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Everyone knows that climate change has consequences, such as a higher likelihood of severe floods, hurricanes and droughts. But here’s a lesser-known problem: Climate change makes toilets more likely to break, which leaves people more likely to “go” outside.

That’s what colleagues and I found when we studied households across six rural Cambodian provinces, focusing on their access to proper toilets and when people decide to abandon sanitary systems in favor of open defecation, or “going” outside.

We analyzed sanitation behavior surveys that were given to about 200,000 households every two years from 2013 to 2020. These questionnaires looked into how households maintained access to sanitary toilet systems, when these facilities were abandoned, and why. It also inquired about the poverty status of the households.

A second survey of 1,472 households that owned a pour-flush latrine purchased through local sanitation businesses supported by the nonprofit organization iDE looked at how well these toilets functioned, as well as attitudes toward waste management. In this case, waste management refers to how often and when latrine pits are emptied and whether the waste is contained in a safe and hygienic way.

Our goal was to establish how living in regions vulnerable to the effects of climate change affects how well sanitary toilets function, and the impact that has on households’ sanitation practices and perceptions.

The key result of our study, which was published in the peer-reviewed journal Environment, Development and Sustainability, was clear: In regions where climate change makes heavy storms and floods more common, households more frequently stop using and maintaining their toilets.

Toilet dysfunction, which temporarily prevents a toilet from flushing or from keeping human waste from entering the environment, is more frequent among households living in flood-prone regions during the rainy season. We found that for every point increase in the composite climate vulnerability index, toilet abandonment went up by 4%.

Unsurprisingly, we found that the poorest households were hit hardest. For every percentage point increase in the number of households living in poverty for any one district, toilet abandonment went up by 1.2%.

Why it matters

Going to the toilet is a basic human necessity, yet more than half the world’s population uses toilets that do not treat human waste before it reenters the environment, typically into rivers.

Moreover, a 2021 report by the World Health Organization and UNICEF found that about 673 million people have no toilets at all and are forced to defecate out in the open.

This is a huge source of pollution and a major risk to human health. Poor sanitation also drastically increases the burden on water treatment systems.

Nonprofits such as iDE, which I consult with and was a partner on this study, are working to improve toilet access and safe practices. In Cambodia, iDE has facilitated the sale of more than 411,000 pour-flush latrines across nine provinces since 2009, contributing to five of these provinces being declared “open defecation free,” meaning that people no longer go to the bathroom outside. Because people pay for their own toilets, they tend to maintain and use them, promoting long-term sustainability to sanitation access.

But this improvement is at risk of being reversed through the increased frequency of climate change-related weather events. In lower-income countries such as Cambodia, seasonal flooding, which is becoming more severe, threatens to disable and damage sanitation infrastructure.

Without improvements to strategies, products and services that mitigate and adapt to climate shocks, people are likely to unsafely dispose of their human waste or be forced to return to open defecation. This is a major contamination risk to water sources and the environment, increasing the risk of sickness.

What isn’t known

We are keen to form more partnerships to continue to study what difference other factors make when it comes to encouraging safe and sanitary toilet practices. This includes looking at the impact of the gender of household purchasers and users, and the proximity of communities to cities and transport links, as well as wastewater treatment options, the density of populations and political will to improve the sanitation of rural communities.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work. Läs mer…

This November, Bob Dylan performed the final concerts of his Rough and Rowdy Ways tour at the Royal Albert Hall in London. The tour picked up where Dylan left off just before the COVID pandemic – endlessly on the road since 1988. But now at the age of 83, the concerts might well be Dylan’s last.

The Rough and Rowdy Ways tour was billed as running from 2021 to 2024, but at the time of publication, there seem to be no future tour dates on the horizon. As Dylan himself wondered on his most recent album: How much longer can it last? How long can this go on?

Dylan has diced with death more than once – think of his infamous motorcycle crash in 1966, or his serious heart ailment in 1997 – and death has preoccupied his songs increasingly in recent years. Throughout this tour, Dylan’s thoughts have been heavily focused on his own mortality and his own legacy.

If the Albert Hall concerts this year are to be his last on the road, then it’s a fitting venue at which to bow out, having first played it nearly 60 years ago. Back then, Dylan was a restless, hungry artist, reinventing his sound, his image, his voice with every album – sometimes, within months of release.

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Between 1962 and 1966, Dylan went from being a Midwest folk singer to the voice of his generation beatnik, via civil rights firebrand, rewriting the popular music songbook as he went.

With each successive regeneration, he seemed determined not only to redefine rock and popular music, but to alienate his audience in the process as well. He was an artist in search of answers, who didn’t give those in his wake time to catch their breath. Sixty years on, and now well into his ninth decade, things haven’t changed.

His own version

Dylan’s final night at the Albert Hall was a summation of how he remains a defiant artist still forging new ideas. The performance contained highlights from his entire career. Eight of the 17 songs were written and released before the 1990s, while everything else was from the 2020 album after which the tour is named. But each song was radically reinvented, reworked to Dylan’s ever-changing vision, with some of the songs even being rearranged during his three-day residency at the Albert Hall.

Take My Own Version of You (2020), Dylan’s late masterpiece about the process of creation. In the song, the narrator – a modern-day Prometheus, maybe even Dylan himself – tells of his efforts to construct his vision from “limbs and livers and brains and hearts”.

Dylan in 2019.
Raph_PH/Wiki Commons, CC BY-SA

The song’s arrangement at the start of the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour was as a brooding, Tex-Mex noir. But by the tour’s end, Dylan had stripped his ode to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to its essentials, until all that was left by the final Royal Albert Hall concert was Dylan’s voice.

He rapped the lyrics, accompanied by his own sparse piano backing and the occasional guitar flourish. It was a performance that evoked similarities to Dylan’s rapid-style solo delivery of songs like It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) (1965) on the same stage in the 1960s.

My Own Version of You is a song in which Dylan reflects on his own artistic and creative processes. And in its radical and stark new arrangement in this final concert, Dylan was returning to how he started: as an artist whose main tools have always been his voice and his words. It’s the reason he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 2016, after all.

Read more:
Bob Dylan’s Nobel prize – and what really defines literature

It’s perhaps unsurprising then that the entire concert was a reflection on the process of creation. Dylan’s process is to reshape, disassemble, reassemble and strip back. While the process is undoubtedly frustrating for some in the audience, as they struggle to guess what song Dylan is performing, it is also exhilarating to watch an artist reinventing himself and his songs in real time.

They become assemblages of the old and the new, the found and the borrowed. When I Paint My Masterpiece (1971) is no longer an elegiac sing-along song, but instead a reggae-influenced tune via Dylan’s own down-and-dirty blues of the Time Out of Mind album (1997), with a bit of his born-again gospel thrown in for good measure.

Dylan and singer Joan Baez during the civil rights March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28 1963.
National Archives at College Park

All Along the Watchtower (1968) is no longer Dylan’s homage to Jimi Hendrix’s career-defining cover version, but a fable of hell trapped on a loop from which the narrator seeks escape, with echoes of T.V. Talkin’ Song (1990). And Every Grain of Sand (1981) becomes a melancholic requiem by an old man with no regrets, determined to rage against time. It conjures memories of Dylan’s version of Tangled Up In Blue, performed at the Royal Albert Hall in 2013.

If this was to be Dylan’s last ever live performance, then what does it say about him and his place in music history? Well, that he remains as vital an artist as he was in the 1960s, one who continues to reinvent himself, who continues to chase that restless, hungry feeling and who doesn’t look back, but constantly forward.

Dylan would leave behind an expansive body of work – both studio albums and live recordings – for scholars, critics and audiences alike to rediscover for decades, if not centuries to come. And in that rediscovery, they will learn much about what it means to be an artist. Läs mer…

Imagine getting a live art class from Leonardo da Vinci, or having a fully interactive discussion about the meaning of life with Socrates. You can now do this in your living room with a laptop and headset through startups like Ireland’s Engage XR and Sweden’s Hello History, combining the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) and the metaverse.

Tradition and technology have often been seen as distinct and even counterfactual, but clearly these technologies are now blurring the lines in ways that can alter how humans engage with cultural heritage.

Here are four emerging trends in this space:

1. New kinds of restoration

Many ancient texts are hard to access because they are close to crumbling or have parts missing, but AI is changing this using machine-learning algorithms to help make sense of fragments that are illegible to the human eye. For instance, this has been used to reveal the contents of papyrus that was charred by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79.

There’s similar potential with ancient sites that have been damaged, whether through neglect or military conflict. Some are now being “restored” by metaverse companies 3D-modelling spaces from digital images which have been created from descriptions in old texts.

Indian startup Who VR, for example, has made a virtual-reality recreation of Sharda Peeth, a ruined Hindu temple and ancient centre of learning. Similarly, Legends of Amsterdam, uses AI to create photo-realistic videos and art prints depicting the Dutch capital and its culture hundreds of years ago.

Legends of Amsterdam uses AI to reimagine stills and videos from the Dutch capital.
Legends of Amsterdam, CC BY-SA

There are also AI companies teaching younger people how to use this technology to make recreations of their own. For example, Brhat, another Indian company, conducts workshops in creating AI visual content rooted in local cultural heritage.

2. Demystifying ancient langauges

Many old texts are written in languages known only to a limited number of people, such as Latin or Sanskrit. This poses barriers to accessing and understanding these historical works and their heritage.

The easiest solution is obviously just to use software that can translate the scripts, but AI offers much more interesting possibilities. For instance, an Indian startup called Mokx has built a chatbot called Arya with which you can discuss at length the Hindu Vedic scriptures. Similarly, there are AI assistants that have been trained on the Latin teachings and traditions of the Catholic church and the Hebrew equivalent for the Jewish Torah.

3. Virtual religion

Young people are engaging with cultural heritage in new ways thanks to these technologies. They are role-playing Indian demigods in a heritage game in the Sandbox metaverse, as well as Catholic clergy on the Roblox gaming platform.

The latter example comes from the Philippines. It involves hundreds of youngsters represented as avatars, attending a Sunday service in a virtual Quiapo Church – a popular Filipino Catholic place of worship. They listen to a sermon from a priest who is being role-played by another member of their Roblox group.

Similar Roblox Catholic services take place in other countries, including Poland and Vietnam. These both help to secure the future of such traditions, and gives youngsters from different parts of the world an easy opportunity to experience one another’s religious cultures.

Coming at spiritual experience from a different angle is Chakra VR, an app on Metaquest in which users meditate in the metaverse and learn about the seven chakras in the body.

4. Anthropomorphism

In some cases, we’re seeing AI combining with heritage in ways in which they take on human characteristics. AskMona is a good example, an AI chatbot deployed in places like the Colosseum Park in Rome and art exhibitions by the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. Visitors can ask “Mona” whatever they like about what they are seeing, and it can begin to seem as if they are dealing with a human.

More exotic examples include the Impossible Torah, a series of written commentaries of the Jewish religious text by AI versions of famous authors such as William Shakespeare and René Descartes. Trained on the life and works of the character in question, this goes way beyond simple mimicry.

They each aim to talk about the Torah in the way that the character would have done, had they been available to write a submission in person. The examples of Da Vinci and Socrates at the beginning of the article fall into a similar category.

Also intriguing was an AI-powered church service held by the German Evangelical Church Congress in 2023. The pastor got Chat-GPT to write a sermon which was then delivered to the congregation by a photorealistic AI-created human.

This all demonstrates how technology is quickly changing the ways in which we interact with heritage and religion. As AI-driven chatbots and characters become increasingly common and take on a life of their own in the metaverse, these worlds will become ever more vivid and accessible.

And that level of immersion is nothing compared to what could be coming if brain-computer interfaces such as Neuralink become commonplace in years to come. No doubt they’ll be able to stimulate the right brain in ways which create deeply spiritual and lifelike experiences with limited distractions. It could lead us to hidden realms of spirituality and connections with the ancients that might lead to more evolved humans. For all the fears about technological advancement, it’s also fascinating to reflect on the huge potential benefits. Läs mer…

US president-elect Donald Trump has indicated that he will again withdraw his country from the Paris agreement and perhaps the UN climate process altogether. The uncertainty this has created was palpable in the negotiation rooms and hallways of the Cop29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, where I wrote this.

I have studied the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its global assessments of scientific knowledge for over 15 years and have followed how its most recent reports are being used in official climate negotiations. As I document in my book, the US and its domestic politics has influenced the organisation of global climate science, and the climate agreements that depend on it, since the IPCC was established in 1988.

From the outset, proposals from the US were influential in the design of a specifically “intergovernmental” body to provide the world with climate science, rather than one lead by scientists themselves. This gave governments a central role in the organisation and its assessment process. Most notably, governments had line-by-line approval of the most read component of the thousand page IPCC reports: the much shorter Summary for Policymakers.

In the second round of the IPCC’s assessment reports in the 1990s, climate scepticism in the US would shape how one of the most important sentences was received – sowing uncertainty that facilitated president George W. Bush’s rejection of the Kyoto protocol, a precursor to the Paris agreement.

In 1996, the IPCC concluded that “the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate”. Controversy around the scientific veracity of this finding was initiated by an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, in which an American physicist accused the lead authors of corrupting the IPCC peer-review process.

This uncertainty was mobilised in a 1998 anti-Kyoto protocol petition, which indicated that there was “no convincing evidence” that human release of greenhouse gases will cause “catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate”.

In 2000, soon after taking office, president Bush rejected the Kyoto protocol because, he said, it exempted 80% of the world. In a letter justifying the move, he also cited incomplete knowledge of climate science.

Climate protesters in Seoul, South Korea, in 2005.
Jeon Heon-Kyun / EPA

The Bush administration’s hostility to climate science would shape IPCC reports throughout the 2000s. Scientists adopted new methods for evaluating scientific uncertainty and ensured a clear line of sight between the main reports and their summaries. For some this made for conservative reports, for others it laid incontestable ground for international climate policymaking.

Put to the test by Trump

The drafting and implementation of the 2015 Paris agreement took place within this context and with US politics firmly in view. An agreement was crafted that would not need senate approval and which depended on national pledges and collective reviews. The strength of this architecture was immediately put to the test during the first Trump presidency.

The IPCC’s sixth assessment cycle, which began in 2015, was set to be its most ambitious and costly round of reports. It would play a pivotal role in implementing the Paris agreement by providing the best available science for the “global stocktake”, where countries assess collective progress towards meeting the long term temperature goal.

However, on taking office, Trump withdrew funding from the organisation, creating a large budget shortfall. When a hugely influential special report on the impacts of warming at 1.5°C was published in 2018, the US government along with Saudi Arabia, Russia and Kuwait, initiated a political struggle when they refused to formally welcome the report at that year’s climate summit in Poland.

We cannot depend on the US

The Paris agreement attempted to bring science from the IPCC and political negotiation at UN climate talks closer together so that parties could be responsive to the latest knowledge and increase collective ambition over time.

This change in US administration is likely to strengthen efforts by some countries to undo this closer alignment between climate science and politics. The wrangling over the IPCC was on view in the first week of Cop29, as countries wrestled over language to identify the IPCC’s role in the second global stocktake.

However, climate action has always been about more than one state. Once Kyoto failed, the architects of the Paris agreement understood that the collective response can never be dependent on the US. Some researchers have observed that, if anything, Trump’s first attempt to withdraw the US from the Paris agreement strengthened it.

Even if this time around Trump withdraws from the entire UN climate convention, the US is likely to maintain influence over the process, as it does other global environmental treaties such as the convention on biological diversity.

Trump’s election still matters, of course. It slows and delays the transition from fossil fuels and increases the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. A more muted US presence was already detectable in the Cop29 negotiating rooms that I observed.

Trump matters to climate politics, yes. But so does everyone else on the planet, and it is that which is most important to keep in view.

Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
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In a book I wrote with a colleague on organisational failures (The Apology Impulse) the inability of many of them to confront their failures, except to say a meaningless “we’re sorry”, is legend.

We highlighted the many cases of organisations in the private and public sector apologising profusely for a high-profile failure, but not taking any personal or organisational responsibility for it. We concluded, after looking at hundreds of organisational failures, that the very act of apologising is itself in crisis.

Organisations are confused and gripped by a range of anxieties. They worry about the consequences of apologising, including the humiliation that comes with admitting wrongdoing. And their (unfounded) fear of inviting litigation often prevents them from giving apologies when they’re most needed.

Crisis communication is becoming a costly business and often the conclusion is that it’s easier not to apologise at all. When an apology is forthcoming, it happens too late or in a wording so cautious as to be stripped of all meaning for the victims.

And in a multi-media age, the fear of potential damage to an organisation’s image and brand will encourage them to be less open and transparent about their failure.

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In the case of the Church of England, there may be a number of additional obstacles which may have inhibited organisation leaders from confronting the appalling behaviour of John Smyth over the years. The now deceased barrister violently abused an estimated 100 boys, many of whom he met via his work with the church.

First, the church is meant to be the “moral” role model of the country. So to admit to itself or to the outside world, that this kind of behaviour exists within its own structures may be difficult to acknowledge or to confront.

Second, the church is a highly hierarchical organisation. People further down the hierarchy might want to cover up their failures to protect their career ambitions or to protect the church’s image and reputation. This may help explain why people did not come forward, despite open concerns about Smyth.

Justin Welby has resigned as Archbishop of Canterbury in the wake of a review that found evidence that Smyth’s crimes had been covered up by the church since the 1980s. Welby said he took responsibility for the “conspiracy of silence” within the church since 2013, when police had been notified about the abuse but the allegations were not properly followed up by the church.

Confronting hierarchy

But there are practical questions to ask about who was responsible for managing this process to ensure that proper safeguarding was put in place. In other words, who had delegated responsibility for this particular individual and situation? Welby may be morally responsible but that doesn’t quite answer the question of who failed to act at the time. This shows lack of senior leadership by the church, who have a duty of care for those under the guidance of the church.

As Helen-Ann Hartley, the Bishop of Newcastle, has highlighted, there appears to be a lack of willingness among many bishops to confront the top leadership of the Church over their accountability for their lack of leadership on this safeguarding issue. This may come down to their personal career concerns or not wanting to rock the proverbial boat.

Welby has taken the fall but there are many more questions to answer.
Alamy

These organisational shortcomings were highlighted in the review of the church’s response to the Smyth case. The review warned of excessive deference to senior clergy in leadership roles and failures of leadership and accountability in safeguarding.

This will all require a serious culture change programme in the future. But as Machiavelli wrote in the Prince:

It should be borne in mind that there is nothing more difficult to arrange, more doubtful of success and more dangerous to carry through than initiating change. The innovator makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old order, and only lukewarm support is forthcoming from those who would prosper under the new.

Change will be needed, nonetheless, and this situation has provided the church the opportunity to seriously explore its leadership and organisational culture – a process that should not stop at the resignation of the archbishop. Läs mer…

Thanks to bestselling authors like Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge, the public has become increasingly aware of the rapid rise in mental health issues among younger people in many western countries. Their warnings about the destructive impact of social media have had an effect, reflected not least in a wave of schools across Europe banning smartphones.

While it’s good to draw attention to the rising rates of depression and anxiety, there’s a risk of becoming fixated on simplistic explanations that reduce the issue to technical variables like “screen time”. In my book, Why We Worry: A Sociological Explanation, I aim to broaden the discussion.

A hallmark of Twenge and Haidt’s arguments is their use of trend lines for various types of psychological distress, showing increases after 2012, which Haidt calls the start of the “great rewiring” when smartphones became widespread. This method has been criticised for overemphasising correlations that may say little about causality. Another problem is the limited timeframe of these analyses.

Most of the graphs in Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation begin around 2002 and end around 2018. Drawing definitive conclusions from just 16 years of data presents several challenges.

One such challenge is that earlier increases are obscured. For instance, when Haidt shows a rise in psychological distress in Nordic countries starting in 2010, we don’t see what happened before 2002. It risks giving the impression that nothing changed before the spread of smartphones.

However, in Sweden, the Public Health Agency has collected data on mental wellbeing among young people since 1986. Looking at self-reported issues with low mood, it’s clear there has been a longer upward trend since the 1980s.

Proportion of boys and girls, ages 11-15, who report feeling low almost every day during the last six months from 1985-86 to 2017-18, Public Health Agency of Sweden.

Similarly, although the 2010s brought a spike among girls, sleep problems have increased long before the introduction of smartphones.

Proportion of boys and girls, ages 11-15, who report having sleep problems almost every day during the last six months from 1985-86 to 2017-18, Public Health Agency of Sweden.

We also see an earlier onset of rising mental health issues in countries like Norway and the UK. According to a review in the journal Psychological Medicine, the reported prevalence of long-standing mental health conditions among four- to 24-year-olds increased sixfold in England between 1995 and 2014 and more than doubled in Scotland between 2003 and 2014.

The US also shows a longer-term increase in mental health issues. Twenge, one of the most prominent critics of youth smartphone use, wrote in 2000 that the “average American child in the 1980s reported more anxiety than child psychiatric patients in the 1950s”.

In 2011, she noted that “almost all of the available evidence suggests a sharp rise in anxiety, depression, and mental health issues among Western youth between the early 20th century and the early 1990s”.

This brings us to a mystery that deepens when we examine the World Mental Health surveys – a series of community psychiatric
surveys coordinated by the World Health Organization and conducted in 30 countries.

Mean lifetime prevalence of mental disorders in the World Mental Health surveys in the country income groups (2001-11)

In 17 of 18 mental problems, there is a consistent pattern of prevalence being lower in the low- and lower-middle-income countries than in high-income countries. This stark difference, which contrasts sharply with patterns in physical health, cannot be explained by smartphone access, as the national surveys were conducted between 2001 and 2011.

So, what can explain this geographical and historical variation beyond the introduction of smartphones and social media?

Numerous academics, including me, have pointed to factors such as an increasing intolerance for uncertainty in modernity, a fixation – both individual and collective – on avoiding risk, intensifying feelings of meaninglessness in work and life more broadly and rising national inequality accompanied by growing status anxiety. However, it’s important to emphasise that social science has so far failed to provide definitive answers.

One could contend that all social problems, even those that social science has yet to fully understand, affect mental health. It seems unlikely that the political and social challenges we face wouldn’t influence our wellbeing. Reducing the issue to isolated variables, where the solution might appear to be to introduce a new policy (like banning smartphones) follows a technocratic logic that could turn good health into a matter for experts.

The risk with this approach is that society as a whole is excluded from the analysis. Another risk is that politics is drained of meaning. If political questions such as structural discrimination, economic precarity, exposure to violence and opioid use are not regarded as shaping our wellbeing, what motivation remains for taking action on these matters? Läs mer…

International cocoa prices have experienced a historic price surge, rising by over 300% in the space of 12 months from £2,166 per tonne of cocoa in April 2023 to £9,980 by April 2024. Prices have fallen since then, and are currently hovering around the £6,400 mark at the time of writing.

This rally, which is the highest on record for cocoa, was driven by poor harvests in the Ivory Coast and Ghana. Powerful El Niño weather events, coupled with years of underinvestment that left Ghana’s cocoa trees vulnerable to diseases, have decimated yields.

In February 2024 Ghana’s cocoa board, Cocobod, revised its cocoa crop forecast down 40% from its initial target of 820,000 metric tonnes for the 2023–24 season. Ghana and the Ivory Coast account for nearly 60% of global cocoa production, so markets reacted to the news swiftly.

We are researchers of the global cocoa trade, and one of us is particularly familiar with the mechanics of Ghana’s cocoa sector. Fuad is currently the head of the Ghana Cocoa Marketing Company UK, which facilitates trade transactions between the Cocoa Marketing Company Ghana (CMC) – a subsidiary of Cocobod and the monopoly seller of Ghanaian cocoa beans – and its clients across the world.

The tripling of cocoa prices in London, which serve as the benchmark for west African cocoa, should have been a blessing for Ghana’s economy and its cocoa farmers, many of whom have long struggled with low incomes. However, the prices farmers are paid for their cocoa (farmgate prices) remained well below international market prices despite the extraordinary surge.

Cocobod increased farmgate prices by 58% in April, followed by another 45% hike at the start of the 2024–25 season in September. This latter move increased the price farmers are paid per tonne of cocoa from 33,120 Ghanaian cedis (£1,599) to 48,000 Ghanaian cedis (£2,304).

A further 3.3% price increase was announced by Ghana’s president, Nana Akufo-Addo, during the celebration of Ghana’s National Farmer’s Day on November 8 in a bid to motivate cocoa farmers.

These price hikes are significant, but they have not kept pace with the movement in the global benchmark. This has led to a growing gap between farmgate prices in Ghana and the Ivory Coast, and the international market.

The gap between the global benchmark cocoa price and the farmgate price received in Ghana and the Ivory Coast grew last year.
KnowledgeCharts LLC

Locking prices in early

In our recent working paper, we show that the limited pass-through of global prices to farmers in Ghana was primarily due to the combined effect of a longstanding forward sales strategy and a financing structure that relies on a loan sourced from a group of international banks (a syndicated loan).

For decades, the CMC has used forward sales to hedge against downward trending prices. This involves selling up to 70% of the anticipated cocoa crop between nine and 12 months ahead of harvest to international traders and local processors at prices tied to the global benchmark.

The average price secured through these contracts is then used to set farmgate prices before the start of each cocoa season. This system protects farmers from price drops in a declining market, but it does not allow them to benefit if the spot price at harvest is above the forward price that is achieved by the CMC.

With a near-tripling of cocoa prices in only 12 months, the average forward prices secured by the CMC were significantly lower than the levels achieved in international spot markets. This limited the potential for a substantial increase in farmgate prices.

Besides price risk management, the forward sales fulfil another role. For over 31 years, Cocobod has relied on a syndicated loan to finance the purchase of cocoa beans from farmers, as well as farming inputs such as fertilisers and jute bags. The forward contracts are used as collateral against which the loan is drawn.

Cocobod has raised nearly US$28 billion (£21.6 billion) through the loan since its inception. Given the size of the cocoa sector in the overall economy – cocoa has ranked consistently among Ghana’s top four exports over the past three decades – the loan’s importance goes beyond the cocoa trade.

The loan has provided the Ghanaian central bank with the ability to borrow hard currency at affordable interest rates. Hard currency is needed to pay for imports and to stock up on foreign exchange reserves. This is particularly needed now as Ghana’s debt crisis has made other means of external borrowing more challenging since 2021.

Because of the need for collateral to secure the loan, forward contracts must be signed and prices locked in before the season starts. This limits the volume of cocoa that can be sold at a more favourable spot price when market conditions improve.

Cocoa prices surged by more than 300% between April 2023 and April 2024.
CW Studios Global / Shutterstock

Breaking free

A downward trending cocoa price over the longer term remains a concern. But extreme weather caused by climate change, and the resulting increased market volatility, have put into question the sustainability of both the forward sales system and the loan.

So, in August 2024 the chief executive of Cocobod, Joseph Boahen Aidoo, announced that Ghana would not raise a loan for the 2024–25 season. The decision to end three decades of dependency on this financing model was made in light of significantly higher interest rates, which has made offshore borrowing much less attractive.

Cocobod’s new financing model requires licensed buying companies (LBCs), which are responsible for purchasing cocoa beans from farmers at the price set by Cocobod, to secure funding independently. Previously, they received centralised funding from Cocobod through the loan.

Under this new system, LBCs primarily source funding from international cocoa traders and, to a lesser extent, domestic banks. The LBCs buy cocoa from farmers with the secured funding and deliver it to the CMC. They are then reimbursed for the amount they paid farmers for the beans plus an agreed margin for their service by Cocobod.

However, the need for LBCs to secure their own financing within a short planning window poses challenges for some in the 2024–25 season, particularly as local firms face hurdles in accessing affordable domestic credit. In an effort to ensure sufficient volumes, many international traders have established sourcing partnerships with local buyers. But some local buyers argue that this could further consolidate power among multinational firms because the buyers would essentially become beholden to them.

Ghana’s 31-year reliance on the cocoa-backed loan has constrained its ability to fully capitalise on price rallies. The shift to a new financing model grants the CMC flexibility to time its cocoa sales, utilising both forward and spot contracts. It also has the potential to improve cash liquidity for Ghana’s cocoa buying companies.

With proper execution and commitment by Cocobod to ensure timely reimbursement, this approach could reshape Ghana’s cocoa industry and significantly improve the livelihoods of nearly 1 million cocoa farming families. Läs mer…

If I had to sum up COP29 in a single word, it would be entropy. Borrowed from thermodynamics, this concept describes the delicate balance between order and disorder, a principle that governs both natural and human systems. An ecosystem, much like the climate negotiations, is not static; it is constantly evolving, adapting and reconfiguring itself.

In a curiously organic way, a COP also works like this, as a chaotic yet seamless gathering of voices, interests and perspectives.

The endless summit corridors are packed with almost 60,000 participants, each navigating their way to uncertain outcomes at predetermined destinations: a negotiating table, a roundtable discussion or a profound conversation on the future of the climate. In this global microcosm, where governments, businesses, NGOs and academics converge, the interplay of interests is never stable, yet the wheels of the system remain constantly in motion.

My watch (and feet) can attest to the sheer scale of this gathering. During my time here I have been clocking over 25,000 steps per day, roughly half a marathon, in my efforts to keep up with the rushing, incessantly conversing human tides.

The energy transition maze: complexity and interdependence

It is easy to point fingers at the more than 1,700 representatives from the oil and gas sectors attending COP29, yet their role in the energy transition is absolutely crucial. After COP28, even giants like ExxonMobil and Shell acknowledged that their future depends on diversifying their portfolios and transitioning to more sustainable business models. The current market is not, however, designed to make clean energy as profitable as oil and gas – complex systemic issues present roadblocks to a competitive transition.

The cost of solar energy has plummeted by 88% since 2010, and onshore wind by 68%. While this has helped to foster key industries such as electric vehicles and solar panels, clean energy is still far from being self-sufficient. Its success depends on a much more complex interplay between industry, governments and infrastructure.

In Spain, for instance, renewables account for 61.5% of installed capacity, with 78,968 MW of production, yet the stark reality is that there are 130 GW of renewable projects waiting to be connected to an electricity grid that is not ready to handle them.

Outdated infrastructure and slow bureaucratic processes are creating a bottleneck that prevents clean energy from being monetised, undermining its profitability and slowing its uptake. The complexities don’t stop there – further progress is also sorely needed in energy storage and data management, as well as in building optimised distribution networks.

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Renewable energy vs biodiversity?

There is a paradoxical element to the climate struggle. As we move towards decarbonisation, some renewable projects are having a highly detrimental impact on the environment, affecting precisely one of the other major global challenges: the recovery of biodiversity.

The Maestrazgo Cluster in Castellon, Spain, which envisages the installation of over 125 wind turbines in Natura 2000 protected areas, is a clear example of this conflict. Local resistance, often framed as a NIMBY (not in my backyard) cause, is not only an aesthetic or territorial issue – it also houses deeper concerns about the preservation of unique ecosystems that could be lost forever.

As industries grapple with being competitive, the stakes are even higher for countries themselves. China and India are heading the technological race, so falling behind could lead to economic disaster. This is the main reason why figures like ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods are encouraging Donald Trump to join the climate negotiations – not out of altruism, but as a strategic necessity.

The energy transition requires more than just investment in renewables; it also means designing a system that can combine efficient grids, streamlined processes, stable public policies, conservation efforts and the needs of local communities. Ignoring any of these elements will not only further delay the transition, it will also expose us to fresh environmental and social crises. There are no easy solutions to these complex problems.

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The price of saving the planet

We are still waiting for the magic “commitment number” – the figure that developed countries decide to allocate to developing nations to fund their climate transition.

Why is this so important? Because many of these countries lack the resources to implement renewable energy projects and adapt their infrastructures to reduce climate change. However, this funding is not just a matter of charity. It is also a way to ensure that all countries, regardless of their resources, can contribute to the fight against climate change.

In this sense, Article 6.4 of the Paris Agreement represents a step towards a more orderly system by setting out a global framework for carbon credit trading, under UN oversight. It aims to prevent double counting and fraud, as well as to restore confidence in a market that fell to $723 million in 2023 after multiple scandals.

Under this system, countries will be able to trade carbon credits produced by projects anywhere in the world, generating revenue to fund their own transitions. It replaces the former Clean Development Mechanism established under the Kyoto Protocol and seeks to establish clear rules to deter fraud and double emission counting.

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The entropy lesson

COP29 offers a clear lesson: tension and complexity are inherent to the climate challenge. Much like entropy itself, the energy transition is a constantly shifting system with opposing forces that need to be balanced.

Solving this puzzle demands more than just funds and technological breakthroughs. It requires bold leadership, international cooperation, and the ability to navigate a system where tensions – decarbonisation vs conservation, efficiency vs climate justice – have to be carefully managed and balanced.

Energy is the driving force behind this process, not only in the physical sense, but also in the political and social realms. The question is whether we can channel COP29’s chaos into a more sustainable and orderly future. Entropy may be a challenge, but it is also an opportunity, a reminder that there is room to build something extraordinary, even within disorder. Läs mer…

Environmental, social and governance investing, also known as impact or socially responsible investing, has become a popular concept. It’s based on awareness of the impact that firms have on the environment and on human wellbeing. Socially responsible investing recognises that these factors increasingly influence financial performance and thus investor returns.

Companies in the tobacco industry have some of the most serious impacts on wellbeing. Tobacco is a unique product in that it causes the premature death of about half of its users who don’t quit.

Organisations such as Tobacco Free Portfolios urge institutions not to invest in or provide financial services to tobacco companies. Their goal is a tobacco-free world. They argue that without financial and investor support, tobacco companies’ operations will become less sustainable.

As researchers with a strong background in economics, we assessed whether a financial case exists for investing in, or divesting from, tobacco stocks.

While a strong moral imperative to disinvest from tobacco stocks exists, many investors care more about the financial rationale for owning stocks.

In our study, we extend research done in 2018 and 2019 and analyse how tobacco companies’ stocks have performed compared to the overall market.

We also evaluate key business fundamentals that affect these stock prices, helping to explain their recent performance.

Our findings show that since 2016, tobacco shares have substantially underperformed the market, cigarette consumption has declined and real revenues have been stagnant or decreased.

The tobacco control measures introduced by dozens of countries around the world appear to have significantly undermined the industry.

They are expected to continue doing so.

We conclude from our findings that the outlook for the tobacco industry is uncertain, and the hostile external environment is unlikely to change.

Novel products are seen as the future. These include heated tobacco products (also known as heat-not-burn products), electronic cigarettes (also known as electronic nicotine delivery systems or ENDS), and oral nicotine pouches.

But it’s unclear whether their growth will be rapid enough to mitigate the decline in traditional tobacco sales. Novel products are being regulated too, and they cut into cigarette sales, especially as competition intensifies with new entrants outside the traditional tobacco industry.

Stock performance, volumes and profits

Using data sourced from news agency Bloomberg from 2008 to 2023, we evaluated historical sales volumes, real revenue, real gross profit per cigarette, stock performance and price-to-earnings trends for nine leading listed global tobacco companies.

From 2008 to 2016, we found that tobacco stocks typically outperformed the market.

Since 2016, however, all nine tobacco companies’ stocks analysed have performed worse than the market.

To put it differently, since 2016, investment portfolios that didn’t contain tobacco stocks would probably have gained more value than similar portfolios that included tobacco stocks.

Stock.

Volumes: Across the selected companies with a full series of data from 2008 to 2023, cigarette sales fell from 2.77 trillion sticks to 2.14 trillion sticks (a 22.8% decline).

Since 2008, all companies with available data have experienced a continuous decline in cigarette unit sales. The exception is Gudang Garam (an Indonesia-based company).

These trends are likely the result of the escalating tobacco control measures imposed on tobacco firms and are expected to continue.

Profits: From 2008 to 2016, most of the companies either maintained or increased their profit per cigarette sold.

However, from 2016 to 2023, four of the seven companies with available data experienced decreasing profits per cigarette sold.

BAT and Philip Morris were exceptions. This can likely be attributed to their growing sales of novel products (reflected in their gross profits).

Therefore, since 2016, it appears that tobacco companies are finding it more difficult to offset reduced cigarette unit sales through price increases.

From 2016 to 2023, revenue declined for six of the nine companies (adjusted for inflation and in dollar terms). The only exceptions were Vector, Gudang Garam and BAT.

BAT was able to increase its revenue by acquiring Reynolds American, a US-based company. It included the acquired company’s sales into its own financial reports.

Since cigarettes are responsible for the majority of the selected companies’ revenues, and since they have struggled to raise net-of-tax prices, it follows that declining cigarette sales volumes have negatively affected their revenues.

Novel product sales

For all the selected companies, novel products still contribute only a small share of their revenues. And the growth in revenues from these products has not been able to offset the decline in cigarette sales.

For example, Philip Morris experienced a decline of 128 billion units (18.2%) in combined cigarette and heated tobacco product sales from 2018 to 2023.

Regarding revenue expansion through novel products, three core challenges confront the tobacco companies we analysed.

First, the growth in sales of these products is likely to accelerate the decline in cigarette sales.

Second, these companies face intensified competition in the novel product market due to the emergence of new multinational competitors.

Third, these products are increasingly being regulated. Heated tobacco products are largely subject to similar strict regulation of cigarettes. Currently, 121 countries regulate electronic nicotine delivery systems in some way or another. Thirty-four countries have banned their sale altogether.

Lessons learnt

For decades, tobacco companies appealed to investors because tobacco stocks delivered robust capital gains and consistent dividends.

Despite a persistently hostile operating environment, tobacco companies experienced strong financial performance and their stock performance reflected this.

But this trend has shifted.

The poor stock performance of the selected companies since 2016 indicates diminished investor confidence, lower perceived value, weakening financial performance, and/or negative market sentiment towards tobacco companies.

The outlook for the tobacco industry is uncertain, and the hostile external environment is unlikely to change.

As a consequence, the financial rationale for including tobacco stocks in a portfolio is not readily apparent. Läs mer…

The outgoing Biden administration has authorized Ukraine to use U.S.- supplied longer-range missiles to strike deeper into Russia territory, according to reports citing White House officials.

The move comes amid concern in the West that Moscow – aided by the influx of thousands of North Korean fighters – might be preparing a major counteroffensive to regain lost territory in the Kursk region of Russia.

But how big a deal is the Biden decision? And could it change the trajectory of the conflict in Eastern Europe? The Conversation U.S. turned to Benjamin Jensen, a professor at American University and the Marine Corps University School of Advanced Warfighting, for answers.

What are the missiles the US authorized Ukraine to use?

The Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, are short-range ballistic missiles that can travel a lot farther than the weapons previously at Kyiv’s disposal.

We aren’t talking about new technology. ATACMS have been around as a concept since the late 1970s and 1980s and first came into production toward the end of the Reagan era, around 1986. By the mid-1990s they were in service, being first deployed by the U.S. in 1991 as part of Operation Desert Storm.

ATACMS have a range of approximately 190 miles. That distance is longer than British-supplied Storm Shadow and French-supplied Scalp cruise missiles, which have a range of 155 miles.

Not only do ATACMS go a lot farther, they also travel very fast – at Mach 3, or three times the speed of sound, making them harder to intercept. Depending on where they are fired from, ATACMS can be difficult for radar systems to detect.

The other benefit, in this regard, is that ATACMS are not reliant on GPS positioning. Moscow has had success in jamming and blunting the effectiveness of other weapons that depend on GPS. But ATACMS can switch to an inertia guidance system, based on gyroscopes, to avoid GPS jamming tactics.

The newly authorized missiles also can carry a heavy payload of up to 500 pounds – enough to create a huge crater on impact.

ATACMS’ range, terminal velocity and size of warhead could potentially make a huge difference in the current conflict. It means that Ukraine would have the capability to conduct deep strikes on Russian territory.

In addition, U.S. authorization of their use by Ukraine in Russia would, in theory, also make it easier for other allies to transfer ATACMS to Kyiv. Nearby Poland and Romania have them, as do South Korea and Australia. Authorization by the Biden administration could give those governments the green light to supply the missiles to Ukraine, too.

Why was this longer-range weapon approved now?

Washington’s decision comes as Russian troop numbers are being swelled by North Korean fighters – the 10,000 North Koreans reportedly in Russia at present is likely just a first wave.

This has coincided with a build up of 50,000 Russian troops near Kursk – the key Russian territory taken by Ukraine earlier this year. Over the past few days, there have been what I would call “probing attacks” by Russia in the area in preparation for what could be a much larger assault to recapture the territory.

In advance of that counter-push, North Korean and Russian troops will need to marshal together before moving to the front – and they will be doing so in assembly areas deeper within Russia.

The military thinking is, if you can hit troops in those deep areas, you can seriously disrupt Moscow’s operational reach. And ATACMS are perfect for attacks on tactical assembly areas – their size, speed and range makes them harder to intercept.

Certainly if I were advising the Ukrainian military, I would be looking to use ATACMS to hit both assembly areas, ammunition sites and airfields.

What appears to be the thinking in Washington?

If I had to bet, I’d say there are still deep concerns of escalation but growing acknowledgment that we are entering a transition phase in the conflict.

President-elect Donald Trump has signaled that he wants to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine. I assess that authorizing ATACMS now suggests the Biden administration is trying to give Ukraine a better hand during those negotiations.

Alternatively, the current White House may have looked at the growing pro-Moscow support of North Korean and concluded that allowing Ukraine to hit North Korean troops before they can be deployed to the front is the only way to offset the advantage this gives Russia. Besides troops, Pyongyang has sent more artillery shells to Russia than the European Union has to Ukraine.

These rationales are not mutually exclusive. It also appears that to the Biden administration, the imperatives outweigh any perceived risks of the U.S. getting drawn further into the conflict or of an escalatory response from Russian President Vladimir Putin.

What does this signal about the state of the war?

My reading of the conflict – and you are getting a sense of this through recent statements form Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy – is that Ukraine may only have until the end of the next campaign season, that is spring to summer 2025, to maintain its position. This is due to the ongoing cost that fighting is having on Ukraine. Kyiv is experiencing problems mobilizing sufficient troops – it has had to increasingly turn to conscription, something Ukraine had tried to avoid.

This isn’t to say that Ukraine has run completely out of steam. But it will struggle to take more Russian-controlled territory. Capturing territory in Kursk was a major achievement, but it was a one-off, high-risk gamble. And fighting in parts of Ukraine’s east occupied by Russia is proving difficult.

So is this about helping Ukraine keep control of Kursk?

The reporting around Biden’s authorization of ATACMS suggests that Washington is telling Ukraine that the missiles can’t be deployed everywhere, just in Kursk.

If Trump does have the ability to force people to talk, as he says he does, that will not stop the fighting. Fighting will continue until the parties agree to a cease-fire, and even after that, it could flare up at anytime.

For these reasons, I think you will see Russia throw everything at Kursk, militarily. And Ukraine will do everything it can to keep control of territory there – Kyiv knows that Kursk would be its biggest bargaining chip should it come to negotiations.

Did Trump’s victory play a role in Biden’s thinking?

I really think that the decision to authorize ATACMS was more about the reality on the ground in Ukraine than politics in the United States. That said, the president-elect’s stated push for negotiations as a way to settle the Ukraine-Russia conflict may well have escalated the decision. Läs mer…