to help others to do the same. But it’s been widely agreed that those who are responsible to act now include (a) the wealthy and (b) polluters working in areas where there are viable and affordable zero-emissions alternatives. It should shock no one to learn an Australian oil and gas company qualifies on both counts.

Woodside’s response is to claim it is acting, mainly by paying for some carbon offsets to put a dent in its direct emissions. But when Bill Hare, a scientist and head of the global consultancy Climate Analytics, asked the company to justify its claim that its plans align with the goals of the landmark Paris agreement, Goyder and O’Neill had no answer, other than to assert that it did.

The hole in the argument was so great, and so obvious, that a majority of voting shareholders felt they could not be seen to take it seriously. That hasn’t happened before. It shows the shift in sentiment in the investment community.

But we shouldn’t get carried away. The pension and super funds still overwhelmingly backed in Goyder as chair, returning him with only 16% voting against. A cynic might say they scolded the company over its climate stance at zero cost while backing the existing management to continue to keep delivering fossil-fuel powered dividends.

Out in the real world, the climate crisis comes in a rush, whether it is flooding in the Dubai desert, heatwaves shutting schools and upending lives across southern Asia, continent-sized sea ice loss in Antarctica, or record mass coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef. Boardroom change is a slower operation.

What happens from here? Goyder said he and the company’s investor relations team have already held more than 150 meetings with investors over their climate concerns. Presumably there are more to come. But Woodside still plans to spend $18bn on fossil fuel projects over the next five years.

The circle can’t be squared while it remains wedded to the self-interested line that gas – the largest source of fossil fuel emissions growth last decade – is a climate solution. But the AGM shows that argument is increasingly exposed, and the push against it isn’t going away.

Michael Sanchez was setting up his new camera to capture a waterfall at Oregon’s Hug Point at sunrise when he spotted a little bird hopping around. He snapped a few photos, and didn’t think much more of it.

A week later, those snapshots have made him the star – and the envy – of the local birding community. Sanchez, who is from Vancouver, Washington, may have inadvertently captured the first images of an extremely rare blue rock-thrush in North America.

The species, which is native to east Asia, has only once before been spotted in this region, in 1997. But that sighting was rejected by the American Birding Association. If Sanchez’s images are verified by local and national birding groups, he could be credited as the first person to successfully record a blue rock-thrush in the region.

“I was very very surprised to see just how stirred up this got folks,” he said. “It’s mind-blowing.”

Sanchez, a middle school band director and musician who very recently took up photography as a hobby, had never considered himself much of a birder. But as he was reviewing his photos from his trip to the coast, it struck him that the cute bird he saw was unusual – he’d never seen anything like it before. “So I thought, I’ve got to post it on the socials, right?” Not long after, a friend of a friend – an avid birder – reached out. From its unique blue and chestnut plumage, the bird looked distinctively like a male blue rock-thrush. It turned out, Sanchez may have set a birding record.

“A lot of times when something like this happens, there’s a lot of effort among the birding community to try and verify it, because everyone wants to go and see it for themselves,” said Brodie Cass Talbott, of the Bird Alliance of Oregon and the Oregon Birding Association.

Volunteer experts have been working with Sanchez to verify the image and confirm its location. No other local birders have been able to spot the bird since Sanchez photographed it – but oddly, there was another blue rock-thrush sighting four days later, at the Farallon Islands off the San Francisco coast.

It’s unclear whether this was the same bird or another bird. As Sanchez’s photos made rounds in online birding groups, another person reported seeing what may have been the same blue rock-thrush in January, but was not able to take a photo.

It is doubly uncertain how this bird even made it so far from its home, to North America. “Maybe this bird individually just has faulty navigation,” said Cass Talbot. It may have gotten lost, and then trapped in a strong wind system. Or it may have hitched a ride on a ship.

Usually, when ultra-rare, non-endemic bird species turn up on the west coast, they tend to be seabirds, spotted far off shore. “That’s part of why it’s been such a big story here, and people have been so excited about it,” he said. “It’s just sort of mind-bending.”

The implausible sighting has been a reminder of how unexpected and fascinating birding can be, Cass Talbot added. “It’s always neat for us to see how big the world is and how incredible these creatures are.”

Sanchez agrees. He wasn’t a birder before, but “this really has opened my eyes,” he said.

“I guess I’m a birder at this point,” Sanchez said. “I think I’m in the club.”

More than 90% of marine animals caught in shark nets off New South Wales beaches over the summer were non-target species, with new documents revealing division within the government over the controversial program.

More than half of the 208 non-target species – such as turtles, dolphins and smaller sharks – that were caught in the nets over the past eight months were killed, data obtained by conservationists show.

The 134 dead animals included five critically endangered grey nurse sharks, four endangered leatherback turtles and an endangered loggerhead turtle, according to the figures released on Tuesday as the nets were removed for another year.

The data, obtained by Humane Society International under the state’s information access laws, show that of the total non-target animals caught, only 74 animals or 36% were released alive.

There were 15 target animals caught; three tiger sharks and 12 great white sharks, with five of these killed. The conservation group said no target shark species were caught at any of Sydney’s metropolitan beaches.

Under NSW’s shark meshing program, nets are installed at 51 beaches between Newcastle and Wollongong from 1 September to 30 April every year.

Before the nets were installed last year, the department of primary industries (DPI) advised the agriculture minister, Tara Moriarty, that the nature of the nets used meant the catch of non-target species was “unavoidable”.

Briefing documents prepared by the department for Moriarty, seen by Guardian Australia, also show the shark nets are considered a “key threatening process” because of how many non-target species, or “bycatch”, are affected.

“The catch in the shark meshing program has always and continues to be dominated by non-target animals. The average ratio of bycatch to the catch of target sharks … in recent years has been approximately 12:1,” one of the briefs said.

The nets were rolled out last year despite the government saying it would wait until it received feedback from eight coastal councils before making a decision.

A brief prepared by the environment department in August last year, seen by Guardian Australia, says the DPI “initially offered coastal councils the option to opt out of shark nets” deployed in their area but then backflipped.

“On 21 August 2023, [Moriarty] announced that the nets would go back in on 1 September for the full meshing season, to allow DPI to gather further data to make better informed decisions about possible changes,” the brief said.

These possible changes could include removing nets in select council areas in the 2024-2025 season, according to the brief.

A government spokesperson on Monday said the department was incorrect to say councils were offered the chance to opt out of the program.

“Last year DPI conducted formal consultation with relevant councils regarding shark management, including their willingness to be involved in future administration,” the spokesperson said.

“As trials of new technologies are proven to improve safety outcomes for swimmers, the government will consider support for the reassessment of shark nets to move towards new technologies.”

The environment minister, Penny Sharpe, has privately voiced her support for ending the use of shark nets.

Sharpe wrote to Moriarty before the 2023-2024 shark meshing season began, proposing their respective agencies work together with local councils on a “staged approach to remove” the nets.

“I understand work with local councils is progressing to allow them to decide whether to continue to use shark nets in their local areas,” Sharpe wrote in a letter seen by Guardian Australia.

“Giving councils the choice to opt out of shark nets empowers local communities to decide the best mix of shark protection measures for their area.”

Envoy Foundation conservationist Andre Borell, who obtained the documents under the state’s information access laws, said Sharpe should “stand up for the environment publicly”.

“A letter in the background I don’t feel is enough,” Borell said. “We would love for them to be more public about that instead of leaving it all to the community and NGOs.”

UK harvests of important crops could be down by nearly a fifth this year due to the unprecedented wet weather farmers have faced, increasing the likelihood that the prices of bread, beer and biscuits will rise.

Analysis by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) has estimated that the amount of wheat, barley, oats and oilseed rape could drop by 4m tonnes this year, a reduction of 17.5% compared with 2023.

The warnings come as farmers have borne the brunt of the heavy rainfall and bad weather experienced over the winter, with the UK experiencing 11 named storms since September.

In England, there was 1,695.9mm of rainfall between October 2022 and March 2024, the wettest 18-month period since records began in 1836.

This has resulted in planted crops either being flooded or damaged by the wet weather, or farmers not being able to establish crops at all.

Tom Lancaster, a land analyst at ECIU, said: “This washout winter is playing havoc with farmers’ fields leading to soils so waterlogged they cannot be planted or too wet for tractors to apply fertilisers.

“This is likely to mean not only a financial hit for farmers, but higher imports as we look to plug the gap left by a shortfall in UK supply. There’s also a real risk that the price of bread, beer and biscuits could increase as the poor harvest may lead to higher costs.

“To withstand the wetter winters that will come from climate change, farmers need more support. The government’s green farming schemes are vital to this, helping farmers to invest in their soils to allow them to recover faster from both floods and droughts.”

The ECIU analysed data from the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) from March, which looked at the amount of land set aside for crops, but also Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) data looking at crop yields in 2020, the next wettest year in recent times.

It estimated that all wheat produced would decline by 26.5% compared with 2023, while winter barley would drop by 33.1% and oilseed rape would reduce by 37.6%.

According to the ECIU, production of spring barley and spring oats will increase by 27% and 23% compared with last year, with farmers giving more area to spring crops due to the difficulties around planting and growing winter crops.

Earlier this month, the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) called for more help to protect farmers from flooding, saying it was undermining the country’s food production and food security.

The NFU vice-president, Rachel Hallos, also said this month: “People should be in no doubt about the immense pressure UK farm businesses are under thanks to this unprecedented and constant rain.

“It’s no exaggeration to say a crisis is building. While farmers are bearing the brunt of it now, consumers may well see the effects through the year as produce simply doesn’t leave the farm gate.”

Some farms in places including Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire were badly affected by persistent rain since October, meaning they have not been able to plant any crops, while the wet weather has significantly depleted the amount other farms have been able to plant.

Colin Chappell, an arable farmer from Lincolnshire and member of the Nature Friendly Farming Network (NFFN), said the wet weather had had a massive impact, with virtually no crops being successfully drilled this winter. He said: “While it’s now dry enough to plant some fields, some of them are so bad I don’t think they’ll get drilled this year.”

Last week, the head of Associated British Foods – one of the UK’s biggest bread makers, which owns Kingsmill and Ryvita – warned of potentially higher prices if the rise in cost of domestic grains is not offset by larger harvests abroad.

For the first time, researchers have formally shown that exposure to toxic PFAS increases the likelihood of death by cardiovascular disease, adding a new level of concern to the controversial chemicals’ wide use.

The findings are especially significant because proving an association with death by chemical exposure is difficult, but researchers were able to establish it by reviewing death records from northern Italy’s Veneto region, where many residents for decades drank water highly contaminated with PFAS, also called “forever chemicals”.

Records further showed an increased likelihood of death from several cancers, but stopped short of establishing a formal association because of other factors.

“This is the first time that anyone has found strong evidence of an association of PFAS exposure and cardiovascular mortality,” said Annibale Biggeri, the peer-reviewed study’s lead author, and a researcher with the University of Padua.

PFAS are a class of 15,000 chemicals used across dozens of industries to make products resistant to water, stains and heat. Though the compounds are highly effective, previous research has linked them to cancer, kidney disease, birth defects, decreased immunity, liver problems and a range of other serious diseases.

Veneto’s drinking water was widely contaminated by a PFAS-production plant between 1985 and 2018. Researchers first found an excess of about 4,000 deaths during this period, or nearly three every month.

Part of the region was supplied with water from a different source, giving researchers the opportunity to compare records for tens of thousands of people who drank contaminated water and lived near those who did not.

Though PFAS can affect the cardiovascular system in different ways, it is largely a problem because it produces stubbornly high and dangerous levels of cholesterol. The levels are difficult to control because they aren’t caused by dietary or lifestyle choices that can be addressed with adjustments, but hormonal changes that impact the metabolism and the body’s ability to control plaque in arteries.

The study’s authors suspect that post-traumatic stress disorder caused by the environmental disaster, which upended lives across the region, may also be contributing to circulatory disease.

The evidence of a jump in kidney cancer was also “very clear”, Biggeri said. In the study’s first five years, 16 cases were recorded, while 65 were recorded in the last five years. It also found elevated levels of testicular cancer during some time periods.

The records “showed clearly” that earlier life exposures led to higher levels of mortality, except for women who have multiple children. Previous research has found levels were higher in women with only one child.

The chemicals accumulate in placentas and are passed onto children during pregnancy, which reduces levels in the body. Mortality levels among women who were of child-bearing age were generally lower, but increased in older women.

The chemicals will be passed down to children for generations, said Laura Facciolo, a Veneto resident who drank contaminated water. She said the findings underscore the need to ban PFAS, and the disaster’s injustice.

“I found myself in a big giant trial where no one gave any consent, just like mice,” she said. “I have no words for this.”

Countries are for the first time considering restrictions on the global production of plastic – to reduce it by 40% in 15 years – in an attempt to protect human health and the environment.

As the world attempts to make a treaty to cut plastic waste at UN talks in Ottawa, Canada, two countries have put forward the first concrete proposal to limit production to reduce its harmful effects including the huge carbon emissions from producing it.

The motion submitted by Rwanda and Peru sets out a global reduction target, ambitiously termed a “north star”, to cut the production of primary plastic polymers across the world by 40% by 2040, from a 2025 baseline.

It says: “The effectiveness of both supply and demand-side measures will be assessed, in whole or in part, on their success in reducing the production of primary plastic polymers to sustainable levels.”

The proposal calls for the consideration of mandatory reporting by countries of statistical data on production, imports and exports of primary plastic polymers.

A global plastic reduction target would be similar to the legally binding Paris agreement to pursue efforts to limit global temperature increase to 1.5C above preindustrial levels, Rwanda and Peru said.

“The target should align with our objectives for a safe circular economy for plastics by closing the circularity gap between production and consumption,” the countries said.

“It should also align with our objective in the Paris agreement to limit warming to 1.5C. To this end, one such global reduction target could be a 40% reduction by 2040 against a 2025 baseline.”

Global plastic production soared from 2m tonnes in 1950 to 348m tonnes in 2017. The plastic production industry is expected to double in capacity by 2040.

About 11m tonnes of plastic leaches into the ocean each year, and by 2040 the scale of this marine plastic waste pollution is likely to triple.

Plastic production is a significant driver of climate breakdown, as most plastic is made from fossil fuels. A study by scientists at the US-based Lawrence Berkeley National Lab has estimated that by 2050 plastic production could account for 21-31% of the world’s carbon emission budget required to limit global heating to 1.5C.

A 2021 analysis by Beyond Plastics found that the US plastics industry will be a bigger contributor to the climate crisis than coal-fired power in the country by 2030.

Countries agreed at UN talks in 2022 in Nairobi, Kenya, that a treaty to cut plastic waste must address the full life cycle of plastic. They promised to forge an international legally binding agreement by 2024.

The Ottawa talks, which are due to finish on Monday, aim to get 175 countries to agree the draft text of the treaty.

Graham Forbes, the global plastic projects leader at Greenpeace USA, who was at the Ottawa talks, said: “This is not an ambitious enough target for Greenpeace but it is an important first step to an agreement to limit global plastic production. You cannot solve the pollution crisis unless you constrain, reduce and restrict plastic production.”

With his farm almost entirely surrounded by the banks of the River Severn in north Shropshire, Ed Tate is used to flooding on his land – but this year, the sheer level of rainfall is the worst he has ever seen.

He points to a field where about 20% of wheat crops have failed as they have been covered with rainwater that has pooled in muddy puddles, in areas that would usually be a sea of green by now.

Over the hill, he struggles to drive his off-road vehicle through boggy fields saturated with water while the rain continues to fall around him.

“I think in living memory this is the worst winter we’ve had, just because of the duration of wet weather we’ve seen, and we’ve got a lot of failing crops,” said Tate, who has been running his 800-acre mixed arable and livestock farm just outside Shrewsbury for about 20 years.

“We’re losing tens of thousands of pounds and there’s just no support. It does mean we’re going to have to look at redundancies on the farm, unfortunately. With some crops we might break even. But for other farms, this could tip them over the edge.”

Met Office data shows that from October 2022 to March 2024, England was hit by the highest amount of rain for any 18-month period since records began in 1836.

Some farm crops have been completely wiped out, while many others have drastically reduced yields. The Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board has predicted this year’s wheat yields will be down 15%, winter barley down 22% and oilseed rape down 28%, the biggest drop since the 1980s.

“I don’t want to work out the numbers really. We’ve lost tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of pounds off our income,” said Rory Lay, who works on his family’s 1,200-acre arable, beef and sheep farm north of Shrewsbury.

“It has been relentless this winter, my waterproofs are worn out. It’s never nice, just trudging around in the rain – that mental aspect has been pretty hard on people this year and it’s still really, really wet.

“My dad is at retirement age, and even he doesn’t remember having this much crop loss, bare fields and just water everywhere.”

Like many farmers, Lay has been checking the weather forecast constantly, desperately hoping for a letup in the wet conditions. “It has even got to the silly point where you’re all comparing weather apps and looking for the slightest difference to give you some hope,” he said.

Last week the government opened a farming recovery fund scheme to help farmers recuperate from the effects of flooding from Storm Henk in January. But many areas, including low-lying north Shropshire, which is particularly vulnerable to wet weather, were not covered as they were not one of the worst-affected areas in that storm.

Most of the crops Lay planted in autumn have rotted in the wet conditions, and he has been desperately trying to replant so he can salvage his harvest. But the sodden soil is still too compacted to drill, leaving messy tracks in the fields where he has attempted to plant before giving up.

“I’m doing more of a mess trying to alleviate the problem because it’s still too wet. I’m trying to have that patience but we’re against that ticking clock,” he said.

“I’ve got some fields where the whole crop has gone, and my yield is dropping every single day. Another week and there will probably be no point. It’ll cost as much to plant it and harvest it as what we get off it. We are looking at a very tough 18 months ahead of us where we are going to have very low returns, because we literally just have very little to sell.”

The Lib Dem MP for North Shropshire, Helen Morgan, said the impact of rain had been devastating across the industry.

“You can probably afford to have a poor winter drill crop, but you can’t afford to have a poor summer one as well. Farmers are struggling,” she said. “If we don’t get a bit of luck in the next couple of weeks or so, we’re going to get a really, really difficult harvest.”

She said longer-term government support to help farmers combat heavy rainfall and flooding was essential, including incentives to support farmers who allow their fields to flood in order to prevent flooding farther downstream.

But in the absence of financial help, most farms are in a race against time to plant in time for the summer harvest. Over at Lynn South farm, in the east of the county, all hands are on deck to get potatoes in the ground as the soil slowly dries out.

The farm’s income comes from its arable planting – potatoes and wheat – as well as its flower fields which are harvested for wedding confetti and opened up to the public in summer for events.

“Everything is late – the potatoes are late, the wheat is late and the flowers are late to go in. If we can’t get planted in the next week or two weeks, it’s not going to work,” said Ashley Evers-Swindell, who helps run the farm’s flower business, Shropshire Petals. “To say it’s been stressful is an understatement.

“Our loss of yield right now could be between 10 and 15%, and we’ve already lost about £80,000 from our potatoes just because we’re planting late. In every field, there’s probably about an acre of waterlogged ground that we’ll lose.”

Kate Mayne, who runs the local National Farmers’ Union farmers group, said people had been spreading fields at her family farm outside Shrewsbury at 2am when a clear weather window finally appeared.

“There’s a huge backup of work at the moment, so when you can get out and do it, you have to go for it,” she said. “The rain has just been absolutely mind blowing, we haven’t had any rest from it, and the implications are massive.

“It’s pretty horrendous for a lot of farmers out there.”