Back in April 2004, in the shadow of the previous European summer, I started work at Downing Street advising the British prime minister on climate change. The 2003 heatwave had killed an estimated 70,000 people across Europe. Many were older people, in homes and neighbourhoods ill-equipped for prolonged heat.

In May this year, I walked through Bordeaux with my 83-year-old mother-in-law in 38C heat. I saw how quickly heat changes the terms of ordinary life. Streets emptied. Shade became essential. The question was not simply the temperature, but whether people could work, sleep or remain safely at home.

That was the European spring. By summer, 42,000 hectares around Gironde and Arcachon surrounding the city had burned. France experienced its worst fires since 1949.

In June, during the Tour de Suisse, the Italian champion cyclist Elisa Longo Borghini suffered heatstroke. She struggled afterwards to remember the final climb. If extreme heat can overwhelm an elite athlete, we should understand the danger it presents to us all.

Europe’s warning is relevant to every Australian city.

Extreme heat is not merely uncomfortable weather. Between 2000 and 2018, extreme heat caused more deaths in Australia than all our bushfires, floods, storms and cyclones combined. Yet it remains under-recognised because it leaves little visible destruction and its effects are often recorded as heart, kidney or respiratory illness rather than heat itself.

And risk is not evenly shared. Older people, particularly those living alone, people with chronic illness, outdoor workers and people in poorly cooled homes are more exposed. As we age, our ability to sense heat, sweat effectively and regulate body temperature can diminish, while thirst can become a less reliable prompt. Staying hydrated must be a habit throughout a hot day, not an afterthought when work is finished.

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This has cultural as well as policy implications. We should challenge the idea that a cold beer is enough to manage the impact of hard physical labour in dangerous heat. Or its quieter twin: the carer skipping her own break to help someone else. Nagging your older relatives and checking on neighbours could save a life.

Australians understand seasonal preparation. We do it for bushfires. Governments plan, agencies coordinate, volunteers are mobilised and communities are encouraged to act before danger arrives.

We should bring the same mindset to extreme heat.

The risk is not confined to bushland at the edge of our cities. It may be a hot top-floor apartment, a home with no shade or breeze, or a worksite. It affects the postcodes of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth differently, but is now a national test of whether our homes, cities and services are ready for the climate we have.

Here in New South Wales, the state government and its agencies have recognised heat as a growing risk and strengthened arrangements for declared heatwaves, including clearer roles and updated warnings.

The government can build on these foundations. Our Heat Stress Spotlight Report identifies a critical gap. NSW has improved its response once a heatwave is declared, but dangerous heat does not always meet a formal threshold. Isolated very hot days and heat combined with high humidity can be dangerous too. Emergency arrangements must be complemented by a coordinated, annual system of preparation.

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We believe NSW Health can lead a seasonal heat plan through the hotter months. It could help agencies prepare, ensure warnings are clear and trusted, and direct support to those at greatest risk. Exposure to extreme heat can also be reduced through cooler housing, better shade and tree cover, stronger thermal protections for renters and social and Aboriginal housing tenants, and effective workplace heat plans.

NSW also needs consistent public data on heat-related illness and deaths. If we cannot see the burden clearly, we cannot judge whether our responses reach those who need it to prevent avoidable harm.

Responding to hotter summers is work government cannot do alone. Resilient Sydney has helped place heat resilience on the public agenda, including through the Greater Sydney Heat Smart City Plan. Sweltering Cities has made the everyday reality of heat in homes, streets and suburbs impossible to ignore, especially for people least able to avoid it. Their work deserves recognition. It also shows why state government, councils, health services, employers and community organisations need to work together.

Bushfires have flames. Floods leave visible damage. Extreme heat acts silently, accumulating in homes, streets and bodies over days and nights. By the time it becomes visible in emergency departments or mortality figures, the opportunity to prevent much of the harm has passed.

We treat bushfire as a seasonal certainty. It is time we treated heat the same way: by preparing early, coordinating well and protecting people before the next heatwave reaches a street near you.

If you think you have heard enough about the growing “super” El Niño, trust me, you are going to hear a lot more. What is happening in the equatorial Pacific is jaw-dropping and could well mark one of the biggest global weather upheavals in a millennium. It will spawn a string of weather catastrophes around our world in what remains of this year and in 2027, and there is no reason to think the UK will be immune.

To recap briefly, El Niño involves a heating of the central and eastern equatorial Pacific ocean. It happens every few years and is part of a natural cycle termed the El Niño southern oscillation, which switches between warm (El Niño) and cool (La Niña) phases. El Niños that see heating reach or exceed 2C are defined as “super” but this one, which is forecast to top-out at an astonishing 4C later this year, is so much bigger, the term “hyper” might be more appropriate.

El Niño is nothing new. Evidence for its existence extends back hundreds of millions of years and its ramifications have always been negative and disruptive. The difference today is that it is happening at a time when our world is heating more rapidly than ever before, and it is being supercharged as a result, leading to increasingly extreme weather.

Figuring out how much global heating alone is influencing El Niño is not straightforward, as its strength and other characteristics change naturally over time. Both El Niños and La Niñas, for example, have been steadily increasing in duration over the last 7,000 years. This is bad news in its own right, as it means the world’s weather is knocked out of kilter for even longer, but added to this, stronger El Niños are becoming more frequent as we continue to add CO₂ to the atmosphere.

There is no straightforward correlation between El Niño’s strength and the magnitude of impacts in any given part of the planet. But given the unprecedented amount of extra heat being added to the atmosphere over the Pacific, it would be reasonable to expect the world to experience exceptionally hazardous weather over the course of the next several months.

How, then, is the UK likely to fare? The Met Office has already warned of the increased likelihood of a stormy and wet autumn and early winter, so it would be judicious to start preparing now for flooding on a serious – perhaps even epic – scale. After all, the last big El Niño, in 2015–16, resulted in the most extreme UK floods on record. Stronger winds are also a big worry, as many trees weakened by this summer’s extreme drought conditions could be brought down in the powerful storms to come. A strong El Niño could also bring Arctic air to the UK later in the winter, although this is far from set in stone. Whether El Niño fosters more record-breaking heat next summer also remains to be seen.

But there are likely to be indirect impacts on the UK too, thanks to the devastating effects strong El Niños have on the global economy. While the great recession of 2008 resulted in global GDP reducing by around $2tn, the 1997–98 super-El Niño resulted in losses of $5.7tn. Much of this was due to the suppression of economic activity that can last for up to 14 years after a strong El Niño. The late-90s El Niño – the most powerful of the 20th century – peaked at 2.4C; the current one is already at 2.7C, meaning significant impacts on UK food security, cost of living and general economic wellbeing would not be a surprise.

However the UK fares in the coming months, its challenges are likely to be small beer compared with elsewhere on the planet. The effects of the strengthening El Niño are already being keenly felt, particularly across India, which is experiencing its weakest monsoon for 20 years. As El Niño peaks later this year, and slowly subsides, the west coast of South America and the western US can expect torrential rains, severe flooding and mudslides. Meanwhile, heatwaves, drought and wildfires will be the order of the day across the Amazon, south and south-east Asia and much of Australia. One tiny positive is that Atlantic hurricane activity tends to be damped down during El Niño years, but this is more than made up for by the revving up of Pacific typhoons.

California, in particular, is bracing itself for the worst, primarily because past super-El Niños have brought some of the wettest periods in the history of the state. This is because El Niño years tend to favour the formation of “atmospheric rivers” – streams of exceptional precipitation that track across the state from the Pacific for days at a time, dumping colossal amounts of rain. Such conditions contributed to the great flood of 1862, which left a vast area of the state under water, including a 480km-long stretch of the Central Valley. The biggest worry is that this unprecedented El Niño will see the realisation of a megastorm worst-case scenario known as the ARkStorm. If it does, expect millions of homes and businesses to be flooded, long-term damage to infrastructure, and economic losses totalling almost $1tn. Given, too, that tech companies would be severely impacted, the knock-on effects could result in another hammer blow to the global economy.

The effects of the El Niño will be felt well into 2027, almost certainly ensuring that next year is the hottest ever recorded, possibly by some margin. It would not be unexpected for the average global temperature to reach at least 1.6C above preindustrial levels, and quite possibly 1.7C or more.

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Every tonne of CO₂ added to the atmosphere helps El Niños get stronger, and it would be nice to imagine that the coming monster might prove a wake-up call. But no. Governments continue to row back on green policies and fossil fuel corporations still plan for expansion.

As this year’s super-El Niño looms large, the UK government advises us to stock up on food while it prepares to greenlight the extraction of more fossil fuels from the North Sea. Cognitive dissonance doesn’t even begin to describe the idiocy of such thinking. You couldn’t make it up.

• Bill McGuire is professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at UCL. His latest book is The Fate of the World: A History and Future of the Climate Crisis (HarperCollins Publishers, £20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

The ancient craft of hedge laying is experiencing a strong revival as farmers use techniques that peaked in the 18th and 19th centuries to boost wildlife, capture carbon and help tackle flooding.

Hedge laying, which restores and revives mature hedges to keep them fresh, was among the four most popular categories of capital grants selected by farmers out of a total pot of £225m provided by the government this year to support practical environmental improvements on farms and across the countryside.

The 2,500 farmers across England who applied for grants to restore and maintain their mature hedgerows using a craft that dates back thousands of years, will – if the grants are approved – lay 1,300km (800 miles) of mature hedgerows, enough to stretch from Land’s End to Hadrian’s Wall and back.

Megan Gimber, the key habitats officer for the People’s Trust for Endangered Species, said hedge laying was one of the most effective tools farmers had to respond to the climate crisis. “Hedge laying really stopped after the war, so it has been over a generation since it was a normal part of farm management and we have seen a huge decline in hedgerows as a result,” she said.

“These grants will give 1,300km of potentially ancient hedges a new lease of life, to help plug the gap, and it is fantastic that it is such a popular grant application.”

Mature, maintained hedgerows are a carbon sink, capturing more carbon in every hectare than forests. They support thousands of species, provide shade for livestock, reduce soil erosion and slow down, absorb and store vast amounts of rainwater to help reduce flooding.

“They are massively important,” said Stephen Budding, the chair of the National Hedgelaying Society. “The greatest biodiversity gain is from hedge laying older hedges.

“Our members are seeing quite a surge in work, but I don’t think this would be happening without the government grants available.”

Hedge laying involves cutting through the hedge stems almost completely, then laying them at an angle to the ground. Laying the branches down invigorates growth at the point where they have been cut, filling gaps in the hedges and restoring youth and freshness. It is done by hand by skilled layers – many of whom will compete next month at the National Hedgelaying Championships in Chipping Norton.

Robert Rose, who farms 220 acres of grassland for beef cattle and arable fields at Rosewood Farm in Ellerton in Yorkshire’s Lower Derwent valley, is waiting for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) to approve his application for a grant to lay old blackthorn, newer hawthorn and ash and willow hedges across his farm.

“We lay the hedges in a modern conservation style that retains more of the bushy growth for the benefit of nesting birds as well as stock proofing,” said Rose, who farms with his brother and wife.

The trio planted new hedges 20 years ago, but maintaining them is vital to keep them working to store carbon, support wildlife and retain water. “We taught ourselves how to do the laying, which was a bit of trial and error,” he said. “It is only recently that we have noticed how much other farmers are talking about hedge laying online, in community groups, it really seems to be taking off.”

The grant Rose has applied for will help him lay about 50 metres of hedges as well as planting new hedgerows and coppicing others.

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Peak hedge laying season starts in October and ends in February so farmers like Rose are hoping for quick decisions from Defra. “There are so many benefits with hedge laying for wildlife, for livestock, for conservation. We see a lot more birds using the hedges and a lot more small mammals around the bottom of mature managed hedges,” said Rose.

“I think hedge laying is, if you like, a bit of a gateway drug into more conservation. It spreads around the communities to other farmers, the talk about it is everywhere. So this grant scheme is exactly what is needed.”

As well as grant requests for hedge laying, about 5,000 applications are for planting new hedges – representing approximately 2,500km of new hedgerows, roughly equivalent to the distance from Newcastle to Naples. But without management, the new hedges will not survive.

Figures from the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in 2023 showed the country is still losing hedges despite record planting efforts through over-trimming and undermanagement. The centre also discovered that 61% of the newly planted hedges in the survey had been lost since their 2007 survey.

“Hedgerows are succession habitats, made up of trees and shrubby woody species, that naturally change over time,” said Gimber. “They require management to maintain the valuable mid-succession stage of bushy, low growth and prevent them developing into lines of trees.”

A Defra spokesperson said: “This government is putting its full weight behind farmers – giving them the funding, tools and opportunities they need to succeed.

“In July, we opened a new round of environmental land management capital grants with increased funding of up to £225m available to support investment in infrastructure that boosts productivity, strengthens resilience and supports environmental outcomes, which has now closed following strong uptake.”

Scientists have discovered nine new deep-sea sponge species off Alaska, offering new insights into the region’s largely unexplored marine biodiversity.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) announced the discovery on Thursday, saying the species were found in the Gulf of Alaska and the Aleutian Islands. The findings bring the total number of known sponge species in Alaska to 232.

The specimens were collected during Noaa Fisheries’ annual bottom-trawl surveys, which monitor groundfish and shellfish stocks. Researchers analyzed samples collected as far back as 2012, describing the new species in two recent scientific papers.

Often described as living water pumps, sponges are among Earth’s earliest multicellular animals, dating back more than 600m years. They filter seawater and help create habitats on the seafloor, despite having no brain or complex organs.

“Sponges are ecologically important,” said Sean Rooney, a Noaa fisheries biologist and co-author of the studies at the agency’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center. “They aren’t plants, but like trees in a forest, they provide complex structure along the seafloor that creates habitat and refuge for commercially important fish and crabs,” he added.

“Each time we find a new species, it opens up new doors … Deep water is hard to access, especially rocky places we can’t reach with bottom-trawl surveys. There are now more than 232 identified species of sponges in Alaska, and probably hundreds more that we don’t know about yet. The future in this field is exciting,” he continued.

Unlike most marine animals, which can be identified by visible traits such as fins and body shapes, sponges can be much harder to distinguish. Because they lack complex organs and other distinctive external features, scientists often rely on their microscopic skeletons and genetic material to identify them.

“DNA barcodes provide a quick genetic reference,” said Meredith Everett, a biologist at Noaa’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center. “Sponge DNA can be tricky because they filter-feed, and within their tissues we may find foreign DNA and biochemicals that inhibit testing. But despite the challenges, we successfully developed several new barcodes for Alaskan species,” she added.

Dense sponge communities are considered essential fish habitat by Noaa because they provide shelter that supports fish survival, growth and population recovery.

Sponges also produce chemicals to defend themselves against predators and competing organisms. Some of these compounds have shown promise for potential use in cancer treatments.

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Yet despite their ecological importance, Alaska’s deep-sea sponge communities face growing threats from Donald Trump’s proposals to expand deep-sea mining for critical minerals such as nickel and copper – used in military and technological applications – as well as bottom trawling in the region.

Environmental groups have opposed the proposals, warning that the activities could damage fragile seafloor ecosystems as the climate crisis intensifies.

Cooper Freeman, Alaska director of the Center for Biological Diversity, said: “Alaska’s sponge gardens do so much for a healthy ocean, including providing shelter and serving as vitally important nurseries for all kinds of fish and crabs. Bottom trawl fishing is so damaging and unsustainable because it indiscriminately destroys the habitats that support future generations. Adding seafloor mining to the picture adds insult to injury, scraping up and devastating life on the bottom of the ocean.

“Instead of stewarding Alaska’s precious sponge gardens so they can support Alaskan coastal communities and wildlife, the Trump administration is pushing extractive marine activities on these irreplaceable seascapes for nothing but short-term profit,” Freeman added.

In addition to Alaska, the Trump administration has proposed exploring deep-sea mining across millions of hectares of fragile Pacific ecosystems, including areas around the Northern Mariana Islands and Guam – a plan that has drawn backlash from the US territories.

One is a boy of 15, who threw a burning cigarette into a wood near Bordeaux. Another is a 36-year-old man who set a paper bag of rubbish on fire in bushes near Perpignan. A third is a 50-year-old woman accused of lighting 17 fires south of La Rochelle.

According to the French interior ministry, since the start of a summer in which a record 115,000 hectares of forest, scrub and heathland have gone up in flames, 514 people – including 198 minors – have been arrested on suspicion of starting wildfires.

Who are they, and what motivates them? Experts say arson is an under-studied field in France. It remains, according to Thierry Toutin, a criminology researcher with the national police, “a mysterious crime, often hard for people to understand”.

Two hundred years ago, under Napoleon, deliberately starting a wildfire in France was a crime so grave it carried an automatic death penalty by guillotine. These days, sentences start at 10 years in jail and a €150,000 fine, rising to 15 years if protected forests or reserves burn, and life if someone is killed.

Arsonists have “many different profiles”, Toutin said in an essay for The Conversation. Several French departments have set up dedicated arson groups uniting police, forestry board experts and local services to help identify, find and prosecute them, he said, but still: “These are often crimes that are unsolved, or don’t lead to convictions, because the fire has destroyed the evidence.”

France’s official statistics classify wildfires by their cause: natural, such as lightning; accidental (say, a vehicle fire or electrical fault); involuntary professional (sparks from a machine); involuntary individual (a cigarette or barbecue) – and voluntary.

In practice, as a government PSA has repeated all summer on radio, TV and online, nine out of 10 fires are caused by human activity, with roughly two-thirds classed as involuntary (which, if negligence is proven, carries a jail term of one to five years).

That means fully one-third of wildfires in France each year are set deliberately, with the intention of doing harm. In 2025, the last year for which full figures are available, deliberate acts of arson were the biggest single cause of forest fires in France, accounting for 29.4% of blazes.

Graph of the area of land burnt by wildfires in France

Among those convicted this summer are a 27-year-old man diagnosed with autism and schizophrenia who set fire to a letter to his late daughter in tinder-dry vegetation near Béziers. He was sentenced to four years of detention and treatment.

Perpignan court last week sentenced a 51-year-old man to five years in prison for lighting four fires in July and August. In Les Sables d’Olonnes, a volunteer firefighter – reported to police by his superiors – was handed a three-year suspended sentence.

In Lyon, a 29-year-old man with a police record for theft, trafficking and domestic violence was convicted of setting a fire that destroyed more than a hectare of land, took 71 firefighters to extinguish and forced the evacuation of 150 people.

Those convicted of negligence include a motorist who lit a fire to alert emergency services after he broke down (six months, suspended) and two restaurant owners in the south-west who defied a red fire alert to light a charcoal grill and set off fireworks.

An early analysis based on police reports and obtained by Le Figaro showed 97.5 % of arson suspects arrested this year have been men, aged on average 32.5, with 28.7% under 18. More than 95% were French citizens. Of a relatively small sample of 80 suspects, 37 were unemployed.

Exactly what drove them to act is often much harder to establish. In principle, criminologists identify four main categories of motivation. Some arson attacks are carried out in the context of a conflict: a dispute with a neighbour; criminal rivalry between gangs; revenge against someone or something.

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Other arsonists may act for financial gain, such as a false insurance claim, or out of ideological or political conviction. The remainder display some kind of pathology, often psychological – including a small number of genuine pyromaniacs.

“Arsonists may be after money, or revenge, or be trying to cover up a crime. They may be under the influence of alcohol or other substances,” said Laurent Layet, a psychiatrist. “A pyromaniac’s sole objective is to set fire to something.”

Pyromaniacs “have difficulty organising their personalities”, Layet told France Inter radio. “They are often impulsive, and they have trouble controlling their emotions. Often, they are quite isolated socially.”

Classified as an impulse-control disorder, pyromania is characterised by “a fascination with fire, by a mounting tension before the act, and then a feeling of pleasure or relief immediately afterwards”, he said. But pyromaniacs are typically organised, aware of the consequences of their acts, and considered criminally responsible.

They also represent barely 5% of the people who deliberately set fires. Another equally small group are firefighters – mostly volunteers, very rarely professionals – who deliberately set fires for the glory that comes from extinguishing them.

Over the years, France’s departmental fire services have set up filtering mechanisms to detect such personalities during the recruitment process, including psychological tests. They acknowledge that each year, some slip through the net.

But the motivation of most people who deliberately light wildfires is rarely quite so clearcut. For many, it boils down to an ill-defined “act of defiance – to confront the system, and get pleasure from destroying other people’s property”, said Johanna Rozenblum, a clinical psychologist who works with the fire service.

A strikingly large proportion of the arsonists she had dealt with had “marked antisocial profiles”, Rozenblum said. And in the case of minors, adolescent impulsiveness and frustration combine with “immaturity and internal revolt” to prevent them fully realising the devastating scale of the damage they risk doing.

Kilos and kilos of courgettes, cucumbers, tomatoes and salad leaves are ripe and ready for picking on a small Welsh farm in the rural county of Powys.

The haul being harvested by Tilly Gomersall is not just impressive after a difficult growing season hit by a record string of heatwaves and drought across all of Wales and most of England, but all the more remarkable given that 18 months ago the site was uncultivated pasture.

“Until now, I’ve just been turning the earth with my own power,” Gomersall says. “We’ve got a two-wheel tractor, but you do have to heft that around with your body quite a lot and we’re cultivating from pasture, so it’s really hard work.”

The site at Wern farm, near Newtown, is part of a scheme to encourage young growers to supply fresh produce to nearby towns and cities and boost domestic production in the face of increasing risks to national food supplies.

The 15-hectare (36-acre) site is divided into three plots, each with a holiday chalet where the growers live, as well as shared facilities including a barn and diesel generator, to cover any power not provided by the farm’s solar panels.

Gomersall’s farm, Cân y Pridd (Welsh for Song of the Soil), totals 4.9 hectares but she is now only growing on half a hectare, including in polytunnels, where she says she is “producing very big volumes for the scale”.

She and her two neighbours are already providing fresh fruit and vegetables for the local community, through a veg box subscription service and at markets. In late July, they also started supplying fresh produce to Birmingham city council, where it is distributed to holiday clubs, giving disadvantaged children a taste of homegrown veg for perhaps the first time.

The Wern farm project was launched by Our Food Trust, a charity which is working to increase levels of homegrown produce and aims to tackle Britain’s food insecurity.

The UK depends on imports for about 40% of its food and has one of the lowest food self-sufficiency ratios among large western European countries, leaving it exposed to supply shocks prompted by the climate crisis, or other risks including geopolitical tensions and cyber-attacks.

Just 0.2% of land in Wales is used for horticulture, according to the charity, giving huge scope for expansion. “We have to produce a lot more food for the regional and local market and for our cities,” says Duncan Fisher, joint chief executive at the charity.

One way to do this is to remove barriers for young people who want to get into growing, Fisher says, but who often find themselves priced out of renting or buying land and a suitable home. “There are lots of well-trained and skilful growers who can’t find land to grow food on,” he says. “The price of land here is set by the market, by people who are not going to farm it.”

The charity has given Gomersall the chance to turn a dream into reality and start a farm just 10 miles from where she grew up, while her neighbour, Lydia Dibben, says she was “quite blown away by the opportunity”.

“It was amazing to be offered seven acres, which is a big amount for small-scale vegetable production, with a house with affordable rent and shared infrastructure,” says Dibben, 28. She and her partner Charlie James have named their plot Tir a Nant (Land and Stream).

Our Food worked with the landowner, Powys county council, on the project, securing a 95-year lease for the plot and changes to the county’s planning guidance for rural enterprise dwellings, to enable growers to have a home on the land they work.

The council leader, Jake Berriman, says “there was a perception that planning was a barrier and we wanted to remove that barrier”. He says local worries about extreme weather had also encouraged the authority to get involved. “We are starting to see genuine concern,” he says. “We have gone from flood to drought to fire.”

The charity also negotiated the contract for the farmers to supply Birmingham, which has two aims: to give the growers a guaranteed buyer for some produce as they find their feet, while ensuring nutritious and sustainably produced fruit and vegetables reach deprived areas.

The farmers have 35 customers for their veg box subscription service, along with selling to a local wholesaler and at regional markets. While they stress the importance of growing for their community, they do not believe that doing so would currently sustain their businesses.

“Because of the cost of living crisis, there’s a limited amount of people who can afford to buy the veg we produce, and we are growing a hell of lot more than we can sell locally,” says Dibben, adding it was “really amazing being able to sell a hundred kilos of courgettes a week” to Birmingham.

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Gomersall reels off a list of the produce the farmers have supplied to the city in the course of a few short weeks, including a “couple of bathtubs” of salad leaves, 28kg of spring onions and 18kg of French beans.

The gently rolling hills above Wern farm feel a world away from the urban sprawl of Britain’s second-largest city, although it is just 70 miles away on the other side of the Shropshire hills.

The UK, and its largest cities in particular, have become too dependent on international supply chains and imported food sold by large retailers, according to food experts such as Tim Lang, a professor emeritus of food policy at City St George’s, University of London.

This challenge is recognised by Birmingham council and its food system team, led by Sarah Newton.

“Birmingham is an urban area surrounded by urban areas,” she says. “If you’re going to feed 1.2 million people, supply chains are the absolute crux of the matter, and we need to strengthen them.”

Produce grown at Wern farm is sent to the city’s holiday activities and food programme, part of a national scheme for children from low-income families. About 1,000 children who attended these summer holiday clubs received boxes filled with vegetables from Powys, which they could eat fresh or cook as part of activities.

Newton adds: “You’ve got children who have not had exposure to different vegetables. There are huge barriers to trying new foods if you’ve never had the opportunity to be exposed to it, it takes 10 to 15 tastes to develop the liking for food.”

The Powys scheme is deliberately small-scale, she says, with one van of produce travelling from Wales to Birmingham each week. The goal is to prove that a direct relationship between food growers and a city of diners can work.

“It’s connecting the entire supply chain on a small scale, looking at all the barriers and the facilitators on the way,” says Newton. “If we had a coordinated, national approach that we should be eating target foods, you could line up supply and demand nationally and then you’d get a meaningful shift in economies of scale.”

This kind of national approach to overhauling food systems is already under way in other countries: the French government introduced its projets alimentaires territoriaux (territorial food projects) in 2014, which work to connect local production with public health priorities.

Back at Wern farm, the growers are planning how to expand their cultivated area as they further develop the site.

Gomersall says: “What’s so joyful about the Birmingham project is … we really enjoy harvesting knowing that kids are going to be eating it and enjoying the flavours of real food.”

Recently, I overheard a conversation in a cafe where someone described their toast as “awesome”. I felt myself bristle. Not because the toast wasn’t good – I didn’t taste it – but because I remember a time when “awesome” meant something that inspired awe: towering mountains, the vastness of the night sky, the haunting song of a humpback whale. Now it’s being used to describe breakfast.

“Fantastic” has met the same fate, shedding its fantastical origins to become a synonym for “great”. Meanwhile “literally” has been so thoroughly abused that it can now mean something that is, quite literally, not literal.

Linguists call this “semantic bleaching”: the gradual erosion of a word’s original meaning through overuse. Which got me thinking about another word we hear with increasing frequency: “unprecedented”, the go-to adjective in reporting about the climate crisis. In recent months, I’ve read about unprecedented heat, unprecedented rain, unprecedented drought and unprecedented wildfires. Batten down the hatches: reports suggest that the current El Niño is going to be – you guessed it – unprecedented.

The dictionary definition hasn’t changed. “Unprecedented” still means something that has never happened before – and all the events described above have indeed represented a ratcheting up of the severity of heat, drought, rain and fire. But the word is being used so often, it feels as though it’s losing its punch. The extraordinary is starting to sound ordinary, the unprecedented almost routine.

And yet, there is nothing ordinary about what is happening. Britain has just experienced its hottest summer on record, beating the previous record set only last year. When climate-related records keep being smashed, it raises a question: what do we actually find remarkable?

In a study analysing more than 2bn weather-related social-media posts, Frances Moore from the University of California, Davis, and colleagues found that when it comes to temperature, remarkability changes with repeated exposure. Unprecedented temperatures feel less remarkable when we’ve experienced similar ones in the previous few years. We don’t make judgments based on historical precedents or childhood memories, but on what we’ve lived through recently. In other words, something can be historically unprecedented but psychologically precedented.

This means our yardstick for what counts as normal or remarkable is constantly changing. Ecologists call this “shifting baseline syndrome”. This was originally described in the context of fisheries, when Daniel Pauly noted that successive generations of fisheries scientists accepted increasingly depleted fish populations as their baseline. We now realise that the phenomenon is widespread, applying not just to biodiversity loss, but to pollution, environmental degradation and the climate crisis.

But Moore’s study contained a twist. Although extreme temperatures became less remarkable with repeated exposure, the negative feelings they provoked didn’t fade. We may stop finding unprecedented temperatures remarkable, but that doesn’t mean we find them tolerable. We’re not necessarily becoming blase about the climate crisis. We can still recognise that something is unpleasant without realising how unusual it is.

You have probably heard the parable of the boiling frog. When the unfortunate amphibian is placed in a pot of slowly warming water, it supposedly fails to notice the gradual rise in temperature and stays put until it croaks. So, here we all are, bobbing around in our family-size Le Creusets, marvelling at how balmy the water feels, as we complain that we’re starting to poach.

And that’s the dangerous bit. If extreme temperatures become familiar, we may be less likely to recognise just how extraordinary they are. What once would have seemed remarkable becomes just another hot summer, another flooded street, another crop failure. The baseline shifts, and with it our sense of what needs fixing. If the water feels normal, we may be less likely to demand that the heat be turned down.

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Which brings us back to the frog. As it turns out, the old parable gets it completely wrong. No healthy frog would sit idly in a warming pan of water. They feel the heat and respond to it. When the temperature crosses a threshold, they hop out. So, maybe that’s the question we should be asking ourselves. If we can no longer recognise how remarkable these uncomfortable temperatures are, what will it take for us to do what the frog does: respond to the heat?

One place to start is with the words we use to describe what is happening. “Awesome” became ordinary because we kept using it for ordinary things – such as warm bread and marmalade. Climate extremes are different: the events themselves haven’t become ordinary, even if our experience of them is becoming more familiar. “Unprecedented” is in danger of becoming a synonym for “really extreme”. It shouldn’t. The word tells us that we have crossed into territory humanity has never experienced before. It’s important we retain that historical meaning.

Perhaps one of the most unsettling things about a heating world is not that unprecedented weather keeps happening. It’s that “unprecedented” is beginning to sound like a perfectly normal thing to say.

Canada and Australia are both democracies built on abundant resources, extraordinary biodiversity and world-class science, with prosperity built substantially on mining, oil and gas. We are major fossil fuel exporters running an economic model incompatible with a stable climate, and living the consequences through worsening bushfires, floods and drought.

As I prepare for the Climate Integrity Summit in Sydney, I am struck less by the distance between our countries than by how much we have in common. We face the same defining question: how do we move beyond fossil fuels without sacrificing prosperity or nature?

Our political systems differ, but Australians are asking the same questions Canadians are: young people wanting action to match promises, Indigenous communities wanting real recognition of their rights, scientists warning about tipping points, businesses recognising that tomorrow’s economy will reward innovation over dependence on yesterday’s technology.

The challenge facing our countries is not technological. It is governance.

Canada and Australia have focused on reducing emissions from fossil fuels while avoiding the harder conversation about reducing our dependence on them. That distinction matters. It determines whether we are managing decline or genuinely transforming our economies. The world is already moving to renewable energy. Australia has started that shift, Canada is late to it. Expanding renewables while continuing to expand fossil fuels is not a transition, it is addition. Every extra tonne of greenhouse gas warms the planet, no matter how sophisticated our accounting becomes.

This debate is especially live in Australia now. Parliament is reviewing reforms to the Safeguard Mechanism, the country’s main industrial emissions framework. The central question: should major emitters meet their obligations by buying carbon offsets instead of cutting emissions on-site?

Canada has wrestled with near-identical debates over carbon capture and offset markets. My own view, shaped by science rather than ideology, is that offsets and carbon capture have a limited role, for genuinely hard-to-abate emissions only. They should never excuse delaying the transformation science tells us is unavoidable.

Climate integrity means being honest about the gap between emissions reduced on paper and emissions reduced in the atmosphere. Research increasingly questions whether offset credits are truly additional, or whether buyers decarbonise any faster than those who don’t. If offsets stay cheaper than innovation, we reward the status quo. Canada’s own wildfires have shown, starkly, that forests are not permanent carbon stores.

Finance is another area of convergence. Australia has introduced a science-based Sustainable Finance Taxonomy directing investment toward net zero activities. Canada has pursued mandatory climate disclosures, and through my proposed Climate-Aligned Finance Act, I am seeking to align financial markets with our climate commitments. The question is no longer whether finance should support the transition, but whether policy keeps favouring yesterday’s industries. Canada’s own taxonomy debate shows how hard these choices remain: sustainable finance only works when it reflects science, not political compromise.

Climate cannot be separated from biodiversity loss, inequality or reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. Tackled together, these challenges produce more resilient, equitable solutions. Australia’s integration of Indigenous safeguards into its finance framework offers Canada real lessons. Canada’s parliamentary oversight and accountability legislation may offer something back.

Neither country has the perfect model, and legislation on both sides remains fragmented. That is why dialogue between democracies matters, and why Parliamentarians for a Fossil-Free Future exists: legislators cannot solve global problems in national silos. As the talks in Colombia showed, sharing our successes is valuable, and sharing our mistakes may be more valuable still.

Canada and Australia should see this transition as an opportunity, not a sacrifice. The countries that lead will be those that channel investment into innovation, protect nature and build economies generating long-term wellbeing within planetary limits.

We have the capacity to lead. What remains to be seen is whether we have the political courage to make our climate commitments more than declarations. Climate integrity is ultimately a question of trust: whether citizens believe governments and industries will align decisions with the science they publicly accept. Trust may be our most valuable national resource.

Together, as two middle powers with complementary experience, we can help show that prosperity, biodiversity, Indigenous reconciliation and climate leadership are not competing ambitions. They are the foundations of the same future.

Attempts to stoke a climate crisis culture war must be rejected or the world will face economic disaster, the UN’s climate chief has warned.

Simon Stiell, the executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, warned that this year’s “hot as hell” summer had killed tens of thousands of people in Europe alone and “hammered” infrastructure, businesses and economics, costing a likely €180bn (£155bn), as well as leading to forced migration around the world.

“The climate crisis is now a continent-wide economic security emergency,” he told a committee of the European parliament on Thursday morning. “We’ve seen mass evacuations. Power stations closed. And trade routes choked. Crops lost. Yields down. And food prices up – and set to rise further.”

He said political polarisation over climate action was not in the interests of voters and would lead to far worse outcomes. “Climate is sometimes seen as a partisan issue, as territory in the culture wars,” he said. “That is palpably false … Climate cuts across the core concerns of voters, whatever their politics: [affecting] family health, community safety and economic stability; affordable food and available water; jobs, business costs and household bills.”

With populist parties in the EU and around the world calling for backtracking on policies to cut greenhouse gas emissions, Stiell hit out at some of those politicians’ key talking points, including on migration, which he said was increasing as a result of extreme weather. “To be soft on climate action is to be soft on inflation, and the cost of living, soft on sovereignty and security, and soft on economic growth and jobs. The fossil fuel crisis is also pushing up the costs of government borrowing, meaning less fiscal space to deliver vital services that populations need and expect.”

Stiell’s warnings came as the EU’s climate monitoring service released data showing August 2026 was the joint hottest month ever recorded around the world. Global temperatures reached 1.65C above preindustrial levels, scientists said on Thursday, amid warnings of further heating.

Last month tied with July 2023 for the hottest on record, according to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. Sea surface temperatures also soared to their highest levels on record for August.

These temperatures were recorded before the coming El Niño weather system had made much of an impact. El Niño is a naturally recurrent phenomenon whereby wind changes over the Pacific lead to rising ocean temperatures and the transfer of huge amounts of heat to the atmosphere, with the consequences felt around the world in floods, droughts and heatwaves.

This year’s system, likely to reach its full strength towards the end of the year, is forecast to be potentially the most intense on record, as it is now supercharged by the climate crisis.

Friederike Otto, a professor of climate science at Imperial College London, said: “While El Niño is starting to ramp up the heat, the underlying driver [behind this year’s high temperatures] remains our relentless burning of fossil fuels. Climate change makes every El Niño hotter, and until we stop burning coal, oil and gas, these record-shattering months will simply keep on coming.”

The effects of August’s extreme heat are still being felt around the world, in the aftermath of devastating wildfires, damage to harvests, excess deaths from heatwaves and disruptions to transport, business and public services in many countries. Food price inflation is likely to increase further, as the impacts of smaller harvests are felt in domestic markets and imports.

Stiell said: “If humanity doesn’t cut the fossil fuel pollution … this summer’s brutal heat, fires and droughts will seem mild compared to the permanent climate nightmare that will follow.”

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Although temperatures exceeded 1.5C above preindustrial levels, set in the 2015 Paris climate agreement as the lower of two limits that governments would strive to keep, such highs would need to continue for several years before the agreement was judged to be breached.

Data from the Copernicus Earth observation satellite service confirmed that western and central Europe, as well as areas of Scandinavia and south-eastern Europe, had experienced much drier than usual conditions over the summer, while around the world much of the south of the US, northern Mexico, parts of Canada, the Maghreb, part of the Horn of Africa, Siberia, large parts of central Asia, China, South America, South Africa, and northern Australia were all also drier than average.

The more temperatures rise above the 1.5C threshold, the greater the chance of reaching planetary “tipping points” that could push temperatures much higher and irretrievably break down key stabilisers of the climate system, such as the Arctic ice cap and the Amazon rainforest. Ruth Fuller, chief adviser on climate to the environmental charity WWF UK, said: “This year has seen records broken left, right and centre, increasing the risk that natural systems will irreversibly change once they are pushed past tipping points.”

Samantha Burgess, the strategic lead for climate at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, which operates the Copernicus service, said: “August 2026 was a remarkable month in the global climate record. It was both the warmest August and the warmest month ever recorded, with global temperatures reaching 1.65C above preindustrial levels, marking the return of global temperatures above 1.5C.

“Combined with record global sea surface temperatures and the warmest summer on record for western Europe, these observations show how climate change is driving extremes across the atmosphere and the oceans. The impacts of these conditions are increasingly being felt by communities, economies and ecosystems across the world.”

The NHS faced the “busiest summer in its history” as the UK experienced a series of heatwaves, health officials have said, while the waiting list for routine hospital treatment in England has risen to its highest level for nine months.

The health secretary said “extreme demand” on the service was “no longer confined to winter” and NHS leaders warned that the service had “never gone into winter on the back of such a heavy summer”.

Figures show A&E attendances in June, July and August reached nearly 7.3m, the highest ever over a summer period, according to NHS England. This is almost 1m higher than the equivalent period in 2022 when 6.4m attendances were recorded over the summer months.

Ambulances also dealt with a record number of callouts – about 2.4m – between June and August, NHS England said.

An estimated 7.33m treatments were waiting to be carried out at the end of July, relating to 6.21 million patients, according to NHS figures – up from 7.27m treatments and 6.15 million patients at the end of June.

The numbers are the highest since October 2025, when the list stood at 7.40m treatments and 6.24 million patients.

Long waits for NHS hospital treatment in England have also increased. An estimated 111,379 people had been waiting more than a year to start routine treatment at the end of July, up from 105,711 at the end of June.

An estimated 65.4% of patients in July began hospital treatment within 18 weeks of referral, down from 65.8% in June but above the target of 65% that the government and NHS England set for March of this year.

Labour previously pledged that by July 2029, 92% of patients would be seen within 18 weeks for routine hospital treatment such as hip and knee replacements. But leading surgeons have said it is unlikely the target will be met.

Prof Frank Smith, the senior vice-president of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, said: “Our analysis shows that, if the pace of improvement seen over the last two years continues, no region in England will restore the 18-week standard by 2029.”

The NHS England figures show that an average of 2,973 patients in England received corridor care each day in August, with 2,296 in A&E departments and 677 in other hospital areas.

Commenting on the summer pressures facing the health service, Sarah Woolnough, the chief executive of the King’s Fund thinktank, said: “The NHS is now facing a twin crisis with summer joining winter as a major pressure on services and leaving little room for staff and the system to recover between peak periods. Extreme heat is now an NHS pressure point, not just a weather story.

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“If ministers want to protect patients, staff and performance, they need to treat climate resilience and delivering a radical shift to prevention as core health policy.’

Dr Vicky Price, the president of the Society for Acute Medicine, said: “Behind the national figures are teams describing relentless pressure, a lack of meaningful solutions and morale at a low ebb. Staff continue to work tirelessly, but goodwill cannot compensate indefinitely for structural problems that remain unresolved.”

The health secretary, Yvette Cooper, said: “This has been the most demanding summer on record for our A&E and ambulance staff, with heavy pressure on our NHS and winter still to come. I want to pay tribute to the incredible dedication of NHS staff.

“Despite unprecedented demand, they managed to see a record number of patients within four hours in A&E over the summer. With the support of this government, the NHS has worked hard to strengthen its ability to respond to these challenges, but the reality is that extreme demand is no longer confined to winter.

“That’s why we’re backing the NHS with record investment and rolling out plans to support services through both summer and winter pressure.”