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Oceans cover 71% of the Earth’s surface, but despite their immense size and impact on the planet, we know very little about them. While many of us might associate the sea with relaxing holidays on tropical beaches, the ocean is nothing but cold, dark and monotonous for most of the creatures that inhabit it.

The average depth of the ocean is 3.5km (the equivalent of crossing San Francisco’s Golden Gate bridge twice). Sunlight only penetrates up to 200 metres in crystal clear waters, and much less in murkier conditions. Beyond this depth, the world as terrestrial creatures know it ceases to exist, and life develops in total darkness. Welcome to the deep sea, the world’s largest ecosystem.

Deep, dark, and practically unknown

As well as being dark and massive, the deep sea is extremely difficult for humans to access, meaning it has remained almost completely unexplored. We don’t know about the majority of its life forms, nor the processes that take place there. In many cases, we don’t even know its depth with any certainty.

Faunal records collected at depths of more than 2000 m from 1900 to 2024.
OBIS

Despite this lack of information, the deep sea has caught the attention of global powers in recent years, mainly due to its abundance of natural resources that may one day become scarce on dry land, such as nickel and manganese.

The International Seabed Authority (ISA) was established in 1994 to regulate extraction of these resources, and to protect this environment in international waters – over 12 nautical miles from any country’s coast, the sea belongs to no one, and to everyone.

Logos of the ISA and Sustainable Seabed Knowledge Initiative (SSKI).

54% of the sea belongs to everyone

Based in Jamaica, the ISA is the organisation through which the states that signed the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) organise and control mineral-related activities in international waters for the benefit of all mankind.

This is not a straightforward task. The ISA has 170 members – 169 Member States and the European Union – and is responsible for no less than 54% of the area of the world’s oceans.

Moreover, international waters and their resources are counted as part of the common heritage of humanity, the same as the moon and any resources found there.

Information on the Area, the state of biodiversity and the role of the ISA.
https://www.isa.org.jm/sski/sski-did-you-know/

Searching for new species

One well-known 2012 study estimated that we have discovered approximately 200,000 marine species – around 24-34% of the total.

However, knowledge is not the uniform across all of the sea. Coastal and shallow waters have been much more thoroughly studied than the deep sea, and waters in the Northern Hemisphere are much better known than those in the Southern Hemisphere. For some areas, and for many types of fauna and flora, there are not even reliable estimates.

This lack of knowledge surrounding marine biodiversity in the deep sea – and its possible exploitation by mining interests – led the ISA to launch the Sustainable Seabed Knowledge Initiative (SSKI) in 2022.

This programme includes an unprecedented initiative within marine biology: the clear and ambitious goal of describing 1,000 new marine species in international waters by 2030.

SSKI projects and mud dragons

Describing these species will broaden knowledge of life on the seabed, and will help to understand and manage the possible impacts of human activity in deep sea ecosystems.

Scope of SSKI projects, and their expected results.

Following its first call in 2023, the response from the scientific community was overwhelmingly positive – 67 proposals were submitted from all over the world. Of these projects, nine were funded, dealing with the description of animal groups as varied as sharks, starfish and meiofauna. The last of these are very small animals studied by our research team at the Complutense University of Madrid.

Kinorhyncha, also known as a mud dragon (filo Kinorhyncha).
Photo: Diego Cepeda & Nicolas Gayet

The Spanish project focuses on the description of two phylum species (the most basic and broadest classification in the animal kingdom): kinorhyncha, or mud dragons, and the loricifera. These are two little-known categories with a very small number of experts dedicated to their study worldwide, so the potential for discovering new species is enormous.

This project hopes to describe up to eight new species from various areas of the deep ocean, from the Pacific Ocean to the Antarctic.

Why taxonomy matters for conservation

Taxonomy orders and classifies biological diversity, and it is one of the oldest and most basic scientific disciplines in existence. Despite this – or perhaps because of it – it has fewer and fewer people involved, and less and less support.

However, the description and classification of species is a funamental pillar for other disciplines with much broader social and economic implications, such as ecology and conservation. You cannot conserve without knowing what you are going to conserve, nor can you measure something’s impact without knowing what is affected by it.

This research has been supported by the International Seabed Authority’s Sustainable Seabed Knowledge Initiative: One Thousand Reasons Campaign (co-financed by the European Maritime, Fisheries and Aquaculture Fund, Project 101071214 – SSKI-I – EMFAF-2021-ISA-SSKI-IBA).

It is our hope that these 1,000 new marine species will be a step forward, both for deep ocean conservation and for public and scientific interest in taxonomy. Läs mer…

From Iraq to Afghanistan to the US, basic freedoms for women are being eroded as governments start rolling back existing laws.

Just a few months ago a ban on Afghan women speaking in public was the latest measure introduced by the Taliban, who took back control of the country in 2021. From August the ban included singing, reading aloud, reciting poetry and even laughing outside their homes.

The Taliban’s ministry for the propagation of virtue and the prevention of vice, which implements one of the most radical interpretations of Islamic law, enforces these rules. They are part of a broader set of “vice and virtue” laws that severely restrict women’s rights and freedoms. Women are even banned from reading the Quran out loud to other women in public.

In the past three years in Afghanistan, the Taliban has taken away many basic rights from women who live there, so that there’s very little that they are allowed to do.

From 2021, the Taliban started introducing restrictions on girls receiving education, starting with a ban on coeducation and then a ban on girls attending secondary schools. This was followed by closing blind girls’ schools in 2023, and making it mandatory for girls in grades four to six (ages nine to 12) to cover their faces on the way to school.

Women can no longer attend universities or receive a degree certificate nationally, or follow midwifery or nursing training in the Kandahar region. Women are no longer allowed to be flight attendants, or to take a job outside the home. Women-run bakeries in the capital Kabul have now been banned. Women are mostly now unable to earn any money, or leave their homes. In April 2024, the Taliban in Helmand province told media outlets to even refrain from airing women’s voices.

Afghanistan is ranked last on the Women, Peace and Security Index and officials at the UN and elsewhere have called it “gender apartheid”. Afghan women are putting their lives on the line — facing surveillance, harassment, assault, arbitrary detention, torture and exile — to protest against the Taliban.

Many diplomats discuss how important it is to “engage” with the Taliban, yet this has not stopped the assault on women’s rights. When diplomats “engage”, they tend to focus on counter-terrorism, counternarcotics, business deals, or hostage returns. Despite everything that has happened to Afghan women over a short period, critics suggest this rarely makes it onto diplomats’ priority list.

Afghan women protest via song against the Taliban.

Iraq’s age of consent

Meanwhile, in Iraq, on August 4 2024, an amendment to Iraq’s 1959 personal status law which would possibly lower the age of consent for marriage to nine years old from 18 (or 15 with permission from a judge and parents) was proposed by member of parliament Ra’ad al-Maliki and supported by conservative Shia factions in the government.

The law would have the potential of having matters of family law – such as marriage – adjudicated by religious authorities. This change could not only legalise child marriage but also strip women of rights related to divorce, child custody and inheritance.

Iraq already has a high rate of underage marriage, with 7% of girls married by 15 years old, and 28% married before the legal age of 18.

Unregistered marriages, not legally recorded in court but conducted through religious or tribal authorities, prevent girls from accessing civil rights, and leave women and girls vulnerable to exploitation, abuse and neglect, with limited options for seeking justice.

Many women’s groups have already mobilised against the law. But the amendment has passed its second reading in parliament. If introduced, it could pave the way for further modifications that deepen sectarian divides and move the country further away from a unified legal system. It would also be an especially troubling step backward in protecting children’s rights and gender equality.

Abortion rights in the US

Meanwhile, in the US, women’s access to abortion has been eroded significantly in the past few years. In late 2021, the US was officially labelled a backsliding democracy by an international thinktank.

Six months later, the landmark US Supreme Court ruling of Roe v Wade, which had safeguarded the constitutional right to abortion for nearly 50 years, was overturned. This led to a cascade of restrictive laws, with more than a quarter of US states enacting outright bans or severe restrictions on abortion.

Republican US congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested, in May 2022, that women should stay celibate if they did not want to get pregnant. If only all women had that choice. In fact, in the US a sexual assault occurs every 68 seconds. One in every five American women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape. From 2009-13, US Child Protective Services agencies found strong evidence indicating that 63,000 children per year were victims of sexual abuse.

These developments reflect a troubling pattern. There is evidence from Donald Trump’s first term that there could be further erosion of women’s rights in his second presidency. During his previous term there were significant attempts to weaken healthcare access, with his foreign policy reinstating the “global gag rule” restricting access to women’s reproductive healthcare worldwide via funding conditions.

Read more:
How a second Trump presidency is likely to threaten abortion rights and women’s healthcare globally

Fragility of women’s rights

If the world can tolerate the Taliban’s abuses, Iraq’s restrictive laws and the US restrictions on abortion access, it reveals the fragility of women’s and girls’ rights globally, and how easy it is to take them away.

The UN agency, UN Women, says it could take another 286 years to close the global gender gaps in legal protections. No country has yet achieved gender equality, based on the gender pay gap, legal equality and social inequality levels. Women and girls continue to face discrimination in all corners of the world, and it seems to be getting worse. But despite everything women continue to resist. Läs mer…

On December 8, Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris will open its doors to the public for the first time since fire raged through the 14th-century building in April 2019. It has taken just over five years to restore the cathedral – an extraordinary achievement. Scotland’s much-loved Glasgow School of Art, also devastated by fire, has not fared so well. Two blazes in a decade and a restoration project mired in controversy have left the iconic art nouveau landmark shrouded in scaffolding.

In 2014, the first fire partially destroyed the building. A scarcely believable second fire in 2018 left only a shell standing. Painstaking, expensive work to recreate the library and other parts of the school which had just been completed, turned to ashes.

The people of Glasgow were incredulous. Twice they had lost this prized heritage building that had stood as a beacon of creative arts and culture for 125 years, exemplifying the “Glasgow style” of Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

The young Glaswegian whose work influenced art movements across Europe, such as art nouveau and secessionism, was seen as a pioneer of modernism. His work stood out as a new interpretation of modern architecture where asymmetry of form and attention to detail, decoration and furnishings defined the aesthetic.

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The destruction of the art school stands as a threefold loss: that of a famous educational establishment, a landmark building for the city of Glasgow and an important tourist attraction for Scotland. Despite the devastation, the international fame and reputation of the building still carries heft.

This has left the professional conservation community in a dilemma between conserving the art school’s intangible values as a modern piece of art and place of education, and its faithful reconstruction as a major historic Scottish building. This dilemma comes with enormous financial, ethical and practical challenges.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s art nouveau masterpiece, Glasgow School of Art.
John Peter Photography / Alamy

There has been an energetic move forward in removing debris, consolidating the building and dismantling key parts of the site in preparation for the reconstruction work. But recent wrangles with insurers have cast doubt over the completion of the conservation work – and consequently the future of the building.

The increase in costs and the timescale of the proposed work began to affect the feasibility of completing the conservation project. Since plans for the rebuild were shelved following a legal dispute with insurers in May 2024, a revised proposal is now being considered. It now looks like the work will not be completed for at least another decade or more.

The cost of delay

This is an astonishing state of affairs for such a important building that attracts international attention. But issues over funding and donations have failed to reflect this fact, delaying the final plan to restore the art school. This is all the more galling when Notre Dame raised than €846 million (£707m) after the fire of April 2019, and President Macron fulfilled his promise to complete the rebuilding within five years.

Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris approaching the completion of its rebuild in September 2024.
Saskia Brouns / Alamy

The authorities need to listen to what matters to the people of Glasgow and the city’s artists when it comes to the conservation and revitalisation of the art school.

This is critical to efforts to create a well-supported and managed plan for the regeneration of the building. Any delay further affects the costs, eroding the almost-enough funding that has been raised in the last few years. It also causes further damage to the fabric of the building and its value in terms of heritage, tourism and amenity for artists.

The proposal to faithfully reconstruct the art school is paramount for a building of such historical and architectural significance. But key to its success are in-depth evaluation processes as well as enough time, budget and skills that enable the completion of the work without running into ethical and authenticity debates.

This article is part of our State of the Arts series. These articles tackle the challenges of the arts and heritage industry – and celebrate the wins, too.

Authenticity is an important concept in heritage conservation. If there are no extensive archival materials, the authenticity of the reconstructed parts can be subject to assumptions and falsifications.

It is also important to ensure clear differentiation between old and new for future generations. Faithful restoration using the same materials requires a quite different process from reconstruction of missing elements, where original materials have been destroyed.

Owing to the severe impact of the fire, this also depends on how detailed the building has been documented to provide accurate information for the reconstruction work, and how specialists will replace the destroyed substance of the building.

Although there have been serious attempts to document the aftermath of the two fires, two critical dimensions should be considered when thinking about the impact of the delay to faithful reconstruction. The first is the approach to restore the lost physical components that were not fully recorded. The second is the material and structural degradation of the building without proper treatment and restoration.

Another huge challenge is the lack of traditional and heritage skills in the UK, which puts considerable pressure on the project in terms of time and money. This is an important part of the long-term management of the project as it raises further uncertainty about a faithful reconstruction.

The restoration of Notre Dame saw local and traditional craftsmanship playing a key role in the project. This aspect is moving in a positive direction with the UK signing up to Unesco’s intangible cultural heritage convention, which should drive new training programmes in traditional arts and crafts, building skills and technologies.

Despite the value of the faithful reconstruction of this architectural masterpiece, it is crucial to make sure that a balanced and realistic approach is adopted to protect and preserve the building. The Mackintosh art school will require alternative strategies in the meantime to avoid the effect of skills shortage on its preservation work. Läs mer…

Following Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election, Bitcoin was one of the assets that surged in value. This was widely felt to be a response to Trump’s promise to establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve – essentially holding a large stock of the cryptocurrency as a security. On November 13, the week after Trump’s win, Bitcoin broke through the US$90,000 (£71,340) price threshold for the first time, and the value of the global crypto market topped US$3 trillion for the first time in three years.

US stock markets the Dow, S&P 500 and Nasdaq also hit record levels, with investors expecting to price in Trump’s promises of tax cuts and tariffs, fuelling the dollar and sparking a sell-off in US government bonds. Promises of corporate tax cuts and deregulation tend to encourage financial innovation, making markets more active.

These and others can be defined as “Trump trades” – financial market trends influenced by the president-elect’s win. These trends emerge as investors adjust their strategies based on the economic policies, regulatory changes and geopolitical impact associated with a Trump presidency.

When Trump last became president in 2017, prices for consumer goods had risen almost 5% over the previous four years. By contrast, since January 2021 those same prices are up by around 20%. This is a dramatically different economic backdrop in which inflation has been a global phenomenon since the onset of the COVID pandemic in 2020.

Supply chain issues, shifting consumer spending patterns, the cost of living and other quirks related to COVID lockdowns collided with the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act (a US$1.9 trillion government package to support workers in the pandemic) to send costs shooting higher.

This combination of higher inflation and interest rates could make many of the ideas Trump talks about either riskier or more costly than before, especially as unemployment is very low. When more people are employed, increased consumer demand can lead to higher prices amid competition for goods and services.

But markets are in euphoria territory right now. The word speculator comes from the Latin “speculum”, meaning mirror. Hence, investors and speculators in the US capital market today are simply mirroring Trump’s promises of economic growth and protectionism.

Trump is definitively market and economy-friendly – and this creates short-term surges in stock values. But stocks will stay high only if Trump follows through with a light-touch approach to regulation to scale back some of the reforms undertaken by President Biden’s administration.

Since 2021, the regulatory burden faced by the finance industry has increased. Agencies like Securities and Exchange Commission and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau have introduced enforcement campaigns against financial firms in order to protect consumers from bad practice. This challenged things like private equity deals and cryptocurrency trades.

Read more:
Spacs: why investors fell in love with these stock market vehicles – and how the bubble burst

Trump’s unpredictability and controversial character might seem like red flags for investors. Yet markets often take a pragmatic approach, focusing more on outcomes than personal traits. For example, Trump’s potential trade war with China might spark market volatility. But investors will adapt as they see tariffs as part of a broader strategy to secure better terms for US businesses.

By contrast, even if markets become volatile or fall (as happened with the US bond market in the aftermath of Trump’s win), investors might still see it as an opportunity for profit. Active traders often thrive on sharp market moves, and many investors are selling their long-term treasury bonds ahead of any further rises in long-term rates (bond prices fall as interest rates rise).

Impact on the EU and UK

The re-election of Trump could have significant implications for both the UK and the EU, touching on things like trade, geopolitics and global economic stability.

Trump’s “America first” policies may pose challenges for the UK and the EU in trade relations. The EU could face tariffs, particularly on sectors like automotive manufacturing. This protectionist approach could disrupt European exports and global trade flows.

And the UK, hoping for a US trade deal post-Brexit, may find itself in a weaker negotiating position under a Trump administration that emphasises US dominance.

Under Biden, the US collaborated with the EU on green energy and technology policies. A Trump presidency, with its rollback of environmental regulations and scepticism of international agreements, could undermine these efforts.

With Trump in charge, the EU and UK could lose a vital ally in decarbonising.
Alex Brandon/Associated Press/Alamy Stock Photo

For Europe, this might mean losing a key ally in global climate initiatives, forcing the bloc to recalibrate its strategies for addressing climate change and advancing technology. It may also escalate tensions around tech regulations, especially if Trump’s policies align with figures like Tesla boss and Trump’s incoming efficiency lead Elon Musk, who often clashes with EU regulatory frameworks. In this sense, Musk can be seen as a financial risk factor.

Under a Trump administration, the combination of tariffs, climate policy rollbacks, and geopolitical dynamics could have significant implications for investors. Tariffs and sanctions often trigger sell-offs in affected sectors, but can create opportunities for speculators, who often anticipate these moves.

For example, hedge funds in the US ahead of Trump’s victory began short selling energy and renewable stocks. They gained US$1.2 billion once the value of their shares fell sharply over concerns that tax credits for green energy will end.

Despite Trump’s rhetoric, markets are underpinned by uncertainty rather than undermined by it. Uncertainty is after all the main source for profit in our western model of capitalism.

It is also true that markets care about tangible actions, and Trump seems determined to deliver on his promises. But only time will tell whether his economic agenda is merely wishful thinking.

Trump has only four years as president and he is in a hurry to move forward with his economic agenda. The chances are that at least some of his economic policies will have a sugar-rush effect and cause markets to surge before their impact fades away once higher interest rates slow the economy. Läs mer…

Physicists have long grappled with the question of why the universe was able to support the evolution of intelligent life. The values of the many forces and particles, represented by some 30 so-called fundamental constants, all seem to line up perfectly to enable it.

Take gravity. If it were much weaker, matter would struggle to clump together to form stars, planets and living beings. And if it were stronger, that would also create problems. Why are we so lucky?

Research that I recently published with my colleagues John Peacock and Lucas Lombriser now suggests that our universe may not be optimally tailored for life. In fact, we may not be inhabiting the most likely of possible universes.

We particularly studied how the emergence of intelligent life is affected by the density of “dark energy” in the universe. This manifests as a mysterious force that speeds up the expansion of the universe, but we do not know what it is.

The good news is that we can still measure it. The bad news is that the observed value is way smaller than what we would expect from theory. This puzzle is one of the biggest open questions in cosmology, and was a primary motivation for our research.

Anthropic reasoning

We tested whether “anthropic reasoning” may offer a suitable answer. Anthropic reasoning is the idea that we can infer properties of our universe from the fact that we, humans, exist. In the late 80s, physics Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg discussed a possible anthropic solution for the observed value of the dark energy density.

Weinberg reasoned that a larger dark energy density would speed up the universe’s expansion. This would counteract gravity’s effort to clump matter together and form galaxies. Fewer galaxies means fewer stars in the universe. Stars are essential for the emergence of life as we know it, so too much dark energy would suppress the odds of intelligent life such as humans appearing.

Weinberg then considered a “multiverse” of different possible universes, each with a different dark energy content. Such a scenario follows from some theories of cosmic inflation, a period of accelerated expansion occurring early in the universe’s history.

Weinberg proposed that only a tiny fraction of the universes within the multiverse, whether real or hypothetical, would have a sufficiently small dark energy density to enable galaxies, stars and, ultimately, intelligent life, to appear. This would explain why we observe a small dark energy density – despite our theories suggesting it should be much larger – we simply could not exist otherwise.

Number of stars (white) produced in universes with different dark energy densities. Clockwise from the upper-left panel: no dark energy, same dark energy density as in our universe, 30 and 10 times the dark energy density in our universe.
Credit: Courtesy of Oscar Veenema, former undergraduate student at Durham University, now PhD student at Oxford University, CC BY-SA

A potential pitfall in Weinberg’s reasoning is the assumption that the fraction of matter in the universe that ends up in galaxies is proportional to the number of stars formed. Some 35 years later, we know that it is not that simple. Our research then aimed at testing Weinberg’s anthropic argument with a more realistic star formation model.

Counting stars

Our goal was to determine the number of stars formed over the entire history of a universe with a given dark energy density. This boils down to a counting exercise.

First, we picked a dark energy density between zero and 100,000 times the observed value. Depending on the amount, gravity can hold matter together more or less easily, determining how galaxies can form.

Next, we estimated the yearly amount of stars formed within galaxies over time. This followed from the balance between the amount of cool gas that can fuel star formation, and the opposing action of galactic outflows that heat up and push gas outside galaxies.

We then determined the fraction of ordinary matter that was converted into stars over the entire lifetime (past and future) of a certain universe model. This number expressed the efficiency of that universe at producing stars.

Credit: Image readapted from D. Sorini, J. A. Peacock, L. Lombriser, in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 535, Issue 2, Pages 1449–1474. Source: https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stae2236, CC BY-SA

We then assumed that the likelihood of generating intelligent life in a universe is proportional to its star formation efficiency. As the figure above shows, this suggests that the most hospitable universe contains about one-tenth of the dark energy density observed in our universe.

Our universe is thus not too far from the most favourable possible for life. But it also isn’t the most ideal.

But to validate Weinberg’s anthropic reasoning, we should imagine picking a random intelligent life form in the multiverse, and ask them what dark energy density they observe.

We found that 99.5% of them would experience a larger dark energy density than observed in our universe. In other words, it looks like we inhabit a rare and unusual universe within the multiverse.

This does not contradict the fact that universes with more dark energy would suppress star formation, hence reducing the chances of forming intelligent life.

Marbles in boxes.
CC BY-SA

By analogy, suppose we want to sort 300 marbles into 100 boxes. Each box represents a universe, and each marble an intelligent observer. Let us put 100 marbles in box number one, four in box number two and then two marbles in all other boxes. Clearly, the first box contains the single largest number of marbles. But if we pick one marble at random from all boxes, it is more likely to come from a box other than number one.

Likewise, universes with little dark energy are individually more hospitable for life. But life, although more unlikely, can still spawn in the many possible universes with abundant dark energy too – there will still be a few stars in them. Our calculation finds that most observers among all universes will experience a higher dark energy density than is measured in our universe.

Also, we found that the most typical observer would measure a value about 500 times larger than in our universe.

Where does that leave us?

In conclusion, our results challenge the anthropic argument that our existence explains why we have such a low value of dark energy. We could have more easily found ourselves in a universe with a larger dark energy density.

Anthropic reasoning may still be salvaged if we adopt more complex multiverse models. For example, we could allow for the amount of both dark energy and ordinary matter to vary across different universes. Perhaps, the reduced spawning of intelligent life due to a higher dark energy density might be compensated by a higher density of ordinary matter.

In any case, our findings warn us against a simplistic application of anthropic arguments. This makes the dark energy problem even harder to grapple with.

What should we cosmologists do now? Roll up our sleeves and think harder. Only time will tell how we solve the puzzle. However we will do it, I am sure it will be incredibly exciting. Läs mer…

“An ambitious new climate finance goal” should be the priority of every nation at the latest round of international climate negotiations in Baku, Azerbaijan. That’s according to Simon Stiell, who heads the United Nations process for negotiating an agreement to limit global heating.

Discussions are deadlocked at the start of the second week. The objective is to raise money to drive a global shift towards clean energy and ensure that those who bear the brunt of escalating climate disasters are resilient enough to respond.

Finding this funding is more difficult in the wake of the US election. President-elect Donald Trump has promised to pull his country, the world’s richest and biggest historical emitter of greenhouse gas, out of the Paris agreement (again) and possibly out of international climate negotiations entirely.

Political bedfellow Javier Milei, the far-right president of Argentina, has withdrawn his country’s delegates from the talks.

Trump has also suggested he will repeal the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which extended tax credits for renewable energy and green technology investments in the US and mobilised private finance for climate action to the tune of billions of dollars.

Neglecting these efforts will fuel mounting climate disasters such as the recent floods in Valencia, Spain. How the global community acts to compensate the countries least able to bear these impacts is more important than ever.

Why does it matter?

The stakes are huge for low- and middle-income countries. Extreme weather, along with slower impacts like sea-level rise or soil degradation, can hurl developing countries into spiralling debt, forcing them pay to rebuild over and over again.

This diverts money from measures to reduce carbon emissions, but also from healthcare, education and other public services. Many of the economic gains of poor countries in recent decades are being undone by climate change.

Climate change is heaping punishment on poor, developing states.
EPA-EFE/Ernesto Mastrascusa

The loss and damage caused by a warming climate has loomed over negotiations between rich and poor countries for more than a decade. Last year’s summit, Cop28 in Dubai, opened with an announcement that a new fund would be established. Direct compensation for the disproportionate loss and damage sustained by the poorest nations is not on the table, but what the fund will finance is still to be decided.

After seven years of observing the politics of climate loss and damage at the UN negotiations, it has become apparent to me that the trickiest issues are kicked down the road. Important decisions are devolved to poorly resourced bodies while committees are stubbornly split between developing and developed countries.

With the loss and damage fund, there remains no answer to the question of where funding will come from, whether it will be anywhere near enough to address the mounting costs and who will be able to access it.

This is not to say that there hasn’t been progress. Rich countries pledged about US$700 million to the fund at Cop28. The fund’s board has chosen the Philippines, a large country on the frontline of climate change, as its host. This grants the board legal personality to form partnerships, including with the World Bank, which will host the secretariat responsible for implementing the decisions of the board.

How much? And how will it be paid?

Even conservative estimates suggest that the total cost of loss and damage could reach between US$150 and US$300 billion (£119-238 billion) a year by 2030.

The question is somewhat dependent on how loss and damage needs are defined. Developed countries want to focus on projects that, for example, address losses from slow-onset hazards and avoid the topic of compensation. Developing countries on the fund’s board have said that at least US$100 billion a year of support should be provided by 2030, and while they avoid the word “compensation”, they emphasise the importance of public finance – that is, money raised by governments, rather than private sector funding.

Meanwhile, developed countries prefer investment from individuals and companies to fill the gap. But the business case for funding programmes to address climate losses – museums to commemorate cultural heritage that has disappeared under rising seas, or counselling for children dealing with the anguish of hurricanes – looks very different to, for example, investing in renewable energy.

A degree of imagination is required. Civil society groups have pushed for innovative forms of climate finance, like a tax on flights or a levy on shipping.

Most models of public climate finance provide grants for particular projects. This is not so helpful for addressing loss and damage, which demands money urgently for repairs and recovery efforts.

A march in favour of climate finance for developing countries in Karachi, Pakistan.
EPA-EFE/Rehan Khan

Senegalese and American banker Ibrahima Cheikh Diong was recently appointed the executive director of the fund. He led an international agency that pooled insurance for African countries following extreme weather.

Developed countries have long preferred insurance, as opposed to publicly funded grants, to finance loss and damage. Some observers worry Diong’s background will prime the fund accordingly. But as climate impacts escalate, some assets, like homes and businesses in vulnerable coastal towns or farming villages, may no longer be insurable.

Slow but relatively certain changes such as sea-level rise are also not suitable for insurance-based financing. And then there are losses related to cultural heritage, physical and mental health and vanishing livelihoods that cannot be compensated through insurance.

Since the money pledged in Dubai for the fund has not been delivered yet, and the sources, types and ways of accessing the fund have yet to be determined, the fund’s fate remains ambiguous.

Next year’s conference will mark 30 years of climate change negotiations. No wonder people are asking whether this process is working. The loss and damage fund is a microcosm of the wider negotiations. Its success or failure would indicate whether these summits are, or ever were, fit for purpose.

Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
Get our award-winning weekly roundup in your inbox instead. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 40,000+ readers who’ve subscribed so far. Läs mer…

The Canadian Space Agency announced a competition today to name Canada’s first-ever rover mission to the moon. This unmanned mission will explore the south polar region of the moon to search for water ice and explore its unique geology.

I am a professor and planetary geologist. I am also the principal investigator for Canada’s first rover mission to the moon and a member of the science team for the upcoming Artemis III mission, the first human trip to the moon since 1972.

A piece on Canada’s moon rover mission. (Global News)

A Canadian first

It is almost two years to the day that Canadensys Aerospace Corporation and its team was selected to build the Canadian lunar rover.

This mission is hugely significant because it’s not only the first rover that Canada will send to the moon, but it will be the first-ever Canadian-led mission to another planetary body.

While Canadian technology has made it to the surface of the moon and Mars before, it’s always been on missions led by other nations.

Not that this is a bad thing: science is only possible through collaboration. But it’s a testament to the calibre of Canada’s space community that, for the first time in history, we are in the driver’s seat.

Canada’s first rover mission is truly a team effort. Supporting Canadensys are seven Canadian companies that will build various parts of the rover and its science instruments.

I am proud to lead the science team, which includes faculty and students from six Canadian universities in Québec, Ontario, Manitoba, Alberta and British Columbia. In keeping with the spirit of collaboration in space, we also have several scientists from the United States and the United Kingdom on our team.

One of the science instruments is also being provided by the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, supported by NASA. In return, Canada gets a launch from NASA.

Infographic on Canada’s lunar rover mission.
(Canadian Space Agency), CC BY

What’s in a name?

Every mission needs a name, but not everything is equal when it comes to naming spacecraft. Satellites, for example, are often named in a very functional way — like Radarsat, Canada’s flagship satellite program.

When it comes to rover missions, however, NASA has been choosing inspirational names since the early 1990s with its first Mars rover, Sojourner. Then came along Spirit and Opportunity in 2004 followed by Curiosity eight years later.

The most recent arrival on Mars was Perseverance in 2021, which is currently emerging from a deep meteorite impact crater called Jezero.

NASA’s goal in naming its rovers is to inspire interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM); this has undoubtedly been a huge success.

The connection to rovers has also become deeply personal, evident in the outpouring of grief when Oppy — the nickname given to NASA’s Opportunity rover — was declared “dead” in 2019.

The European Space Agency followed suit with its hugely popular animated stories for the Rosetta mission — the first mission designed to orbit and land on a comet — that depicted its Philae lander with a backpack and yellow helmet.

The Philae lander depicted with a backpack and yellow helmet.
(European Space Agency), CC BY

Four potential names

The names of NASA’s series of Mars rovers are inspirational and capture the quest of exploration. In contrast, the Apollo and Artemis programs and many other space missions were named after figures in Greek mythology. Other mission names have historical connotations; some also allude to the culture and values of the country leading the mission.

For Canada’s first moon rover, the Canadian Space Agency has come up with a shortlist of four potential names that conjure up various characteristics of Canada as well as capturing the spirit and goals of the mission:

Athabasca — A famous river that flows from the Rockies through Alberta to Lake Athabasca. Canada’s rivers have been used for millennia and continue to be pathways of discovery, transport and exchange.

Courage — A name that would be representative of the work that has led to the Canadian lunar rover mission.

Glacier — Not only are glaciers associated with the polar regions of Canada, but one of the goals of the rover mission is to find water ice on the moon.

Pol-R — A word play on polar. Canada is a polar country and the rover mission will be landing in the south polar region of the Moon.

The online voting form to name Canada’s first rover mission to the moon is open until Dec. 20, 2024.

The Canadian lunar rover pictured on the surface of the moon in a virtual reality environment. Will it be named Athabasca, Courage, Glacier or Pol-R?
(Canadian Space Agency)

The work continues

As our team waits for Canadians to choose the name of our mission, we are hard at work on all aspects of its design and implementation.

In June, we got the green light for our preliminary design review aimed at assessing whether the original design met all the requirements set forth by the government of Canada, and that the risks, cost and schedule, were all acceptable.

We haven’t chosen an easy mission for Canada’s first trip to the moon. We are going to one of the most hostile regions of the lunar surface: the South Pole. Because of this, our rover must survive very long and cold lunar nights, where the temperature can drop below minus 200C for up to 14 Earth days.

We also have to pack all the hardware, plus our six science instruments, into the rover, which is the size of a small coffee table and weighs only 35 kilograms.

The author, Gordon Osinski, poses next to an early prototype of the Canadian lunar rover.
(Gordon Osinski), Author provided (no reuse)

I recently provided an update on the science of our soon-to-be-named mission at the International Astronautical Congress in Milan, Italy. In addition to talking about our science instruments, I also delved into the three main objectives of the mission:

To investigate the geology of this unique region of the moon where, so far, no human or robot has ever been.
To search for water ice, a major discovery in the decades since the Apollo missions. The moon was thought to be devoid of water, but satellite observations suggest deposits of water ice may be present in this polar region. But we need boots on the ground — or wheels, in our case — to confirm these satellite observations.
To study the radiation environment of this region in preparation for the return of humans to the moon.

Canada’s long involvement in space rovers

Over the past two decades, the Canadian Space Agency has funded the construction of a series of prototype planetary rovers ranging from small so-called nano-rovers to massive machines capable of carrying two astronauts. Our new lunar rover has a lot of heritage behind it.

The Canadian Space Agency’s fleet of prototype rovers.
(Canadian Space Agency), CC BY

If not for the delay to the launch of the European Space Agency’s ExoMars rover mission, originally scheduled for 2022, Canada would have already had wheels on Mars. The wheels, chassis and drive train for the Rosalind Franklin ExoMars rover was built by Canada’s MDA Space. Launch is now set for 2028.

Canada has also set its sights on a much bigger moon rover. Announced in the 2023 federal budget, Canada aims to build a lunar utility vehicle that will help to transport cargo, perform science investigations and support astronauts on the moon.

This rover will be a major contribution to the NASA-led Artemis program. Following the flight of Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen on the upcoming Artemis II lunar flyby mission, the Lunar Utility Vehicle, Canadarm3 and other Canadian contributions to the Artemis program will ensure a Canadian will one day walk on the moon. Läs mer…

Scientists have found new evidence that desertification, potentially linked to global warming, leads to large amounts of nutrient-rich dust landing in the sea, causing ocean algae to grow rapidly. Biological oceanographer John A. Gittings and an international group of researchers have found an example of this phenomenon in the Indian Ocean south-east of Madagascar.

They analysed satellite images that showed how the colour of the sea in that area had changed over the years. Phytoplankton (microscopic algae found in the oceans) affect the colour of the water when they grow rapidly in response to higher levels of nutrients – including iron that’s found in dust. The researchers found that drought in southern Africa’s drylands had caused the strongest phytoplankton bloom in about 27 years, south-east of Madagascar.

What is a phytoplankton bloom?

Millions of tiny organisms called phytoplankton live in every aquatic environment. They are critical components of the Earth system – phytoplankton are estimated to produce about 50% of Earth’s oxygen.

They have a crucial role in the global carbon cycle.

Phytoplankton also form the foundation of marine food webs. They provide an essential food source for organisms like zooplankton (tiny marine animals), which in turn sustain larger species such as fish and whales. This directly benefits fisheries and human communities that rely on them.

Read more:
As the oceans warm, deep-living algae are thriving – with major potential effects for the marine ecosystem

Just like land plants, they grow more in certain seasons. When light, nutrients and other conditions, such as temperature, are at the best level for phytoplankton, they can rapidly multiply and flourish. This leads to the development of a phytoplankton bloom.

Phytoplankton cells contain chlorophyll, a green pigment that affects the colour of oceanic surface waters. This can be detected from space using specialised satellite ocean colour sensors. It is difficult to say exactly how many phytoplankton cells made up the bloom. However, this bloom off the Madagascar coast covered an estimated 2,000km².

How the phytoplankton bloomed.
Courtesy European Space Agency.

During the spring/summer of 2019/2020 in the southern hemisphere, an exceptional phytoplankton bloom was discovered in the Indian Ocean south-east of Madagascar. This was during a period of the year when blooms are not expected. The bloom began in November 2019 before diffusing into the Mozambique channel and broader Madagascar basin in December 2019 and January 2020.

What were the causes of this?

To determine the cause, we conducted an in-depth analysis of what’s known as Lagrangian trajectories in this part of the ocean. This is like following the path of an object as it moves through space. Imagine you’re watching a leaf floating on a river: instead of just looking at the river’s flow, you focus on the leaf’s journey, tracking where it goes and how it moves over time.

We analysed the movement of water parcels (a mass of water of similar properties that can be tracked). This allowed us to investigate whether nutrients important for phytoplankton growth had originated from the east coast of Madagascar and the south-east Africa continental shelf. We then explored whether the settling of dust from the air or atmosphere could have been what had fertilised the ocean.

Read more:
Earth’s oldest, tiniest creatures are poised to be climate change winners – and the repercussions could be huge

We found that in the 60 days prior to the bloom beginning, about 75% of water parcels we tracked to the bloom area did not originate from nearby land masses.

The bloom near Madagascar was caused by nutrient-rich dust that blew from drought-stricken drylands in the western parts of southern Africa. The Etosha and Makgadikgadi salt pans in Namibia and Botswana, pans and ephemeral rivers in the coastal Namibian desert, as well as the south-western Kalahari pan belt, are major suppliers of dust to the Southern Ocean and its outer edges.

Carried over long distances by wind, the dust was deposited into the nutrient-limited surface waters south-east of Madagascar through intense rainfall events. Blooms of this magnitude are rare. But rising air temperatures, increasing dryness, and higher dust emissions in southern Africa suggest that such events could become more common in the future.

How was ocean and marine life affected?

The effects of the 2019/2020 bloom on the broader marine food web in waters south-east of Madagascar still need to be fully investigated. But this abundant food supply could have potentially boosted populations of zooplankton and fish species in the region.

The oceans play a crucial role in absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, making them essential for climate regulation. During the 2019/2020 bloom, the region acted as a significant carbon sink because of the high rates of photosynthesis occurring. (Photosynthesis is the process by which plants and algae use sunlight to produce food; in doing so, they absorb carbon dioxide from the air.) As the phytoplankton thrived during the bloom, they took in large amounts of carbon dioxide.

Read more:
Inside the world of tiny phytoplankton – microscopic algae that provide most of our oxygen

Phytoplankton blooms like this one are uncommon. This one was the first of its kind since the beginning of the satellite ocean colour data record – in other words, the first in about 27 years.

Current trends in air temperatures, aridity and dust emissions in southern Africa suggest that such events could become more probable in the future. Together with recent findings on ocean fertilisation by drought-induced megafires in Australia, our results point towards a potential link between global warming, drought, aerosol emissions and ocean blooms.

Dust that fertilises the ocean and leads to an increased number of phytoplankton blooms could help remove carbon from the atmosphere. This will only be confirmed by further research. Läs mer…

ExxonMobil chief executive Darren Woods has urged president-elect Donald Trump to not take the US out of the Paris agreement on climate change. “We need a global system for managing emissions”, he said in an interview at the annual UN climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan.

Though Woods’ words were unusually high profile and direct, some of his equivalents at rival fossil fuel firms have expressed similar sentiments.

On the face of it, big oil and gas firms – and ExxonMobil is one of the very biggest – are a surprise proponent of the Paris agreement, which seeks to defend ambitious targets on climate change. After all, these are the very organisations that have financially benefited from contributing to the crisis, and that fought for decades to kill the climate agenda. It’s hard to believe they’re now working for its survival.

One obvious explanation is greenwashing. When oil and gas firms claim to offset their emissions, for example, many people will intuitively recognise an obvious attempt to improve their reputation that has little credibility in practice. These firms of course continue to intensively extract and supply fossil fuels that directly exacerbate global warming.

But there is more to it than simple greenwashing or chasing a positive headline. There are sound strategic (if not moral) reasons why these firms have now decided to at least appear to cooperate with an agenda to reduce emissions.

A global framework helps global firms

The sheer scale of these firms (ExxonMobil operates in more than 60 countries) means they might naturally benefit from a standardised global framework for addressing climate change. This allows multinationals to exploit coordination efficiencies and reduces their uncertainties.

Woods, the ExxonMobil boss, also warned of a “polarised political environment” and the economic impact of “policy switching back and forth as political cycles occur”. The Paris agreement should, in theory, survive changes of government in any one country.

The Paris agreement has already survived one term of Donald Trump.
Avivi Aharon / shutterstock

At the same time, fossil fuel firms have a further interest in being at the table. Their involvement means they can influence things like how quickly we plan to transition to a greener economy and what the transition will involve.

Being part of the emerging discourse about the survival of the Paris agreement perhaps enables them to have a say and build legitimacy for a continued reliance on particular parts of their non-renewable portfolio, like natural gas.

The E in ESG

Even mainstream investors now want firms to explicitly consider so-called environment, social and governance (ESG) impacts. These firms therefore have to be seen to deliver the E in ESG. Whether they’re entirely sincere is less straightforward, and we should interpret their efforts with some caution.

Research my colleagues and I conducted on large firms’ increasing involvement in sustainability initiatives and standards points to a worrying “penalty zone” for the environment. It appears investors do indeed reward some explicit sustainability activities, but they also penalise firms that do “too much”.

After an initial win-win, where firms are rewarded for doing some sustainability, there is a tipping point beyond which being more sustainable weakens financial performance. The implication is that these oil and gas firms must be seen by important stakeholders to be doing just the right amount of sustainability to drive financial performance, and no more.

Large oil and gas firms supporting the Paris agreement is therefore not surprising, especially when we understand it as a strategic response within a politically contested arena.

Now that outright climate denial is no longer an option, influencing the status quo might be their best bet. The involvement of powerful actors can introduce contradictions that delay action, creating what scholars term a “climate impasse”. Such delay serves as useful cover for fossil fuel firms to continue their operations.

Good reason to doubt their motives

There are other good reasons to be sceptical. When colleagues and I researched human rights in the oil and gas industry, we found that claims to be socially responsible often did not reflect the reality. The big firms did have accountability policies but they commonly overstated the actions firms would actually take.

Having human rights policies in place can reassure stakeholders with ESG concerns, yet human rights abuses are still commonplace in the supply chains of large fossil fuel and mining firms, and victims rarely receive an apology, financial compensation or any other remedy.

This kind of hypocrisy is why we must remain alert. When these large oil and gas firms appear to play leading roles as global citizens in addressing climate change, we have perhaps good reason to doubt their motives.

It seems unlikely that their underlying aim is to find the fastest route to reducing emissions. Instead, we might better interpret these moves as tactics to influence the development of norms in the emerging climate change frameworks in ways that can benefit their existing business of extracting and selling fossil fuels.

It will be interesting to follow the public reaction to the apparent incongruence. It’s not yet clear if oil and gas firms will be perceived as making a genuine U-turn, or condemned for showing blatant hypocrisy regarding an increasingly urgent issue of critical societal importance.

Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
Get our award-winning weekly roundup in your inbox instead. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 40,000+ readers who’ve subscribed so far. Läs mer…

In the last few years, there has been a spate of military coups in Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Sudan and Guinea. Military rule, long dormant in African politics, is back.

Coup leaders have suppressed protest, gagged the media and spilled much civilian blood in the name of public safety. They claim to be protecting their people from enemies both internal and external – some invented to justify their takeovers and others very real (while military regimes have arguably made violent extremism worse, they did not create it).

The generals fight with one another as much as with their enemies, leading to duelling coups in Burkina Faso and a full-on civil war in Sudan.

In west Africa, soldiers have shaken up the geopolitical order, pushing away France and the United States, while drawing the Russian Federation (or more precisely, Russia-funded mercenaries) closer.

Outside observers, and a fair number of insiders, were blindsided by these events. That’s because military rule, with its drab aesthetics and Cold War trappings, seemed like a relic of the past. Explanations for its return have mostly focused on meddling outsiders, especially Russia. Others emphasise the inherent vice of African states – the weaknesses that were there from the beginning of independence, including poverty and corruption, that made people disenchanted with democracy.

I’m a military historian, and over the last few years I watched with alarm as the history I was writing about military dictatorships in the 1980s became current events. Military rule has deep roots, as my open-access book Soldier’s Paradise: Militarism in Africa After Empire argues. The coups of the last few years are a return to one of independent Africa’s most important political traditions: militarism.

Militarism, or rule by soldiers, is a form of government where military objectives blur into politics, and the values of the armed forces become the values of the state at large.

West Africa’s recent string of coups can only be understood in the long view of postcolonial history. The military regimes of the past were brutally innovative. They made new rules, new institutions and new standards for how people should interact. They promised to make Africa an orderly and prosperous paradise. They failed, but their promises were popular.

Africa’s military regimes

Militaries ruled by force, not consensus, but plenty of people liked their disciplinary verve. Whipping the public into shape, sometimes literally, had a real appeal to people who felt that the world had become too unruly. Independence did not always mean freedom, and soldiers’ rigid ideas shaped decolonisation in ways that we’re only starting to understand.

Long submerged by more hopeful ideological currents, militarism is now rising back to the surface of African politics. My book describes where militarism came from, and why it lasted so long.

Petty and paranoid

Between 1956 and 2001 there were about 80 successful coups, 108 failed ones and 139 plots across Africa south of the Sahara. Some countries had many coups (Sudan has the highest, with 18 known attempts since 1950) while others had none (like Botswana). But even in places where the military wasn’t in charge, the threat of a military takeover shaped how civilians governed.

The successful coups produced military regimes that were remarkably durable. Their leaders promised their regimes would be “transitional” or “custodial” and that they would hand back power to civilians as soon as they could.

Soldier’s Paradise cover image.
Duke University Press

Few did, and in some countries military rule lasted for decades. This could involve a graveyard-like stability where a single soldier-king ruled for an entire generation (like Burkina Faso), or constant turmoil as one junta gave way to another (like Nigeria). Military governments were petty and paranoid – each officer knew he had a line of rivals behind him waiting for their moment.

In these “revolutions”, as coup plotters called their takeovers, a new ideology emerged. Militarism was a coherent and relatively consistent vision for society, even though not all military regimes were the same. It had its own political values (obedience, discipline), morals (honour, bravery, respect for rank), and an economic logic (order, which they promised would bring prosperity).

It had a distinct aesthetic, and a vision for what Africa should look and feel like. The military’s internal principles became the rules of politics at large. Officers came to believe that the training they used to make civilians into soldiers could transform their countries from the ground up. Some came to believe, ironically, that only strict discipline would bring true freedom.

The army officers who took power tried to remake their societies along military lines. They had utopian plans, and their ideology could not be boiled down to the big ideas of their times, like capitalism and communism. There were military regimes of the left, right and centre; radical and conservative; nativist and internationalist.

Militarism was a freestanding ideology, not just American liberalism, Soviet socialism or European neocolonialism dressed up in a uniform. Powerful outsiders pulled some of the strings in African politics, but not all of them, and officers were proud of the fact that they followed no one’s orders but their own.

Military tyranny

Part of militarism’s appeal was its maverick independence, and military regimes endeared themselves to the public by cutting ties with unpopular foreigners, just like Niger and Burkina Faso did with France in 2023.

Soldiers ran their countries like they fought wars. Combat was their metaphor for politics. Their goal was to win – and they accepted that people would get hurt along the way.

But what did “winning” look like when the enemy was their own people? They declared war on indiscipline, drugs and crime. To civilians, all of this was hard to distinguish from tyranny, and military rule felt like a long, brutal occupation.

No military dictatorship succeeded in making the martial utopia that soldiers promised. Other parts of government pushed back against the military’s plans, and African judiciaries proved especially formidable opponents. Civil society groups fought them tooth and nail, and challenges came from abroad, especially from the African diaspora.

Like most revolutions that don’t succeed, militarists blamed the public for not committing to their vision and outsiders for sabotaging them. They do this today, too.

Today’s military regimes don’t seem to have the same long-term visions of their predecessors, but the longer they stay in power the more likely they are to start making plans. Despite all their promises to return to the barracks, they don’t seem to be going any time soon.

If we’re trying to anticipate what the continent’s military regimes might do next, it makes sense to look to the past. In the late 20th century, military regimes promised to make Africa into a “soldier’s paradise”. That promise is part of their strategy today. Läs mer…