Author: MIL-OSI Publisher

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Justin Stebbing, Professor of Biomedical Sciences, Anglia Ruskin University

Cancer treatment has come a long way, but many of today’s therapies still come with steep costs: not just financial, but physical and emotional too. Chemotherapy and radiotherapy remain vital tools, yet they often damage healthy cells alongside cancerous ones, leaving patients exhausted and vulnerable to long-term side effects.

Around the world, researchers are searching for treatments that are both effective and gentle, able to target tumours precisely while sparing the rest of the body.

Now, US researchers have introduced a promising new light-based treatment that could transform the way cancer is treated. Their discovery combines near-infrared LED light with nanoscopic flakes of tin oxide, known as SnOx nanoflakes, to kill cancer cells while leaving healthy ones unharmed.

This marks an important advance in photothermal therapy, a technique that uses light to heat and destroy tumours. In this case, the process relies on inexpensive, accessible LED systems rather than specialised lasers. The approach reduces damage to surrounding tissues and could one day offer a safer and less invasive alternative to chemotherapy or radiotherapy.

At the core of the innovation is a simple concept: using light to create localised heat that targets and kills cancer cells. The team designed the SnOx nanoflakes to absorb near-infrared light efficiently, a wavelength that can safely penetrate biological tissue.

When illuminated, these nanoflakes act like microscopic heaters, producing enough warmth to disrupt cancer cell membranes and proteins, ultimately causing cell death. Healthy tissues remain largely unaffected because they are less sensitive to heat and because the nanoflakes can be directed specifically toward malignant cells.

This targeted heating process, known as photothermal therapy, relies on a physical rather than chemical mechanism. This means it can avoid many of the systemic side effects typically seen with chemotherapy.

Read more:
Chemotherapy can be a challenging treatment – here’s how to deal with some of the side-effects

Traditional photothermal systems use lasers because they can focus light precisely deep within tissue. However, that same intensity can also damage healthy cells, requires costly equipment, and limits use to highly specialised facilities.

In this study, the researchers replaced lasers with light-emitting diodes (LEDs), which emit a gentler, broader spectrum of light. LEDs produce more uniform heating and are far less likely to burn or harm healthy tissue. They are also inexpensive and portable, making them well suited for clinical or even at-home use.

In laboratory studies, the LED light combined with SnOx nanoflakes destroyed up to 92% of skin cancer cells and 50% of colorectal cancer cells within 30 minutes. Healthy human skin cells were unaffected. This level of selectivity makes the technique particularly promising for cancers such as melanoma and basal cell carcinoma, which can be treated directly through light exposure. Such precision is rare among photothermal technologies, which often risk harming surrounding tissue.

The underlying science is equally significant. Tin oxide is a stable, biocompatible material already used in electronics. By converting tin disulfide (SnS₂) into oxygenated tin oxide nanoflakes, the researchers created structures that absorb near-infrared light much more effectively.

This transformation improves photothermal performance and allows the nanoflakes to be made using water-based, non-toxic synthesis methods. The process avoids harmful solvents and expensive manufacturing steps, making it scalable, sustainable and suitable for medical applications.

The team envisions compact LED devices that could be applied directly to the skin after surgical tumour removal to destroy any remaining malignant cells and reduce the risk of recurrence.

For example, after removing a melanoma or basal cell carcinoma, a patch-like LED device could deliver focused light to activate the nanoflakes at the surgical site. This type of portable, home-based treatment could make post-surgical cancer care safer, more convenient and less dependent on hospital visits.

The innovation also opens the door to combination therapies. Photothermal treatment can make cancer cells more vulnerable to other forms of therapy, such as immunotherapy or targeted drugs.

Heat generated by light can weaken tumour cells, make their membranes more permeable and trigger immune responses that help the body identify and destroy cancer. Integrating LED-based photothermal therapy with other approaches could make treatment plans more precise, effective and less toxic.

Read more:
Unlocking the body’s defences: understanding immunotherapy

Although still in the early stages, the researchers are refining the technology and exploring new applications. They are studying how different wavelengths and exposure times affect outcomes and investigating whether other materials similar to tin oxide could reach deeper tissues, such as those affected by breast or colorectal cancers.

Another area of development is implantable nanoflake systems: tiny biocompatible devices that could provide ongoing photothermal control inside the body.

The potential for accessibility is one of the most exciting aspects of this work. Because LED-based devices are inexpensive to manufacture and simple to operate, they could be used in low-resource regions where access to cancer care is limited.

This could democratise advanced treatment by extending it beyond major hospitals. For superficial cancers detected early, LED therapy might even be incorporated into outpatient or cosmetic procedures, reducing recovery time and improving quality of life.

Safety is another major advantage. Chemotherapy damages rapidly dividing healthy cells across the body, and radiotherapy can harm normal tissue and cause fatigue or scarring. Photothermal therapy, by contrast, confines its effects to the illuminated site. It produces no systemic toxicity, no cumulative organ damage and minimal discomfort.

This high precision stems from both the optical targeting and the biological selectivity of the nanoflakes, which preferentially heat cancer cells due to their altered metabolism and greater sensitivity to thermal stress.

The next step is to translate these laboratory findings into preclinical and, eventually, human trials. While much work remains, LED-driven photothermal therapy could represent a shift in how we treat cancer, making therapies more precise, affordable and humane.

Light, one of nature’s simplest energies, could become a powerful medical tool for selectively destroying tumours without harming healthy tissue. With innovations such as SnOx nanoflakes, the vision of non-invasive, localised, patient-friendly cancer treatment is coming steadily closer to reality.

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

– ref. How a new light-based cancer treatment could destroy tumours without harming healthy cells – using LEDs – https://theconversation.com/how-a-new-light-based-cancer-treatment-could-destroy-tumours-without-harming-healthy-cells-using-leds-267556

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Barry Langford, Professor of Film Studies, Royal Holloway, University of London

Most caper movies tend to focus on the elaborate logistics of a theft – typically of an outlandishly colossal haul or priceless artefact (think Ocean’s Eleven or The Italian Job). In contrast, their close cousin, the heist film, focuses less on the mechanics of the crime and more on its invariably destructive human consequences (such as in Heat or The Town).

While The Mastermind falls firmly into the latter camp, writer-director Kelly Reichardt dials down the genre’s hard-boiled violence and tension in favour of a downbeat, compassionately ironic character study.

It’s bleak early 1970 in the small Massachusetts city of Farmington. President Nixon has just invaded Cambodia and the US is being torn apart by the Vietnam war. But art school dropout James (Josh O’Connor) has only one, almost solipsistically close-to-hand “cause”. He plans to escape the hand-to-mouth tedium of his life as a jobbing interior decorator by lifting four abstract canvases from the local museum.

James recruits a couple of other local losers and they pull off his comically rudimentary plan, clumsily but effectively. But barely have the crew made their getaway than things fall apart. Faced with unwelcome attention from both law enforcement and the local mob, James has to go on the run.

The remainder of the film observes his meandering efforts to elude capture. We follow James’s attempts to husband his dwindling resources across a series of cheerless, wintry locales – diners, bus stations and cheap hotels that call to mind the bleak mid-century vignettes of American artist Edward Hopper.

The Mastermind makes for a fascinating companion piece to Paul Thomas Anderson’s smash hit One Battle After Another, another story of life underground in modern America which is relentlessly propulsive from start to finish – with life-and-death stakes, and political and personal fates inextricably intertwined.

In contrast, The Mastermind portrays the isolation of life on the run with nowhere and nothing to aim for. Unlike One Battle’s revolutionary vanguards “the French 75” (inspired by militants from the era when The Mastermind is set), James is no misguided militant idealist. He’s a would-be grifter who lacks the street smarts to carry off his pitifully low-grade felony. Nor does he have the emotional resilience to reckon with the consequences of his inevitable failure.

Of these, the saddest yet most predictable is the estrangement of his family – wife Terri (Alana Haim) and his two sons. Flattering himself to the bitter end that his sophomoric caper was “for the family … at least 75% of it”, James seems never to have properly considered the consequences of his actions on those closest to him.

He’s an observer of his own life, not a participant, with delusions of superiority wholly unmoored from reality. All around him, his peers march to stop the war. But not only does James lack any larger cause, he barely seems to care who he is or what he’s becoming.

The Mastermind could easily have played as a coldly satirical, loftily Kubrickian take on the futility of ambition and the endless human capacity for self-destructiveness. But Reichardt stays close to her protagonist throughout, neither condemning nor excusing his many failures, and never allowing the film’s pervasive irony to tip into contempt.

James isn’t a particularly bad guy, and nor is he a classic antihero. He is simply morally and ethically myopic – chronically ungrounded and always seeking the path of least resistance. Throughout the film, his manifold failings remain only too human, and Reichardt observes them with a consistently compassionate eye – with Christopher Blauvelt’s cinematography finding the poignancy and poetry in the dreary late-winter Northeastern landscape.

James is certainly no mastermind. But Reichardt invites us to understand and if not empathise, at least sympathise with him – and in so doing, recognise how close we all might be to making equally terrible mistakes.

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

– ref. The Mastermind: this art theft heist offers a compassionate character study – https://theconversation.com/the-mastermind-this-art-theft-heist-offers-a-compassionate-character-study-267911

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Ewan Archer-Brown, DPhil Candidate in Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford

Britain’s flagship home insulation programme has received a damning verdict from the National Audit Office. Under the Energy Company Obligation (ECO) scheme, tens of thousands of households have been left with faulty or even dangerous installations. It’s a result, the auditors say, of weak oversight, poor skills and confused accountability.

This report is troubling not only because of the human cost but because it exposes a deeper failure of governance in how the UK tries to decarbonise home heating. It’s a complex task that demands long-term stewardship, but is instead being left to the market.

The ECO was designed to make energy suppliers help households cut emissions and bills. Suppliers are the companies that buy electricity or gas from generators and sell it to you – the company named on your bills is your supplier. In theory, the ECO means these suppliers meet government-set carbon or energy saving targets by funding insulation and heating upgrades for households, with regulators checking that installations qualify.

The ECO was preceded by two other schemes that operated on the same principle. For years, they worked reasonably well for simple and low cost measures like loft or cavity wall insulation. But in 2013, the ECO was launched and expanded to cover more complex and expensive retrofits like solid wall insulation – an unprecedented shift.

So what went wrong?

The National Audit Office’s latest findings confirm fears that this was an approach set up to fail. Many installations require major remediation, some pose immediate health risks. The problems are familiar: an under-skilled workforce, uncertified installers, weak regulation and oversight.

Individually, these problems could be fixed. The government could improve installer training, tighten audits and crack down on fraud. But together, they reveal a deeper problem: a misplaced belief that market-based tools can deliver foundational change.

Energy efficiency obligations such as ECO work well for standardised, low-risk actions, like swapping bulbs or improving boilers. But, as we warned back in 2012, they are less suited to complex, capital-intensive retrofits of millions of households that require lots of coordination and long-term financing.

The UK’s energy efficiency governance still sits at arm’s length from the realities in people’s homes. Responsibilities are split confusingly between suppliers, Whitehall departments, auditors and local authorities, and it can often seem like no one is really in charge.

That’s why the failings highlighted in the National Audit Office report are not just implementation glitches or down to some “bad apple” installers. They’re failings of a governance model designed for incremental change, not the transformation required for net zero.

German lessons

If the UK really wants to retrofit millions of homes, it should look to what’s worked in other countries. Germany’s long-running KfW loan programme is one example. For more than three decades it has supported high-performance refurbishments through low-interest loans and grants. Successive German governments have recognised that the returns – in jobs, tax revenues, economic stimulus – have consistently outweighed the upfront cost.

By contrast, ECO has been repeatedly restructured, with shifting targets and funding levels that make it hard to plan ahead. Treating home retrofit as a short-term obligation rather than a long-term national project has left the UK far behind its peers.

Read more:
When insulation goes wrong – the science behind why botched retrofits can be so damaging

Retrofitting homes is inherently local (you can’t pick up your house and move it to a different area). Local authorities should therefore play a much stronger role in coordinating delivery, enforcing quality, and linking retrofit to other social goals such as tackling fuel poverty.

Getting councils involved would align retrofit with local priorities rather than distant central government targets. It could also rebuild trust among people who may understandably be wary of such schemes.

The UK’s forthcoming warm homes plan is a chance to reset. The government should take a hard look at the tools at our disposal and think about what is needed to foster the creative and courageous policy needed to decarbonise our homes.

Jan Rosenow regularly advises organisations such as governments and government agencies, organisations including the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, the World Bank, and the International Energy Agency. He also advises private sector clients from time to time as a consultant. In the past, Jan Rosenow has been funded through the UK Energy Research Council and the Centre on Innovation and Energy Demand to work on UK energy efficiency policy. There are no commercial interests to disclose.

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

– ref. A home insulation fiasco has left tens of thousands in cold and leaky homes over winter – https://theconversation.com/a-home-insulation-fiasco-has-left-tens-of-thousands-in-cold-and-leaky-homes-over-winter-268002

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Martin Plaut, Senior Research Fellow, Horn of Africa and Southern Africa, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London

According to data released by global market research firm Ipsos in September, 80% of South Africans say their country is on the wrong track. It is not hard to see why.

Even if they are not among the white Afrikaners who have sought refugee status in the US, courtesy of President Donald Trump’s controversial policy to protect them from the discrimination he alleges they are facing, there is a great deal for ordinary men and women in South Africa to complain about.

And with nearly 60% of the population born after apartheid ended in 1994, the government’s attempts to frame the hardships faced by its people as the result of past repression have decreasing relevance.

The most obvious problem is perhaps the failure for standards of living to improve. The ruling African National Congress (ANC) party has overseen flatlining or declining GDP per capita for more than 15 years, according to a two-year study published in 2023 by Harvard University.

Worse still, the study showed that unemployment has risen by 0.5% on average every year since the ANC came to power in 1994. This has left the majority of young men and women in South Africa without any prospect of earning a living. As the South African Department of Statistics reported in May 2025:

“Among the 4.8 million unemployed youth in the first quarter of 2025, 58.7% reported having no previous work experience. That means nearly six in ten unemployed young people are still waiting for their first opportunity to enter the job market.”

It continued: “Without experience, youth struggle to get hired – yet without being hired, they cannot gain experience. This cycle of exclusion continues to fuel long-term unemployment and stalls skills development at a critical stage of life.”

These are just two areas of decline. Johannesburg, the country’s commercial capital, has endured repeated electricity and water failures, while its streets have been so poorly maintained that some are close to being dysfunctional.

The military, once respected – and even feared – across the continent, is in shambles. According to DefenceWeb, an African defence and security news publication, only 15% to 20% of the South African National Defence Force’s aircraft are serviceable. It has one seaworthy frigate and just several inshore patrol vessels to guard nearly 3,000km of coastline.

South Africa’s police force is also severely infiltrated by criminal syndicates – so much so that Firoz Cachalia, the minister of police, has warned that the country is in danger of becoming “the next Colombia or Ecuador”. Both of these countries are plagued by criminal syndicates, with Ecuadorian crime groups particularly notorious for their links with the police.

This is all taking place against a backdrop of rampant corruption, which was exposed by the South African government’s own commission of inquiry in 2022. Hundreds of ANC politicians and officials were named or linked to corrupt activities after evidence was unearthed by the Zondo commission during its nearly four years of hearings.

Few of the accused are behind bars. And the author of the report, former Chief Justice Raymond Zondo, has expressed his disappointment at the slow progress.

Reasons for optimism

An air of gloom has settled over South Africa. Yet there is evidence that allows for a more optimistic analysis. First, the country remains genuinely democratic, holding elections that are regarded as free and fair nationally and internationally.

This remains true, even though the ANC lost its absolute majority in the 2024 election and has had to join forces with opposition parties to govern. This was very different from the response of many parties across Africa in recent years, which have rigged votes or refused to recognise elections they have lost.

More than 27 million citizens registered to vote for the 2024 election, and the results reflected a multiparty system with genuine voter choice. At the same time, over 11 million South Africans did not cast a ballot, even though they were registered voters. This indicates a feeling of apathy towards politics.

Second, the official opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, has provided proof that there are alternatives to ANC governance that can work. Helen Zille was elected as mayor of Cape Town in 2006 and the party has held it ever since.

Her party has administered South Africa’s Western Cape region since 2009. And their administrations have generally been effective and free from corruption, giving citizens an idea of what an alternative future might hold. She has now decided to stand for mayor of Johannesburg in 2026, a major challenge to the ANC.

Third, most of the media and book publishing industries in South Africa are not controlled by the government. South Africa guarantees freedom of the press, and its media landscape is among the freest in Africa. It is ranked 27th globally on the 2025 World Press Freedom Index – the highest in Africa.

Fourth, the judiciary is independent and has a record of holding criminals to account. This includes some, such as former police commissioner Jackie Selebi, who were well connected. However, it is capable of being disrupted by powerful figures who find loopholes to delay justice. South Africa’s former president, Jacob Zuma, is a case in point.

He has faced 16 charges of corruption related to a 30 billion rand (roughly £1.3 billion) deal to modernise the country’s defence in the late 1990s. Zuma denies the charges and none have been heard in court. As his late lead counsel, Kemp J. Kemp, put it in 2007, he defended Zuma against corruption charges “like Stalingrad … burning house to burning house”.

Fifth, South Africa’s agricultural sector is first rate, exporting across the world, while tourism remains a major attraction and a foreign exchange earner. Mining is also still important, even though it is a declining industry.

And sixth, several of its universities are among the best in Africa and produce skilled men and women who can serve their communities. The universities of Cape Town, Stellenbosch and Witwatersrand rank first, second and third on the continent respectively. These factors together could provide a basis for reform and renewal.

Martin Plaut is affiliated with the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London

– ref. South Africans feel mixture of hope and despair as apartheid becomes a distant memory – https://theconversation.com/south-africans-feel-mixture-of-hope-and-despair-as-apartheid-becomes-a-distant-memory-267160

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Lynda Dunlop, Senior Lecturer in Science Education, University of York

What will the world look like in 2100? This question is central to a new free online game called FutureGuessr. Launched in June 2025, this new form of climate communication combines gameplay with visual climate imagery and encourages players to explore future scenarios.

Players are shown an image from the future and asked to guess the location. Information is revealed about how close they are, what the climate change consequences would be, what will happen if no action is taken and how things could be different.

Available to play in English and French, the game takes inspiration from GeoGuessr, the online geography game that has enabled millions of people to travel virtually from their phone and guess where they are. FutureGuessr uses pictures to give users a visual representation of how familiar landscapes will look in 2100 as a result of climate change.

FutureGuessr is part of a broader trend in the use of games in climate communication. Creative board games and video games can reach diverse audiences and communicate climate change in serious, playful, thought-provoking and surprising ways.

Games played for pleasure, like Game Changers (an online story-based game produced by Megaverse) can generate conversations on climate actions by creating an innovative visual game world and integrating climate change into the plot. Collective decision making in the game allows players to learn and discuss climate change with others.

Our research suggests that this helps players critique corporate power, learn about greenwashing and enjoy an aesthetic experience. In the world of board games, Daybreak challenges players to cooperate and stop climate change by trying out different technical, social and economic projects.

Play with purpose

Serious games go beyond entertainment to connect with real-world problems. The most successful ones are fun while engaging with social, environmental and economic issues that players really care about.

Games can support players in thinking about becoming disaster ready and building disaster resilience. A game called The Flood Recovery Game is being used by researchers to identify disaster recovery gaps. It can also help policymakers create more comprehensive strategies to address flooding.

In terms of climate education, interactive in-person game-based workshops like the Climate Fresk already connects millions of people with science from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN body that assesses the science on climate change. These three-hour workshops also enable people to consider how they might act to create positive climate solutions.

FutureGuessr is a game for pleasure with a serious purpose: to make climate change data visible. Produced in partnership with Résau Action Climat, a network of non-governmental organisations, it shows the negative effects of climate change in familiar locations such as Antarctica and Easter Island.

Read more:
How interactive ‘climate fresk’ workshops are trying to accelerate environmental awareness around the globe

Research on visual climate communication found that images showing climate impacts such as extreme weather and floods moved people, especially when it featured localised impacts. There is a balance to be struck between highlighting local relevance and linking to the bigger picture. Showing the future of recognisable places we care about might be powerful in building support for climate action.

But photographs from the future don’t exist. FutureGuessr uses images generated from a bespoke AI model which combines maps with photographs of locations and data from IPCC reports.

This has a cost. The climate cost of the AI revolution is increasingly measured and documented, and image generation is one of the most energy intensive tasks you can do with AI. Experts in computing have called for “frugal AI”: to treat AI as finite, only to be used when necessary, and even then, as effectively as possible.

It is important to consider not just the message, but the medium, and the environmental effects of game production. The Playing for the Planet Alliance has produced a carbon calculator for the industry and offers awards and game jams to support the video game industry to take climate action.

Now that the images have been created, an effective use of FutureGuessr might be to generate conversations about the effects of climate change, and about how research, game design and communication can be carried out in the most environmentally sensitive way.

People won’t act just based on facts alone. The development of creative ways to communicate the climate emergency that connect people with why this matters is essential for people and communities. Already, some games are making an increasingly visible contribution to the conversation but we need greater transparency in the environmental impacts of game production, and consideration of how to minimise these impacts through visible commitments to sustainability as modelled by Daybreak.
FutureGuessr demonstrates value of bringing games and visual climate communication together to raise awareness of how climate change affects landscapes everywhere on the planet. We all need to play for the planet. Our research shows that whether played for purpose or pleasure, games can create space for serious conversations about how to tackle climate change.

Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?

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Lynda Dunlop has received funding from the Economic and Social Research Council, the Education Endowment Foundation, British Educational Research Association, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the Templeton World Charity Foundation, Wellcome and UK Research and Innovation.

Steven Forrest works for the University of Hull. He has received funding from the Aviva Foundation and Ferens Education Trust to carry out serious gaming projects.

– ref. A new online game helps imagine life on Earth in 2100 – https://theconversation.com/a-new-online-game-helps-imagine-life-on-earth-in-2100-267353

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Rachael Jolley, Environment Editor, The Conversation

Over the weekend I was at an environment conference on the tiny island of San Servolo, just off the coast of Venice. You are surrounded by water on all sides, stretching for miles.

Given this visual reminder of how low-lying Venice is it’s hard not to think about the increasing threat of flooding and the long-term implications of climate change for this historic city and the surrounding region of wetlands as well as towns and villages along the coast.

Venice is, after all, famous for its aqua alta, (high waters) and floods. It sits on the Mediterranean’s biggest lagoon which has an average depth of less than one metre. With increasing numbers of extreme storms, it’s clear that rising waters here are likely to cause greater and greater damage to people’s homes and livelihoods.

So in many ways the view was an ideal geographical prompt for the fourth Dolomite Conference on Global Governance of Climate Change and Sustainability, organised by the Vision thinktank. The conference brought together speakers from around the world to discuss climatic challenges and ideas for what could mitigate those changes. Debates ranged widely. From the way flooding and wild fires may make it difficult, or even impossible, for people to access insurance for their homes to how the health of soil is not being valued and its ability to grow crops is steadily declining.

I spoke to some delegates to see what they thought was the biggest challenge that their home faced from climate change.

Los Angeles

Paulina Velasco is the deputy chief of staff for district six in Los Angeles. She sees the biggest challenge ahead as “making sure that we have all the people in the room who know what’s going on”.

“Not just the academics talking about the statistics, but also people in the community, the people who have asthma because the air quality is so bad and they live next to a freeway, ensuring that it’s not just one way [of] looking at things from a high level, but making sure that everyone has an understanding and we can act as a community.”

Looking ahead to the upcoming LA Olympics 2028, Velasco felt there was an opportunity to change behaviour that could help the city tackle climate change threats.

“The question is not just what’s going to happen in the Olympics or what’s going to happen in the world cup, but how are we going to recycle all the plastic or make sure we drive less.”

It was about what was going to happen so that people act differently, taking more public transport, for instance, in ways that can be sustained after the Olympics, she said.

Brazil

Julia Paletta, a PhD researcher at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, said the issue that concerned her most about Brazil was emissions coming from land use change. Brazil is an agricultural country and the pressing issue was extending agriculture into new areas, such as the Amazon, causing deforestation. By some estimates the Amazon rainforest could become a dry grassland if deforestation continues at pace.

“With Brazil hosting Cop30 [the UN climate conference] this year I think the big discussion is going to be around the Amazon,” she added. She felt it was going to be “a very important moment for the global community being there and seeing the Amazon”. Not only because this was a pristine area, but also a very important place to be preserved. “It’s very important not only to Brazil, but overall to the world.”

Belgium

Taube Van Melkebeke is head of policy at the Green European Foundation, a foundation aligned to the European Green party arranges debates and training around green issues.

She said: “The biggest hurdle for Belgium is a lack of systemic planning that really takes into account different dimensions, both the short and the long term, such as social and economic aspects, and energy security.”

“I think there is a lack of political long term-ism, which is, of course, partially embedded in our political systems. But I also do think that there is a lack of political will and political insights to really connect the dots.”

Read more:
Flood-prone Houston faces hard choices for handling too much water

I often find that conferences can be gloomy places where people come together to discuss problems and can easily disappear into a rabbit-hole of depression, rather than proposing solutions. This conference’s organisers decided to do something different, by asking postgraduate students to put forward discussion points with suggestions of what could change, not just what was wrong.

There was an excellent session on soil erosion, which covered everything from the weight of tractors and farm vehicles, to how societies have focused on machinery and forgotten the importance of keeping the soil healthy. Students from Bocconi University came up with proposals and then experts from farming, policy and government were asked to respond.

It is this kind of approach that could make a long-term difference. Putting people from different walks of life into the same room, and asking them all what happens next and what could work has got to be a fruitful way of creating change, and that feels positive.

Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
Get a 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.

– ref. What people at a Venice conference believe is the biggest climate change challenge in their home countries – https://theconversation.com/what-people-at-a-venice-conference-believe-is-the-biggest-climate-change-challenge-in-their-home-countries-267563