By Nurbek Bekmurzaev
“Concerns over China’s impact on corruption, damage to the environment by Chinese companies, and the rights of Kyrgyz workers at Chinese firms are all prevalent.”
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By Nick Bernards, Associate Professor of Global Sustainable Development, University of Warwick
A US$125 billion rainforest fund is being hailed as a flagship announcement from the 2025 UN climate summit in Belém, Brazil. The goal is noble: this is essentially a trust fund that will pay countries to keep their tropical forests standing. But its core idea was tried 30 years ago, and the results weren’t great.
Brazilian president Luiz Inàcio Lula da Silva suggests…
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By Human Rights Watch
Click to expand Image Indigenous people attend a protest to call for climate justice and territorial protection during the U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP3O), in Belem, Brazil, November 17, 2025. © 2025 Anderson Coelho/Reuters This year’s United Nations climate summit (COP30) is taking place in Belém, gateway to Brazil’s Amazon rainforest. Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva began the summit by announcing a global investment fund to pay tropical forest countries to keep trees standing. Indigenous peoples have made their presence felt throughout, demanding recognition for…
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By Juliano Palacios Abrantes, Postdoctoral researcher, Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, University of British Columbia
Narissa Bax, Marine Biologist, University of Tasmania
The momentum of COP30 and the first global agreement for marine areas beyond national jurisdiction creates a unique opportunity to further integrate the ocean, particularly the deep sea, into the climate agenda.
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By George S. Rigakos, Professor of the Political Economy of Policing, Carleton University
Baseball’s exclusion from the varsity system in Ontario and its absence from university athletics bodies in the rest of the country doesn’t square with fan interest and cross-Canada baseball participation.
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By Simon Blanchette, Lecturer, Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University
Artificial intelligence is fascinating, transformative and increasingly woven into how we learn, work and make decisions.
But for every example of innovation and efficiency — such as the custom AI assistant recently developed by an accounting professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal — there’s another that underscores the need for oversight,…
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By Sheena Cruickshank, Professor in Immunology, University of Manchester
Peanut allergy is one of the most common food allergies, affecting between 1% and 2% of people living in the west. And, for many years, their prevalence has been rising.
But a recent study out of the US shows that the rate of peanut allergy diagnoses in infants has actually declined. It appears this decline may be due to changes in allergy guidelines – highlighting the…
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By Nicholas Ryder, Professor of Law, Cardiff University
Fraud is now the most common offence in the UK accounting for more than 40% of reported crime. In the year to July 2025, around 4.2 million people reported being defrauded in England and Wales.
Yet that’s probably only a fraction of the true scale of the problem. The National Crime Agency estimates…
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By Jon Gluyas, Professor of Geoenergy, Carbon Capture and Storage, Durham University
Imagine powering long-haul aircraft and heavy ships with fuels derived from just air, water and renewable electricity. This is moving from science fiction to the verge of reality, thanks to the falling price of renewables like wind and solar.
Whereas burning today’s fuels releases carbon into the atmosphere that has been sequestered underground for millions of years, these “e-fuels” would be more environmentally friendly, adding and subtracting carbon from the air in roughly equal quantities.…
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By Haomin Wang, Lecturer in Economics, Cardiff University
Alessandro Di Nola, Assistant Professor in Economics, University of Birmingham
Whatever decisions Rachel Reeves makes in her second budget as UK chancellor, it is clear that she needs to find lots of money. Some argue that the best and fairest way of doing this is to raise the taxes of the country’s wealthiest people.
Others feel that such a move will do further harm to the UK’s longstanding problem with productivity, by discouraging investment and entrepreneurship.
Economists describe this as the “equity-efficiency…
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