Environmental groups have warned that work to boost biodiversity across the UK countryside will be put at risk by the government’s decision to freeze the level of payments to farms in England.

Farmers – already angry at changes to inheritance tax rules announced in the Budget – have been told payments from the public purse will be frozen next year.

The Wildlife Trusts say the decision leaves a “monumental gap” between current environmental land management scheme (Elms) funding and what is needed to help farmers protect and boost wildlife and its habitats, while still producing food.

The government said it would maintain the £2.4bn current level of farm payments in England for 2025/26, and that its commitment to farming was “steadfast”.

One farmer told the BBC he no longer believed the government understood the pressures of producing the nation’s food and protecting the countryside.

James Grindal, a mixed arable and livestock farmer in Leicestershire, said: “I wouldn’t think the government has any idea.

“I think they ought to come and see the reality – the coalface of putting food on people’s plates.”

In Wednesday’s Budget, the Chancellor announced that, while there would continue to be no inheritance tax due on combined business and agricultural assets worth less than £1m, above that there would be a 50% relief, at an effective rate of 20%, from April 2026.

While some maintain the new policy is designed in part to cover large-scale landowners who may have invested in farmland for the tax benefit, many in farming say the £1m limit will hit small family farms hardest.

Mr Grindal, who has two sons, aged 17 and 19, said he could be hit twice by the changes – on handing down the family farm, and if landowners sell off the land he rents.

“I explained to my youngest son, who asked what the implications were, that if you take 20% off something every time someone dies, it’s not long before you get to nought,” he said.

“The Chancellor said she wants to protect small farms, but she is protecting the person who made a lot of money somewhere, bought a nice house with 20, 30, 50 acres to have a few horses on.”

Liberal Democrat environment spokesman Tim Farron said of the changes to agricultural property inheritance tax relief: “This is a family farm tax which risks ringing the death knell for local farmers and the small businesses who rely on them.”

Conservationists and environmental groups have spoken out on the government’s plans to maintain the farming payments budget at its current annual level of £2.4bn, the majority of which goes on environmental land management schemes.

The Wildlife Trusts said around £3.1bn was needed for environmental farming schemes in England, and that maintaining the budget at current levels was a real-terms cut.

Elliot Chapman-Jones, the Trusts’ head of public affairs, said: “Ultimately, there is a monumental gap between current funding and what is needed to reverse wildlife declines, clean up rivers and significantly reduce the use of chemicals on farms.”

Tom Lancaster, land, food and farming analyst at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit think tank, said all the budget did was “maintain the status quo, just about keeping the show on the road for now”.

The Country Land and Business Association’s (CLA) president Victoria Vyvyan said the decision to freeze the budget at the same level would hit hard-pressed farmers.

She added: “It could hit sustainable food production and undermine improvements to wildlife habitats, flood management and access to nature.”

The government said the £2.4bn farming budget for England in 2025/26 would still be the “largest ever budget directed at sustainable food production and nature’s recovery”.

Minister for Food Security and Rural Affairs Daniel Zeichner said: “Our commitment to farmers and the vital role they play to feed our nation remains steadfast.

“That is why this government will commit to the largest ever budget directed at sustainable food production and nature’s recovery in our country’s history, enabling us to keep momentum on the path to a more resilient and sustainable farming sector.”

A Chinese spacecraft with a three-person crew, including the country’s first female space engineer, has docked after a journey of more than six hours.

The crew will use the homegrown space station as a base for six months to conduct experiments and carry out spacewalks as Beijing gathers experience and intelligence for its eventual mission to put someone on the Moon by 2030.

Beijing declared the launch of Shenzhou 19 a “complete success” – it is one of 100 launches China has planned in a record year of space exploration as it tries to outdo its rival, the United States.

The BBC was given rare access to the Jiuquan Satellite launch centre in Gansu and we were just over a kilometre away when the spacecraft blasted off.

Flames shot out of the rocket launcher as it took to the skies, lighting up the Gobi Desert with a deafening roar.

Hundreds of people lined the streets, waving and cheering the names of the taikonauts, China’s word for astronauts, as they were sent off.

At the Tiangong space station, the Shenzhou 19 crew met with three other astronauts who are manning the Shenzhou 18 and will return to Earth on 4 November.

Just two years ago, President Xi Jinping declared that “to explore the vast cosmos, develop the space industry and build China into a space power is our eternal dream”.

But some in Washington see the country’s ambition and fast-paced progress as a real threat.

Earlier this year, Nasa chief Bill Nelson said the US and China were “in effect, in a race” to return to the Moon, where he fears Beijing wants to stake territorial claims.

He told legislators that he believed their civilian space programme was also a military programme.

However, in Dongfeng Space City, a town built to support the launch site, China’s space programme is celebrated.

Every street light is adorned with the national flag.

Cartoon-like astronaut figurines and sculptures sit in the centre of children’s parks and plastic rockets are a centrepiece on most traffic roundabouts.

A huge poster with Xi Jinping on one side and a photo of the Shenzhou spacecraft on the other greets you as you drive into the main compound.

Hundreds have gathered in the dark after midnight to wave flags and brightly coloured lights as the Taikonauts make their last few steps on Earth before heading to the launch site.

The brass band strikes up Ode to the Motherland as young children, kept up late for the occasion, their cheeks adorned with the Chinese flag, all shout in full song.

This is a moment of national pride.

The pilot of this mission, Cai Xuzhe, is a veteran but he’s travelling with a new generation of Chinese-trained taikonauts born in 1990 – including China’s first female space engineer, Wang Haoze.

“Their youthful energy has made me feel younger and even more confident,” he told the gathered media ahead of take-off.

“Inspired by dreams that spark glory, and by glory that ignites new dreams, we assure the party and the people that we will stay true to our mission, with our hearts and minds fully devoted. We will strive to achieve new accomplishments in China’s crewed space programme.”

Standing to his left, beaming, is Song Lingdong.

He recalls watching one of China’s first space station missions as a 13-year-old with “excitement and awe”. He chose to become a pilot in the hope that this is how he could serve his country.

All three convey their deep sense of national pride, and state media has emphasised that this will be its “youngest crew” to date.

The message is clear: this is a new generation of space travellers and an investment in the country’s future.

China has already selected its next group of astronauts and they will train for potential lunar missions as well as to crew the space station.

“I am determined not to let down the trust placed in me,” says Mr Song. “I will strive to make our country’s name shine once again in space.”

China’s name has been “shining brightly” a lot lately when it comes to headlines about its space programme.

Earlier this year, the country achieved a historic first by retrieving rock and soil samples from the far side of the Moon.

In 2021, China safely landed a spacecraft on Mars and released its Zhurong rover – becoming just the second nation to do so.

China also has a fleet of satellites in space and has plans for many more.

In August it launched the first 18 of what it hopes will eventually be a constellation of 14,000 satellites providing broadband internet coverage from space, which it hopes will one day rival SpaceX’s Starlink.

Elon Musk, Starlink’s chief executive, admitted on his own platform X that China’s space programme is far more advanced than people realise.

But others in the US are voicing even greater concerns, as they fear this technology can be weaponised.

The head of US Space Command, General Stephen Whiting, told a space symposium in April that China and Russia were both investing heavily in space at a “breath-taking speed”.

He claimed that since 2018, China has tripled the amount of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance satellites it has in orbit, building a “kill web over the Pacific Ocean to find, fix, track and target United States and allied military capabilities”.

China’s space exploration is a “collective mission for humanity”, says Li Yingliang, director of the general technology bureau of China’s Manned Space Agency, dismissing US concerns as “unnecessary”.

“I don’t think this should be called a competition… China has long upheld the notion of peaceful use of space in its manned space programme. In the future, we will further develop international co-operation in various aspects of manned space technology, all based on sharing and collaboration,” he adds.

But the new space race is no longer about getting to the Moon. It’s about who will control its resources.

The Moon contains minerals, including rare earths, metals like iron and titanium – and helium too, which is used in everything from superconductors to medical equipment.

Estimates for the value of all this vary wildly, from billions to quadrillions. So it’s easy to see why some see the Moon as a place to make lots of money. However, it’s also important to note that this would be a very long-term investment – and the tech needed to extract and return these lunar resources is some way off, writes the BBC’s science editor Rebecca Morelle.

Chinese experts at the launch centre were keen to point out the benefits of Beijing’s space station experiments.

“We study bones, muscles, nerve cells, and the effects of microgravity on them. Through this research, we’ve discovered that osteoporosis on Earth is actually similar to bone loss in space. If we can uncover unique patterns in space, we might be able to develop special medications to counteract bone loss and muscle atrophy,” said Zhang Wei, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

“Many of these experimental results can be applied on Earth.”

China is, at times, trying to downplay its advances.

At the launch of a roadmap for its space ambitions, which include building a research station on the Moon, returning samples of Venus’s atmosphere to Earth and launching more than 30 space missions by the middle of this century, Ding Chibiao from the Chinese Academy of Sciences said the country did not have a great number of achievements “compared to developed nations”.

And even here at the launch centre, they admit to “significant challenges” as they try to land a crew on the Moon.

“The technology is complex, there’s a tight schedule, and there are a lot of challenges,” said Lin Xiqiang, spokesperson for the China Manned Space Agency.

“We’ll keep up the spirit of ‘two bombs and one star’. We will maintain our self-confidence and commitment to self-improvement, keep working together and keep pushing forward. We’ll make the Chinese people’s dream of landing on the Moon a reality in the near future.”

That’s perhaps why President Xi appears to be prioritising the country’s space programme even as the economy is in a slow decline.

And even though they are bringing along international press to witness their progress – there are key restrictions.

We were kept in a hotel three hours from the launch site and transported back and forth by bus, a total journey of 12 hours, rather than being left on site for a few hours.

A simple trip to a friendly local restaurant was carefully guarded by a line of security personnel.

We also noticed a large sign in town holds a stern warning: “It’s a crime to leak secrets. It’s an honour to keep secrets. You’ll be jailed if you leak secrets. You’ll be happy if you keep secrets. You’ll be shot if you sell secrets.”

China is taking no chances with its new technology, as its rivalry with the United States is no longer just here on Earth.

The world’s two most powerful countries could soon be staking territorial claims well beyond this planet.

Human-caused climate change made the ten deadliest extreme weather events of the last 20 years more intense and more likely, according to new analysis.

The killer storms, heatwaves and floods affected Europe, Africa and Asia killing more than 570,000 people.

The new analysis highlights how scientists can now discern the fingerprint of climate change in complex weather events.

The study involved reanalysing data for some of the extreme weather events and was carried out by scientists from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group at Imperial College London.

“This study should be an eye-opener for political leaders hanging on to fossil fuels that heat the planet and destroy lives”, said Dr Friederike Otto, co-founder and lead of WWA.

“If we keep burning oil, gas and coal, the suffering will continue,” she said.

The researchers focused on the 10 deadliest weather events registered in the International Disaster Database since 2004. That was when the first study was published linking a weather event – a heatwave in Europe – with our changing climate.

The deadliest event of the last two decades was a drought in Somalia in 2011 which is reckoned to have killed more than 250,000 people. The researchers found the low rainfall that drove the drought was made more likely and more extreme by climate change.

The list includes the heatwave that hit France in 2015 killing more than 3,000 people, where researchers say high temperatures were made twice as likely because of climate change.

It also contains the European heatwaves of 2022, when 53,000 people died, and 2023, which led to 37,000 people losing their lives. The latter would have been impossible without climate change, the study finds.

It says the deadly tropical cyclones that hit Bangladesh in 2007, Myanmar in 2008 and the Philippines in 2013 were all made more likely and intense by climate change. That was also the case with the floods that hit India in 2013.

The researchers say the real death toll from these events is likely to be significantly higher than the figures they quote.

That is because fatalities linked to heatwaves do not tend to be recorded as such in much of the world, especially in poorer nations which are most vulnerable.

The study was carried out before the storms in Spain left dozens dead this week.

The link between climate change and weather events is only possible because the two scientists who founded the WWA – Dr Otto and a Dutch climatologist called Geert Jan van Oldenborgh – pioneered a way to track global warming in catastrophic weather events.

They knew that weather records showed that extreme weather events were becoming more intense. What’s more, a huge body of peer-reviewed science explained how warming the atmosphere can intensify extreme weather. What was missing was the link between a single event to rising global temperatures.

‌For years forecasters have been using atmospheric models to predict future weather patterns. Otto and Oldenborgh repurposed the models to run repeated simulations to work out how likely a weather event was in the current climate.

‌They also created parallel simulations which explored how likely the same event was in a world in which the industrial revolution had never happened. These computer models stripped out the effects of the billions of tonnes of CO2 that humans have pumped into the atmosphere.

‌The calculations meant they could compare how likely the same event was with and without the 1.2C of global warming that the world has already experienced since the industrial revolution.

“The massive death tolls we keep seeing in extreme weather shows we are not well prepared for 1.3°C of warming, let alone 1.5°C or 2°C”, said Roop Singh, of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre which supports the WWA.

She said today’s study showed the need for all countries to build their resilience to climate change and warned: “With every fraction of a degree of warming, we will see more record-breaking events that push countries to the brink, no matter how prepared they are.”