Hidden under our feet is a miniature landscape made up of tunnels, caves and decaying matter. Soil is where a quarter of the species on our planet are believed to live and in this dark, quiet, damp world, death feeds life. Rotting leaves, fruits, plants and organisms are folded into the soil and burped out as something new.

Good soil structure provides many nooks and crannies that house organisms, which, in turn, create an environment that suits them, directly altering – and improving – the structure of soil. Like a collective of tiny chemists, they keep soils healthy and productive by passing nutrients between them, either by collaborating or killing each other.

Complex food webs move nutrients around the system, generating healthy soils that provide goods and services for humanity. Goods include food, fibre and clean water. Services include regulation of the carbon and nitrogen cycles, nutrient recycling, water storage, regulation of disease and detoxification of pollutants.

Despite all this and the fact that soil is at the heart of our existence, we know very little about it. We do know, however, that this fertile skin has been damaged by intensive farming, pollution, deforestation and global heating. A third of the planet’s land is severely degraded and 24bn tons of fertile soil are lost every year through intensive farming alone, according to a UN-backed study, the Global Land Outlook.

The future of our soil hangs in the balance as the UN prepares for the first Global Symposium on Soil Biodiversity, with scientists warning that soil degradation is as important as the climate crisis and destruction of the natural world above ground.

I’m digging, and it’s a bad day for it. Moving soil from one place to another in a fog of breath, and after the dip in temperature, it’s hard. As the shovel goes into the soil in one place and the edge breaks into sections, I spy something. Something completely unusual. And entirely expected.

I peer at it, a glistening vein in the soil, like some kind of organic cable, or weird, flinching root. A pulsation runs down it, the sharp, low sun of the morning lighting it up amid the matt of unthawed soil. I know nothing about it – other than that without it, we’d be doomed.

Could there be a creature with an image more damned than the earthworm? It is for ever destined to be caught by the early bird, speared on a cartoon fish hook, or at the very least disturbed in its work by a shovel. Get buried, and you’re “worm food”. A food chain of crippling weight presses upon this squishy, hydrostatic organism. Moles behead them and collect bodies as sustenance, like inverse battle scalps. Children are fascinated by one cleaved in half, because it’s all right when it’s a worm: it will survive and make two.

It won’t. That’s one of many myths about the worm. And they’re not all the same – far from it. We have 27 species, of thousands worldwide. Some burrow vertically. Some borrow horizontally. The fat ring towards one end is called a saddle, and is the core of the reproductive system. They can clone themselves, or reproduce sexually. They’re bristled, which is how they move. They are hermaphrodites. And in cold snaps like the one we’ve had, they die, or dig deep – or lay egg cocoons that look like unpopped corn kernels to carry on their work. They are interesting.

Moreover, the earthworm absolutely – and literally – underpins our everything. Waste managers and ecosystem engineers par excellence, they masterfully work, fertilise and irrigate our soil. Critical, but unpleasant – and therefore doomed to be unappreciated.

The whitest-ever paint has been produced by academic researchers, with the aim of boosting the cooling of buildings and tackling the climate crisis.

The new paint reflects 98% of sunlight as well as radiating infrared heat through the atmosphere into space. In tests, it cooled surfaces by 4.5C below the ambient temperature, even in strong sunlight. The researchers said the paint could be on the market in one or two years.

White-painted roofs have been used to cool buildings for centuries. As global heating pushes temperatures up, the technique is also being used on modern city buildings, such as in Ahmedabad in India and New York City in the US.

Currently available reflective white paints are far better than dark roofing materials, but only reflect 80-90% of sunlight and absorb UV light. This means they cannot cool surfaces below ambient temperatures. The new paint does this, leading to less need for air conditioning and the carbon emissions they produce, which are rising rapidly.

“Our paint can help fight against global warming by helping to cool the Earth – that’s the cool point,” said Prof Xiulin Ruan at Purdue University in the US. “Producing the whitest white means the paint can reflect the maximum amount of sunlight back to space.”

The whitest-ever paint has been produced by academic researchers, with the aim of boosting the cooling of buildings and tackling the climate crisis.

The new paint reflects 98% of sunlight as well as radiating infrared heat through the atmosphere into space. In tests, it cooled surfaces by 4.5C below the ambient temperature, even in strong sunlight. The researchers said the paint could be on the market in one or two years.

White-painted roofs have been used to cool buildings for centuries. As global heating pushes temperatures up, the technique is also being used on modern city buildings, such as in Ahmedabad in India and New York City in the US.

Currently available reflective white paints are far better than dark roofing materials, but only reflect 80-90% of sunlight and absorb UV light. This means they cannot cool surfaces below ambient temperatures. The new paint does this, leading to less need for air conditioning and the carbon emissions they produce, which are rising rapidly.

“Our paint can help fight against global warming by helping to cool the Earth – that’s the cool point,” said Prof Xiulin Ruan at Purdue University in the US. “Producing the whitest white means the paint can reflect the maximum amount of sunlight back to space.”

Royal Dutch Shell has urged investors to vote for its strategy to shift the business towards cleaner energy sources, despite warnings that the plan does not go far enough to meet the Paris climate agreement goals.

The oil company set out its energy transition plan before its annual shareholder meeting in May, when investors will be able to take part in an advisory vote on Shell’s climate plans for the first time. The vote will not be binding.

Shell’s strategy includes plans to reduce the carbon intensity of the energy it produces by 20% before the end of the decade, by producing less oil and more renewable energy, and further steps to become a carbon neutral company by 2050.

Ben van Beurden, Shell’s chief executive, said the company was asking shareholders to vote for an energy transition strategy “designed to bring our energy products, our services, and our investments in line with the temperature goal of the Paris agreement and the global drive to combat the climate crisis.

“It is a strategy that we believe creates value for our shareholders, our customers and wider society,” he said.

When Laura Briggs and her husband finally found their dream home in west Texas, they knew they’d be sharing space with the oil industry. The Pecos county ranch’s previous owner, local attorney Windel “Hoot” Gibson, died there when a rickety old pumpjack teetered over and fell on top of him.

But sharing 900 acres with a handful of old oil wells seemed like a fair trade for a spacious ranch where the Briggs family could raise four kids and a mess of farm animals. The property is smack dab in the middle of the Permian Basin, an ancient, dried-up sea that streaks across Texas and New Mexico and is the most productive oil field in the United States. Approximately 3m barrels of the Permian’s monthly crude production happens in Pecos county; there is an oil or gas well for roughly every two people here.

After closing on the property a decade ago, it didn’t take the Briggs family long to make the place their own. They built a roomy, two-story metal house and constructed livestock pens for hogs, goats, donkeys and cattle. For a few years, the Briggs ranch delivered the rural splendor they’d hoped for. “When you come out here, it is dry. There is no Starbucks. But there is a peace to that,” Laura said. “This takes some stress off your shoulders and you’re like, all you really need in life is a pair of blue jeans and a good book.”

The opposition climate change minister, Chris Bowen, has warned almost one million Australians will lose their jobs if runaway climate change decimates the environment and the economy – with Queensland bearing the brunt of any failure to act.

Bowen used a speech in Brisbane on Thursday night to warn Queenslanders they would pay the price for the federal Coalition’s failure to act in accordance with climate science, with half a million jobs lost in the state and a forecast economic contraction of 8% by 2050 and 14% by 2070.

Since taking the portfolio in late January, Labor’s new climate spokesman has been concentrating his advocacy in Queensland and other regional areas that swung to the Coalition in the 2019 election, in part because of successful scaremongering by Liberal and National MPs about the costs of climate action.

Bowen has reconfigured Labor’s messaging on climate policy to emphasise both the economic risks of failing to act and the upsides of new jobs created during the transition to a low emissions economy.

The UK government is facing fresh calls to abandon its £750m plan to support a gas export terminal in Mozambique over fears the fossil fuel project is stoking the insurgency in the north of the country, which has left thousands of people dead and displaced hundreds of thousands.

In a letter to the government, seen by the Guardian, lawyers for the environmental group Friends of the Earth have warned that the huge natural gas project has worsened the conflict in Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province, and called on the UK government to withdraw its financial support.

Mozambique’s poverty-stricken northern province has suffered increasingly violent attacks by Islamic State-affiliated insurgents since 2017, many targeting towns and communities near the $20bn (£15bn) gas project, which is backed by major international investors and companies.

Rachel Kennerley, climate campaigner at Friends of the Earth (FoE), said: “The violence started as far back as 2017, because of social inequalities, deprivation and acute issues like displacement of local communities from their land by the gas projects. This has continued and worsened recently.

“So, while the gas companies are a target of the violence, they are also a significant causal factor to the violence, exacerbating the conditions that meant this insurgency could take hold. They are an integral part of the problem.”

Just 3% of the world’s land remains ecologically intact with healthy populations of all its original animals and undisturbed habitat, a study suggests.

These fragments of wilderness undamaged by human activities are mainly in parts of the Amazon and Congo tropical forests, east Siberian and northern Canadian forests and tundra, and the Sahara. Invasive alien species including cats, foxes, rabbits, goats and camels have had a major impact on native species in Australia, with the study finding no intact areas left.

The researchers suggest reintroducing a small number of important species to some damaged areas, such as elephants or wolves – a move that could restore up to 20% of the world’s land to ecological intactness.

Lucrative pay and share options have created an incentive for oil company executives to resist climate action, according to a study that casts doubt on recent net-zero commitments by BP and Shell.

Compensation packages for CEOs, often in excess of $10m (£7.2m), are linked to continued extraction of fossil fuels, exploration of new fields and the promotion of strong market demand through advertising, lobbying and government subsidies, the report says.

The setup with executives runs counter to efforts around the world to keep global heating to 1.5-2C (2.7-3.6F) above pre-industrial levels.

Boardroom rewards also underpin a skewed corporate logic that is slowing the world’s path to decarbonisation, according to the study, which was exclusively shared with the Guardian before publication in the Energy Research and Social Science journal.

Richard Heede, of the Climate Accountability Institute in the US, a co-author of the paper, said the discovery showed that the need for changes in corporate structures was more urgent than consumer behaviour changes.

China must shut down nearly 600 of its coal-fired power plants in the next 10 years, replacing them with renewable electricity generation, to meet its goal of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2060, a report has said.

But replacing the 364GW of coal generation with renewable power would achieve a net saving of $1.6tn (£1.2tn) over the period, since wind and solar power are now much cheaper than coal, according to the analysis company TransitionZero.

The coal consumption of China, the world’s biggest emitter, is of global concern. The country has ramped up plans for new coal-fired power stations in an effort to spur economic growth after the recession caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

Last September the country’s president, Xi Jinping, surprised the world by pledging that China would achieve net zero emissions by 2060, and that its emissions would peak before 2030.