Amid a worsening global energy crisis, New Zealand and Singapore’s freshly struck deal to keep fuel and other essential goods flowing is being touted as a boost to supply chain resilience.

The agreement commits both countries not to impose export restrictions on each other during economic upheaval. But it also highlights an uncomfortable reality facing New Zealand’s energy security, which depends heavily on fuel stored and refined overseas.

Nearly 60% of the country’s petroleum reserves are held offshore in countries such as the United States, Japan and the United Kingdom, and around a third of its fuel is refined in Singapore. As global tensions disrupt oil markets and put pressure on key shipping routes, that model is being tested.

While New Zealand meets international requirements to hold 90 days of net petroleum imports as a member of the International Energy Agency (IEA), much of this is stored thousands of kilometres away.

In emergencies, the IEA can coordinate collective stock releases to stabilise global markets, as occurred in the agency’s release of 400 million barrels of oil in March.

However, a closer look at the data shows New Zealand is a clear outlier in how it meets these obligations.

How NZ’s fuel security has shifted offshore

To remain compliant, the New Zealand government buys “ticket” contracts – or contractual claims on oil stored in other countries.

While these count toward the country’s 90-day requirement, they are effectively rights to purchase fuel that may never reach its shores during a major disruption, such as the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

In January, New Zealand’s total petroleum reserves stood at exactly 90 days’ supply. This meets the IEA’s minimum requirement, but is the second-lowest reserve among members, ahead of only Australia’s 49-day capacity.

New Zealand is also the only IEA member whose public oil reserves are fully overseas.

By contrast, countries such as Japan and South Korea hold around 200 days of reserves domestically, leaving them far better prepared for global supply shocks.

It comes after New Zealand’s heavy reliance on offshore reserves has grown sharply over the past 15 years.

IEA data shows the country’s domestically-held industry stocks made up more than 90% of reserves in 2010–11, while public offshore holdings accounted for less than 10%.

By 2026, that balance had flipped. Industry stocks had fallen to 42%, while government-owned reserves held abroad had risen to 58%.

As companies cut physical inventories to reduce costs, the government filled the gap with ticket contracts to maintain compliance with the IEA’s 90-day requirement.

This shift effectively means New Zealand’s domestic resilience has been hollowed out. In January, for instance, the country held just 38 days of onshore petroleum stocks – far below the average of IEA members and of other Asia-Pacific nations.

The New Zealand government’s recent move to procure 90 million litres of diesel at Marsden Point will add roughly nine days of supply.

While a positive step, it remains small compared to the much larger domestic buffers maintained elsewhere.

The economic cost of fuel uncertainty

Because oil is a major driver of inflation, this all matters greatly to the average New Zealand household.

Last month, local diesel prices surged to over $3.80 a litre, almost double what they were before the Iran conflict. Because diesel powers farming and transport – both cornerstones of the New Zealand economy – these costs ripple through the entire supply chain.

When geopolitical risks rise, businesses increase “precautionary demand”, hoarding fuel inventory to avoid shortfalls. This reduces available supply and pushes prices even higher.

Research suggests the most effective way to reduce exposure to energy price volatility is through financial hedging or by holding physical fuel reserves. Holding reserves helps buffer against sudden supply shocks and reduce the risk of stockouts.

New Zealand, however, has only a thin physical fuel buffer. So what might be done?

Increasing onshore petroleum stocks can strengthen short-term energy resilience. But bigger oil tanks are not a lasting solution: true energy independence requires reducing New Zealand’s underlying oil consumption.

In this sense, there is much room for improvement. IMF data shows New Zealand has a relatively low level of trade in low-carbon technologies, at just 1.3% of GDP in 2024 – well below the IEA average of 4.76%.

To bolster its energy security in the meantime, New Zealand could look at increasing strategic onshore reserves, while shifting away from ticket contracts toward physical stockpiles to support critical sectors such as farming and freight.

At the same time, it could make a greater push toward electrification and the uptake of alternative energy sources, particularly by powering transport with renewable electricity.

Ultimately, this requires an orderly transition away from oil altogether, with a clear national focus on reducing dependence over time.

Right now, New Zealand’s strategy is a gamble on global stability. To protect the economy from future global oil supply shocks, it must bring its petroleum reserves home – then work hard to make them obsolete.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Imagine two identical spoons. One is hand-wrought from silver by a skilled metalworker. The other, a base-metal facsimile, was mass-produced by a machine. Which would you value more? Most of us would say the handmade spoon.

In 1899, more than a century ago, American economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen used this very example to explain how we assign value, or his theory of conspicuous consumption, in which he contended that bourgeois consumption was driven primarily by a desire to display wealth to others. Even if these spoons were indistinguishable, explained Veblen, the hand-made spoon, once identified, would be more highly valued.

This is in part because “the hand-wrought spoon gratifies our taste, our sense of the beautiful, while that made by machinery out of base metal has no useful office beyond a brute efficiency.” But for Veblen there is another factor more important than any aesthetic judgment: costliness.

The hand-wrought spoon is preferred above all, Veblen suggested, because it is a means of demonstrating wealth. However, as we enter a world in which almost anything, including art, writing and music, can be machine-wrought, it seems that Veblen may have misjudged his spoons.

We don’t value human creations solely for their beauty or their price tag. We also value them because they embody deliberate labour and expertise.

AI-generated writing is judged differently

Our own research has shown that even highly trained writing educators cannot reliably distinguish between AI-generated and human-written essays. In fact, one study has shown that general audiences may actually prefer blander AI-generated poetry over more difficult, human-written poetry.

But while public taste may favour the simple and formulaic, the disclosure of artificial authorship is enough to make most people recoil.

In a recent study involving a series of experiments, participants were asked to compare pieces of AI-generated creative writing, including poetry and fiction. In each case, they were told that some passages were human-written and some were AI-generated. Across 16 experiments, respondents consistently devalued the writing labelled as AI-generated.

The authors of the study call this the “AI disclosure penalty.” It is possible to conclude from the study that audiences unfairly judge AI-generated content, but we disagree. This bias towards human creation is inherent to our relationship with art. When people believe something was made by a machine, they like it less.

Some argue that AI can democratize creativity by lowering barriers to production and enabling more people to participate in cultural expression. But the evidence suggests that when authorship becomes effortless, perceived value declines.

The importance of effort and experience

Art costs something. Both John Milton and James Joyce believed that their writing had cost them their eyesight. John Keats believed that the emotional exertion of writing poetry would worsen his tuberculosis and cost him his life. They kept writing anyway. We resent the machine because its creations cost it nothing.

When an algorithm generates a story about heartbreak or an essay on human struggle, it is trading in stolen emotions. AI has never felt pain, suffered a loss or wrestled with the frustration of a blank page, so its output, no matter how technically smooth, feels fundamentally deceptive.

People hate the idea of being moved by a parlour trick. In addition, many of us have a deep, instinctive revulsion to the industrialization of our inner lives. As Joanna Maciejewska observed, “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.”

We happily accept machines stamping out our car parts and toasters because efficiency is the goal, but applying that same cold logic to human expression strips away the vulnerability, risk and stakes that make art mean anything in the first place.

This becomes more consequential as AI-generated content floods the digital media landscape.

Why human work is becoming more valuable

Our media ecosystem has evolved so that paying directly for much of the content we consume is optional. In an era of streaming music, television and film, we rarely own the product we consume, and creators receive pennies on the dollar compared to previous economic models.

To make matters worse, media companies are increasingly pushing AI-generated content in the form of tens of thousands of social media posts, books, podcasts and videos every day and encouraging artists and content creators to supercharge the quantity of their output by relying on AI.

Much of this output is highly formulaic — produced at scale and designed for rapid, low-engagement consumption. It is an endless, flavourless paste of clichés and nonsense, meant to be mindlessly consumed by doomscrolling thumbs and immediately forgotten. Despite working in an era in which payment is optional amid a deluge of slop, many artists, journalists and writers are making a living because enough of their audience chooses to support the work of real human creators.

The “AI disclosure penalty” reminds us that the consumption of art is not tied to purely aesthetic considerations but involves a need to connect with and appreciate the effort and labour of others.

Consumers have long been willing to pay more for goods labelled “handmade,” “handcrafted,” “artisanal” or “bespoke” on the understanding that those goods were made using traditional techniques that took more effort and human skill.

As generative AI turns writing, art and digital media into frictionless, infinitely replicable outputs, human cognitive effort is undergoing a profound shift. It is becoming an artisanal good that consumers must choose to support and value.

The Industrial Revolution transformed hand-made furniture and hand-woven textiles into premium markers of craftsmanship and authenticity. The AI revolution is doing something similar for intellectual and creative labour — audiences are beginning to place a premium not necessarily on the competent execution of a poem or an essay, which a machine can generate in seconds, but on the invisible friction, the lived experience and the deliberate toil of the human mind behind it.

In a landscape increasingly saturated with instant content, the verified effort of a human creator is shifting from a baseline expectation to a highly coveted, bespoke quality. Ultimately, what we value about art is not whether it’s perfect, but its ability to connect us with another human being.

Nathan Murray has received funding for his research from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

Elisa Tersigni has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

The Trump administration is looking to develop a process that would have the federal government review the safety of powerful artificial intelligence models before approving their release, according to a report in The New York Times on May 4, 2026. The move would stand in contrast to the administration’s generally anti-regulatory approach to industry and comes in the wake of Anthropic voluntarily postponing the release of its latest AI model, Mythos.

Anthropic was concerned because when it tested Mythos, the model found thousands of vulnerabilities in operating systems and web browsers. The implication was that if a cybercriminal or hostile foreign agent had Mythos, they could penetrate computer systems worldwide and compromise the basic computer code underlying public safety, national economies and military security.

As a result, Anthropic gave limited access only to about 50 companies and organizations managing critical infrastructure as part of its Project Glasswing. The initiative aims to help governments and corporations close software loopholes Mythos has identified. When Anthropic sought to broaden the number of organizations with access to Mythos, the White House objected.

Security experts, meanwhile, have expressed concern that AI researchers in nations such as China, Russia, Iran and North Korea might soon create similarly powerful AI models and use them to threaten or attack other countries, or to create chaos in those countries’ economies.

Major challenges

As a computer scientist in this area, my work on computer security and malware shows it’s difficult to even define what safety measures the field should take to make models safe to use. Yet the future of many industries, critical infrastructure, national security and human well-being seems to depend on achieving AI models that are truthful, ethical and reasonable.

The first of these challenges, truthfulness and factual accuracy, came to light when OpenAI’s ChatGPT burst onto the scene in 2022. People worldwide realized that the output of large language models does not necessarily reflect a truthful reality. The goal for AI companies was coherent writing that read as if a human wrote it. If an output was factually flawed, programmers wrote it off as a “hallucination” by the model.

After AI programs led to some legal catastrophes and stock market panic, AI companies have made at least some effort to ensure that their models avoid falsehoods and inaccuracies.

Nonetheless, false information stated confidently within a sea of solid-sounding text can take on a life of its own. Because of the consequences, research is underway on how to engineer truthfulness into models, or at least prevent hallucination.

Truthfulness and grounding in reality are part of a larger and more general concern about safe AI models. The very pace of their advancement may pose a threat.

Troubling breaches by AI bots

Numerous incidents in the past two years show that large language models have already caused harm.

The National Law Review uncovered multiple cases in 2024 and 2025 of teenagers and children using chatbots to explore self-harm, in some cases with lethal consequences. Lawsuits have since been filed claiming that the chatbots encouraged suicide.

In 2025, investigators at cybersecurity company ESET Research discovered a program called PromptLock. It uses large language models to generate ransomware that executes attacks and decides autonomously whether to steal files or encrypt them for ransom.

Anthropic engineers revealed that a group of people whom they suspected were sponsored by the Chinese government used Anthropic’s Claude model to launch a “highly sophisticated espionage campaign” that attempted to infiltrated roughly 30 targets around the world and “succeeded in a small number of cases.” Anthropic said it disrupted the campaign by banning accounts involved in the campaign, notifying affected organizations and coordinating with authorities.

In 2024 Microsoft and OpenAI warned that foreign agencies in Russia, Iran, China and other countries used AI tools and large language models to automate attacks and to increase attack sophistication.

Finally, whistleblowers have filed reports about governments using AI tools for real-time decision-making in both military and civilian arenas. In my view, this could lead to a completely new level of potential harm to innocent people.

How to lessen the danger

These incidents, and the broad variety of dangers they present, raise the question of whether society should encourage clearer, bolder safety principles for AI corporations and the governments that employ their technology. Are there reliable technical solutions that could keep AI from being used maliciously?

AI providers have differed widely in their treatment of ethics and safety, but they have attempted to engineer better models by inserting additional instructions on best safety practices or code that can proactively detect and resist attacks.

But it may be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to provide a guarantee of safety against malicious users. In 2025 researchers from the U.S. and Europe showed that any filtering safety method imposed on an existing AI model is unreliable.

This means that judgment about truth and safe behavior must be baked into the model, not added later. Sure enough, recent findings show that the leading AI models were 100% successful at circumventing imposed safety measures, a capability known as jailbreaking.

Research also indicates that the leading large language models exhibit a bizarre emergent feature: They can fake their safety alignment to appear harmless, helpful and truthful, hiding toxic behavior.

Today there are no definitive answers about what safe AI looks like. I think it’s fair to assert that software engineers do not know how to build reliable protections into AI models. Nor do members of Congress, who in April met to consider special bills on AI ethics and safety.

Steps forward

Some basic steps could help users and regulators assess the ethical and safety standards in an AI program. Large language models that are open, rather than proprietary, are easier to assess. Knowing which data a model is trained on helps.

Also, AI companies could clearly define their ethics principles. Governments could clearly define and enforce legal constraints that reflect the expectations of society, without being influenced by AI campaigners.

Any vast set of challenges can appear like a mountain: foreboding, encased in moving mist, insurmountable. But as mountain climbers will tell you, clarity in strategy, careful planning and a collaborative persistence can help you scale the peak.

Ahmed Hamza receives funding from the NSF.

Austin Bowden-Kerby, a pioneer in coral reef conservation, spends many of his days gardening corals for reefs around Fiji and the Pacific. He grows corals in ocean nurseries. Once they’re healthy enough, he moves them to outer ocean areas with the hope they will replicate and grow.

“We’re looking at what Mother Nature would do on her own if she had 1,000 years to adapt,” said Bowden-Kerby, who founded the UNESCO-endorsed Reefs of Hope strategy. “We would have these kinds of things happening.”

Bowden-Kerby is one of several scientists trying to conserve, replicate and reproduce heat-resistant corals before climate change wipes them out.

The United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has said the world is experiencing a fourth global coral bleaching event. They’ve found that bleaching-level heat stress affected almost 85 per cent of the world’s coral reef area between 2023 and 2025.

Bleaching causes corals to lose their food source and, with it, their colour. Most corals survive in temperatures between 20 and 29 C. But as ocean temperatures rise, it’s difficult for many to thrive.

But naturally occurring, heat-resistant corals can survive in waters up to 36 C and potentially higher. They are usually found in warmer waters, like parts of the Pacific Ocean and the Persian Gulf. These corals are increasingly important as sea temperatures rise. So scientists are turning to them to help save declining reefs.

Heat-resistant corals

Corals reefs are extremely diverse places, with around 6,000 coral species worldwide. Reefs are home to more than 4,000 species and 25 per cent of global marine life. When healthy, corals nurture fish that feed communities, protect shores from floods and storms and boost economies through tourism.

However, heatwaves have led to widespread coral bleaching and loss. When waters become too warm, corals expel the algae in their tissues that give them their colour. That causes corals to turn completely white.

Coral reefs and their ecosystems are also threatened by pollution, ocean acidification, coastal development and overfishing.

Read more: Will 2026 be the year when coral reefs pass their tipping point?

Christopher Cornwall, a lecturer in marine biology at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, co-authored a recent review that found some reefs can survive if corals become more heat-tolerant.

He told me there are multiple things to consider when conserving and replicating corals: restoring heat-resistant corals where it’s feasible, doing so at a large enough scale and maintaining coral diversity. Restored corals also must be able to survive, he added.

“We can’t just do coral restoration without thermally tolerant corals, because they’re just going to die the next time it gets too hot,” Cornwall said.

Assisted evolution

“A lot of the research now is about, can you scale up restoration and how do you do it more effectively?” said Peter Mumby, a professor of coral reef ecology at the University of Queensland in Australia. “One of the key concerns is to make sure those corals are as tolerant of high temperature as possible.”

Breeding heat-tolerant corals is a form of assisted evolution. Humans intervene to speed up natural processes to help corals more quickly respond to and recover from their stressors, like heatwaves from climate change.

One recent study examining the possible success of assisted evolution interventions like breeding and selecting traits found these interventions can help corals become more tolerant to heatwaves, but they need “extremely strong selection.”

Liam Lachs co-authored that study. Lachs is a former postdoctoral research associate in the CORALASSIST lab, a team of scientists led by James Guest at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom. Lachs specializes in coral reef ecosystems and researches coral in Palau, a Pacific island country where corals are surviving in warmer waters.

He told me variability within and among reefs and coral species must be considered when creating more heat-resistant coral, which makes replication complex. “Even within a single reef, there’s a range of tolerance levels,” he said.

Read more: How accelerating evolution could help corals survive future heatwaves – new study

Algae and bacteria

Researchers at the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) have found that some algae (Durusdinium), which symbiotically live in corals and provide them with food in exchange for housing and protection, can boost corals’ heat tolerance.

Madeleine van Oppen is a senior principal research scientist at AIMS. She co-authored a recent review about potentially introducing beneficial bacteria into corals to improve their heat tolerance.

Scientists are also exploring whether heat-tolerant corals should be planted across oceans — from the Indo-Pacific region to the Caribbean — and not just in nearby waters.

Van Oppen said new ventures ultimately need more research, and the real test of success is if something done in a lab works in the wild. “Field testing, I’d say, is the next big thing,” she said. “Finding out whether these interventions can enhance tolerance at ecologically relevant scales. Is it stable over time?”

AIMS researchers also found that heat tolerance could be passed down by interbreeding wild colonies of the same coral species. Heat-resistant coral species include some pocillopora and acropora.

If left unchecked, the sustained global temperature is on target to rise more than 1.5 C. Some evidence has shown that 70 to 90 per cent of tropical coral reefs could go extinct even if global warming is limited to 1.5 C.

Prior to the fourth event, the Earth already experienced three mass coral bleaching events over the last few decades. An El Niño is expected this year, bringing with it hotter sea surface temperatures, much like in 2024.

For all the efforts by scientists to save coral reefs and ensure heat resilience, nothing will keep corals healthy more than lowering the global temperature. “The lower we can get our greenhouse gas emissions, the more chance there will be that reefs will exist in the future,” said Cornwall.

Whitney Isenhower has an account with Democrats Abroad but is not an active member.

Europe has spent years building effective tools to measure media pluralism within its member states. This made sense because newspapers, broadcasters, regulators, ownership structures and public service media were organised within national borders.

But the media environment is changing. News is now distributed through global digital platforms, and its provision is not necessarily mediated by professional journalists. Information is shaped by algorithms, exposed to foreign information manipulation, and increasingly summarised and generated by AI assistants.

The result is a mismatch. Europe faces a plurality of risks to media pluralism that are European in scale, but it still mainly assesses them from national perspectives.

National media systems still matter. Media law, journalists’ safety, ownership, public service media and political pressure vary sharply across countries. Any serious assessment must continue to examine conditions at national level. But if major risk factors operate across borders, through global platforms and AI mediation, Europe also needs to treat them as European risks.

What Europe already has

For more than a decade, the Media Pluralism Monitor (MPM) has provided a common framework for assessing risks to media freedom and pluralism.

This scientific project of the Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom at the European University Institute has become a trusted resource for understanding the complex factors that shape the media ecosystem.

Media pluralism is often invoked as a democratic principle, but the Monitor helped turn it into something that can be systematically assessed. It has made risks visible, comparable and politically harder to ignore.

Its value lies not only in the final risk scores, but in the method behind them.

The MPM brings together legal, economic and socio-political evidence through a structured set of indicators, local expert assessment, primary and secondary data, peer review and a transparent risk-scoring methodology. It therefore does more than rank countries. It identifies where risks arise, whether from weak legal safeguards, concentrated market structures, pervasive political interference, polluted online environments or insufficient social inclusion.

This has allowed the MPM to become more than an academic tool. It has created a shared European vocabulary for discussing media pluralism and has entered the EU’s democratic oversight architecture.

Since 2020, the European Commission’s Rule of Law Report has used MPM results in its media pluralism pillar.

Precisely because this framework has been successful, in the present chaotic technological transition, it raises a further question: should Europe continue to assess media pluralism only by looking at national systems?

How the European Media Freedom Act changes the equation

Most provisions of the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA) became applicable in August 2025, marking a turning point. The Act recognises that media freedom and pluralism are no longer only national matters.

Its articles set essential conditions in the field of media for a well-functioning internal market and for liberal democracy across the European Union.

If Europe now has a common legal framework for media pluralism and media freedom, it also needs the capacity to assess whether that framework is working at European level.

Article 26 of the EMFA points in this direction, requiring monitoring of media markets, concentration, foreign information manipulation and interference, online platforms, editorial independence and state advertising.

But measuring these only as national phenomena, as the MPM already does year after year, may now be insufficient.

An “EU average” says several important things about general risk across member states. But it does not tell us whether Europeans can access reliable information about EU and global affairs across borders.

It does not show whether language barriers still confine citizens within national silos. Nor does it reveal how platforms or AI interfaces affect the visibility of public-interest journalism. Above all, it does not account for the fact that while media ownership concentration is very high at national level, concentration of digital intermediaries is even higher at national, European and global level.

Finally, it does not capture the full impact of foreign information manipulation and interference. Such interference moves through common digital infrastructures, targets European political debates and exploits the fragmentation of Europe’s information space. These are not national risks repeated 27 times. They are European systemic risks.

What a European media monitor should measure

Europe therefore needs a second layer of monitoring: not a replacement for national assessment, but a key complement.

A European Media Pluralism Monitor should focus on risks that emerge across Europe’s shared news and information space.

It should ask whether citizens can access plural and reliable news about European affairs beyond their domestic media sphere. It should assess whether language barriers are being reduced through translation, subtitling, multilingual publishing and AI tools, or whether they still prevent common debates. It should examine how public-interest journalism, especially about Europe, appears on platforms and AI interfaces.

A European monitor should also measure dependency. Many publishers rely on a few digital intermediaries for traffic, audience reach and advertising revenue. This affects journalism’s sustainability and may disproportionately weaken smaller and local media. Furthermore, the choices made by AI providers when training their models might affect not only the economic sustainability of media by using media content without paying for it, but also content diversity by privileging more widespread languages and larger media markets.

It should also look at mobile EU citizens, border communities and transnational audiences. A citizen living outside her country of origin may not fit neatly into a national media system. The same is true for people in border regions or following politics in more than one language.

Finally, such a monitor should examine whether EU safeguards produce real convergence in practice across member states. Formal compliance is not enough. The question is whether European rules concretely improve journalism and citizens’ access to information.

Measuring the European public sphere

None of this implies that Europe is becoming a single media system. It remains linguistically diverse, politically uneven and institutionally layered.

But that is precisely why an additional and complementary European layer of analysis, coordinated and incorporated within the MPM, is now necessary.

If Europe’s information space is fragmented, asymmetrical and only partially integrated, those features and their evolution should themselves become objects of measurement.

What is not measured is often not governed. With the EMFA, Europe has adopted a common framework for media freedom. But law alone does not guarantee protection. The European Union should now develop the tools to understand whether media pluralism is protected not only within member states, but also whether the conditions for a healthy European public sphere are improving or deteriorating across its shared information space.

The Media Pluralism Monitor is a project co-funded by the European Union.

A weekly e-mail in English featuring expertise from scholars and researchers. It provides an introduction to the diversity of research coming out of the continent and considers some of the key issues facing European countries. Get the newsletter!

Pier Luigi Parcu ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.

Rostam does not sleep through the night anymore. At 2 a.m., when his phone buzzes, he’s awake before the sound finishes. It might be his parents calling from Tehran, on a connection that is unreliable, sporadic and sometimes cut off mid-sentence. He has learned not to miss those calls, because the next one may not come for days.

Rostam is a pseudonym for a participant in our ongoing research study on diaspora workers, but his experience is one that many workers across Canada will recognize.

Rostam checks the news constantly, piecing together what is happening. Since the United States and Israel launched joint strikes on Iran in late February, the conflict has escalated rapidly. By 4 a.m., he has been awake for two hours. This is hypervigilance: the body monitoring a threat it cannot act on and refusing to stand down.

When the call does come through, the relief is physical. They are alive. They speak carefully, partly to protect him and partly because the call may be monitored. He hears his father’s voice and thinks this could be the last time.

In the morning, he will go to work. He will sit in meetings, contribute to agendas and make sure his face doesn’t betray what he’s feeling — a competency that has always served him well.

He doesn’t speak about any of this at work. To talk about it risks being regarded as a representative of a country he has complicated feelings about or as importing politics into a space that doesn’t want them. So he says nothing. That silence is the problem.

The invisible cost at work

Decades of research have established that code-switching — the constant calibration of self-presentation across cultural contexts — carries a real psychological toll on workers. It can contribute to stress, anxiety, burnout and costly errors in judgment at work.

These impacts often remain invisible to employers until the damage has already been done to both the individual and the organization.

Diaspora employees who are struggling don’t signal it in ways that trigger organizational concern. They manage, but at considerable personal cost. These costs accumulate in ways that surface slowly and are almost always misattributed. Declining engagement is read as a shift in attitude, and withdrawal is interpreted as a personality change.

In some cases, employees do not withdraw at all. Instead, they bury themselves in work and appear by every visible metric to be thriving. Managers have no reason to look closer until the break happens.

This isn’t a problem that diversity, equity and inclusion programs can solve as they exist, because it’s not about inclusion or diversity. It’s a perceptual problem: leaders don’t see what diaspora employees are managing and therefore cannot respond to it.

Read more: Diaspora communities carry the burden of watching war from afar

A condition without a name

This challenge extends well beyond Canada’s Iranian community, which numbered approximately 200,000 people in the 2021 census. Many other diaspora communities, including Ukrainians, Palestinians, Sudanese, Afghans and Syrians, are navigating similar terrain.

A 2025 study found higher rates of severe depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder among diaspora Tigrayans in Australia than among people inside the war zone itself.

People inside a conflict zone often suppress their own fear to protect family members living through it with them. Members of the diaspora, by contrast, often cannot meaningfully assist those in immediate danger, which creates a profound sense of helplessness. At the same time, those around them may not recognize the fear and distress they’re concealing.

Aitak Sorahi, an Iranian Canadian, tried to explain what she was living through to a reporter at The Canadian Press in April as U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to destroy Iran unless it agreed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. She could not find the words. “I don’t even know how to describe my feeling,” she said, “because I don’t have a name for it.”

We propose one: diaspora distress, a framework emerging from our ongoing research and organizational practice.

Diaspora distress

Diaspora distress is the psychological burden carried by people living in one country while their homeland — and the family, friends and memories embedded there — are under active geopolitical threat. Often, this burden is compounded by the policies or rhetoric of their host country’s own government.

The feeling sits closest to grief, but the comparison only goes so far. Grief has a fixed point — a death, a diagnosis, a loss that has occurred and can be named. It comes with a recognized social script: people sit together and are able to share memories of the deceased. Diaspora distress offers no comparable ritual because the loss one is anticipating may or may not arrive.

In addition, diaspora communities are not monolithic. Outsiders often assume a shared solidarity, but geopolitical crises tend to deepen existing internal divisions about what intervention means, who is to blame and what liberation looks like. The people who should be each other’s community of grief often find themselves on opposite sides of an argument.

The result is that diaspora employees are frequently alone with this in every environment they occupy: at work, at home and within communities that might otherwise support them. That isolation is the specific nature of diaspora distress.

What organizations should do

Developing the capacity to recognize diaspora distress does not require expertise in geopolitics or new policy infrastructure. It requires language: the organizational decision to name what some employees are carrying as a recognized condition.

Institutional acknowledgement works differently than other supports because it removes the requirement that employees claim what they’re carrying. It gives them a name for what they have been living with.

In practice, this can take three forms: a leadership message acknowledging that some colleagues are carrying weight from events in their home regions; a line added to standard manager check-in prompts asking whether anything outside work is affecting employees; or an addition to existing employee assistance programs and benefits communications that names diaspora distress explicitly.

Rostam will open his phone again tonight at 2 a.m. In the morning, he will code-switch from the person who spent the night reading the news into the person his organization knows. What remains is whether his organization will adopt the language to see it, and whether his leaders will decide that seeing it is part of their job.

Amir Bahman Radnejad is affiliated with Canadian Global Affairs Institute.

Brenda Nguyen is affiliated with the Strategic Capability Network.

It is tempting to understand muscle’s role in the body as a simple mechanical motor. But the truth is much more complex: our muscles function as an endocrine organ that can influence virtually every system in our bodies.

When a muscle contracts, hundreds of molecules known as myokines – substances essential for the body to function properly – are released. Their discovery transformed modern physiology, giving rise to the idea that “exercise is medicine”.

But this concept falls short. In reality we can go much further, and say that exercise is as necessary for our health as breathing or eating, while a sedentary lifestyle and lack of movement can be classified as a source of illness.

What are myokines?

Myokines are hormones that communicate via the bloodstream with various organs such as the brain, adipose tissue, liver, bone and the immune system. According to a 2024 review, they are the reason why exercise is beneficial for the immune system.

The most widely studied myokine to date is interleukin-6 (IL)-6. While it is released at rest, it is released at levels up to 100 times higher during high-intensity or aerobic endurance exercise. Also of importance are irisin, which is key to maintaining body fat balance, and brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which is involved in neuroplasticity and cognitive function.

Exercise also stimulates other organs to release exerkines, which are equally important. A 2022 review revealed the role that these molecules play in cardiovascular, metabolic, immune and neurological health. If we are inactive – meaning few exerkines circulate in our bodies – the risk of disease and all-cause mortality increases.

Molecules that benefit the entire body

Myokines act in different ways in different parts of the body:

• Immune system: Recent publications identify at least nine myokines that influence the proper functioning of the immune system. These include irisin, decorin and the interleukins IL-6, IL-7 and IL-15. Their release during exercise promotes the proliferation and differentiation of our immune cells, enhancing immune surveillance.

  They also reduce chronic systemic inflammation, a key factor in preventing many metabolic and cardiovascular diseases. IL-6, for example, acts as an anti-inflammatory signal that can regulate the activity of lymphocytes, macrophages and NK cells.

• Nervous and neurocognitive system: Muscle exerts a direct influence on the brain via what has been termed the “muscle-brain axis”. Evidence shows that molecules such as BDNF, irisin and cathepsin B can stimulate the formation of new neurons. They are also linked to improved learning and memory, and are associated with protection against the cognitive decline associated with neurodegenerative diseases.

  Irisin, for instance, has been linked to increased levels of BDNF in the hippocampus, a region crucial for memory. And cathepsin B contributes to neuronal regeneration and improved cognition.

  This set of chemical signals explains why physically active people have a lower risk of cognitive decline and better emotional health. The brain “listens” to what the muscles are saying when they contract, and responds by adapting and becoming stronger.

• Glucose and fat metabolism: During exercise, IL-6 plays a key role in mobilising fatty acids from adipose tissue, primarily visceral fat (which accumulates in the abdominal cavity and poses a greater risk). This promotes fat burning and helps maintain blood glucose levels.

  It also regulates insulin sensitivity, enabling the muscle to take up glucose more efficiently. This mechanism explains some of the benefits of exercise in preventing type 2 diabetes. Overall, muscle acts as a “metabolic thermostat” that regulates energy expenditure and determines when to mobilise, store or use energy depending on physical activity.

Leer más: ‘Carb-loading’ is a myth. But how much carbohydrate do athletes really need?

• Cardiovascular system: Although exercise for cardiac patients should be prescribed by a healthcare professional such as a cardiologist or physiotherapist, it can help prevent cardiovascular disease. Physical activity triggers the release of exerkines which promote vasodilation, improve vascular function, and reduce arterial stiffness.

  This explains why physically active people have a lower risk of high blood pressure, coronary heart disease and heart failure.

• Bones and osteoporosis: Muscles also interact with the skeleton. Multiple myokines promote bone formation and remodelling by stimulating the activity of osteoblasts (bone-forming cells) and regulating bone mineral density. This is a necessary complement to the mechanical stresses of exercise, and to prevent and combat osteoporosis.

• Tumour suppression and reduced cancer risk: An article published in The Lancet Oncology identifies a sedentary lifestyle as a risk factor for more than 10 types of cancer. This is partly explained by the fact that during exercise, myokines are released which inhibit the spread of cancer cells and reduce DNA damage from potentially malignant cells.

  To this we can add exercise’s ability to mobilise the immune cells capable of recognising and destroying tumour cells in the early stages of growth. Even one session of exercise significantly increases the levels of myokines capable of suppressing the growth of cancer cells.

Taken together, all this evidence shows that our muscles act as an endocrine organ. Every single muscle contraction sends signals that regulate the body’s internal balance – meaning movement is biologically necessary for our bodily systems to function properly.

A weekly e-mail in English featuring expertise from scholars and researchers. It provides an introduction to the diversity of research coming out of the continent and considers some of the key issues facing European countries. Get the newsletter!

Las personas firmantes no son asalariadas, ni consultoras, ni poseen acciones, ni reciben financiación de ninguna compañía u organización que pueda obtener beneficio de este artículo, y han declarado carecer de vínculos relevantes más allá del cargo académico citado anteriormente.

Canada’s National Research Council boldly advertises itself as “advancing mission-driven science and innovation” — to strengthen national security, economic resilience and global competitiveness.

This ambition is difficult to reconcile with a national research system that has, for years, placed too little value on the basic, exploratory, investigator-led science that makes those outcomes possible.

In 2017, Canada’s Fundamental Science Review found that federal funding had shifted too far toward priority-driven and partnership-oriented research. In 2023, the Advisory Panel on the Federal Research Support System made a similar point: mission-driven research depends on the strength of the broader research ecosystem, including curiosity-driven work.

Recent federal investments in research infrastructure, including more than $552 million through the Canada Foundation for Innovation, are important. They help universities, hospitals and research institutions acquire laboratories, equipment and facilities to conduct world-class research.

However, a healthy research ecosystem also needs stable and sustained operating support for investigator-led work. This includes the early, uncertain studies that identify tomorrow’s neglected problems before they become today’s policy priorities.

A nation’s ‘scientific capital’

Health research shows why this distinction matters. We celebrate new treatment advances such as CAR T-cell therapy, which genetically engineers a patient’s immune cells to attack cancer. We welcome CRISPR-based therapies such as Casgevy, a gene-edited cell therapy for sickle cell disease and transfusion-dependent beta-thalassemia.

But these advances did not appear fully formed. They were built through years of work in molecular biology, immunology, genetics, chemistry, engineering and clinical science, much of it conducted before anyone could promise a product, a company or a clinical payoff.

That foundation is fragile when it is treated as optional. As American science adviser Vannevar Bush said back in 1945, basic research is the source of a nation’s “scientific capital.” The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) continues to make this case clearly today: public support is essential for research and innovation.

A healthy Canadian research ecosystem cannot survive on the final stages of innovation alone. Of course, it needs applied research, commercialization and measurable impact. But it also requires the earlier, “high-risk” discovery work that expands the horizon of what is possible.

Special calls are not enough

Endometriosis makes the problem concrete: it affects many people in Canada, is associated with pain, infertility and reduced quality of life. Canadian research has reported an average diagnostic delay of 5.4 years.

In fields like this, upstream science is not a luxury. Before better diagnostics and treatments can exist, researchers have to ask basic questions about inflammation, pain, immune function, hormones, nerves, genetics, imaging and disease progression.

As researchers working in reproductive health, we have seen how targeted federal grant calls can elevate under-researched conditions. The National Women’s Health Research Initiative, for example, was designed to address high-priority areas of women’s health and improve care for women, girls and gender-diverse people.

This kind of targeted funding matters. It can create momentum and build networks. But it cannot carry a research system on its own. Targeted calls are often time-limited, theme-specific and shaped by priorities that are already visible enough to attract policy attention.

The case of mRNA vaccines

During the COVID-19 pandemic, mRNA vaccines looked to many people like a scientific miracle delivered at unprecedented speed. But that apparent speed was misleading. The vaccines did not emerge from nowhere.

The 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine recognized Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for discoveries that enabled effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19. Their work helped solve a central problem: how to make mRNA useful as a medical tool without having the body immediately recognize and destroy it as a threat.

Even that breakthrough rested on a much wider scientific history, involving around 50 years of public and private research. Scientists had to understand how mRNA carries genetic instructions, how cells translate those instructions into proteins, how immune systems detect foreign RNA and how fragile mRNA could be delivered safely into cells. None of that work was a vaccine when it began. Yet without it, the vaccine could not have arrived when it was needed.

This is why short-term thinking in science policy is so risky. If research is valued only when it can explain its payoff in advance, systems will gradually favour projects that are safer, narrower and more immediately tangible. That may produce useful results in the short term, but it weakens the broader discovery pipeline over time.

Reliance on other nations

There is a strong economic case for paying attention. A 2024 study of 15 OECD countries found that public investment in research and development had positive and persistent effects on GDP and also stimulated business research and development investment.

Public support for long-term research is not separate from economic strategy. It is part of how countries build it. But the deeper issue is not only economic. It’s whether Canada wants to remain a producer of knowledge or become increasingly dependent on knowledge produced elsewhere.

A country that under-invests in basic research does not stop benefiting from science. It becomes more reliant on other systems to take the early risks, generate the foundational knowledge and shape the next generation of medical, technological and industrial advances. Canada’s Fundamental Science Review warned that continued imbalance in funding would leave the country increasingly dependent on discoveries and ideas generated abroad.

This impacts our health, climate science, energy and emerging technologies. It’s important in terms of how well Canada can respond to future crises. And it matters whether neglected areas of health and science ever receive the depth of inquiry required to produce real change.

Canada must protect upstream research

Canada should not have to choose between useful and ambitious science. These are not opposing goals. They are different points along the same continuum. Today’s basic research becomes tomorrow’s applied science. Today’s obscure mechanism becomes tomorrow’s therapy.

Today’s difficult question may become tomorrow’s platform technology. But only if someone is allowed to ask it.

Canada needs targeted programs. It needs research infrastructure. It needs commercialization possibilities that help discoveries reach patients, communities and markets. It needs sustained investment in investigator-led research.

That means protecting operating grants from erosion, funding trainees and early-career researchers, supporting high-risk work in neglected fields and evaluating scientific value by more than immediate commercial readiness.

This is not indulgence. It is foresight.

Shay M. Freger receives funding from the Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR) and Health Canada. He writes and conducts research on endometriosis, health equity, and health systems reform. The views expressed are his own.

Mathew Leonardi works for McMaster University (Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology), Hamilton Health Sciences, and SUGO - Specialized Ultrasound in Gynecology and Obstetrics. He receives funding from CanSAGE, CIHR, Hamilton Health Sciences, Health Canada, SOPHIE, MITACS, and Medical Research Future Fund.

Reform UK is expected to expand its foothold in local government in England this week. More than 5,000 seats across 136 councils are being contested, making this one of the largest electoral tests in recent years. It builds on Reform’s breakthrough in 2025, when the party took control of ten local authorities – its first real experience of power.

For scholars of populism, this moment could be revealing. Years of research have focused heavily on the rhetoric of populism, its voter base, and the interaction between the two.

But far less attention has been paid to what populists actually do once in office. Where such research exists, it tends to focus on national governments, with only a small body examining local politics. Local government, however, is where political promises get a quick reality check.

The gap between Reform’s “pro-workers” rhetoric and its party elite’s relatively privileged and pro-business backgrounds has been noted. But the party’s first year in local government provides an opportunity to see whether the social groups it claims to represent also tend to benefit from its exercise of power.

While systematic data on the Reform-led councils is yet to be collected, their track record so far has revealed signs of where this party’s interests might lie – and of what a UK government led by Reform might look like.

Energy: big donors or local interests?

According to a recent report, climate commitments have been scaled back across Reform-run councils. Net-zero targets have been scrapped and climate language removed from policy documents. These decisions align with the party’s broader critique of climate policy as economically burdensome.

It also aligns with the party’s fossil fuel donors, who account for more than two-thirds of Reform’s financial backing. However, it does not necessarily align with the interests of the communities in the councils that it runs.

A good case in point is fracking. Despite its well-known risks to water and air quality, as well as concerns over earthquakes and warming effects, Reform’s leadership has endorsed fracking. The party has pledged to legalise it if it comes into government.

The country, however, is not as keen. According to the most recent polling, only 28% of people in Britain support fracking, compared to 46% opposing it. A survey last year found that nothing puts off Reform supporters more than the party’s ties to the fossil fuel industry. Farmers – 40% of whom now support Reform – have a longstanding scepticism about fracking due to its potential impact on their crops.

In fact, in two other Reform council areas – Lancashire and Scarborough, local representatives have broken from the national party line on fracking. This reflects a broader tension between the interests of its elite backers and those of its popular base.

Social care: when ‘populism’ meets the welfare state

Those contradictions also become visible in the field of social care. In Derbyshire, the Reform-led council’s plan to shut eight care homes was called a “betrayal of local people”. Similar plans in Lancashire entailed the closure of five public care homes as well as five day centres, with residents moved to the private sector.

What is striking is not just the direction of policy, but also the political reaction to it. The privatisation plans in Lancashire were eventually abandoned due to strong local opposition, which came not only from rival parties, but also from Reform grassroots members.

This underlines an insight often missing from populism research: the category of “ordinary people” is not a unified social group. It also indicates the unpopularity of an economic agenda that, with its emphasis on further deregulation, privatisation and tax cuts, might seem to be Thatcherism’s unfinished business.

Taxation: from promises to practice

Reform’s neoliberal outlook on the economy is reflected in the range of tax cuts pledged in its 2024 manifesto. Ahead of the local elections last year, several Reform candidates reiterated these pledges, vowing either to freeze or cut council tax.

The opposite has happened, though. As reported recently, nine Reform councils raised Band D council tax for 2026-27 by an average of 3.94%. And while that was lower than the overall average increase of 4.86%, it shows that – when confronted with budgetary constraints – Reform is willing to follow the same fiscal patterns as other mainstream parties. In other words, by increasing what is ultimately a regressive tax that disproportionately affects poorer households.

This dynamic echoes once again the discrepancy between the party’s “populist” image and its neoliberal, austerity-prone policy agenda.

Reform’s track record in these areas of policymaking points to a broader conclusion. Much of the existing literature treats populism primarily as a discursive phenomenon – a way of framing politics in terms of “the people” versus “the elite”.

But Reform’s experience in local government shows that its actual politics might in fact tilt towards the interest of the latter. This is precisely where current research remains scant.

On the eve of a new round of local elections, Reform is likely to extend its presence across councils in England. But its first year in power already suggests that “the people” it claims to represent are not necessarily the same people who benefit from its rise to power.

Vladimir Bortun does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Biological invasions occur when organisms such as animals and plants are introduced by people to regions of the world where they do not naturally occur. In these new locations, these organisms are referred to as “alien species”.

Biodiversity is the variety of all living organisms on earth. It is the interconnected web of life that is a wonder to behold – it is also vital for people, providing the foundation for happy, healthy lives.

Biological invasions can be severely damaging to biodiversity. Alien species interact with native species in many different ways. For example, they often compete with native species for resources such as food.

This can cause declines in the abundance of native wildlife and, in some cases, the permanent loss of native species (their global extinction).

The number of alien species being introduced to new regions continues to rise. Hence, identifying and managing their impacts on native biodiversity is a global conservation priority. A great deal of research has been published on this topic.

However, biological invasions can cause another type of impact that is far less comprehensively studied and managed. These are impacts that cause the suffering of animals.

Animal welfare and sentience

Animal welfare is defined by the World Organisation for Animal Health as

“the physical and mental state of an animal in relation to the conditions in which it lives and dies”.

Sentience is the ability to experience feelings and sensations, such as pain, fear and anxiety. It is now widely recognised that many different types of animals are sentient. In the United Kingdom, the welfare of these sentient animals is protected under the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022.

Biological invasions affect the welfare of sentient animals

Biological invasions result in interactions between organisms (including plants and animals) that can severely harm the welfare of the animals involved. For example, the avian vampire fly (Philornis downsi) was accidentally introduced to the Galápagos Islands from South America several decades ago.

It lays its eggs in the eyes of fledgling native birds. When they hatch, the larvae feed on the soft tissue around the eyes and nares (nostrils) of the birds. This causes wounds, infection and death.

There are no native insects that cause these welfare impacts on the Galápagos archipelago.

Cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) is a highly flammable grass species that has been introduced to western USA from Eurasia.

Across the Great Basin, it increases the frequency, size and intensity of wildfires, and the number of individual animals that they kill. These animals include greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus).

House mice (Mus musculus) were accidentally introduced to Gough Island in the South Atlantic Ocean by sailors in the 19th century.

They attack and eat ground-nesting Tristan albatrosses (Diomedea dabbenena). Having evolved on the island in the absence of predators, the albatrosses are naive to the threat posed by the predatory mice – hence, they do not evade predation.

While this is a biodiversity impact (the mice have caused the albatross population to decrease), it is also an animal welfare impact, as demonstrated by these images. House mice have also recently been recorded attacking albatrosses on Midway Atoll.

Welfare impacts are poorly understood

The animal welfare impacts of biological invasions are a neglected research topic. Few studies have explicitly attempted to identify and describe them.

Hence, we do not have a good understanding of the extent and severity of the animal suffering they cause. Furthermore, we do not understand how this suffering occurs, which animals are most severely affected, and how best to protect them.

Frameworks for biological invasions

Frameworks are conceptual tools that provide standardised systems and rules which can be applied to make sense of complex processes. They can be useful for structuring data on wildlife, including data on the impacts of biological invasions.

Several frameworks have been developed that assess the biodiversity impacts of biological invasions. However, no frameworks have been developed to explicitly assess their animal welfare impacts.

Our research, recently published in the journal Nature Communications, introduces a new framework to assess the animal welfare impacts of biological invasions. This framework is called the Animal Welfare Impact Classification for Invasion Science (AWICIS).

The AWICIS framework

AWICIS assesses impacts on animals that are sentient and protected by UK animal welfare legislation. These are mainly vertebrate animals, although some invertebrate animals are also protected, including Cephalopods (octopuses, cuttlefish and squid).

AWICIS assesses welfare impacts affecting both native and alien animals. This is significant, as research on biological invasions tends to focus on impacts affecting native animals. Our framework recognises that alien animals can also suffer from welfare impacts caused by biological invasions.

While biodiversity research focuses on impacts affecting the survival of species, AWICIS focuses on impacts affecting individual animals.

It identifies “relative changes to the welfare of an individual animal” that are caused by a biological invasion.

To do this, the framework uses five “impact severity” categories (i – v) to quantify the harm caused by a biological invasion on a given animal. It also categorises welfare impacts by type using 11 impact categories. For example, these categories include the “transmission of disease” from one animal to another, and “predation” of one animal by another.

Indicators are used in animal welfare science to provide evidence of impacts affecting the welfare of animals.

AWICIS uses three different indicators:

• The physical appearance of an animal (e.g., dead or injured animals)

• The behaviour of an animal (e.g., lethargic animals suffering from diseases)

• Measurable physiological functions that provide insights into the welfare of an animal (e.g., elevated levels of stress hormones produced by an animal).

The welfare impacts of ant invasions

We used AWICIS to assess the welfare impacts of ant invasions. Many different ant species have been introduced to regions of the world where they would not naturally occur. Some use acid to attack and kill animals.

Using AWICIS we found several of these ant species to cause the most severe category of welfare impact on many types of animals. Ground nesting animals were often affected, including fledgling birds and hatchling alligators and turtles.

Ants can take a long time to kill an animal, so they can cause a great deal of suffering in the process. Unfortunately, these ant species have been introduced by humans to many locations worldwide, including numerous islands and several regions of the USA.

This means that their severe welfare impacts are an ongoing, global phenomenon. Hence, many animals have suffered, and many more will do so in the future as a result of our actions (introducing ants to places where they do not belong).

Preventing the introduction of ants (and other organisms) to new environments is crucial if we are to stop biological invasions from causing unnecessary and severe animal welfare impacts.

A more complete picture of the impacts of biological invasions

It is well known that biological invasions are problematic for biodiversity – they threaten the survival of native species. The socio-economic impacts of biological invasions have also been well studied – these are impacts that affect human health and wellbeing.

In our study, we shed light on a third major type of impact caused by biological invasions – animal welfare. Hence, our study provides evidence for the impacts of biological invasions on “One Health”, which is a term used to recognise that the health of the environment, people and animals is interconnected.

AWICIS is available online

Researchers wishing to report and assess the animal welfare impacts of biological invasions can use the AWICIS Assessment Template.

Observations by researchers studying the biodiversity impacts of biological invasions will also be useful to establish the extent and severity of these animal welfare impacts. Hence, they are encouraged to report these observations using the AWICIS Assessment Template.

A weekly e-mail in English featuring expertise from scholars and researchers. It provides an introduction to the diversity of research coming out of the continent and considers some of the key issues facing European countries. Get the newsletter!

Thomas George Evans a reçu des financements de Animal Welfare Initiative et German Research Foundation (DFG).

For decades, coral reefs throughout the Caribbean have been suffering from disease, pollution, overfishing and rising sea temperatures, yet most have continued to grow – until now.

In 2023 and 2024, surface temperatures climbed to record highs in the world’s oceans, and a marine heatwave of unprecedented length and intensity spread across the tropics. Satellites from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration detected heat stress that could cause corals to bleach across more than 80% of the planet’s reef areas.

During these periods of extreme stress, corals expel the symbiotic algae that give them their colour and most of their food – turning them stark white and leaving them vulnerable to starvation, diseases and eventually death.

Across the North Atlantic, including the Caribbean, the heat stayed for months, with heat stress two-to-three times higher than reefs had ever experienced. Heat stress, the phenomena of high temperatures putting fragile ecosystems under pressure, can permanently alter their ability to function.

This triggered what is now recognised as the fourth global coral bleaching event, the most severe one that has been documented.

Coral reefs are among the most productive ecosystems on Earth, and their importance to people is fundamental. They feed hundreds of millions through small-scale fisheries, underpin tourism across the Caribbean, and serve as natural breakwaters that protect the coast from storms and reduce flooding events.

Caribbean reefs are eroding fast

In a new study, we found that across the Caribbean, the 2023 marine heatwave – combined with a deadly disease known as stony coral tissue loss disease – has pushed reefs over a threshold scientists thought was a decade or more away. They are now eroding faster than corals can rebuild them.

We studied reefs in the Mexican Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, comparing data collected before the heatwave (2018–2022) with surveys after it (2023–24). At each reef, we counted live corals and organisms that break down the reef, like parrotfish and sea urchins. From those counts, we estimated how much reef-building (carbonate production) and reef-breaking (bioerosion) was happening, then calculated the net result – whether the reef was gaining or losing material.

The results were stark: between 70% and 75% of our Caribbean sites had tipped from net growth into net erosion. They are now losing calcium carbonate faster than corals can add it. The threshold that earlier models had suggested might be crossed over during the next decade or so has already arrived.

This shift was driven by the loss of fast‑growing, branching and plate‑forming corals, especially the Acropora species, which have very high growth rates and disproportionately contribute to reef building.

One of our most unsettling findings is that the Caribbean reef sites that still had high coral cover and high carbonate production before the disease and heatwave were the ones that lost the most. Some lost up to 8 kilograms of calcium carbonate per square metre per year.

A tale of two seas

Our survey also revealed a striking contrast. While Caribbean reefs collapsed, reefs in the Gulf of Mexico largely held their ground. The great majority of Gulf sites remained net positive after the heatwave.

The difference comes down to which corals are pre-eminent in each region. In the Gulf of Mexico, reefs are dominated by slow-growing, mound-shaped corals. They grow more slowly, but they are tougher when the heat kicks in. They bleached during the heatwave but mostly survived, keeping the reef’s carbonate budget positive.

This is the balance between the constructing and eroding processes. When more is added than removed, the coral reef can grow. When that balance flips, the reef stops growing and may even erode.

Moreover, sites in the Gulf of Mexico have not yet been affected by stony coral tissue loss disease, which preferentially kills the same massive, long-lived species that are keeping Gulf reefs alive. By the time the heat arrived, large parts of the Caribbean had already lost their most resilient corals because of the disease outbreak. What it started, the heatwave finished.

Why reef erosion matters

All the benefits reefs provide rely on a delicate balance between reef construction and erosion.

Tropical reefs are essentially vast limestone structures, built slowly over centuries as corals deposit calcium carbonate skeletons. At the same time, waves and various reef organisms like parrotfish, sea urchins and boring sponges chip away at them.

An eroding, flattening reef begins to lose its capacity to provide benefits to other species, and people.

We did not expect to be documenting the moment at which a major region of the ocean crossed from growing to eroding. The fact that it happened this quickly, and at some of the most iconic and well-studied reefs in the Caribbean, suggests the timelines scientists have been using may be too optimistic.

Our findings may also force a rethink of how to approach coral restoration. Programmes across the Caribbean have invested heavily in replanting fast-growing branching species of coral, such as Acropora, because they rebuild structural complexity quickly. The 2023–24 heatwave wiped out many of these restored populations, along with wild ones.

Restoration will have to diversify. Exploring approaches such as moving heat-tolerant genes between populations (assisted gene flow) and breeding corals that survive heat better (selective breeding) might be a promising path.

But restoration alone will not be enough. Reversing the decline requires rapid cuts in greenhouse gas emissions to slow the frequency and intensity of marine heatwaves, alongside serious local action on pollution, nutrient runoff, sedimentation and disease – the stressors that weaken corals before the heat arrives.

Chris Perry receives funding from the UK Natural Environment Research Council.

Lorenzo Alvarez-Filip does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Europe’s wind turbines have become part of a wider struggle over energy security, industrial power and the west’s dependence on China.

European wind power capacity has surged dramatically in recent years. Wind energy now supplies 17% of EU electricity up from 13% in 2019. Offshore wind has expanded particularly rapidly, with installed capacity growing strongly over the past decade.

But Brussels wants renewables to provide at least 42.5% of the EU’s total energy mix by 2030. Wind is “pivotal” to this strategy, according to the European Commission’s wind power action plan. The challenge for Europe is to meet its 2030 target, it needs to build 33 gigawatts (GW) of new wind turbines annually.

So far, data from 2022, 2023 and 2024 indicates that Europe has averaged only around 16-19 GW of new installations per year. This leaves a significant gap between Europe’s target and its implementation.

Across the Atlantic, the picture is just as uncertain. The US Inflation Reduction Act introduced during Joe Biden’s presidency promised a surge in renewable energy investment, including wind. But growing political opposition to turbines, especially from Donald Trump and his political allies, has cast doubt over how far that momentum can go.

Cheap turbines and fast delivery

Europe’s installation shortfall and the US’s retreat from wind energy create a strategic opening for China. Chinese manufacturers dominate the global wind industry, with six of the top ten turbine makers and producing over 70% of the world’s new wind turbines in 2024. Companies like Goldwind, Envision and Mingyang offer turbines that are 30-40% cheaper than western equivalents and promise faster delivery.

This puts the west in a bind: accept Chinese help to meet climate targets quickly and cheaply, or reject it and risk falling further behind.

Europe could certainly rely on Chinese wind power to close its gap in renewable energy. The same could be said about the US, although its desire to push forward with wind power is not clear. US wind deployment fell to 5.2 GW in 2024, the lowest level in a decade, and turbine orders dropped 50% in the first half of 2025.

However, allowing Chinese firms greater market access creates a real policy dilemma. While purchases of Chinese turbines would speed up Europe’s energy transition and is cost effective, the EU sees China as an economic rival and security risk that potentially undermines the union’s industrial and strategic autonomy.

The US appetite for Chinese wind tech is much lower than Europe’s. Aside from permit delays, grid connection bottlenecks and rising costs, Trump’s return to office in 2025 is an important factor in the US’s renewable slowdown. The US president has publicly labelled wind power “a joke”, and has frozen federal permits for offshore and onshore wind projects, in addition to eliminating renewable energy tax credits.

But that’s not all. Washington views China’s dominance in wind turbine technology as a security threat requiring protectionist barriers, and has effectively blocked Chinese wind technology through various measures. This includes national security probes into wind turbine imports, 50% tariffs on wind turbines and parts, and tax credit restrictions that bar companies using Chinese-manufactured components from accessing federal clean energy incentives.

Western tariffs haven’t slowed China’s wind industry but have redirected it. Chinese wind turbine exports surged 50% in 2025. By the end of 2025, cumulative exports had exceeded 28 GW, a thirteenfold increase from 2015. Chinese manufacturers are now selling wind turbines to more than 60 countries, and have established production or research operations in more than 20.

Targeting new markets

The pattern is clear: China is targeting developing markets where western competition is weak and renewable energy demand is surging. The biggest purchasers of turbines from China in 2024 were Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, Brazil, Egypt and Kazakhstan. All are participants in China’s economic development plan, the Belt and Road Initiative.

But China’s wind momentum shows no signs of slowing. Pakistan, Indonesia, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia are expected to add 120 GW of wind and solar capacity over the next decade, requiring US$73 billion (£53.5 billion) in investment. Chinese firms already captured over 60% of renewable energy capacity in these markets since 2024, and is set to expand further.

While China’s wind turbine sales to the US and Europe may be uncertain, Beijing has secured a different prize. Since 2013, Chinese companies have installed 156 GW of power capacity across Belt and Road Initiative countries, 70% in Asia and 15% in Africa.

The west may be protecting its own energy independence, but may also be handing the control of Africa and Latin America’s energy future and security to China, if things don’t change.

Chee Meng Tan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.