So far not a single target of the plan has been met. As negotiators convene for Cop17, the pressure is on to find a way to honour the commitments made at previous summits

• Cop17 at a glance: everything you need to know about the UN’s nature summit

Passersby could smell the dead fish before they saw them. In August, more than 3,000 pike, roach, carp and rudd were found lifeless along the River Wensum in Norwich. Some gasped for air in their final moments, desperate for the oxygen that heatwave conditions had depleted in the water. Investigators believe that the die-off was triggered by heavy rainfall that flushed through high concentrations of pollution at a time when wildlife were already struggling.

The 45-mile (70km) chalk river is one of about 250 in the country. They are a geological accident almost unique to Britain – and one of Earth’s rarest habitats. They emerge from chalk aquifers and are home to species such as freshwater shrimp, otters and stoneflies, also providing drinking water for millions of people. But just 11 have formal protection, with many ravaged by sewage pollution and overextraction. The Norfolk river is one of the few that does have legal protection, but it is in poor ecological health.

While the party’s MPs went into hiding, it was left to its failed byelection candidate Matt Goodwin to defend it

It was the dog that didn’t bark in the night. After Sunday night’s ITV exposé of widespread racism and misogyny within Reform, you might have expected one of its MPs to have taken to the airwaves on Monday morning to defend the party’s honour. To try to persuade viewers that the real problem lay with the journalists who couldn’t stop themselves from investigating Reform rather than the fact that the party’s bigotry was endemic.

Instead, we got nothing. Every Reform MP was otherwise engaged. Were too busy having breakfast. Nothing from Nigel Farage. Nothing even from Robert Jenrick. Maybe he realised he had crashed and burned a few days earlier by suggesting it was just one of those things. One of life’s little mysteries. The BBC was riddled with paedophiles and Reform was awash with racists, said Honest Bob. No big deal. Every organisation had its crosses to bear.

Dulwich Picture Gallery, London
With its helpless rowers, naked river-crossers and snowbound tea-drinkers, this magnificent series is a warning to put your faith in the essential and enduring

The giant wave’s foaming white summit spreads high over the heads of the helpless souls huddled in their long thin boats, crackling into what look like many sharp claws. It is a monster, hungry to swallow human flesh. But beyond it, over the wild water, soothing the terror of those in peril on the sea, is Mount Fuji – a solid cone of hope and solace. The mountain, not the wave, is the hero of this masterpiece, as it is the hero of all the prints in Dulwich Picture Gallery’s stunning exhibition – the first in Britain – of the complete Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji.

When you look closely here at three different, superb impressions of Katsushika Hokusai’s Under the Wave off Kanagawa – widely known today as the Great Wave – your mental picture of this icon is shattered by the violent onrush of water. In reproductions the wave just seems beautiful, an elegant curl of blue and white. But here, to paraphrase Tennyson, it is nature, blue in tooth and claw. The wretched people are the emotional heart of the picture, their imminent risk of drowning its whole point.

Twenty years ago, if a pregnant woman had asked for a C-section because of her fears over poor staffing levels, midwives would have thought she was over-anxious. Now, it seems like a depressingly realist position

The classic way to outrage someone who’s pregnant is to touch their stomach without asking. I would never do that and it never, back in the day, happened to me – but I always thought, as outrageous as it might hypothetically be, that it also stood as a vivid analogy for the generalised social intrusiveness you get while you’re visibly pregnant. Endless questions about how you’re feeling, when you’re due, what hospital you’re going to, whether it’s a boy or a girl, how much time you have off. I hated this interrogation 20 years ago, but now I do it on a reflex; some driving force of human fellowship makes me want to know. I realised mid-sentence, asking a stranger about hospitals – and replying “That’s a great hospital, my sister had her kids in there” – that it must be even more grating than it was in the 00s. My nieces are 19 and 21 now, and that great hospital, unless it’s magically unconnected to the rest of the NHS, has probably changed quite a lot.

The NHS Alliance has announced that up to 20 of the country’s 155 smaller, consultant-led maternity units, mostly in rural or coastal areas, might have to close, since their safety is in question. The problem – which will seem very pressing and obvious to anyone about to give birth, yet quite abstract and manageable to anyone who isn’t – is that those areas aren’t teeming with alternatives. There are women in Devon whose maternity hospital has been temporarily closed, whose next nearest hospital is 53 miles away. Do they even encourage people to write a birthing plan any more? Because nobody’s, surely, would start: “First, I’d like to spend 90 minutes in a car, yelling at my birthing partner.”

From rent strikes to squatting, a new show reveals how people have managed to keep a roof over their head in London – and the mould and astronomical rents that persist

Charles Booth’s pioneering poverty maps of Victorian London show a vivid colour-coded warren of streets, alleyways and slums tightly packed together. Those marked black and dark blue were classed as being “very poor”, defined by “chronic want”. The light blue ones were poor – “18s to 21s a week for a moderate family”. Pink streets housed those who were “fairly comfortable”, and those where the wealthy lived were marked in yellow.

The maps by the British social reformer are the 19th-century equivalent of the modern-day indices of deprivation, which rank every geographic area of the UK by its level of social and economic disadvantage. Comparing the two shows how much has changed in the past 150 years – but also what hasn’t. Historical slums have been cleared away and housing conditions have generally improved, but extreme poverty and extreme wealth continue to live side by side in the capital.

I’d become obsessed with appealing to my invisible audience. But since I ditched the app a year ago, my quieter moments have taken on brilliant new meaning

I first downloaded Instagram when I was 17 and became hooked on it the way most people fall in love: slowly, and then all at once. For a long time, I never considered myself a social media addict. I self-righteously refused to download TikTok, declared Snapchat to be for “children”, and posted less regularly on Instagram than half of the people I followed.

As I went through my university years, however, certain changes crept up on me. I began to swap reading – or essay-writing – for hours spent curating new posts. On my way home from lectures (or later, from my work as a journalist), I would spend ages trying to take the artsiest, most perfect picture of that evening’s sunset for my story – as if the people who followed me were eagerly awaiting yet another photo of one of the Earth’s rotations. What usually followed was a night of reloading my feed to see how many people had reacted to my post – or worse, hadn’t reacted at all.

Exclusive: Undercover footage of Dan Jukes raises fresh questions about Reform leader’s statement that £5m gift was for security

Nigel Farage undermined his own claims that a £5m gift was for security when he referred to the money as a reward for Brexit, according to one of his closest aides.

The apparent admission came in undercover footage seen by the Guardian in which Dan Jukes says that it is “priced in” for Farage to profit from politics.

Exclusive: Utility seen as ‘litmus test’ of PM’s promise to bring ‘essentials of life’ under public control

Andy Burnham has told officials to rip up their plans for how to fix Thames Water and present him with more radical options for what to do with the stricken company.

In an early test of his promise to bring “the essentials of life” under public control, the prime minister is urging his advisers to go back to the drawing board and create a new list of policies for the utility.

Interior minister concedes police ‘lost control’ of weekend protests as PM vows to restore public order

Partial curfews have been issued for a number of French cities, including parts of Paris, after the government admitted police had “lost control” during violent weekend protests around the country.

Sébastien Lecornu, the French prime minister, said after an emergency cabinet meeting on Monday he was “fully resolved to restore public order” and had called for “local and partial” curfews if needed. There was “no question” of imposing a full curfew on entire cities, he said.

President facing criticism for his move to waive sanctions for Russia as a new poll by Reuters shows only 31% of Americans approve of his performance in office

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A new Washington Post-ABC poll shows that Donald Trump’s approval rating has reached a new low – 33%.

This comes, just over two weeks away from the November midterms, as the president continues crisscrossing the country as part of his campaign blitz for embattled Republicans.