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March 5, 2026

Faith leaders joined the fight against woman abuse in the DRC. Did it help?

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Meg A. Warren, Professor of Management, Western Washington University

Can pastors, imams and rabbis be allies to women and children and help stop gender-based violence?

Many wars have been fought in the name of religion. Much pain and dehumanisation has been inflicted on women and girls in the name of religious culture. So, it wouldn’t be surprising for there to be cynicism about the question.

But, in fact, a growing body of research shows that faith leaders can be powerful allies against social ills like gender-based violence.

As a social-organisational psychologist, I research how people use their strengths and the strengths of their culture to assist those who are suffering in their society.

My colleagues, Karen Torjesen and Grace Ngare, and I set out to study the impacts of a year-long intervention by religious leaders in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The religious leaders had initiated a programme that they hoped would contribute to social change when it came to gender-based violence within marriage, gender roles in the family, and male allyship in the community.

Our study found that faith leaders could indeed be activated as champions of positive social change. They can activate entire communities – men and women – to come together to address gender-based violence. We found that the ripple effect can endure and extend well beyond initial efforts.

A history of violence

The Second Congo War (1998–2003) was one of Africa’s deadliest civil wars, claiming as many as 3 million lives.

Systematic rape was wielded as a weapon of war. The DRC earned the unfortunate label of “rape capital of the world”. Internally displaced women and girls were viewed by armed militia as soft targets.

From the 2000s, boys in the DRC who had been recruited as child soldiers were returning home as young adults. They had been taught that women were no more than “spoils of the war”.

Without the support of therapy, they had to reintegrate into their families and live among their mothers, aunts and sisters, and start their own families. Predictably, gender-based violence was rampant.

Ending it was a clear goal for the health and stability of civil society.

At the same time, women were reluctant to report the men who raped them. In addition to cultural norms of silence and shame around sexual violence, they did not want to have their brothers, sons and husbands locked up in prison. The community had to find another means to restore women’s safety and well-being while also protecting the fabric of their society.

In a context of crumbling infrastructure, the people who truly understood the extent of the rape and violence against women were not the police or other authorities. Rather, it was the quiet presence of the church pastors and the wives of the imams that the women confided in.

The pastors and imams decided to use their influence to teach congregants about healthy interpersonal relationships – where respect, gender equity, nonviolence and empowerment were key.

The Tamar Campaign

In 2013, their three-year initiative, the Tamar Campaign, was delivered directly and through spin-off efforts to more than 30,000 people across multiple cities and villages in the DRC. Participants each attended the programme for about a year.

Created by the Fellowship of Christian Councils and Churches in the Great Lakes and the Horn of Africa, this was an interfaith, inter-organisational effort to combat gender-based violence through the use of scriptures and the engagement of communities. It was named after the story of the rape of Tamar in the Old Testament – a common thread across Christianity, Islam and Judaism – in which a daughter of King David was raped by her brother.

Because of toxic gender norms around what it meant to be a man, the men returning from war had not learned how to identify their own emotions, how to speak about their emotions, or how to see the emotions of others and work with them.

The goal was to use stories from scripture as the entry point to teach men how to be better allies to women and girls. In the story of Tamar, for example, rape combines elements of incest, domestic violence and the conspiracy of men. When Tamar sought help after being raped, she was told to be quiet. This displays the culture of silence around such acts.

In each monthly session run by the faith leaders, scriptural stories were introduced as an entry point to openly discuss gender-based violence within a mixed-gender setting. They lifted the shroud of silence in a sacred and safe space, often a house of worship. Next, participants discussed gender-based violence in their own families and the community. They talked about how they could become agents of change.

In the process, in monthly group sessions of 25 or so people, the programme sought to teach socio-emotional skills, detoxify notions of masculinity, deepen understanding between men and women, strengthen their relationships, and develop action plans for healing, repair and allyship.

The study

My research team evaluated the effectiveness of this intervention four years later. In a field study, a survey was given to Tamar participants, and matching control groups in North and South Kivu.

We found that those in the programme had a 50%-85% lower incidence of violence, with larger drops in violence in North Kivu compared to South Kivu. It was a dramatic success story.

This tremendous drop in violence happened after many earlier interventions to address the problem had failed. Typical advocacy-based interventions failed because women worried that even if they became better at advocating for themselves, the fabric of society would disintegrate – the women would be beaten, ousted from their community, and lose their children. Their only choice seemed to be silence – unless the intervention wasn’t about the women at all, but about turning the men into their allies.

My team studied the results, including the effects on the participants’ marital relationships. We found, amazingly, that their relationships were better than when women had remained silent. There were accounts of women and men communicating and dealing with emotional issues with respect, rather than derision.

Long after the funding had ended, other groups and communities who had heard about the programme borrowed the Tamar curriculum, with positive results. The allyship was still spreading and still having an impact. Community members were intervening when they saw violence occur among their neighbours or their extended family. They were being allies out in the world, not just for their own partner or immediate families.

This offers one example of how cultural phenomena like religion can be a resource to combat large, complex and entrenched societal problems. Congolese participants were drawing on their strength, building relationships, prioritising healing, and thinking in the long term to shift a toxic culture from the inside out.

This study was made possible by research funding from Norwegian Church Aid.

– ref. Faith leaders joined the fight against woman abuse in the DRC. Did it help? – https://theconversation.com/faith-leaders-joined-the-fight-against-woman-abuse-in-the-drc-did-it-help-277270

March 5, 2026

The Black Death’s counterintuitive effect: as human numbers fell, so did plant diversity

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Christopher Lyon, Visiting Research Fellow, Centre for Death and Society, University of Bath

Between 1347 and 1353, Europe was gripped by the most catastrophic pandemic in its history: the Black Death. Killing many millions, the plague wiped out between one-third and a half of Europe’s population.

In some cities, mortality rates were as high as 80%. In rural areas, Black Death mortality caused intense labour shortages. Entire villages were left empty as rural economies collapsed. In many places, cultivated fields were abandoned and reclaimed by woodland, scrub and deer.

Given the widely reported negative effects that people have had on nature over recent decades and centuries, we might expect this continental-scale “rewilding” to have enabled biodiversity to flourish. However, our new study in the journal Ecology Letters uncovers a potentially counterintuitive result: when Europe’s human population crashed, plant biodiversity also plummeted.

Fossilised pollen grains in sediment cores extracted from lakes and bogs contain information about plant communities that existed thousands of years ago. We used data from over 100 fossil pollen records from across Europe to explore how plant diversity changed before, during and after the Black Death.

The pollen data show that between 0BC and 1300, plant diversity in Europe increased. It grew through the rise and fall of the Western Roman Empire and continued through the early Middle Ages. By the High Middle Ages, biodiversity levels were at their peak.

However, in 1348, Europe was hit by plague and for about 150 years, plant biodiversity plummeted. It was only after a century and a half – as human populations recovered and farming resumed – that plant diversity began to rise again.

black and white etch of people dying from black death — The plague of Florence in 1348, as described in Boccaccio’s Decameron. Etching by L. Sabatelli. Iconographic Collections.
Wellcome Collection gallery (2018-04-05), CC BY-NC-ND

We found that the biggest losses of plant diversity occurred in areas most affected by land abandonment. By plotting patterns of biodiversity changes from sites with different Black Death land use histories, we discovered that biodiversity collapsed in landscapes where crop (arable) production was abandoned, whereas landscapes with growing or stable arable farming became more biodiverse.

Our work suggests that over 2,000 years of increasing European biodiversity was generated because of – not in spite of – humans. But why? And what lessons can we learn from this for managing biodiversity now, when land being converted into farmland is driving biodiversity losses?

Population growth and technological innovations pushed agricultural activities into previously unused lands over the first 1,300 years of the common era. Unlike today – where crop monocultures are dominant – mixed agricultural systems were the norm over the majority of the last 2,000 years. Across Europe, a diverse lattice of farmlands and farming practices were typically separated by woods, rough grazing lands and uncultivated plots, often enclosed by hedgerows or trees.

wooded landscape with crops on farmland — A patchy landscape of woodland, farmland, grazing lands and unused areas creates a mixture of habitats for plants that raises biodiveristy.
Yuri Dondish/Shutterstock

The result was a patchy landscape where there were lots of opportunities for different plant species to survive, and biodiversity was high.

The Black Death disrupted this by reducing human disturbance. The result was a less patchy landscape and an overall loss in plant diversity. Diversity only recovered when extensive farming returned.

People can boost nature

These findings call into question conservation policies that advocate for removing or reducing human influence from Europe’s landscapes to protect biodiversity.

One such policy initiative is rewilding, which is seen by many as a route to achieving a biodiverse future where nature is given space to flourish. Yet, many of the most biodiverse locations in Europe are those with a long history of low-intensity, mixed agriculture. To rewild these human-formed landscapes may, paradoxically, risk eroding the biodiversity that conservationists seek to protect.

Our findings of long-term positive human–biodiversity relationships is not solely a European phenomenon. Multimillennial interactions between humans and the natural world have resulted in elevated biodiversity levels across planet. Examples of diverse, cultural ecosystems include the forest gardens of the Pacific North West (forests cultivated by Indigenous peoples), the satoyama of Japan (low intensity mixed systems of rice paddies and woodlands in mountainous foothills) and the ahupua’a of Hawaii (segments of diverse hillsides used to cultivate multiple crops).

Modern, intensive farming practices have caused substantial biodiversity losses across the globe. Yet, our Black Death findings, in combination with numerous other examples, show us that humans and nature do not always have to be kept separate to conserve and promote biodiversity. Indeed, recognising landscapes as cultural ecosystems may help us imagine futures where both nature and people can live together and thrive.

Traditional, low-intensity land management practices have generated diverse ecosystems for millennia. Today, where locally appropriate, they should be encouraged for the conservation of both biological and cultural diversity.

Christopher Lyon receives funding from a Leverhulme Trust Research Centre—The Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity, grant no. RC-2018-021 and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, grant number BB/Z516697/1. He has previously received funding from the York Environmental Sustainability Institute; the White Rose University Consortium; the Biotechnology and Biological Science Research Council, Economic and Social Research Council, Natural Environment Research Council, and the Scottish Government, grant no. BB/R005842/1; and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, grant no. 132726.

Jonathan D. Gordon receives funding from a Leverhulme Trust Research Centre—The Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity, grant no. RC-2018-021

– ref. The Black Death’s counterintuitive effect: as human numbers fell, so did plant diversity – https://theconversation.com/the-black-deaths-counterintuitive-effect-as-human-numbers-fell-so-did-plant-diversity-277386

March 5, 2026

How Denver’s Northeast Park Hill community reduced youth violence by 75%

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Beverly Kingston, Director and Senior Research Associate, Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence, University of Colorado Boulder

The neighborhood had nearly double the youth arrest rate of the other 76 Denver neighborhoods combined. Royalty-free/Getty Images

Northeast Park Hill, a Denver neighborhood, has a long history of violence. During Denver’s summer of violence in the early 1990s, it was considered ground zero for gang conflict.

From the late 1990s through 2014, violent crime in Northeast Park Hill declined from its peak in the early ’90s but remained persistently higher than city averages. In 2016, Northeast Park Hill recorded 1,086 youth arrests per 100,000 young people. The arrest rate for the combination of the other 76 Denver neighborhoods was 513.

With a population of approximately 9,600, 19% of families in the neighborhood lived below the federal poverty line, 39% of residents identified as Black, and 27% identified as Hispanic.

Yet, Northeast Park Hill is also a community defined by collective action. In 2013, residents started organizing in response to a series of violent events. They laid the foundation for an emerging movement committed to rebuilding community safety.

Building on these community strengths, researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence partnered with local leaders to implement Communities That Care in 2016. The program is a science-based prevention process designed to help communities use data, evidence and collective action to reduce youth violence.

As a sociologist and director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence, my work examines the root causes of youth violence. I study how community-led, data-driven prevention efforts can reduce risk and build supports that help young people stay safe and connected. Working alongside leaders and residents in Northeast Park Hill, I’ve seen firsthand what’s possible and what their remarkable success can teach all of us.

A welcome change

After just five years, the youth arrest rate in Northeast Park Hill fell to 276 per 100,000 – a 75% reduction.

This drop in youth arrests reflects a decades-long nationwide trend. Across the country as a whole, juvenile arrests peaked in 1996 and then began a steady decline.

But not all neighborhoods benefited equally. To measure the impact of local prevention work in Northeast Park Hill, we compared its arrest rate to a carefully constructed “look-alike” community made up of similar Denver neighborhoods that did not receive the intervention. We found Northeast Park Hill saw a sharper and earlier decline than its comparison community – pointing to an impact beyond national trends and tied to the local interventions.

Impacts of youth violence

Youth violence is a major cause of harm.

This is especially true for urban communities that have endured decades of chronic disinvestment. That includes neglected infrastructure, deteriorating housing and long-standing environmental and health inequities. Such environments often lack the opportunities, resources and support that are essential for healthy youth development.

In the 1960s, Park Hill became a burgeoning mecca for affluent Black families. Redlining, a federal practice that deemed certain minority neighborhoods “hazardous” and denied those residents mortgages and insurance, changed the community. A 9News report looks back at how redlining defined Park Hill.

Young people in these neighborhoods are more likely to face increased exposure to violence and daily challenges associated with navigating violent communities, such as witnessing shootings near their homes and schools. They also face ongoing experiences of marginalization and discrimination. Many young people move through daily life in a constant state of vigilance. Some youth withdraw, carry weapons for protection or turn to substances to cope with chronic anxiety.

Building a prevention infrastructure

As part of Communities That Care, the community formed a prevention coalition of approximately 25 members, known as Park Hill Strong, to guide the work.

Three Black leaders, Troy Grimes, Jonathan McMillan and Dane Washington Sr., who grew up in the neighborhood and experienced the violence of the 1990s firsthand, chaired the coalition.

Following the Communities That Care model, they began by creating a community profile. They used local data, including youth and parent surveys, and neighborhood indicators, such as access to safe parks, after-school programs and healthy foods. The data helped the coalition identify the biggest sources of risk and what protective supports were available in the community.

That data pointed to several factors that increase the likelihood of youth violence. Many youth felt disconnected from their community and had limited supervision or inconsistent support at home. The data also highlighted early and persistent problem behaviors among youth, including aggression and defiance, which can place young people on a pathway toward later violence.

The data also revealed protective supports to build on. It showed that opportunities for young people to participate in positive activities were limited. Community recognition of youths’ healthy and constructive contributions was also low — highlighting important areas for improvement.

Once the profile was complete, the coalition developed a community action plan describing the community prevention strategies the coalition would use to address their prioritized risk and protective factors.

Community-level prevention strategies

The coalition selected three community-level prevention strategies.

First, a youth-led media campaign called the Power of One (PO1) addressed the risk factor of low neighborhood attachment. The campaign challenged the idea that young people themselves are the cause of violence, instead highlighting how decades of redlining, concentrated poverty and limited access to quality schools and jobs have shaped the conditions they are navigating. The campaign also highlighted positive stories about young people and their communities. The Power of One has reached more than 3,000 youth and adults through social media and hosted six community block parties.

Power of One campaign teaser.

Second, the coalition selected Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies, known as PATHS. This evidence-based program aims to reduce early and persistent problem behaviors. It was implemented in all three of the elementary schools in Northeast Park Hill. PATHS helps students learn social and emotional skills, including managing strong emotions by recognizing when they are feeling angry and using calming strategies before reacting. Strengthening these competencies is associated with lower rates of aggression.

Third, pediatric health care providers identified youth at risk for carrying out future serious violence through the violence, injury protection and risk screening tool. Youth identified as high or medium risk after completing a 14-item screening tool that assesses violence and victimization history and other risk factors are referred to appropriate services. A total of 222 youth ages 10 to 14 were screened between 2016 and 2021.

Funding is in jeopardy

For more than two decades, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has funded the National Academic Centers of Excellence in Youth Violence Prevention, which includes programs like ours. But recent CDC funding cuts threaten the continuation of this work.

Since 2000, these efforts have contributed to reductions in violence in communities across the nation, including Chicago; Denver; Flint, Michigan; Richmond, Virginia; and Youngstown, Ohio.

In Flint, community groups mowed and removed trash from vacant lots between 2009 and 2013. The surrounding areas saw 40% fewer assaults and violent crimes between the months of May and September compared to areas surrounding unmaintained lots.

Likewise, in Youngstown, during the summer months from 2016 to 2018, violent crime fell at twice the rate on streets surrounding vacant lots transformed into gardens and play spaces by community residents than on streets where professional mowers did the greening.

Funding for programs like these is critical for neighborhoods where resources are already scarce and the burden of violence has been concentrated for generations. Without continued investment, communities risk losing hard-won gains and the capacity to create safe and supportive environments for young people.

Read more of our stories about Colorado.

Beverly Kingston receives funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Centers of Excellence in Youth Violence Prevention under Cooperative Agreement Number, 5 U01 CE002757. The findings and conclusions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the official position of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

– ref. How Denver’s Northeast Park Hill community reduced youth violence by 75% – https://theconversation.com/how-denvers-northeast-park-hill-community-reduced-youth-violence-by-75-265943

March 5, 2026

Operational secrecy kept the US from making evacuation plans – and that means Americans in the Mideast could wait days

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Donald Heflin, Executive Director of the Edward R. Murrow Center and Senior Fellow of Diplomatic Practice, The Fletcher School, Tufts University

Canceled flights due to the Iran war have made it difficult for Americans to leave countries in the Middle East. Marcin Golba/NurPhoto via Getty Images

As the U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran, American citizens living in or visiting the Middle East found themselves stranded in countries facing bombing attacks by Iran. The State Department on March 2, 2026, urged Americans in 14 Middle Eastern countries to leave via “available commercial transportation, due to serious safety risks.” But commercial air travel and airports were shut down in many of those places and the U.S. wasn’t offering to evacuate its citizens.

Media reports featuring frustrated and frightened Americans stuck in places where danger was mounting, as well as growing criticism that the U.S. hadn’t handled the situation well or according to normal procedure, led the State Department to scramble and send charter flights to evacuate U.S. nationals from a handful of countries.

The Conversation’s politics editor Naomi Schalit interviewed former ambassador Donald Heflin, a veteran diplomat who now teaches at Tufts University’s Fletcher School, to understand how such situations are normally handled – and how the current situation diverged from longstanding practices.

A Facebook post with a message from the State Department on March 3, 2026, urging 'Americans to DEPART NOW' from the countries listed. — A Facebook post from the U.S. State Department on March 3, 2026, urging ‘Americans to DEPART NOW’ from the countries listed.
Facebook

What is the customary way that the United States and the State Department deal with U.S. nationals who are abroad in an area that becomes dangerous?

Over my 35-year career, I was ambassador to a small country and I worked a lot on African affairs. But most of my time was spent in consular affairs, which is the part of the State Department that does this work. And over the last 20 or 30 years, we’ve made a lot of progress. We’ve developed a model that works pretty well.

When you’re in a country with instability, what you want to do is to get the population of Americans down as small as you can. So the first thing that happens is you have some instability, and you tell Americans, “Listen, we advise against traveling here.” See if you can discourage everybody except missionaries or people whose employers really want them to go there to make money or people visiting family members, but get rid of the casual tourist.

Then, a little more time goes by and things start to get bad, and you say, “You should consider leaving.” And then, a little while later, the embassy gives its own employees and their families what they call “authorized departure,” which is, “It’s OK for you to go back to the U.S., and in fact we’ll help pay for it.” And we tell the public that, and we hope that that’ll help spur more people to leave.

And the step after that?

Next step: We order departure, where we tell parts of the embassy, “You’ve got to go home. You can’t make the decision to stay here, you and your kids go home.” And we tell the public that, and hopefully that makes the number of Americans remaining in the country smaller and smaller.

Then – and it doesn’t always happen – the last step is we evacuate. We say, “We’re getting our people out of here on planes, we’ve got space for you on the planes, you should have listened to us before.”

That’s the standard model. Unfortunately, it didn’t get followed very well this week.

What did you see this week, and how did it diverge from the normal procedure?

We went from zero to 60 very quickly. Look, the Mideast is unstable on a good day, but there had not been a new instability where people should be getting scared and going home. And then what happened was we launched the attack, and all of a sudden there was that instability.

Logically, you would think, there were two places that Americans should be getting out of. One was Iran, where we’ve told people not to be for many years. The other was Israel, because Israel is going to be attacked.

But no, the Iranians attacked over half a dozen countries. So now, all of a sudden, you’ve got Americans who feel unsafe in places that have never really been considered unsafe, like Oman, Cyprus or Turkey.

So now you have a long list of countries where you want to encourage Americans to leave and where they want to leave. There’s some demand, and you haven’t got that drawdown, where it makes things smaller, and also you haven’t done anything about arranging charter flights or military flights to get them out. So they’re going to have to stay where they are and feel unsafe for X number of days.

That’s when this started generating news stories.

This led to lot of people calling a member of Congress, a lot of people talking to the press, saying, “We got to get us out of here.” That’ll continue until the evacuation is arranged. There’s a bit of an analogy to COVID. When COVID first took off, we had a lot of Americans stuck overseas. They wanted to get home to their families. They figured U.S. health care to be the best that’s available, and it took us awhile to arrange charter flights. It was a very expensive process to get everybody home. They just kind of had to hunker down. That’s where we are right now.

On March 3, 2026, the State Department’s recorded message said the U.S. couldn’t help evacuate nationals in the Mideast; a more helpful message appeared the next day.

Do you think this problem that’s being faced by Americans in the Middle East now should have been anticipated by the State Department?

Yes and no. I think a big part of the problem here was that the Trump administration kept the knowledge of the impending attack to a very small circle of people for operational security reasons. You can’t launch a surprise attack if half of Washington knows about it.

You can see a scenario by which a very trusted State Department officer has to eventually talk to a charter plane company about chartering a whole bunch of planes. They’re going to figure out pretty quickly what’s going to happen, and then you’ve got a security leak.

At the same time, I think going back weeks and months, maybe people should have been arranging charter flights and military flights, kind of on spec so that you could flip the switch and get that going right away. They’re kind of starting from scratch this week.

You’ve got people who are stranded, afraid and can’t get on with their lives. What should happen next?

All these Iranian strikes, the casualty numbers aren’t high. So objectively speaking, I think that very few of the Americans over there are in actual, real danger.

But casual tourists do get afraid, and they don’t travel overseas that much. This may be their first time in the Mideast, and all of a sudden this is happening. They want out bad. They’re scared, whether, objectively speaking, they have a good reason to be scared or not. And it’s better for everybody – the U.S. embassy, the host country, for people in Washington – if we get them out of there and get them home.

This will sort itself out. There will be planes, we’ll get all the people out who want to get out, but it’s going to take at least a few days, maybe a week.

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

– ref. Operational secrecy kept the US from making evacuation plans – and that means Americans in the Mideast could wait days – https://theconversation.com/operational-secrecy-kept-the-us-from-making-evacuation-plans-and-that-means-americans-in-the-mideast-could-wait-days-277578

March 5, 2026

2025 was hotter than it should have been – 5 influences and a dirty surprise offer clues to what’s ahead

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Michael Wysession, Professor of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences, Washington University in St. Louis

The sun rises over New York City as a heat wave arrives in June 2025. Gary Hershorn/Getty Images

The past three years have been the world’s hottest on record by far, with 2025 almost tied with 2023 for second place. With that energy came extreme weather, from flash flooding to powerful hurricanes and severe droughts. Yet, by most indicators, the planet should have been cooler in 2025 than it was.

So, what happened, and what does that say about the year ahead?

As an earth and environmental scientist, I study influences that affect global temperatures year to year, such as El Niño, wildfires and solar cycles. Some make Earth hotter. Some make it cooler. And one particularly unhealthy influence has been quietly hiding a large amount of global warming – until now.

Chart shows temperatures rising — The past three years have been the warmest on record. The chart compiled by the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service shows the comparison to preindustrial-era temperatures in the second half of the 1800s.
C3S/ECMWF

Factors that made 2025 cooler than 2024

The Earth’s climate is the result of many factors that change from year to year. Some that helped make 2025 cooler than 2024 include:

La Niña’s arrival: La Niña is part of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, a natural climate pattern that fluctuates between warm El Niño conditions and cooler La Niña conditions. During El Niño, the Pacific Ocean heats up along the equator, influencing the atmosphere in ways that can cause intense storms, droughts and heat waves around the planet. La Niña does the opposite; it’s like putting an ice pack on the atmosphere.

Both 2023 and 2024 were El Niño years, but in 2025 conditions shifted to neutral and then to La Niña starting in September.

The solar cycle: The Sun reached its solar maximum near the end of 2024, the peak of its energy output in an approximately 11-year cycle, and began declining in 2025. So, while the sun’s output was still stronger than average in 2025, it was less than in 2024.

Fewer wildfires: Despite some destructive blazes, the world also saw fewer wildfires during 2025 than 2024, which put less carbon dioxide – a planet-warming greenhouse gas – into the atmosphere.

How different factors affected temperature over a decade. — Major warming and cooling influences from 2016 to 2025. Each graph starts at 2016. Anthropogenic warming, natural carbon sinks and sulfur dioxide (SO2) reductions start from zero in 2016 to illustrate cumulative changes to existing reservoirs; El Niño/La Niña and the solar cycle show real-time influences on the global temperature, relative to mean values.
Michael Wysession. Data: Global Carbon Project (Anthropogenic Global Warming, Natural Carbon Sinks); NOAA (El Niño/La Niña, Solar Cycle); SO2 Reductions (FaIR Analysis by Carbon Brief)

Despite those points, 2025 still ended up as the third-hottest year in over 175 years of record-keeping and likely one of the warmest in at least several thousand years. It was nearly as warm as 2023, at 2.6 degrees Fahrenheit (1.47 Celsius) above the 1850-1900 average, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. It also had the second-highest average land temperature recorded, up 3.6 F (2 C) compared to preindustrial years, with more than 10% of the land experiencing record-high temperatures.

Factors that made 2025 warmer than expected

Several other factors made 2025 warmer than expected, and some are likely to continue to increase in 2026. They include:

Greenhouse gas emissions: The big driver of global warming is excess greenhouse gas emissions, largely from burning fossil fuels, and 2025 had plenty.

Greenhouse gases trap heat near Earth’s surface like a blanket, raising the temperature. They also linger in the atmosphere for years to centuries, meaning gases released today will continue to warm the planet well into the future. The levels of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide in the atmosphere all increased in 2025.

Coal is the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions, followed by oil and gas. — Sources of worldwide carbon dioxide emissions that have grown the most in recent decades.
Carbon Brief, CC BY

Rising energy demand drove an increase in fossil fuel use. About 80% of the increasing electric power demand came from emerging economies, largely for rising air conditioning demands as the world gets hotter. In the U.S., the rapid growth of data centers for AI and cryptocurrency mining helped boost U.S. carbon dioxide emissions by 2.4%.

China has become the largest carbon dioxide emitter in the past 20 years. U.S. emissions have fallen. — Countries that have been the largest sources of carbon dioxide emissions in recent decades.
Carbon Brief, CC BY

Earth’s energy imbalance: Other sources can disrupt the natural balance between the amount of sunlight that reaches Earth and the lesser amount radiated back to space. A recent study found that Earth’s energy uptake surged and temperatures rose quickly when a rare three-year La Niña in 2020-2022 shifted to El Niño in 2023-2024.

Declining polar ice, which efficiently reflects sunlight back into space, also affects the energy balance. As sea ice declines, it leaves dark ocean water that absorbs most of the sunlight that reaches it. In a spiraling feedback, warmer water melts sea ice, allowing more sunlight into the ocean, warming it faster; 2025 had the lowest winter peak of Arctic sea ice on record and the third-lowest minimum extent of Antarctic ice.

Air pollution: Sulfate aerosol pollution from coal combustion and burning heavy fuel oil in shipping has also been affecting Earth’s energy balance. It has been masking the full effects of human-caused greenhouse gases for years by reflecting sunlight back into space, creating a cooling effect. But sulfate aerosol pollution is also a serious health hazard, blamed for about 8 million human deaths per year from lung diseases.

Recent reductions in sulfate pollution – now 40% less than 20 years ago – have meant about a 0.2 F (0.13 C) increase in global temperatures. Much of the reduction was from China’s efforts to reduce its notoriously bad air pollution in recent years and international shipping rules in effect since 2020 that have reduced sulfur emissions from large ships by 85%.

Lines show 2025 was among lost sea ice years for both Arctic and Antarctic sea ice. — Sea ice levels were near record lows for both Arctic and Antarctic ice in 2025.
Carbon Brief, CC BY

Taking all factors together, humans are now warming the planet at a faster rate than at any point in human history: at about 0.5 F (0.27 C) per decade. That extra heat can fuel extreme weather, including flash floods, heat waves, extended droughts, wildfires and coastal flooding, affecting human lives and economies.

Predictions for 2026

Most climate models predict 2026 will be about as hot as 2025, depending on whether a Pacific El Niño develops, which forecasters give about a 60% chance of happening. The planet is already starting the year out warm, even if it doesn’t feel like that everywhere. While January was very cold in parts of the U.S., globally, Earth saw its fifth-warmest January on record, and much of the western U.S. saw one of its warmest winters on record.

Solar output will continue to decrease slowly in 2026. However, the International Monetary Fund projects strong global economic growth at about 3.3%, suggesting electricity demand will also continue to grow. The International Energy Agency expects global electricity demand to increase by 3.6% per year through at least 2030.

Even though global renewable energy use is growing quickly, it isn’t growing fast enough to meet rising demand, meaning more fossil fuel use in the coming years. More fossil fuels burned means more emissions and more warming, while the ability of the ocean and land to absorb carbon dioxide continues to decrease. As a result, the atmosphere and oceans heat up, increasing the risks of passing tipping points – glaciers disappear, Atlantic Ocean circulation shuts down, permafrost thaws, coral reefs die.

If greenhouse gas emissions continue at a high rate, humanity may look back at 2025 as one the coolest years globally in the rest of our lives.

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

– ref. 2025 was hotter than it should have been – 5 influences and a dirty surprise offer clues to what’s ahead – https://theconversation.com/2025-was-hotter-than-it-should-have-been-5-influences-and-a-dirty-surprise-offer-clues-to-whats-ahead-276605

March 5, 2026

We designed an AI tutor that helps college students reason rather than give them answers

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Saharnaz Babaei-Balderlou, Teaching Assistant Professor of Economics, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse

If prompted, an AI tool can be tailored to help students think through their own reasoning rather than just feed them answers. Issarawat Tattong/iStock/Getty Images

Students using AI to cheat on homework or tests is a source of much discussion. But some scholars argue the greater risk of students using AI is that they will simply not learn.

Approximately 90% of 1,100 U.S. students surveyed at two-year and four-year colleges in 2025 reported using generative AI for everything from drafting assignments to clarifying complex concepts.

But when students use AI as a tutor or study partner, not as an immediate answer generator, does it make it easier or harder for them to learn?

We are economists who tried to answer this question by designing an AI tool using ChatGPT’s custom GPT feature, with the web access of the chatbot disabled.

We named the tool Macro Buddy and trained it to guide some students at one of our undergraduate macroeconomics classes at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, through their reasoning rather than giving them direct answers.

We found in our research, conducted in spring 2025, that students who used Macro Buddy, alongside peer discussion, earned higher exam scores than students who worked alone, without this AI tutor.

An image shows a row of college-aged people sitting at a long desk in a library. — College students are increasingly using AI to help them with their studies.
Maskot/iStock/Getty Images

Meet your new tutor

One of our macroeconomics courses enrolled 140 undergraduate students, mostly in their first or second year of college, divided across four sections.

Students’ course materials, assignments and exams were identical across all four sections. Students were generally not allowed to use AI tools or collaborate with classmates during exams. Students took all tests in person and were not allowed to reference any notes or other materials during the exam.

As a result, exam scores reflected what students understood and could explain on their own – without the help of AI or any other outside source.

After all students took their first exam, we randomly assigned the four class sections to take on a different study format.

We prompted one group of students to work individually, without Macro Buddy; another group of students worked in groups, without Macro Buddy; a third group of students worked individually, with Macro Buddy; and a fourth group of students worked in groups, with Macro Buddy.

We wanted to compare how different study approaches – working alone, working with classmates, using Macro Buddy or combining both – altered how well students did on exams.

Macro Buddy’s skills

We trained Macro Buddy with the help of lecture transcripts, slides and homework questions specifically from this macroeconomics course.

Macro Buddy had internet access turned off, so it relied only on the instructor’s course materials.

Macro Buddy was designed to act like a tutor, not an answer machine. Instead of giving students complete solutions, Macro Buddy asked follow-up questions meant to guide students toward an answer.

For example, if a student asked why lower prices might increase consumers’ spending, Macro Buddy would not offer a quick, full explanation. It might instead ask what happens to people’s purchasing power when prices fall. The student would then have to connect the concepts and explain their reasoning, in their own words, step by step.

This distinction between explaining an idea and receiving a finished answer matters.

An AI tool that simply delivers answers can allow students to skip thinking through a problem. One study found that when college students rely on a chatbot as a crutch, they perform worse when they no longer have access to it. A tool that asks questions requires students to do the work themselves, even while receiving guidance. This is the very process that makes learning stick.

What happened to students’ learning

The one group of students that continued working individually, without AI, served as our control group.

The other three groups changed how they studied: One began working in groups without AI, one worked individually with Macro Buddy, and the last group combined group work with Macro Buddy.

All of the students’ average scores declined when they took their second exam, across all four study groups.

By the third exam, however, differences across sections became clearer.

Students who used both Macro Buddy and group discussion earned the highest average scores. Students who used Macro Buddy alone also scored higher than those who worked alone without Macro Buddy. Students who worked in groups without Macro Buddy showed smaller improvements, when compared to the students in other groups.

The third exam happened several weeks after we introduced the new study formats.

By that point, students in the combined group may have grown more comfortable using Macro Buddy to test their understanding, while also explaining ideas to classmates. Working with peers meant having to articulate reasoning clearly and respond to questions, which can deepen understanding over time.

Why this matters

Some critics of AI worry that students will rely on AI to do the hardest parts of learning for them. This reflects a fear that students may stop practicing the skills that build expertise. Students become experts in their fields while struggling with confusing material, revising explanations and seeing whether they truly understand an idea.

Our experiment suggests erosion of learning when using AI is not inevitable.

We found that when AI is designed as a tutor that asks questions instead of simply giving answers – and when students are also required to explain their reasoning to classmates – the technology can support learning rather than replace it.

Most students today use general-purpose chatbots that are not designed as tutors. They type in a question and receive a response. But our findings suggest that even small design choices, such as building an AI chatbot with guiding questions, can shape how students engage with the material.

Peer discussion also adds something to the learning process that AI cannot provide: social accountability and exposure to alternative reasoning.

Together, these practices encourage students to think through problems more actively.

The evidence from our experiment highlights a practical distinction: AI can be used to replace thinking, or it can be used to support it. The impact may depend less on the technology itself and more on how it is structured and integrated into learning.

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

– ref. We designed an AI tutor that helps college students reason rather than give them answers – https://theconversation.com/we-designed-an-ai-tutor-that-helps-college-students-reason-rather-than-give-them-answers-276584

March 5, 2026

Nearly a third of Pennsylvania gamblers are at risk of problem gambling − but few seek treatment

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Gillian Russell, Assistant Research Professor, Penn State

Pennsylvania legalized online gambling in 2017. Tatiana Maksimova/Moment Collection via Getty Images

Nearly three times as many Pennsylvania adults gamble online today than just a few years ago.

And as online platforms make gambling easier and more convenient, some Pennsylvanians are gambling more often and may be more prone to developing problems.

We are researchers at Penn State’s Criminal Justice Research Center and the University of Kentucky’s College of Social Work who recently published these findings in a report on online gambling in Pennsylvania. The report was produced in partnership with the Pennsylvania Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs.

We surveyed over 3,500 Pennsylvania adults and found that between 2.5% and 6.4% could be classified as problem gamblers.

An additional nearly 30% fell into “at-risk” categories, meaning they show meaningful signs of harm but do not yet meet the threshold for problem gambling.

Here are five of our key findings and why they matter:

1. Most Pennsylvanians still gamble offline, not online – but the distance between the two is shrinking

When Pennsylvania legalized online gambling in 2017, it required an annual assessment on the impacts of the legislation on Pennsylvania residents’ gambling behaviors. The assessment began two years after the first licenses were issued.

In the first two years of the survey, which were used to produce the 2021 and 2022 annual reports, approximately 11% of Pennsylvania adults reported gambling online. That number rose to as high as 30% in the most recent 2025 report, which was released in January 2026.

The 2025 report, which used both online and phone survey methods, identified that between 61% and 74% of Pennsylvania adults had gambled at least once in the past year. These numbers were consistent with previous reports. Depending on the sampling method, between 56% and 69% of adults reported they had gambled offline – for example, playing slot machines at brick-and-mortar casinos or buying lottery tickets at a store. Between 17% and 30% had gambled online.

Lottery games and raffles remain the most popular offline gambling format, while sports betting remains the most popular online gambling format. This finding has been consistent through all five years of the report.

But the line between “online gamblers” and “offline gamblers” is blurry. Among those who had gambled online, more than three-quarters also gambled offline.

We grouped Pennsylvania gamblers into three subgroups and found that about 43% gambled exclusively offline, about 4% exclusively online, and somewhere between 14% to 27% were “mixed-mode” gamblers, meaning they gambled both online and offline.

Thumb shown touching mobile phone with betting apps on its display — The number of online gamblers in Pennsylvania has nearly tripled over the past three years.
AP Photo/Jeff Chiu

2. The more ways people gamble, the more they tend to gamble overall

Those who engaged in mixed-mode gambling participated in nearly twice as many gambling formats as those who gambled only offline or only online.

They also gambled most often: close to once a week on average, compared with about once a month for those who gamble offline only.

Mixed-mode gamblers also spent more time and more money on gambling. People who gambled offline-only or online-only spent a median of about US$20-$40 per month on gambling. Mixed-mode gamblers, meanwhile, spent about $105-$230 per month. Mixed-mode gamblers also had the largest single-day gambling losses.

3. Nearly a third of Pennsylvania gamblers are at risk of problem gambling

This year’s report is the first to estimate how many Pennsylvanians meet criteria for problem gambling in the general population.

Between 2.5% and 6.4% of adults could be classified as current problem gamblers, according to the “problem gambling measure.” This is an evidence-based measure of problem gambling that classifies individuals as recreational, at-risk and problem gamblers.

Nearly 30% fell into “at-risk” gambling categories. They showed meaningful signs of harm but did not yet meet the threshold for problem gambling.

People who engage in mixed-mode gambling are significantly more likely to fall into at-risk and problem gambling categories than people who gamble offline only or online only.

4. Most people with gambling problems do not seek help

Despite the size of the at-risk and problem gambling groups, very few people seek treatment or other assistance.

Only about 1.5% of Pennsylvanians said they felt they had a gambling problem in the past year. Just 0.2% said they had sought help.

Even among those who met criteria for problem gambling, only about 6% reported getting help.

Some people did reach out proactively for others. About 0.4% of residents said they had contacted the 1-800-GAMBLER helpline because of someone else’s gambling.

This gap between harm and help-seeking is not unique to Pennsylvania. But it matters more as gambling becomes easier, faster and more continuous, and as people are more exposed to gambling content through social media and streaming platforms.

5. Young men are particularly vulnerable

Pennsylvania’s experience with gambling mirrors what public health research has long shown with alcohol, tobacco and more recently cannabis: When a behavior becomes more accessible and easier to repeat, overall use rises and harm concentrates among a smaller, more vulnerable group.

Features of online gambling – such as ease of access and acceptance of online payment methods, including cryptocurrencies – are particularly appealing to younger adults, many of whom have shown declining interest in traditional forms of gambling, such as casinos or lotteries. Online platforms offer them the opportunity to gamble on their phones, at all hours, with rapid feedback and minimal barriers to entry. This matters because younger people, especially young men, are disproportionately vulnerable to different types of addictive behaviors, including misuse of alcohol and illicit substances.

For most Pennsylvanians, gambling remains a casual pastime. But as with drinking or substance use, increased availability expands both experimentation and the number of people who progress to harmful levels of engagement. As the online gambling market grows, the data suggests that entertainment and harm may be rising together, following a pattern that public health has seen before with alcohol and cannabis.

Read more of our stories about Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, or sign up for our Philadelphia newsletter on Substack.

Gillian Russell receives funding from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

Glenn Sterner receives funding from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

– ref. Nearly a third of Pennsylvania gamblers are at risk of problem gambling − but few seek treatment – https://theconversation.com/nearly-a-third-of-pennsylvania-gamblers-are-at-risk-of-problem-gambling-but-few-seek-treatment-272240

March 5, 2026

Women and wealth: what stands in their way and how to overcome it

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Bomikazi Zeka, Associate Professor in Finance, University of Canberra

You’ve probably heard the saying, “The rich become richer, while the poor become poorer”. It’s about how uneven financial progress can be.

One of the reasons behind financial inequality is the gender pay gap, but the wealth gap is even more revealing. It explains why disparities persist between the rich and the poor. Wealth – your assets, savings, property and retirement provisions – is the true measure of long-term financial security.

Research shows that wealth gaps aren’t created by gender alone. Aspects like race, class, education, disability, age and nationality also influence the distribution of wealth. When these aspects overlap, they create forms of exclusion or privilege that become more powerful over time.

For example, women who come from single parent homes or low-income neighbourhoods are at a disadvantage because this environment can negatively influence their job opportunities, career progression and financial independence. In contrast, women from wealthier families tend to have higher education levels, access to professional networks, better-paid jobs and more money left over for investments.

As a result, some women begin their wealth-building journey on higher ground before they even enter the labour market. Others have obstacles they first need to overcome.

Because of this, we know that inequality doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Our research explored why the income women earn now is not indicative of the ability to build wealth.

We explored the systems that keep people marginalised and how they overcome them. We identify three main things that set women back financially:

career interruptions
restricted access to capital
social norms.

The good news is that financial literacy can create opportunities for women to shift their financial direction, even if inequality has been piling up for years. Financial literacy is the ability to understand and manage money confidently. We recommend ways it can be improved.

Our analysis shows that five benefits flow from women becoming more financially literate. These are:

improved savings habits
increased confidence in investing
better debt management
the ability to build wealth across generations
improved retirement outcomes.

The barriers

Women face a number of barriers to achieving financial stability.

Career interruptions: Women are more responsible than men for childcare, caring for ageing parents and housekeeping. These unpaid responsibilities make it harder to save for the future.

Restricted access to capital: Because of caregiving responsibilities, many women don’t qualify for access to credit, loans or property ownership.

Social norms: Men are often seen as the financial decision-makers, leaving women out of conversations about long-term planning, investing and asset-building.

Financial systems reward those with a good financial head start and penalise those who begin with fewer resources. When all these factors come together, the result is a gender wealth gap that spans generations.

Solutions

Our research set out to understand how gender inequality affects women’s ability to build wealth and whether financial literacy makes a difference. We found that economic and social barriers like gendered occupations and caregiving pressures matter in building wealth. We also found that financial literacy can help women feel more confident about saving, investing and planning for their future.

Savings habits: Financially literate women save actively. They save before spending, instead of saving after spending. This reduces the temptation to spend impulsively. With good savings habits, you no longer rely on willpower to save: the system does the work for you. One practical way to do this is to automate transfers to a savings account the day you’re paid. Even small amounts grow over time.

Investment confidence: Research shows that women are often more risk-averse. Not because they’re inherently cautious, but because they lack confidence or have been excluded from financial conversations. Financial education changes that. Some women avoid investing because it feels complicated. When someone doesn’t understand how investing works, it’s normal to feel unsure or be afraid of making mistakes.

Financial education teaches basic concepts like how money grows over time and the tools necessary to make financial decisions. The more you understand something, the less scary it feels, and the more confident you become.

Debt becomes more manageable: Women with strong financial literacy take on less expensive debt, avoid predatory lending, and maintain better credit health. Financially literate women are more likely to borrow wisely. They compare interest rates before choosing a loan, avoid high-interest options like cash advances or instant loans, and read the details carefully before signing any contract. Financial understanding helps women recognise danger signs, ask the right questions, reject unfair offers, and choose better financial options.

Wealth-building becomes intergenerational: Financially literate women pass this knowledge on to their children. As primary caregivers, women are in a good position to do this. By teaching their children how to manage money, they help them develop essential skills early, such as saving, budgeting, and making thoughtful spending decisions. These lessons not only promote responsible financial habits but also give children the confidence to handle money matters independently. Over time, this guidance lays a strong foundation for lasting family wealth.

Retirement outcomes improve: Women live longer than men but retire with less money. Financial literacy helps women plan early and more effectively. They can take control of their financial future rather than relying on others. Strong financial skills help women achieve independence, reduce stress about the future, and enjoy a more secure and comfortable retirement.

The way forward

For financial literacy to reduce the gender wealth gap, it needs to be widely accessible and supported at multiple levels, through government policies, workplaces, schools, families and everyday conversations.

Financial literacy isn’t just about knowing budgeting tips or being able to understand compound interest. It’s about giving women the knowledge, confidence and skills to make financial decisions.

When women can ask financial questions with confidence, negotiate salaries, invest in assets and teach their children about money, their power isn’t just personal, it changes society.

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

– ref. Women and wealth: what stands in their way and how to overcome it – https://theconversation.com/women-and-wealth-what-stands-in-their-way-and-how-to-overcome-it-277379

March 5, 2026

Women farmers in South Africa pay the cost of broken irrigation systems – the story of one cooperative

Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Elizabeth Hull, Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology, SOAS, University of London

The South African government makes a great deal of the fact that it supports women’s empowerment in agriculture.

But does it?

As an anthropologist, I’ve been engaged in long-term ethnographic research in KwaZulu-Natal since 2007, focusing mostly on rural food systems and food-based livelihoods and before that on health care.

We conducted research into the Isibonelo Cooperative, a small-scale women-led farming cooperative in KwaZulu-Natal. We found that weak governance and old infrastructure had led to women’s dispossession from the land they had farmed for decades.

This isn’t happening through formal dispossession, but because failing irrigation infrastructure is making farming impossible. Old and damaged equipment, high operating costs, and institutional barriers interact to limit the viability of smallholder farming on South Africa’s smallholder irrigation schemes.

The inability of the women to farm has significantly affected their wellbeing, and that of their families.

Women make a substantial contribution to smallholder farming in South Africa. They have the skills and determination to farm. But they depend on adequate water infrastructure and functioning institutional arrangements to make it happen.

The collapse of farming in Makhathini

The Isibonelo Cooperative is a small-scale women-led farming cooperative in KwaZulu-Natal. It belongs to the Makhathini Irrigation Scheme, situated in the north of the province near the borders of Eswatini and Mozambique.

Cooperatives have long been promoted in South African policy as democratic, entrepreneurial entities that facilitate inclusion of women and youth. In practice, they are often fragile, state-dependent institutions that manage resource sharing in precarious circumstances.

We initially chose Isibonelo for our research due to its long-term success at growing food and supporting local families and markets. Until recently, it was successful compared to many cooperatives.

The Makhathini Irrigation Scheme was established in the 1970s by the then apartheid government. The government forcibly resettled local residents to make way for the scheme and in collaboration with chiefs, allocated newly formed 10ha plots to male farmers. Women were excluded from the process.

A group of women organised themselves and successfully applied for a shared plot, which they subdivided into individual plots or “gardens” of 0.2 hectares each. Some of the women were local residents while others were new arrivals who had been forcibly expelled from their homes on white-owned farmland as part of a notorious process of mass evictions carried out by the apartheid regime.

The women continued to grow food into the democratic period after 1994. And its success attracted attention.

Between 2011 and 2018, my research collaborator, Khulekani Dlamini, and I conducted ethnographic research with the Isibonelo Cooperative. It was successfully producing food for families and regional markets. It operated effectively under modest conditions, providing its members with a structure for productive activity, household improvement, and local sharing of labour and resources. But in 2018, farming activity ceased due to broken pipes. Despite repeated efforts by members to raise the issue with authorities, water supply to the gardens has not been restored.

As a result, the cooperative’s agricultural operations have halted almost entirely.

A wider problem

The problem is far wider than this scheme alone. In 2007, over a third of South Africa’s 317 smallholder irrigation schemes were inactive. Recent studies suggest that the revitalisation of schemes has been sporadic, and they remain inhibited by structural problems. These include market access, access to credit, physical infrastructure and governance of the schemes. Beyond Makhathini, farmers have abandoned plots due to difficulties accessing water.

Yet the absence of comprehensive recent data inhibits a clear understanding of the scale of the problem.

In some cases, a focus on expensive technology upgrades has necessitated high yielding commercial production to ensure financial viability. In turn this has led to the unintended demise of smallholder projects. Across Makhathini and other schemes, cost recovery is low as farmers struggle to pay for operational bills in a context of intermittent and unreliable water.

Impact on local economies and food security

The schemes are a vital part of the local economy. Before farming was interrupted, the cooperative was more than a means of survival. It enabled women to improve their homes, feed their families, engage in urban markets, and maintain some economic independence in a region with high unemployment and limited formal opportunities.

To understand what had changed, Dlamini returned to Makhathini between 2022 and 2025 to interview 11 cooperative members, their relatives and neighbouring farmers.

They reported that the collapse of farming has led to loss of income, food insecurity, household debt, mental health challenges, and a decline in local cooperation including food sharing and stokvel (informal saving club) participation.

Rising prices have compounded these problems. One member told us:

Today we are buying everything that we used to grow for ourselves… We never bought vegetables (previously), but today we are buying from other farmers and in shops at high prices.

Home extensions initiated by farming income stood incomplete. One member had moved away from the area, troubled by poultry theft and no longer able to farm. Some found work cutting grass as part of government employment schemes or selling clothes door-to-door. Others relied on borrowing from local store owners. One member stated her challenges candidly:

I am struggling to buy enough food for my grandchildren and I am always in debt.

The group has made repeated efforts to raise the issue with relevant authorities. But water supply to the gardens has not been restored. The lack of clear accountability for infrastructure maintenance, coupled with a fragmented governance environment involving traditional leaders, municipal authorities and parastatal entities, contributes to inaction.

Today the gardens are overgrown. The women are still waiting for water. The impact extends to future generations as opportunities to pass valuable farming knowledge and skills to younger family members dwindles.

What needs to happen next?

Political attention focuses on the speed and scale of land transfers as part of the government’s flagship land reform programme. But apartheid era irrigation schemes also deserve much greater attention. Targeted and appropriate support could enable recovery.

For this to be sustainable, the focus must extend beyond technology fixes to address deeper problems in the governance of the schemes. These must tackle how top-down management has impeded the potentiality of smallholders.

There is an urgent need for irrigation infrastructure to be repaired and restored on plots where smallholders have the potential to return to farming. Rainwater is unreliable and other water sources are far too limited to grow food without irrigation.

Local governance structures must be better coordinated by clarifying the role of scheme management bodies, municipal officials, traditional leaders, and provincial departments. Farmers will then better understand who is responsible for water, maintenance and dispute resolution.

The voice of farmers, especially women and cooperatives, must be strengthened through improved local liaison structures and strengthening procedures for maintenance requests.

Training and support must be developed that is tailored to both group-level and individual needs, recognising that individual production affects group-level viability and developing finance models that accommodate this uncertainty.

Khulekani T. Dlamini was a co-researcher and contributed to this article.

Elizabeth Hull received funding from The London Centre for Integrative Research on Agriculture and Health (LCIRAH).

– ref. Women farmers in South Africa pay the cost of broken irrigation systems – the story of one cooperative – https://theconversation.com/women-farmers-in-south-africa-pay-the-cost-of-broken-irrigation-systems-the-story-of-one-cooperative-271855

March 5, 2026

Billions of dollars, decades of progress spent eliminating devastating diseases may be lost with undoing of USAID

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Sarah Greene, Instructor in Pediatrics and Infectious Diseases, Washington University in St. Louis

The parasites that cause river blindness and elephantitis have been afflicting people for centuries. Alexis Huguet/AFP via Getty Images

In Greek mythology, King Sisyphus was condemned by the god Zeus to spend eternity rolling a boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down, having to start anew every day.

His story captured our attention as researchers studying neglected tropical diseases – a collection of conditions that primarily affect poor people in low-income countries. These diseases do not kill people at the rates of more well-known infections, such as HIV, malaria and tuberculosis, but cause significant pain and disability. As chronic infections that can cause disfigurement, they are also stigmatizing and economically devastating.

For over 50 years, researchers, clinicians and policymakers in the global health community have worked to eliminate infections such as onchocerciasis (also known as river blindness) and lymphatic filariasis (elephantiasis). They’ve done this through controlling black flies and mosquitoes, the vectors that spread these diseases, as well as huge campaigns to distribute antiparasitic medications to entire communities in areas where these diseases are endemic.

Unfortunately, the Trump administration’s sudden defunding of the U.S. Agency for International Development in 2025 has created a real-life Sisyphean struggle for countries working to eliminate neglected tropical diseases. Withdrawal of USAID support is abandoning the boulder of disease elimination partway up the mountain. When countries are unable to provide treatment, the parasites that cause these diseases will spread to infect more people.

Inevitably, the boulder will roll backward, undoing decades and billions of dollars of work.

Ancient foes

Lymphatic filariasis and onchocerciasis are centuries-old afflictions. An Egyptian statue of Pharaoh Mentuhotep II from 2000 B.C. is suggestive of lymphatic filariasis.

Filarial worms can live for years within humans, causing a variety of different problems. In lymphatic filariasis, adult worms live in the lymphatic vessels, a network running throughout the body that returns fluid back to the circulatory system. This disruption of the lymphatic system can cause the extremities or the scrotum to swell tremendously.

In onchocerciasis, adult worms live in small nodules under the skin. The larval forms of these parasites migrate through the skin and can invade the eyes, causing chronic inflammation that can lead to blindness.

Close-up of a person's legs, one significantly swollen in comparison — Lymphatic filariasis, also known as elephantitis, causes significant disfigurement and disability.
Noah Seelam/AFP via Getty Images

In recognition of the significant suffering these diseases cause, the World Health Organization coordinated global efforts to eliminate them: onchocerciasis starting in 1974 and lymphatic filariasis in 2000.

Since then, these public health campaigns have distributed hundreds of millions of doses of treatment for lymphatic filariasis and onchocerciasis. Medications vary somewhat by location, but they often involve the use of the Nobel Prize-winning drug ivermectin. Merck, the manufacturer of ivermectin, provides the drug for free to each country’s disease control program. Similarly, the companies GlaxoSmithKline and Eisai respectively donate the antiparasitic medications albendazole and diethylcarbamazine citrate for these campaigns.

Together, these programs have dramatically reduced the numbers of people exposed to these infections. For lymphatic filariasis, as of 2024, 871 million people no longer need preventive medications, and 21 countries have eliminated this infection. Five countries have eliminated onchocerciasis.

A job partially completed

Despite significant progress in controlling these infections, it remains logistically challenging to map endemic areas, deliver medications, test for ongoing infection and decide which areas have active outbreaks.

While each country runs its own medication delivery programs, these efforts have been supported by the World Health Organization as well as USAID or USAID-funded nongovernmental organizations. The Trump administration’s funding cuts to USAID halted over 40 drug distribution drives in 2025, affecting over 140 million people. Importantly, the U.S was the largest financial contributor to the World Health Organization until it withdrew its membership in January 2026.

The end of USAID has caused famine and disease outbreaks.

We and others working on eliminating these neglected diseases are concerned that the rapid decrease in funding for these programs will destabilize efforts to treat infections. Stopping medication delivery now can allow these infections to spread unchecked and roll back decades of progress. Donated medications can be effective only if they are delivered to those who need them. This might mean that these campaigns will have to be combined with other public health efforts already underway, or that each country reallocates resources toward these efforts.

If the world turns its back on eliminating these diseases, millions of people will be hurt by the boulder rolling back down.

Sarah Greene has received funding from the NIH.

Philip Budge has received funding from the Gates Foundation and the NIH. He is a member of the Infectious Diseases Society of America and the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

– ref. Billions of dollars, decades of progress spent eliminating devastating diseases may be lost with undoing of USAID – https://theconversation.com/billions-of-dollars-decades-of-progress-spent-eliminating-devastating-diseases-may-be-lost-with-undoing-of-usaid-266195