The UN General Assembly in September last year was a pivotal moment in the pandemic, when leaders began to show some unity as global deaths approached a million. They had learned hard lessons from the damage that hoarding protective equipment had done, they said. When a vaccine was developed, the world s most vulnerable would be first in line, they claimed. The vaccines are now here and that solidarity has frayed. Between the United Kingdom and the European Union, it has disappeared entirely and given way to an all-out battle over who is more entitled to tens of millions of doses produced by British-Swedish drugmaker AstraZeneca. Meanwhile, many countries in the global south have yet to administer a single vaccine.
A fight between the EU and UK reveals the ugly truth about vaccine nationalism
The UN General Assembly in September last year was a pivotal moment in the pandemic, when leaders began to show some unity as global deaths approached a million. They had learned hard lessons from the damage that hoarding protective equipment had done, they said. When a vaccine was developed, the world’s most vulnerable would be first in line, they claimed.
The vaccines are now here and that solidarity has frayed. Between the United Kingdom and the European Union, it has disappeared entirely and given way to an all-out battle over who is more entitled to tens of millions of doses produced by British-Swedish drugmaker AstraZeneca. Meanwhile, many countries in the global south have yet to administer a single vaccine.
Can vacant farmland sustainably fulfill the world’s biofuels needs?
Researchers investigate pathways by which biofuels could provide a third of the world s green energy needs
January 29, 2021
Spread across the planet are millions of hectares of abandoned cropland, lying fallow and unused. But if we used this empty land to grow biofuel crops, we could meet a significant share of our green energy needs going into the future while simultaneously limiting the land-guzzling impacts of biofuels that give them a bad name.
That’s the neat solution offered by a team of researchers, whose recent study appears in
Nature Sustainability. They argue that as our future energy needs increase, there’ll be growing pressure to replace some share of fossil fuels with more sustainable green fuels derived from plants like corn and switchgrass.
January 28, 2021
Conventional wisdom holds that cleaning up a company’s environmental record is more expensive than paying fines, settling with plaintiffs, or dodging the liability altogether. That understanding guided decades of corporate behavior, from dumping carcinogens into California’s drinking water supply to faking emission tests on diesel cars.
But a growing body of research challenges that notion. Since 2015, studies have suggested that the cost of improving a company’s environmental record is no cost at all, but rather an investment that boosts profits, efficiency, and competitiveness.
Fanny Hermundsdottir and Arild Aspelund, researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, reviewed more than 100 scientific papers published between 2005 and 2020 measuring the correlation between firms’ investments in sustainability and their competitiveness. Their results, published in the