John Kerry said on Wednesday that the “war had started” when it comes to the climate crisis and right now, “we’re losing". 

"We’re into the decisive decade for action and the reasons for urgency are all around us,” Mr Kerry, President Biden’s international climate envoy, told attendees at the World Economic Forum. 

“We’re here because we can’t afford to lose any longer,” he added.

The forum, typically held in the glitzy Swiss ski resort of Davos, is instead a virtual event this year due to the pandemic.

The little Alpine town usually welcomes around 3,000 titans of business, political thinkers and state leaders, along with thousands of climate activists, demanding speedier action .Instead Mr Kerry spoke via video-screen. 

The former secretary of state has been on something of an apology tour in the past week for the failures of the Trump administration on climate, vowing that the US would “do everything in our power to make up for it”.

Hours after taking office last week, President Biden rejoined the 2015 Paris Agreement to tackle the crisis.

Mr Kerry, who helped negotiate the accords, said the US was rejoining with “humility - and I really mean that…because we know we’ve had four years in which we were inexcusably absent”.

He pointed to President Biden’s commitment to tackling the crisis. Wednesday is “climate day” at the White House with the president issuing a stack of executive orders to more rapidly cut emissions.

On Monday Mr Kerry told the UN Climate Adaptation Summit, hosted virtually by the Netherlands, that work was underway on a new Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) - each country’s target for reducing emissions - and that the US would announce as soon as “practicable”. 

He also said that the US intended to “make good” on its climate finance pledge. As part of the Paris Agreement, former president Obama pledged $3bn toward the Green Climate Fund to help poorer countries adapt. Mr Trump withheld $2bn when he became president.

In 2019, 27 countries announced contributions totalling $9.8bn. The US refused to contribute.

But Mr Kerry noted that no single country’s domestic action could fix the crisis and that“the whole world has to come to the table to solve this problem” at the UN climate summit, COP26, in Glasgow this November.“Failure is not an option,” he added. The former secretary of state said it was time to get away from the “arguments of deniers or procrastinators” which equated tackling the crisis with a poorer quality of life. Instead, he said, climate change was an opportunity, pointing to the examples of Tesla, Mitsubishi and HeidelbergCement in developing zero-emissions technology, “The bottom line my friends is as a world we have yet to be really serious and do what we need to do,” he concluded, saying that both political will and the power of market forces were needed

The world is not acting fast enough to cut the greenhouse gas emissions that are rapidly-heating the planet.                Climate scientists have said that average global temperature rise must be limited to 1.5C to avoid catastrophic consequences. Global emissions need to be cut in half by 2030, if we’re to have even a 66 per cent chance of reaching that goal.The world is currently far off track, heading for a 3.7-4.5C future which would leave many parts of the world uninhabitable. Read more: Follow live updates on the Biden administration On Tuesday Alok Sharma , the British president of COP26, told Davos that shared concern over the climate crisis could strengthen global cooperation.Diplomats fear that tensions in areas from U.S.-China trade to debt relief for developing countries could hinder progress at the talks.

But the British hosts hope that growing awareness of the gravity of the threat might serve to foster a wider spirit of collaboration in other policy areas.

“2021 is absolutely going to be a critical year for climate,” Mr Sharma said. “I want to see the golden thread of climate action woven through every international event on the road to Glasgow.”

The G7 summit is being held in Britain in June and a Commonwealth meeting in Rwanda the following week, and a G20 summit in Rome in October.

“Failure is not an option,” he added. The former secretary of state said it was time to get away from the “arguments of deniers or procrastinators” which equated tackling the crisis with a poorer quality of life. Instead, he said, climate change was an opportunity, pointing to the examples of Tesla, Mitsubishi and HeidelbergCement in developing zero-emissions technology, “The bottom line my friends is as a world we have yet to be really serious and do what we need to do,” he concluded, saying that both political will and the power of market forces were needed

The world is not acting fast enough to cut the greenhouse gas emissions that are rapidly-heating the planet.                Climate scientists have said that average global temperature rise must be limited to 1.5C to avoid catastrophic consequences. Global emissions need to be cut in half by 2030, if we’re to have even a 66 per cent chance of reaching that goal.The world is currently far off track, heading for a 3.7-4.5C future which would leave many parts of the world uninhabitable. Read more: Follow live updates on the Biden administration On Tuesday Alok Sharma , the British president of COP26, told Davos that shared concern over the climate crisis could strengthen global cooperation.Diplomats fear that tensions in areas from U.S.-China trade to debt relief for developing countries could hinder progress at the talks.

But the British hosts hope that growing awareness of the gravity of the threat might serve to foster a wider spirit of collaboration in other policy areas.

“2021 is absolutely going to be a critical year for climate,” Mr Sharma said. “I want to see the golden thread of climate action woven through every international event on the road to Glasgow.”

The G7 summit is being held in Britain in June and a Commonwealth meeting in Rwanda the following week, and a G20 summit in Rome in October.

Councillors have rejected plans for the expansion of a bottled water plant on the site of a community woodland in a major victory for environmental campaigners.

Harrogate Spring Water and Danone, which bought a majority stake in the British water brand last year, had sought permission to further expand an existing bottled water production site onto an adjacent four-acre woodland in the North Yorkshire spa town.

The public forest, known as Rotary Wood, was planted by local children between 2005 and 2011 and hosts a variety of wildlife including wild orchids. It sits alongside Harrogate’s 96-acre Pinewoods forest.

At a planning committee meeting held today, Harrogate Borough councillors voted to reject the bottling plant expansion plans, with several members raising environmental concerns.

Speaking to the committee, councillor Jim Clark said: “This is the frontline in the fight to save the planet. This is where the battle for the planet is going to be fought. It’s what we do as individuals. I think it’s important that each and every one of us takes responsibility."

Harrogate Spring Water was granted outline permission to expand its bottling site in 2016 – a decision that was opposed by the town’s green groups. However, in 2019, the company submitted a revised application for a site that is 22 per cent larger than the one originally proposed. This revised application was rejected today.

Harrogate Council’s planning officers had recommended that the bottling plant expansion plans should be approved ahead of the meeting. 

However, during the meeting, committee members raised concerns about how further expansion of the bottling facility could harm local biodiversity, efforts to boost carbon storage and Harrogate’s international reputation.

Objectors to the plans also argued that Rotary Wood had provided a place for “exercise and sanctuary” during the Covid pandemic.

Television presenter Julia Bradbury, who had written to councillors involved in the decision to urge them to reject the expansion plans, told The Independent: “This is a hugely significant move by a borough council because it shows an understanding and awareness of how important green spaces are for us all and how important it is for communities to be able to access these green spaces.

“We are nature-deficient in this country. We need more wild spaces and green spaces. And this goes to show that, sometimes, it’s not all about monetary value. There is real value in these places in terms of human value.”

Under the plans, more than half of the woodland would have been cut down to make way for the expanded bottling facility.

Neil Hind, chair of Pinewoods Conservation Group who spoke at the meeting, said: “We thank the planning committee for their considered debate and we are very pleased with their outcome to reject this application.

"We also thank all those groups, supporters and residents who have supported our campaign that has been much appreciated.

“This is a critical step in preserving Rotary Wood. Danone will now need to think very carefully on next steps if they decide to come back with a full application for the smaller extension where outlining planning is currently approved.”

A spokesperson for the Harrogate & District Green Party said they were “very pleased” with the outcome but agreed that the original outline planning permission obtained by Harrogate Spring Water in 2016 remained a concern.

“We now call on Harrogate Spring Water and Danone to work with local groups to find alternative and thorough compensation plans or, even further,  to take a global lead in rethinking their business plan and look at sustainable ways to develop their business without destroying local wood or exporting plastic pollution,” the spokesperson said.

Leading scientists, celebrities, politicians and local residents had voiced their opposition to the plans in recent days.

Prof Piers Forster, who is director of the Priestley International Centre for Climate at the University of Leeds and a member of the UK’s Climate Change Committee (CCC) as well as a Harrogate resident, previously told The Independent that the plans cast light on the importance of local decisions to the country’s goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050.

“Through the CCC we have a blueprint for getting the UK to net zero by 2050,” he said.

“This covers every part of the UK and every business in the UK. Being serious on net zero means looking at the carbon footprint of their business choices.

“Destroying 15 years of carbon sequestration by building over public woodland to increase plastic bottling is clearly a massive steer in the wrong direction.”

On hearing of today’s decision, he added: “Speaking as a resident, our planning committee made a bold decision today, one that the Cumbria planners should learn from.

“Harrogate will continue to be famous for its green spaces and cakes - not discarded plastic water bottles. The planners’ powers are limited, so the committee had to turn it down on quite technical grounds, so I’m sure it will go to appeal. 

“Speaking as a member of the UK Climate Change Committee, local actions on transport, buildings and nature are at the core of future UK emission reduction. However, there are currently gaps in local authority powers, as well as policy and funding barriers that provide serious risks to the delivery of net-zero.”

To compensate for cutting down the majority of Rotary Wood, Danone and Harrogate Spring Water had offered to replant the trees lost on another site in Harrogate.

“It is important to say that we are committed to replacing the trees that we remove on a minimum two for one basis and to looking after these trees for a minimum of 30 years,” Rob Pickering, a senior representative for Harrogate Spring Water, previously told The Independent.

However, the replacement trees would have been on private land, meaning the local community would not be able to access it, campaigners said.

And research by Prof Forster and Anna Gugan, a member of Zero Carbon Harrogate and a tree officer at the University of Leeds, found that the number of replacement trees planted would need to be five times higher than what has been offered in order to make up for the carbon lost from Rotary Wood by 2038.

In response to today’s decision, Mr Pickering said: “We’re disappointed by the committee’s decision to reject the revision of our planning application.

“We have been able to clearly demonstrate the economic and environmental benefits, as well as outline our commitment to leaving a positive environmental impact. At this stage, we will need to consider our options and decide on our next steps.

“However, irrespective of this decision, we would like to reassure our local community that we are committed to keeping them informed and involved with any environmental measures and landscaping developments at the Harrogate Spring Water site in the future.”

The biggest ever survey on climate change has found that almost two-thirds of people think it is a global emergency.

The most popular options for tackling the crisis were conserving forests, using renewables, adopting climate-friendly farming techniques and investing more money in green businesses. The least popular course of action was adopting a plant-based diet.

The survey canvassed the views of 1.2 million people and was conducted by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) from 7 October to 4 December 2020.

The poll showed that overall 64 per cent of respondents thought climate change was a global emergency, ranging from 69 per cent of under-18s to 58 per cent of over-60s.

The figure climbed to 81 per cent among those in the UK and in Italy, who topped the poll, while at least half of respondents in all countries said they thought there was a global climate emergency.

In the UK, where 21,189 people responded to the survey, youngsters were also more likely to think climate change was a global emergency, with 86 per cent of under-18s saying it was.

The figure was over 80 per cent for both the 18-35 and the 36-59 age groups, and although the over-60s were slightly more sceptical, 78 per cent of them believed climate change was a global emergency – the highest level worldwide for their age group.

In the United States, which has recently rejoined the Paris climate accord, 65 per cent of respondents thought climate change was a global emergency.

The poll was conducted by distributing questions through adverts in popular mobile gaming apps to 50 countries.

More than 30 million invites to the survey were issued to people when they played a popular mobile game – such as Words With Friends, Angry Birds, Dragon City or Subway Surfers.

The findings were weighted by polling experts at Oxford University to be as representative as possible for each country.

Cassie Flynn, the UNDP’s strategic adviser on climate change, told The Guardian: “The voice of the people is clear – they want action on climate change.

“If 64 per cent of the world’s people are believing in a climate emergency then it helps governments to respond to the climate crisis as an emergency.

“The key message is that, as governments are making these high-stakes decisions, the people are with them.”

Prof Stephen Fisher, from the Department of Sociology at Oxford said that the survey shows “that most people clearly want a strong and wide-raging policy response” to climate change.

Additional reporting by PA

The UK’s 10 leading supermarket chains collectively sold 900,000 tonnes of plastic packaging in 2019, a figure which has gone up by 1.2 per cent since 2017, despite having plastic reduction targets in place.

The third annual plastics survey conducted by the London-based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) and Greenpeace UK described the supermarket chains as “treading water” in the fight against mounting plastic pollution.

The total weight of plastics sold in 2019 was equivalent to 90 Eiffel Towers, the report said.

The survey also ranked the top 10 supermarkets on the efforts they were making to reduce plastic pollution.

Waitrose was at the top, for the second consecutive year, with the best reduction efforts in place, and Iceland came in last in 10th place.

Of the five largest UK supermarkets by market share, Aldi ranked first, followed by Sainsbury's, Tesco, Asda and Morrisons.

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, more than 300 million tonnes of plastic are produced every year, and at least 8 million tonnes end up in the oceans.

Christina Dixon, of EIA, said: “In our third year of looking at plastic packaging in UK supermarkets, we had hoped to see a much sharper downwards trajectory as strategies and targets bear fruit.

“Instead, we are looking at a relatively static picture which represents a drop in the ocean of tackling plastic pollution. The sector urgently needs to pick up the pace of plastic reduction.”

The survey also revealed the ban on free plastic bags still meant significant amounts of heavy duty plastic bags were being sold by supermarkets. More than 1.5 billion plastic “bags for life” were issued in 2019, a 4.5 per cent increase over 2018.

This represents almost 57 bags per UK household during the year.

But the number of single-use plastic carrier bags issued fell by 33 per cent and several supermarkets have stopped selling them entirely.

Water bottles are a considerable problem, the research found, with 2.5 billion plastic water bottles sold or given away in UK supermarkets in 2019.

Ms Dixon said: “Supermarket targets and reduction efforts are primarily focused on own-brand plastic packaging, which makes sense as they have more direct control over the supply chain.

“However, this means that the amount of packaging used for popular branded goods is not reducing and we’d like to see supermarkets increasingly taking the fight to the big manufacturers and compelling them in turn to drive down their own plastic footprints.

“This can be achieved through sourcing policies that reflect packaging reduction requirements and the phasing out of problematic plastics, working with brands to test alternatives and, ultimately, pledges to de-list suppliers which will not comply.”

A key recommendation of the report was for supermarkets to come up with plans for increasing reusable and refillable packaging and delivery systems, both in-store and online, as a way to reduce unnecessary plastic packaging.

Nina Schrank, senior plastics campaigner at Greenpeace UK, said: “Supermarkets have assured their customers that they share their concerns on plastic waste, but we need to see far more ambition than this from the sector if we’re going to even start to turn the tide on plastic pollution.

“All supermarkets should follow Sainsbury’s, and now Aldi, in committing to reduce plastic packaging by 50 per cent by 2025, at the very least.

“How these commitments are met is also crucial. Half of that reduction should come from reuse and refill systems, so we can ensure that packaging stays in those systems and out of the environment.”

The report warned that the growth in online shopping due to the coronavirus pandemic should be seen as a major opportunity to ramp up reuse systems, such as doorstep deliveries of reusable containers which can be picked up, washed and refilled before being sent out again – an innovation put into practice by Tesco and its partnership with Loop.

The report’s authors urged the government to introduce legally binding targets as well as compulsory reporting of companies’ plastic use, in order to reduce the use of single-use plastic overall and incentivise retailers to introduce reuse and refill systems.

Meanwhile, businesses, MPs, faith leaders, academics and campaigning organisations are also calling on Boris Johnson to introduce legally binding targets to stem the growing tide of plastic pollution.  

An amendment set to be debated for inclusion in the Environment Bill is calling for legally binding plastics reduction targets to be included.

In a letter to the prime minister, the group says that while government initiatives – such as the ban on plastic straws, stirrers and cotton buds – have had positive impacts, a more overarching approach is needed to deal with the problem.

Friends of the Earth plastic campaigner Camilla Zerr said:  “Despite the introduction of a few welcome measures, the government must go much further to stem the rising tide of plastic pollution pouring into our environment.

“Boris Johnson has a golden opportunity to get to grips with the crisis by ensuring that the Environment Bill contains legally binding targets for reducing the amount of plastic waste polluting our planet every year

“The government has promised to be a world leader on the environment and set a gold standard for cutting down on plastic waste. Now it’s time to deliver.”  

Richard Walker, managing director of Iceland, said: “In order to tackle the sheer scale of plastic making its way into the environment we need to see businesses and policy makers working together. That’s why we are calling on the government to set ambitious and overarching legally binding plastic pollution reduction targets to drive forward ambition and create a level playing field for all businesses.”

Iceland disputed the findings of the EIA/Greenpeace UK report, and noted it has made significant efforts to eliminate plastics in all its own-brand products.

A Defra spokesperson told The Independent: “The UK is a global leader in tackling plastic pollution. We have taken action to ban microbeads in rinse-off personal care products, we have banned the supply of plastic straws, stirrers and cotton buds, and our charge on plastic bags has already cut sales by 95 per cent in the main supermarkets. This charge will be increased, and extended to all retailers from April.

“We are going to go further though, and our landmark Environment Bill will give us a raft of new powers to create deposit return schemes for drinks containers, to encourage more recyclable packaging through extended producer responsibility, to ban the export of plastic waste to non-OECD countries, and to make it easier for ministers to place charges on other single-use plastic items.”

Billions of tiny insects that have spent almost two decades buried beneath the Earth's surface are soon set to emerge and descend on swathes of the eastern US.

Swarms of cicadas - winged bugs that belong to the same family as leafhoppers and froghoppers - will appear in towns and cities when the weather is warm enough.

There are two types of cicadas: annual cicadas and periodical cicadas, with the latter appearing every 17 years or so, after living life as nymphs under the ground, where they feed on the roots of plants.

Cicadas can be distinguished by their stout bodies, broad heads, clear-membraned wings and large compound eyes.

Residents across eastern parts of the US can expect to see them in the middle of May as the mercury begins to rise.

The last such event happened in 2004 when swarms of the insects were seen - and heard, due to their mating calls - in New York, Ohio and Michigan.

“They may amass in millions in parks, woods, neighbourhoods, and can seemingly be everywhere,” said Gary Parsons, an entomologist at Michigan State University.

“When they are this abundant, they fly, land and crawl everywhere, including occasionally landing on humans.”

According to Mr Parsons, cicadas do not bite and are harmless to humans and property, other than being a "nuisance".

Dogs and other pets sometimes gorge on cicadas which might make the animals sick, although they are not toxic or otherwise harmful.

They usually do not enter homes and instead rest on outside walls, Mr Parsons added.

Swarms of cicadas do make a lot of noise, however, and the males' mating calls can reach up to 100 decibels - a level similar to that of a motorcycle or a chainsaw.

An ambitious, African-led movement to plant a 5,000-mile forest wall to fight the climate crisis has received a commitment of support from one of the world’s most prolific tree-planters, The Independent can share exclusively.

At the United Nation’s One Planet Summit in Paris earlier this month, French president Emmanuel Macron announced a $14bn investment for Africa’s “Great Green Wall” (GGW) over the next four years. The goal is to harness the power of nature to re-green the semi-arid Sahel region and halt the increasing spread of desert.

Nonprofit Ecosia, a search engine which ploughs ad revenues into global tree-planting, is now offering to plant 1 billion trees in the region to extend the wall, along with deploying its tech know-how to map and monitor the health of the forest with satellite imagery and geo-tagging.

By the time it’s finished, the GGW will be a roughly nine-mile-wide belt of forest from Senegal on the Atlantic in the west, snaking south of the Sahara Desert, to Djibouti’s Red Sea coastline in the east. The eventual goal is for it to become the largest living structure on Earth, three times the size of the Great Barrier Reef.

The $14bn accelerator fund comes from donors including France and the World Bank. To complete the wall by 2030, it’s estimated that an additional $19bn will be needed.

Since the project began in 2007 at least 11 countries have come on board, collaborating with international partners such as the UN, EU, the World Bank and Kew Gardens.

Pieter Van Midwoud, Ecosia’s chief tree planting officer, told The Independent that while the GGW had been on the drawing board for a long time, it had been hindered by “limited funding, limited capacity and instructure for the project to be scaled successfully”.

He said: “Ecosia has an extensive network of local vetted NGOs and tree-planting organisations who could actually do restoration, and [we] would put this network to work to ensure the success of the wider Great Green Wall project. 

“Ecosia only works with organisations who ensure that all work is done shoulder to shoulder with local communities.”

Africa faces increasingly extreme challenges from the climate crisis. A senior UN humanitarian official last year called the Sahel region a “canary in the coal mine of our warming planet”.

The region is among the world’s most vulnerable to disasters and a hotspot of climate change, impacting nearly 65 million people and leaving 13.4 million in urgent need, according to the UN.

Historic flooding has forced millions of people to leave their homes while increasing temperatures have led to droughts and land degradation. This severely impacts rural populations, who largely live off the land, and can exacerbate conflicts.

“People in the Central Sahel are facing a catastrophe,” a UN report last year stated. “Without humanitarian aid there will be more death, displacement and suffering. Life-saving aid, however, is not enough on its own and needs to be accompanied by longer-term interventions focused on reducing needs.”

The aim of the GGW is that tree roots will bind and restore the soil, retaining moisture to make it more hospitable for farming and agriculture, providing resources, livelihoods and reasons to stay for the communities which live along it.

Forests are one of the most crucial natural resources for fighting the climate crisis. The GGW could potentially absorb billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas heating the planet, and help mitigate climate change. Additionally an Africa-wide forest belt will help restore biodiversity loss and provide habitats for species.

Ecosia has already funded the planting of more than 117 million trees across 25 countries including Nicaragua, Haiti, Spain, Burkina Faso and Indonesia. Some 30 million of those trees have been in separate projects close to where the GGW is being planted.

Almost as important as getting seeds and saplings in the ground, according to the nonprofit, is monitoring tree growth to ensure there’s a wide enough spread of biodiversity for the forest to survive, particularly in a hostile region like the Sahel.

Christian Kroll, CEO and founder, set up Ecosia to “do something to make the world a better place”.

For several years, the nonprofit has been working with primatologist Dr Jane Goodall’s organisation to create “forest corridors” in Uganda.

In 2018 Ecosia gave away its shares to the Purpose Foundation, meaning it can never be sold and no one, not even the founder, can profit or receive dividends from the company.

Mr Kroll told The Independent: “After setting up a website at university that compared different online brokers, I realised the sheer scale and influence that companies like Google had through search engines. I wanted to create something similar, that used the revenues generated to fund tree planting and help transform the world through the power of the internet.” 

Over the last 30 years, up to a quarter of all known bee species have fallen off international global records, despite a major increase in the number of such records available.

Around 20,000 species of bee are known to science, but analysis of a detailed international data set suggests around 5,000 of these species have not been seen since 1990.

The loss of the bees may not mean they are entirely extinct, researchers said, but represents a sharp collapse in thousands of populations, meaning these species have become so rare that no one is observing them in nature.

“With citizen science and the ability to share data, records are going up exponentially, but the number of species reported in these records is going down,” said lead author of the research Eduardo Zattara, a biologist at the Institute for Research on Biodiversity and the Environment at the National University of Comahue in Argentina.

“It's not a bee cataclysm yet, but what we can say is that wild bees are not exactly thriving.”

Declining bee populations have been widely reported in various countries around the world, but the researchers said previous studies have tended to focus on a specific area or a specific type of bee. But this study aimed to identify more general, global trends in bee diversity.

“Figuring out which species are living where and how each population is doing using complex aggregated datasets can be very messy,” said Dr Zattara.

“We wanted to ask a simpler question: what species have been recorded, anywhere in the world, in a given period?”

To obtain the answer, the researchers pored over the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), an international network of databases, which contains over three centuries’ worth of records from museums, universities, and private citizens, which together hold data on the 20,000 known bee species from around the world.

In addition to finding a quarter of total bee species are no longer being recorded, the researchers observed the decline is not evenly distributed among bee families.

Records of halictid bees - the second most common family - have declined by 17 per cent since the 1990s. Meanwhile, records for melittidae bees - a much rarer family - have gone down by as much as 41 per cent.

“It's important to remember that ‘bee’ doesn't just mean honeybees, even though honeybees are the most cultivated species,” said Dr Zattara.

“Our society's footprint impacts wild bees as well, which provide ecosystem services we depend on.”

The research team cautioned that though their study provides a close look at the global status of bee diversity, it is too general an analysis to make any certain claims about the current status of individual species.

“It's not really about how certain the numbers are here. It's more about the trend,” said Dr Zattara.

“It's about confirming what’s been shown to happen locally is going on globally. And also, about the fact that much better certainty will be achieved as more data are shared with public databases.”

But the researchers warn this type of certainty about global declines might not come until it is too late to reverse the trend.

They said urgent action needs to be taken to help protect the remaining populations of these vital pollinating insects.

“Something is happening to the bees, and something needs to be done,” said Dr Zattara.

“We cannot wait until we have absolute certainty because we rarely get there in natural sciences.

"The next step is prodding policymakers into action while we still have time. The bees cannot wait."

The study is published as the UK government has approved the use of neonicotinoid insecticides, which were banned in the EU after they were linked to the decline of bees and birds.

Recent research has reinforced the link, after scientists found the substance - the most common insecticide worldwide, had a “big effect on the amount of sleep taken by both flies and bees.”

Around a third of wild bees are in decline in the UK, due to habitat loss, climate change and the use of toxic pesticides, according to a 2019 study.

The new research is published in the journal One Earth.

One of Mr Biden’s first acts in office was signing an executive order to recommit the US to the global climate pact, to cut the greenhouse gas emissions heating the planet.

On Thursday, the Colorado congresswoman introduced the “Paris Agreement Constitutional Treaty Act” intending to block funding for the executive order until passed as a treaty by the Senate.

Donald Trump exited the Paris deal in 2017. The US will officially become a party to the agreement again in less than 30 days. 

Rejoining Paris was one of a sweep of executive orders signed by President Biden, the beginning of his administration’s plan to unwind the destructive environmental and climate policies of the Trump era.

Rep. Boebert’s bill was co-sponsored by 11 GOP House members. 

On Friday she tweeted: “I work for the people of Pueblo, not the people of Paris.”

It’s unclear if Rep Boebert is aware that the Paris Agreement was named because it was signed by hundreds of global leaders in the city of Paris, and not because it solely benefits the citizens of the French capital.

GOP Senator Ted Cruz was apparently similarly confused on Thursday when he railed against Mr Biden in a tweet, for being “more interested in the views of the citizens of Paris than in the jobs of the citizens of Pittsburgh”.

A statement from Rep. Boebert’s office also claimed that the Paris Agreement “could destroy up to 2.7 million jobs in the United States by 2025 alone”.

Her office did not respond to The Independent’s request for attribution on the claim at the time of publication. 

After Mr Trump’s withdrawal in 2017,  a group of interdisciplinary scientists published a report looking at the implications of the move and suggested that by 2100, the US would be about 5 per cent poorer with $8trillion in losses.

“The US agreement is not a tax on the American people. There is no massive wealth transfer,” Climate Advisers CEO Nigel Purvis, state department climate negotiator in the Clinton and George W Bush administrations, told the AP about the Paris deal last year.

“In fact, the agreement obligates no country to make any financial payments.”

A separate bill was introduced by Texas Republican Chip Roy on Thursday, also trying to block funding for Mr Biden’s executive order on the Paris Agreement.

Ms Boebert has faced calls to resign, including from Colorado elected officials and local newspapers, after she tweeted details about the location of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi during the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol earlier this month by a pro-Trump mob.

The new congresswoman supported Mr Trump’s false claims of election fraud and has voiced support for the right-wing conspiracy group QAnon.

President Joe Biden rejoined the Paris Agreement on his first day in office,  one of a sweep of executive orders to tackle the climate crisis.

The executive action will see the the US recommitting to the international pact to cut global emissions and get a grip on the climate crisis. 

Donald Trump withdrew the US from the agreement in 2017, calling it a “disaster” for America.

“I will join the Paris Accord because with us out of it, look what’s happening. It’s all falling apart,” Biden said during his first presidential debate with Donald Trump, pointing to the rampant destruction of Brazil’s rainforests, happening in the vacuum of US diplomatic leadership. 

Below is a breakdown of the background, significance and future prospects of the Paris Accord - and what it will mean for the US to re-enter.