Farmed kelp could produce plastic substitutes, beauty products and food supplements. Just steer clear of seaweed chocolate

• Photographs by Christian Sinibaldi , words by Joanna Moorhead

Think sun, sea, Skye – and seaweed. It’s early summer off the west coast of Scotland, and Alex Glasgow is landing a long string of orangey-black seaweed on to the barge of his water farm. It emerges on what looks like a washing line heavy with dirty rags, hoicked up from the depths. And yet, this slippery, shiny, salty substance might, just might, be going to save the planet .

When it comes to sustainability, seaweed is about as shipshape as it gets. Minimal damage to the environment, check. No use of pesticides, check. Diversifies ocean life, check. Uses no land, check. And, in the case of Skye’s seaweed farm, spoils no one’s view, check.

Kyla Orr and Martin Welch of KelpCrofters check the crop from their boat

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Pennsylvania families worry about rising cases of rare cancer with well pads near homes and stalled House bills

One evening in 2019, Janice Blanock was scrolling through Facebook when she heard a stranger mention her son in a video on her feed. Luke, an outgoing high school athlete, had died three years earlier at age 19 from Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare bone cancer.

Blanock had come across a live stream of a community meeting to discuss rare cancers that were occurring with alarming frequency in south-western Pennsylvania, where she lives.

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Porto Alegre’s poorest neighborhoods, often closest to rivers and with the worst infrastructure, bore brunt of crisis

It had been raining for nearly a week when the floodwaters first reached Marcelo Moreira Ferreira’s home in Porto Alegre, the capital of Brazil’s southernmost state, Rio Grande do Sul.

His wife and their four children left to seek shelter with relatives, but Ferreira, 51, wanted to stay: his father had built the modest one-story structure and he had lived there his entire life.

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Diving with marine life such as blue sharks is growing in popularity in the UK, spurred by footage of encounters on social media

We have only been waiting in the grey Atlantic swell a few moments when the first flash of metallic blue appears in the water. A blue shark, a few miles from the coast of Penzance in Cornwall, emerges from the depths. It is time to get in the water – but part of my brain rebels.

“It’s not what you think it will be like … not that ingrained fear that everyone has about sharks. But until you get in the water with them, that fear will remain,” the guide says to the group.

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Bangalow Koalas and private landholders have planted more than 377,000 trees across the region

In 2016 a friend phoned Linda Sparrow about a 400-metre stretch of koala trees on the western edge of Bangalow, a small regional town in northern New South Wales.

The landscape in the region had long since been cut back by loggers and farmers, and there were precious few eucalyptus trees left to provide refuge for koalas looking for food or shelter.

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Having created a watchdog for the environment, the government took its teeth out and muzzled it. Can public outrage rouse the Environment Agency to action?

When Helen Nightingale joined the National Rivers Authority, the predecessor to the Environment Agency, in 1991, she thought of her work as a calling. She had been fascinated by nature since she was a child, when she used to poke around in the earth on her father’s allotment, looking for worms and beetles. In her job, Nightingale spent most of her time walking along the rivers in Lancashire and Merseyside, taking water samples and testing oxygen levels. She was responsible for protecting rivers, and she often learned about sewage and pesticide pollution from members of the public who called a dedicated hotline. “They’d phone you up and say, ‘There’s something wrong.’ And you would go out straight away,” she recalled. “You stood a much better chance of figuring out what was wrong if you could get there quickly.”

Nightingale, who has a Lancastrian accent and curly blond hair, investigated pollution like a hard-nosed police detective inspecting a crime scene. She would visit dairy farms, industrial estates and sewage treatment plants, dressed in a raincoat and boots with steel toe caps, and usually started with the same question: “Can I look at your drains?” The work was demanding, and the pay, when Nightingale started, was just £9,500 a year (the UK average at the time was around £12,000 ), but she was proud to be protecting the environment. “It was a dream job,” she told me. “If we sat in the office, our boss would say, ‘Why are you here? Go out and look at something.’”

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Most comprehensive analysis ever of conflict-driven climate impacts shows emissions greater than those generated by 175 countries in a year

The climate cost of the first two years of Russia’s war on Ukraine was greater than the annual greenhouse gas emissions generated individually by 175 countries, exacerbating the global climate emergency in addition to the mounting death toll and widespread destruction, research reveals.

Russia’s invasion has generated at least 175m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e), amid a surge in emissions from direct warfare, landscape fires, rerouted flights, forced migration and leaks caused by military attacks on fossil fuel infrastructure – as well as the future carbon cost of reconstruction, according to the most comprehensive analysis ever of conflict-driven climate impacts .

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The burden of transition on economically insecure voters must be eased via a more ambitious fiscal approach by governments

Following the European parliament elections of 2019, the newly elected president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, told MEPs: “If there is one area where the world needs our leadership, it is on protecting our climate … We do not have a moment to waste. The faster Europe moves, the greater the advantage will be for our citizens, our competitiveness and our prosperity.”

Five years on, all that remains true, and the urgency of taking decisive action is even greater. Last week, the United Nations general secretary, António Guterres, warned that the world faced “climate crunch time”, referring to new data revealing that the crucial 1.5C threshold for global heating was breached over the past year. But the politics of climate action in Europe is lurching in the wrong direction at alarming speed.

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The party’s manifesto, which pledges to use a wealth tax to revitalise our public services, shows it can push Labour to raise its ambitions

All governments betray the hopes of their supporters. But Labour is getting its betrayal in early. By ruling out a wealth tax and other measures that could fund our collapsing public services and our increasingly desperate care and welfare needs; by failing to denounce the unfolding genocide in Gaza; by remaining silent about the curtailment of our rights to protest ; by breaking its promises on everything from a national care service to the abolition of the House of Lords and a right to roam , Keir Starmer’s party appears to wear betrayal as a badge of honour. This country is desperate for change, but while Starmer mumbles the word in every sentence, he offers as little as he can get away with.

Why? Labour’s anticipatory betrayal is motivated by anticipatory compliance . This means avoiding conflict with billionaire-owned media, the financial, property and fossil fuel sectors, by giving them what they want before they ask. You could call this approach “political realism”. But the “realistic” result is a politics dominated by the sinister rich. Dysfunction and misrule are baked in.

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

Guardian Newsroom: Election results special . Join Gaby Hinsliff, John Crace, Jonathan Freedland and Zoe Williams on 5 July

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