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May 6, 2026

How to build cities for wildlife, not just people – new research

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Helen A. L. Currie, Research Fellow and Centre Manager, Centre for Blue Governance, University of Portsmouth

The Avon River in Christchurch, New Zealand runs through the city’s botanic gardens Adele Heidenreich/Shutterstock

In central Seoul, South Korea, a motorway once covered a buried urban stream. Today, that same stretch has been uncovered – a process known as daylighting – and this river is home to plants, fish and insects. This flowing water cools the city in summer and attracts tens of thousands of people every day. What used to be concrete now boosts biodiversity, the local economy and community wellbeing.

Similar transformations are unfolding elsewhere.

In Christchurch, New Zealand, river habitats and wetlands were rebuilt after a major earthquake in 2011, guided in part by Māori knowledge of waterways and floodplains. In Vancouver, Canada, nature-based stormwater systems have been integrated into urban design through long-term collaboration with local First Nations.

Across the world, urban planning projects are beginning to take a different approach. One that designs with living freshwater systems, rather than trying to control and contain them.

In a new study, our international team of freshwater scientists and planning experts highlights that, while our towns and cities contain some of the world’s most degraded rivers, wetlands and ponds, they also provide huge opportunities for protecting and restoring freshwater wildlife.

Cities and towns have historically been designed with people in mind. Planning systems prioritise housing, transport, economic growth and flood defence – often treating rivers and streams as infrastructure rather than living ecosystems.

This hasn’t always been the case. Ancient civilisations, from the Indus to the Maya, built settlements around water. They worked with floods, wetlands and seasonal flows in ways that supported both people and nature. With the dawn of industrialisation and modern planning, floodplains were built on, rivers were straightened, streams buried and waterways increasingly engineered to move water through cities rather than support wildlife.

The consequences are stark and hard to ignore: degraded urban waterways, declining freshwater species, and whole cities are more vulnerable to climate-driven floods, heatwaves and water scarcity, contributing to a global collapse in freshwater biodiversity.

Our rivers, lakes, ponds and wetlands occupy only a tiny fraction of the planet while supporting roughly a third of all vertebrate species. Importantly, freshwater acts as an ecological life-support system, sustaining a range of species – including us.

This is why the latest figures are so alarming. Freshwater vertebrate animals such as salmon and eel populations have fallen by 85% over the last 50 years. This is one of the steepest collapses of any group of species on Earth. Urban waterways sit at the heart of this rapid decline.

Movement to deal with this crisis has started. Countries have signed up to ambitious global agreements, pledging to halt and reverse biodiversity loss.

But translating these promises into real change remains a major challenge.

Urban planners as allies

Urban planners shape the very environments where freshwater pressures are most intense – towns and cities. Every day, they make decisions affecting how land is zoned, how stormwater is managed, where green space goes, what buffers are protected, and how urban form evolves. Their actions ripple through entire catchments.

Yet most urban planners often aren’t supported or equipped with the ecological knowledge needed to incorporate freshwater biodiversity into daily practice.

Urban planners need the tools, training and support to recognise freshwater ecosystems as valuable living systems that underpin city resilience, human health and everyday wellbeing – rather than obstacles to be overcome.

In cities such as Breda in the Netherlands, Los Angeles in the US and Nanjing in China, this different way of thinking about freshwater is taking hold. And planners aren’t working alone.

Dutch river, birds flying, trees alongside river paths — Canals run through the city of Breda in the Netherlands.
Lea Rae/Shutterstock

Local residents and Indigenous communities, ecologists, engineers and even schools are often involved from the outset. Together, they bring diverse knowledge of the local context and can build a shared environmental stewardship. Early collaboration helps ensure freshwater biodiversity isn’t an afterthought and results in lasting care for rivers, ponds and wetlands.

Education matters too.

To foster this transition, silos between planning, ecology and engineering can be broken down. Land-use decisions can then be made with a clearer understanding of how water behaves across an entire catchment and how that shapes freshwater habitats.

Just as important is how knowledge flows. Freshwater biodiversity research doesn’t always reach the people making day-to-day planning decisions, or those designing and building projects on the ground. When planners, scientists and delivery teams have access to shared tools, open data or simple design guidance, nature-positive ideas are far more likely to make it off the page and into our cities.

Clear rules are also useful. Biodiversity targets only make a difference if they are backed up by practical local standards and the resources to implement them. For example, we need standards on how to protect riverbanks, restore floodplains or design stormwater systems that work with nature, rather than against it. Without that clarity – and the training and resources to support it – planners are often left trying to balance competing demands on their own.

There are still big gaps in what we know. How much space do urban rivers really need, and how does this vary from place to place? Which nature-based solutions work best across different landscapes? Urban planners can help answer these questions by learning from what works and using that knowledge to improve outcomes for freshwater biodiversity.

Urban planners – often working behind the scenes within local and devolved governments – are at the forefront of this transformation. They can embed freshwater biodiversity into the hearts of our cities.

However, planners cannot do this alone. Freshwater scientists, policymakers, river restoration specialists, engineers, social scientists and economists can work with planners. Universities and professional bodies can rethink how planning is taught. Governments can recognise planners as agents of ecological recovery, not just arbiters of urban growth.

Cities could become hubs for freshwater restoration and recovery, rather than hotspots of decline. They can become places where rivers, wetlands and people thrive together – with benefits that flow far beyond city boundaries.

Helen A. L. Currie receives funding from UKRI Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council Noise Network +.

Irene Gregory-Eaves receives funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

Steven J Cooke receives funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. He is appointed as Canadian Commissioner for the Great Lakes Fishery Commission.

– ref. How to build cities for wildlife, not just people – new research – https://theconversation.com/how-to-build-cities-for-wildlife-not-just-people-new-research-280388

May 6, 2026

‘No fear of roaring lions’: Iran has a long history of standing firm against outside aggressors

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Amin Saikal, Emeritus Professor of Middle Eastern Studies, Australian National University; The University of Western Australia; Victoria University

US President Donald Trump’s threats against Iran since the war began have targeted not just the country’s military capabilities, but its entire civilisation.

In recent days, he has threatened that Iran would be “blown off the face of the earth” if it attacks US ships trying to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

He’s previously pledged to send Iran back to the “Stone Age”, and warned that “a whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again”.

These statements show not only extreme belligerence, but Trump’s complete lack of understanding of Iran’s long, resilient culture and civilisation and the fortitude of its people.

Iran has been subjected to much internal strife and foreign power intervention, but it has never been colonised or subjugated. At every difficult moment in their history, Iranians have fought to preserve what is theirs.

Persian influence in ancient Greece and Rome

Since the Greco-Persian Wars (499 BCE), Persia has served as the West’s ultimate “other”: a dark and despotic oriental villain menacing an enlightened West.

This is despite Persia’s return of exiled Jews in Babylon to Jerusalem to rebuild their temple in 538 BCE, and its tolerance of diversity in the world’s first truly multicultural empire.

The victories of a coalition of Greek city-states over the Achaemenid Persian imperial forces at Salamis (480 BCE) and Marathon (490 BCE) are considered pivotal moments in the history of Western civilisation.

Yet this was just a minor setback for Persia. In fact, Persia continued to play a decisive role in Greek affairs. Persian gold helped Sparta defeat Athens in the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE), and Persia was often the most important mediator in Greek affairs.

The Parthian and Sasanian Empires that followed the Achaemenids in Persia then challenged the Romans.

In 260 CE, Sasanian Emperor Shapur I captured Roman Emperor Valerian in battle – an unprecedented act. A century later, Shapur II’s army fought off an attempted invasion by Emperor Julian, killing him in the process.

Western triumphal narratives tend to forget that Persia repeatedly humbled the greatest Western empire in ancient times.

The triumph of Shapur I over the Roman emperors Valerian and Philip the Arab in Naqsh-e Rostam, Iran.
Wikimedia Commons

Surviving invasions from the east and west

Alexander the Great conquered Persia militarily. However, he embraced Persian culture, which outlasted Greek influence in the region.

The advent of Islam did not extinguish Persia’s civilisation or resilience, either. Islamic leaders preserved Persian language and culture, kept pre-Islamic festivals such as Nowruz (the 3,000-year-old Persian New Year), and adapted Zoroastrian concepts into Shiite Islam’s emphasis on resistance to tyranny.

The Mongols’ multiple invasions (between 1219 and 1258) devastated Iran, yet core elements of Persian civilisation survived. Persian power flourished again, especially under the Safavid dynasty (1501–1736).

During the Qajar dynasty (1789–1925), Persia was squeezed by the Anglo-Russian rivalry of Great Game era, but was not subdued.

During the second world war, Iran was occupied by the British in the oil-rich south and the Soviets in the north. However, both powers pledged, along with the United States, to respect Iran’s sovereignty and withdraw at the end of the war.

A turbulent 20th century

This episode rejuvenated Iranian nationalism and prompted a movement to free Iran from traditional major power rivalries and gain control over its own resources. This especially pertained to oil, since the British had controlled Iran’s oil reserves through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) from the early 19th century.

In 1951, a long-time nationalist-reformist, Mohammad Mossadegh, was elected prime minister and promptly nationalised the AIOC, sparking a major dispute with London.

Mossadegh also sought to limit the power of Iran’s monarchy in favour of democratic reforms, causing a conflict with the young, pro-Western Mohammad Reza Shah, who was still the country’s reigning monarch.

The shah was forced into exile in 1953, only to be returned to the throne days later when Mossadegh was overthrown in a covert operation by the US Central Intelligence Agency, with MI6’s help. (Fifty years later, US President Barack Obama acknowledged the CIA’s role in the coup.)

Mohammad Mossadegh during his court martial after being overthrown.
Wikimedia Commons

The US backed the shah as a pillar of American hegemony in the Middle East. In return, US oil companies received a 40% share of Iran’s oil industry.

Yet the shah was able to transform his dependent relationship with the US into one of interdependence. Iran became a pivotal player in the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and in the region.

In the wake of the 1973–74 energy crisis, then-US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger warned the United States would react with force if it was “strangled” by a cut in oil deliveries – a veiled message to the shah.

The Iranian revolution of 1978–79 then toppled the shah and enabled his chief religious and political opponent, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, to assume power. Khomeini declared Iran an Islamic Republic with an anti-US and anti-Israel posture.

He essentially based his rule in the historic pride Iranians held as a people in charge of their destiny.

Khomeini and his successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei sought to entrench Shia political Islamism as the ideological guide and legitimate foundation of the state. But they sought to blend this with the Iranians’ sense of civilisational, cultural and nationalist identity, especially in the face of outside aggression.

‘Iran is my land’

The celebrated Persian-speaking poet Abul-Qasim Ferdowsi (940–1020 CE) once said:

Iran is my land, and the whole world is under my feet. The people of this land are the possessors of virtue, art and bravery. They have no fear of roaring lions.

As Iran’s standoff with the US continues, it appears the regime is prepared for the long haul against yet another military foe.

But there is no military solution to the conflict. Diplomacy within the framework of mutual respect and trust is the best way forward. Otherwise, the region and the world may remain captive to an energy and economic crisis that could have been resolved through negotiations, rather than war.

As for the future of the Islamic government, that needs to be determined by the Iranian people.

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. ‘No fear of roaring lions’: Iran has a long history of standing firm against outside aggressors – https://theconversation.com/no-fear-of-roaring-lions-iran-has-a-long-history-of-standing-firm-against-outside-aggressors-281645

May 5, 2026

From ancient goddesses to modern peace activists − Mother’s Day celebrates women’s political power

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Marie-Claire Beaulieu, Associate Professor of Classical Studies, Tufts University

Mothers are often honored and gifted flowers on Mother’s Day, but their broader influence in the political sphere is not celebrated enough. www.direct2florist.co.uk/ via Flickr, CC BY

On Mother’s Day, Americans go all out with gift-buying and dining out to honor the women in their lives. In fact, according to some estimates, consumer spending in the United States on this day is around US$34 billion.

This consumerist emphasis has long been criticized – including by the holiday’s founder, Anna Jarvis. She started the celebration in 1908 to honor her own mother, Civil War-era activist Ann Jarvis, who founded Mothers’ Day Work Clubs in her native West Virginia.

These clubs were associations of local mothers who came together for collective workdays during which they provided education and assistance to families. When the Civil War broke out, the clubs pivoted to promoting peace and reconciliation and offered food and medical assistance to both Union and Confederate soldiers. These mothers viewed peace as the only way to preserve their communities and to ensure the health and well-being of all.

As a scholar of Greek and Roman antiquity, I’m aware that honoring motherhood goes far beyond women’s work in the domestic sphere. In fact, for millennia the role of mothers has included not only childbearing and education but also protection over the community as a whole, especially through advocacy for peace.

Texts dating as far back as the fifth century B.C.E. show mothers promoting peace. In Aristophanes’ comedy “Lysistrata,” the women of Athens unite to end the Peloponnesian War. The leader of the peace movement argues that women suffer twice as much as men in war – bearing children only to send them off to die as soldiers.

Mothers and ancient goddesses

In the ancient world, motherhood itself guaranteed a woman’s power within her family and community, especially if the baby was male. The birth provided an heir for the family and ensured that the woman was not going to be rejected by her husband for childlessness.

In fact, as classical scholar Florencia Foxley explains, motherhood elevated a woman to the rank of protectress and sustainer of the city because she provided a new generation of citizens and soldiers for the community.

A woman in a brown dress stands center stage, while several male actors look up at her. Greek-style buildings form the backdrop. — In ‘Lysistrata,’ the women of Athens unite to end the Peloponnesian War – depicted in the 2008 Macmillan Films staging directed by James Thomas.
Wisdomforlife via Wikimedia Commons

The birth of children also gave the woman unofficial power and influence over the political decisions made by her husband and sons, as dramatized in the play “Lysistrata.”

The cult of the Greek goddess Hera, the wife of Zeus and queen of the gods, reflects this dual function of mothers as protectors of children and of communities in the ancient world.

Hera was worshipped in wedding rituals, and she presided over childbirth in the figure of her daughter Eileithyia, the midwife goddess. Beyond the domestic sphere, Hera was also the divine protectress of the ancient city of Argos.

An old coin with a woman in the center with two children on either side and one on her shoulder. — Ancient Roman bronze coin with the goddess Juno Lucina, protectress of motherhood, with three children.
American Numismatic Society

In Rome, under her Latin name Juno, she was worshipped with the epithets of Pronuba as the goddess of marriage, and Lucina as the goddess of childbirth. Nonetheless, Juno was also an integral part of the Capitoline Triad with Jupiter and Minerva, the trio of deities that protected the city. In fact, Juno was credited with saving Rome from an attack by the Gauls in 390 B.C.E. when her sacred geese warned the Romans of the approaching enemy army.

Contemporary practices

The tremendous power of women as peace advocates and protectors of communities continues today.

As journalist Margot Adler has shown, some neo-pagans believe that ancient societies that worshipped mother deities were more peaceful than cultures with patriarchal religious traditions. Today, these worshippers seek to revive the cults of mother deities in order to return to this harmonious way of life. They invoke mother goddesses to promote the political power of women, demilitarization and harmony with the natural world, as well as world peace.

A green, ceramic, seated female figurine sits beneath a tree, with a metal wine glass and a bottle containing a red liquid placed beside her. — Mother Earth figurine on a modern Wiccan altar.
Amber Avalona, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

Similarly, “Lysistrata” continues to inspire women’s advocacy for peace worldwide. In 2003, for instance, peace activists Kathryn Blume and Sharron Bower advocated against the Iraq War by coordinating over 1,000 readings of “Lysistrata” worldwide in a single day.

Admittedly, the play presents female characters in ridiculous ways and, as classical scholar Mary Beard has pointed out, the ending of the play makes it clear that women’s political power is only a fantasy. Yet the play acknowledges that women suffered disproportionately from the consequences of war in ancient times, just as they do today.

The play also acknowledges, albeit in a humorous way, that women wield tremendous power for peace, which is borne out today as well. In fact, according to a study by King’s College London, “states where women hold more political power are less likely to go to war and less likely to commit human rights abuses.”

A painting of Our Lady of Guadalupe shows her with hands folded in prayer, wearing a green cloak and surrounded by a golden halo. — The Virgin of Guadalupe.
Courtesy of the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, inventory number 2008.361

In a different context, Catholics around the world honor Mary as a mother figure associated with peace and justice. One of her manifestations, Our Lady of Guadalupe, is a popular figure of veneration in Mexico and Latin America, particularly among people of Indigenous descent.

Our Lady of Guadalupe is represented pregnant and venerated by devotees seeking protection and peace. Pope John Paul II, in a public prayer to Our Lady of Guadalupe in 1979, asked her to “grant peace, justice and prosperity to our peoples.”

The way Mother’s Day is celebrated in the U.S. today conspicuously omits the tremendous power that women wield beyond the domestic sphere. While women’s work raising children and supporting their families is important and should always be honored, Anna Jarvis envisioned this day as more expansive – a day that honors women as political and moral actors, especially as agents of peace globally.

Marie-Claire Beaulieu 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. From ancient goddesses to modern peace activists − Mother’s Day celebrates women’s political power – https://theconversation.com/from-ancient-goddesses-to-modern-peace-activists-mothers-day-celebrates-womens-political-power-275805

May 5, 2026

In the age of AI, human creative output is becoming a luxury

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Nathan Murray, Assistant Professor, Department of English and History, Algoma University

Imagine two identical spoons. One is hand-wrought from silver by a skilled metalworker. The other, a base-metal facsimile, was mass-produced by a machine. Which would you value more? Most of us would say the handmade spoon.

In 1899, more than a century ago, American economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen used this very example to explain how we assign value, or his theory of conspicuous consumption, in which he contended that bourgeois consumption was driven primarily by a desire to display wealth to others. Even if these spoons were indistinguishable, explained Veblen, the hand-made spoon, once identified, would be more highly valued.

This is in part because “the hand-wrought spoon gratifies our taste, our sense of the beautiful, while that made by machinery out of base metal has no useful office beyond a brute efficiency.” But for Veblen there is another factor more important than any aesthetic judgment: costliness.

The hand-wrought spoon is preferred above all, Veblen suggested, because it is a means of demonstrating wealth. However, as we enter a world in which almost anything, including art, writing and music, can be machine-wrought, it seems that Veblen may have misjudged his spoons.

We don’t value human creations solely for their beauty or their price tag. We also value them because they embody deliberate labour and expertise.

AI-generated writing is judged differently

Our own research has shown that even highly trained writing educators cannot reliably distinguish between AI-generated and human-written essays. In fact, one study has shown that general audiences may actually prefer blander AI-generated poetry over more difficult, human-written poetry.

But while public taste may favour the simple and formulaic, the disclosure of artificial authorship is enough to make most people recoil.

In a recent study involving a series of experiments, participants were asked to compare pieces of AI-generated creative writing, including poetry and fiction. In each case, they were told that some passages were human-written and some were AI-generated. Across 16 experiments, respondents consistently devalued the writing labelled as AI-generated.

The authors of the study call this the “AI disclosure penalty.” It is possible to conclude from the study that audiences unfairly judge AI-generated content, but we disagree. This bias towards human creation is inherent to our relationship with art. When people believe something was made by a machine, they like it less.

Some argue that AI can democratize creativity by lowering barriers to production and enabling more people to participate in cultural expression. But the evidence suggests that when authorship becomes effortless, perceived value declines.

The importance of effort and experience

Art costs something. Both John Milton and James Joyce believed that their writing had cost them their eyesight. John Keats believed that the emotional exertion of writing poetry would worsen his tuberculosis and cost him his life. They kept writing anyway. We resent the machine because its creations cost it nothing.

When an algorithm generates a story about heartbreak or an essay on human struggle, it is trading in stolen emotions. AI has never felt pain, suffered a loss or wrestled with the frustration of a blank page, so its output, no matter how technically smooth, feels fundamentally deceptive.

People hate the idea of being moved by a parlour trick. In addition, many of us have a deep, instinctive revulsion to the industrialization of our inner lives. As Joanna Maciejewska observed, “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.”

We happily accept machines stamping out our car parts and toasters because efficiency is the goal, but applying that same cold logic to human expression strips away the vulnerability, risk and stakes that make art mean anything in the first place.

This becomes more consequential as AI-generated content floods the digital media landscape.

Why human work is becoming more valuable

Our media ecosystem has evolved so that paying directly for much of the content we consume is optional. In an era of streaming music, television and film, we rarely own the product we consume, and creators receive pennies on the dollar compared to previous economic models.

To make matters worse, media companies are increasingly pushing AI-generated content in the form of tens of thousands of social media posts, books, podcasts and videos every day and encouraging artists and content creators to supercharge the quantity of their output by relying on AI.

Much of this output is highly formulaic — produced at scale and designed for rapid, low-engagement consumption. It is an endless, flavourless paste of clichés and nonsense, meant to be mindlessly consumed by doomscrolling thumbs and immediately forgotten. Despite working in an era in which payment is optional amid a deluge of slop, many artists, journalists and writers are making a living because enough of their audience chooses to support the work of real human creators.

The “AI disclosure penalty” reminds us that the consumption of art is not tied to purely aesthetic considerations but involves a need to connect with and appreciate the effort and labour of others.

Consumers have long been willing to pay more for goods labelled “handmade,” “handcrafted,” “artisanal” or “bespoke” on the understanding that those goods were made using traditional techniques that took more effort and human skill.

As generative AI turns writing, art and digital media into frictionless, infinitely replicable outputs, human cognitive effort is undergoing a profound shift. It is becoming an artisanal good that consumers must choose to support and value.

The Industrial Revolution transformed hand-made furniture and hand-woven textiles into premium markers of craftsmanship and authenticity. The AI revolution is doing something similar for intellectual and creative labour — audiences are beginning to place a premium not necessarily on the competent execution of a poem or an essay, which a machine can generate in seconds, but on the invisible friction, the lived experience and the deliberate toil of the human mind behind it.

In a landscape increasingly saturated with instant content, the verified effort of a human creator is shifting from a baseline expectation to a highly coveted, bespoke quality. Ultimately, what we value about art is not whether it’s perfect, but its ability to connect us with another human being.

Nathan Murray has received funding for his research from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

Elisa Tersigni has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

– ref. In the age of AI, human creative output is becoming a luxury – https://theconversation.com/in-the-age-of-ai-human-creative-output-is-becoming-a-luxury-276514

May 5, 2026

White House wants to vet powerful AI models for risks − a computer scientist explains why AI safety is so difficult

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Ahmed Hamza, Associate Teaching Professor of Computer Science, University of Colorado Boulder

Is it possible to keep AI from causing harm? J Studios/DigitalVision via Getty Images

The Trump administration is looking to develop a process that would have the federal government review the safety of powerful artificial intelligence models before approving their release, according to a report in The New York Times on May 4, 2026. The move would stand in contrast to the administration’s generally anti-regulatory approach to industry and comes in the wake of Anthropic voluntarily postponing the release of its latest AI model, Mythos.

Anthropic was concerned because when it tested Mythos, the model found thousands of vulnerabilities in operating systems and web browsers. The implication was that if a cybercriminal or hostile foreign agent had Mythos, they could penetrate computer systems worldwide and compromise the basic computer code underlying public safety, national economies and military security.

As a result, Anthropic gave limited access only to about 50 companies and organizations managing critical infrastructure as part of its Project Glasswing. The initiative aims to help governments and corporations close software loopholes Mythos has identified. When Anthropic sought to broaden the number of organizations with access to Mythos, the White House objected.

Security experts, meanwhile, have expressed concern that AI researchers in nations such as China, Russia, Iran and North Korea might soon create similarly powerful AI models and use them to threaten or attack other countries, or to create chaos in those countries’ economies.

Major challenges

As a computer scientist in this area, my work on computer security and malware shows it’s difficult to even define what safety measures the field should take to make models safe to use. Yet the future of many industries, critical infrastructure, national security and human well-being seems to depend on achieving AI models that are truthful, ethical and reasonable.

The first of these challenges, truthfulness and factual accuracy, came to light when OpenAI’s ChatGPT burst onto the scene in 2022. People worldwide realized that the output of large language models does not necessarily reflect a truthful reality. The goal for AI companies was coherent writing that read as if a human wrote it. If an output was factually flawed, programmers wrote it off as a “hallucination” by the model.

After AI programs led to some legal catastrophes and stock market panic, AI companies have made at least some effort to ensure that their models avoid falsehoods and inaccuracies.

Nonetheless, false information stated confidently within a sea of solid-sounding text can take on a life of its own. Because of the consequences, research is underway on how to engineer truthfulness into models, or at least prevent hallucination.

Truthfulness and grounding in reality are part of a larger and more general concern about safe AI models. The very pace of their advancement may pose a threat.

Cybersecurity experts are worried about Anthropic’s powerful Mythos model: Here’s why. Joseph Squillace, Pennsylvania State University, via AP

Troubling breaches by AI bots

Numerous incidents in the past two years show that large language models have already caused harm.

The National Law Review uncovered multiple cases in 2024 and 2025 of teenagers and children using chatbots to explore self-harm, in some cases with lethal consequences. Lawsuits have since been filed claiming that the chatbots encouraged suicide.

In 2025, investigators at cybersecurity company ESET Research discovered a program called PromptLock. It uses large language models to generate ransomware that executes attacks and decides autonomously whether to steal files or encrypt them for ransom.

Anthropic engineers revealed that a group of people whom they suspected were sponsored by the Chinese government used Anthropic’s Claude model to launch a “highly sophisticated espionage campaign” that attempted to infiltrated roughly 30 targets around the world and “succeeded in a small number of cases.” Anthropic said it disrupted the campaign by banning accounts involved in the campaign, notifying affected organizations and coordinating with authorities.

In 2024 Microsoft and OpenAI warned that foreign agencies in Russia, Iran, China and other countries used AI tools and large language models to automate attacks and to increase attack sophistication.

Finally, whistleblowers have filed reports about governments using AI tools for real-time decision-making in both military and civilian arenas. In my view, this could lead to a completely new level of potential harm to innocent people.

How to lessen the danger

These incidents, and the broad variety of dangers they present, raise the question of whether society should encourage clearer, bolder safety principles for AI corporations and the governments that employ their technology. Are there reliable technical solutions that could keep AI from being used maliciously?

AI providers have differed widely in their treatment of ethics and safety, but they have attempted to engineer better models by inserting additional instructions on best safety practices or code that can proactively detect and resist attacks.

Today’s AI agent models pose a much bigger threat than AI chatbots.

But it may be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to provide a guarantee of safety against malicious users. In 2025 researchers from the U.S. and Europe showed that any filtering safety method imposed on an existing AI model is unreliable.

This means that judgment about truth and safe behavior must be baked into the model, not added later. Sure enough, recent findings show that the leading AI models were 100% successful at circumventing imposed safety measures, a capability known as jailbreaking.

Research also indicates that the leading large language models exhibit a bizarre emergent feature: They can fake their safety alignment to appear harmless, helpful and truthful, hiding toxic behavior.

Today there are no definitive answers about what safe AI looks like. I think it’s fair to assert that software engineers do not know how to build reliable protections into AI models. Nor do members of Congress, who in April met to consider special bills on AI ethics and safety.

Steps forward

Some basic steps could help users and regulators assess the ethical and safety standards in an AI program. Large language models that are open, rather than proprietary, are easier to assess. Knowing which data a model is trained on helps.

Also, AI companies could clearly define their ethics principles. Governments could clearly define and enforce legal constraints that reflect the expectations of society, without being influenced by AI campaigners.

Any vast set of challenges can appear like a mountain: foreboding, encased in moving mist, insurmountable. But as mountain climbers will tell you, clarity in strategy, careful planning and a collaborative persistence can help you scale the peak.

Ahmed Hamza receives funding from the NSF.

– ref. White House wants to vet powerful AI models for risks − a computer scientist explains why AI safety is so difficult – https://theconversation.com/white-house-wants-to-vet-powerful-ai-models-for-risks-a-computer-scientist-explains-why-ai-safety-is-so-difficult-281117

May 5, 2026

The EU measures media freedom country by country, but cross-border risks remain overlooked

Source: The Conversation – France – By Pier Luigi Parcu, Professor of Communications, Media and Economics at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute

Europe has spent years building effective tools to measure media pluralism within its member states. This made sense because newspapers, broadcasters, regulators, ownership structures and public service media were organised within national borders.

But the media environment is changing. News is now distributed through global digital platforms, and its provision is not necessarily mediated by professional journalists. Information is shaped by algorithms, exposed to foreign information manipulation, and increasingly summarised and generated by AI assistants.

The result is a mismatch. Europe faces a plurality of risks to media pluralism that are European in scale, but it still mainly assesses them from national perspectives.

National media systems still matter. Media law, journalists’ safety, ownership, public service media and political pressure vary sharply across countries. Any serious assessment must continue to examine conditions at national level. But if major risk factors operate across borders, through global platforms and AI mediation, Europe also needs to treat them as European risks.

What Europe already has

For more than a decade, the Media Pluralism Monitor (MPM) has provided a common framework for assessing risks to media freedom and pluralism.

This scientific project of the Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom at the European University Institute has become a trusted resource for understanding the complex factors that shape the media ecosystem.

Media pluralism is often invoked as a democratic principle, but the Monitor helped turn it into something that can be systematically assessed. It has made risks visible, comparable and politically harder to ignore.

Its value lies not only in the final risk scores, but in the method behind them.

The MPM brings together legal, economic and socio-political evidence through a structured set of indicators, local expert assessment, primary and secondary data, peer review and a transparent risk-scoring methodology. It therefore does more than rank countries. It identifies where risks arise, whether from weak legal safeguards, concentrated market structures, pervasive political interference, polluted online environments or insufficient social inclusion.

This has allowed the MPM to become more than an academic tool. It has created a shared European vocabulary for discussing media pluralism and has entered the EU’s democratic oversight architecture.

Since 2020, the European Commission’s Rule of Law Report has used MPM results in its media pluralism pillar.

Precisely because this framework has been successful, in the present chaotic technological transition, it raises a further question: should Europe continue to assess media pluralism only by looking at national systems?

Since 2014 the Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom (CMPF) has been using the Media Pluralism Monitor (MPM) to assess the risks for media pluralism across the EU.

How the European Media Freedom Act changes the equation

Most provisions of the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA) became applicable in August 2025, marking a turning point. The Act recognises that media freedom and pluralism are no longer only national matters.

Its articles set essential conditions in the field of media for a well-functioning internal market and for liberal democracy across the European Union.

If Europe now has a common legal framework for media pluralism and media freedom, it also needs the capacity to assess whether that framework is working at European level.

Article 26 of the EMFA points in this direction, requiring monitoring of media markets, concentration, foreign information manipulation and interference, online platforms, editorial independence and state advertising.

But measuring these only as national phenomena, as the MPM already does year after year, may now be insufficient.

An “EU average” says several important things about general risk across member states. But it does not tell us whether Europeans can access reliable information about EU and global affairs across borders.

It does not show whether language barriers still confine citizens within national silos. Nor does it reveal how platforms or AI interfaces affect the visibility of public-interest journalism. Above all, it does not account for the fact that while media ownership concentration is very high at national level, concentration of digital intermediaries is even higher at national, European and global level.

Finally, it does not capture the full impact of foreign information manipulation and interference. Such interference moves through common digital infrastructures, targets European political debates and exploits the fragmentation of Europe’s information space. These are not national risks repeated 27 times. They are European systemic risks.

What a European media monitor should measure

Europe therefore needs a second layer of monitoring: not a replacement for national assessment, but a key complement.

A European Media Pluralism Monitor should focus on risks that emerge across Europe’s shared news and information space.

It should ask whether citizens can access plural and reliable news about European affairs beyond their domestic media sphere. It should assess whether language barriers are being reduced through translation, subtitling, multilingual publishing and AI tools, or whether they still prevent common debates. It should examine how public-interest journalism, especially about Europe, appears on platforms and AI interfaces.

A European monitor should also measure dependency. Many publishers rely on a few digital intermediaries for traffic, audience reach and advertising revenue. This affects journalism’s sustainability and may disproportionately weaken smaller and local media. Furthermore, the choices made by AI providers when training their models might affect not only the economic sustainability of media by using media content without paying for it, but also content diversity by privileging more widespread languages and larger media markets.

It should also look at mobile EU citizens, border communities and transnational audiences. A citizen living outside her country of origin may not fit neatly into a national media system. The same is true for people in border regions or following politics in more than one language.

Finally, such a monitor should examine whether EU safeguards produce real convergence in practice across member states. Formal compliance is not enough. The question is whether European rules concretely improve journalism and citizens’ access to information.

Measuring the European public sphere

None of this implies that Europe is becoming a single media system. It remains linguistically diverse, politically uneven and institutionally layered.

But that is precisely why an additional and complementary European layer of analysis, coordinated and incorporated within the MPM, is now necessary.

If Europe’s information space is fragmented, asymmetrical and only partially integrated, those features and their evolution should themselves become objects of measurement.

What is not measured is often not governed. With the EMFA, Europe has adopted a common framework for media freedom. But law alone does not guarantee protection. The European Union should now develop the tools to understand whether media pluralism is protected not only within member states, but also whether the conditions for a healthy European public sphere are improving or deteriorating across its shared information space.

The Media Pluralism Monitor is a project co-funded by the European Union.

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Pier Luigi Parcu ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d’une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n’a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.

– ref. The EU measures media freedom country by country, but cross-border risks remain overlooked – https://theconversation.com/the-eu-measures-media-freedom-country-by-country-but-cross-border-risks-remain-overlooked-280316

May 5, 2026

Diaspora distress: When geopolitical conflict follows immigrant workers into the office

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Amir Bahman Radnejad, Chair and Associate Professor of Innovation and Marketing, Mount Royal University

Rostam does not sleep through the night anymore. At 2 a.m., when his phone buzzes, he’s awake before the sound finishes. It might be his parents calling from Tehran, on a connection that is unreliable, sporadic and sometimes cut off mid-sentence. He has learned not to miss those calls, because the next one may not come for days.

Rostam is a pseudonym for a participant in our ongoing research study on diaspora workers, but his experience is one that many workers across Canada will recognize.

Rostam checks the news constantly, piecing together what is happening. Since the United States and Israel launched joint strikes on Iran in late February, the conflict has escalated rapidly. By 4 a.m., he has been awake for two hours. This is hypervigilance: the body monitoring a threat it cannot act on and refusing to stand down.

When the call does come through, the relief is physical. They are alive. They speak carefully, partly to protect him and partly because the call may be monitored. He hears his father’s voice and thinks this could be the last time.

In the morning, he will go to work. He will sit in meetings, contribute to agendas and make sure his face doesn’t betray what he’s feeling — a competency that has always served him well.

He doesn’t speak about any of this at work. To talk about it risks being regarded as a representative of a country he has complicated feelings about or as importing politics into a space that doesn’t want them. So he says nothing. That silence is the problem.

The invisible cost at work

Decades of research have established that code-switching — the constant calibration of self-presentation across cultural contexts — carries a real psychological toll on workers. It can contribute to stress, anxiety, burnout and costly errors in judgment at work.

These impacts often remain invisible to employers until the damage has already been done to both the individual and the organization.

Diaspora employees who are struggling don’t signal it in ways that trigger organizational concern. They manage, but at considerable personal cost. These costs accumulate in ways that surface slowly and are almost always misattributed. Declining engagement is read as a shift in attitude, and withdrawal is interpreted as a personality change.

In some cases, employees do not withdraw at all. Instead, they bury themselves in work and appear by every visible metric to be thriving. Managers have no reason to look closer until the break happens.

This isn’t a problem that diversity, equity and inclusion programs can solve as they exist, because it’s not about inclusion or diversity. It’s a perceptual problem: leaders don’t see what diaspora employees are managing and therefore cannot respond to it.

A condition without a name

This challenge extends well beyond Canada’s Iranian community, which numbered approximately 200,000 people in the 2021 census. Many other diaspora communities, including Ukrainians, Palestinians, Sudanese, Afghans and Syrians, are navigating similar terrain.

A 2025 study found higher rates of severe depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder among diaspora Tigrayans in Australia than among people inside the war zone itself.

People inside a conflict zone often suppress their own fear to protect family members living through it with them. Members of the diaspora, by contrast, often cannot meaningfully assist those in immediate danger, which creates a profound sense of helplessness. At the same time, those around them may not recognize the fear and distress they’re concealing.

Aitak Sorahi, an Iranian Canadian, tried to explain what she was living through to a reporter at The Canadian Press in April as U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to destroy Iran unless it agreed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. She could not find the words. “I don’t even know how to describe my feeling,” she said, “because I don’t have a name for it.”

We propose one: diaspora distress, a framework emerging from our ongoing research and organizational practice.

Diaspora distress

Diaspora distress is the psychological burden carried by people living in one country while their homeland — and the family, friends and memories embedded there — are under active geopolitical threat. Often, this burden is compounded by the policies or rhetoric of their host country’s own government.

The feeling sits closest to grief, but the comparison only goes so far. Grief has a fixed point — a death, a diagnosis, a loss that has occurred and can be named. It comes with a recognized social script: people sit together and are able to share memories of the deceased. Diaspora distress offers no comparable ritual because the loss one is anticipating may or may not arrive.

In addition, diaspora communities are not monolithic. Outsiders often assume a shared solidarity, but geopolitical crises tend to deepen existing internal divisions about what intervention means, who is to blame and what liberation looks like. The people who should be each other’s community of grief often find themselves on opposite sides of an argument.

The result is that diaspora employees are frequently alone with this in every environment they occupy: at work, at home and within communities that might otherwise support them. That isolation is the specific nature of diaspora distress.

What organizations should do

Developing the capacity to recognize diaspora distress does not require expertise in geopolitics or new policy infrastructure. It requires language: the organizational decision to name what some employees are carrying as a recognized condition.

Institutional acknowledgement works differently than other supports because it removes the requirement that employees claim what they’re carrying. It gives them a name for what they have been living with.

In practice, this can take three forms: a leadership message acknowledging that some colleagues are carrying weight from events in their home regions; a line added to standard manager check-in prompts asking whether anything outside work is affecting employees; or an addition to existing employee assistance programs and benefits communications that names diaspora distress explicitly.

Rostam will open his phone again tonight at 2 a.m. In the morning, he will code-switch from the person who spent the night reading the news into the person his organization knows. What remains is whether his organization will adopt the language to see it, and whether his leaders will decide that seeing it is part of their job.

Amir Bahman Radnejad is affiliated with Canadian Global Affairs Institute.

Brenda Nguyen is affiliated with the Strategic Capability Network.

– ref. Diaspora distress: When geopolitical conflict follows immigrant workers into the office – https://theconversation.com/diaspora-distress-when-geopolitical-conflict-follows-immigrant-workers-into-the-office-281411

May 5, 2026

Heat-resistant corals could help reefs adapt to climate change

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Whitney Isenhower, Journalism Fellow, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto

As ocean temperatures rise, it’s difficult for many corals to thrive, but naturally occurring, heat-resistant corals can survive in warmer waters. (Unsplash/Rx’ Diaconu)

Austin Bowden-Kerby, a pioneer in coral reef conservation, spends many of his days gardening corals for reefs around Fiji and the Pacific. He grows corals in ocean nurseries. Once they’re healthy enough, he moves them to outer ocean areas with the hope they will replicate and grow.

“We’re looking at what Mother Nature would do on her own if she had 1,000 years to adapt,” said Bowden-Kerby, who founded the UNESCO-endorsed Reefs of Hope strategy. “We would have these kinds of things happening.”

Bowden-Kerby is one of several scientists trying to conserve, replicate and reproduce heat-resistant corals before climate change wipes them out.

The United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has said the world is experiencing a fourth global coral bleaching event. They’ve found that bleaching-level heat stress affected almost 85 per cent of the world’s coral reef area between 2023 and 2025.

Bleaching causes corals to lose their food source and, with it, their colour. Most corals survive in temperatures between 20 and 29 C. But as ocean temperatures rise, it’s difficult for many to thrive.

But naturally occurring, heat-resistant corals can survive in waters up to 36 C and potentially higher. They are usually found in warmer waters, like parts of the Pacific Ocean and the Persian Gulf. These corals are increasingly important as sea temperatures rise. So scientists are turning to them to help save declining reefs.

Heat-resistant corals

A colourful coral reef with fish swimming above — A coral reef in the Red Sea. Healthy corals nurture fish that feed communities and protect shores from floods and storms.
(Unsplash/Francesco Ungaro)

Corals reefs are extremely diverse places, with around 6,000 coral species worldwide. Reefs are home to more than 4,000 species and 25 per cent of global marine life. When healthy, corals nurture fish that feed communities, protect shores from floods and storms
and boost economies through tourism.

However, heatwaves have led to widespread coral bleaching and loss. When waters become too warm, corals expel the algae in their tissues that give them their colour. That causes corals to turn completely white.

Coral reefs and their ecosystems are also threatened by pollution, ocean acidification, coastal development and overfishing.

Christopher Cornwall, a lecturer in marine biology at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, co-authored a recent review that found some reefs can survive if corals become more heat-tolerant.

He told me there are multiple things to consider when conserving and replicating corals: restoring heat-resistant corals where it’s feasible, doing so at a large enough scale and maintaining coral diversity. Restored corals also must be able to survive, he added.

“We can’t just do coral restoration without thermally tolerant corals, because they’re just going to die the next time it gets too hot,” Cornwall said.

An infographic explaining coral bleaching. — An infographic explaining how heat and pollution affect the algae in coral, causing bleaching.
(NOAA)

Assisted evolution

“A lot of the research now is about, can you scale up restoration and how do you do it more effectively?” said Peter Mumby, a professor of coral reef ecology at the University of Queensland in Australia. “One of the key concerns is to make sure those corals are as tolerant of high temperature as possible.”

Breeding heat-tolerant corals is a form of assisted evolution. Humans intervene to speed up natural processes to help corals more quickly respond to and recover from their stressors, like heatwaves from climate change.

One recent study examining the possible success of assisted evolution interventions like breeding and selecting traits found these interventions can help corals become more tolerant to heatwaves, but they need “extremely strong selection.”

Liam Lachs co-authored that study. Lachs is a former postdoctoral research associate in the CORALASSIST lab, a team of scientists led by James Guest at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom. Lachs specializes in coral reef ecosystems and researches coral in Palau, a Pacific island country where corals are surviving in warmer waters.

He told me variability within and among reefs and coral species must be considered when creating more heat-resistant coral, which makes replication complex. “Even within a single reef, there’s a range of tolerance levels,” he said.

Algae and bacteria

Researchers at the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) have found that some algae (Durusdinium), which symbiotically live in corals and provide them with food in exchange for housing and protection, can boost corals’ heat tolerance.

Madeleine van Oppen is a senior principal research scientist at AIMS. She co-authored a recent review about potentially introducing beneficial bacteria into corals to improve their heat tolerance.

Scientists are also exploring whether heat-tolerant corals should be planted across oceans — from the Indo-Pacific region to the Caribbean — and not just in nearby waters.

Van Oppen said new ventures ultimately need more research, and the real test of success is if something done in a lab works in the wild. “Field testing, I’d say, is the next big thing,” she said. “Finding out whether these interventions can enhance tolerance at ecologically relevant scales. Is it stable over time?”

AIMS researchers also found that heat tolerance could be passed down by interbreeding wild colonies of the same coral species. Heat-resistant coral species include some pocillopora and acropora.

If left unchecked, the sustained global temperature is on target to rise more than 1.5 C. Some evidence has shown that 70 to 90 per cent of tropical coral reefs could go extinct even if global warming is limited to 1.5 C.

Prior to the fourth event, the Earth already experienced three mass coral bleaching events over the last few decades. An El Niño is expected this year, bringing with it hotter sea surface temperatures, much like in 2024.

For all the efforts by scientists to save coral reefs and ensure heat resilience, nothing will keep corals healthy more than lowering the global temperature. “The lower we can get our greenhouse gas emissions, the more chance there will be that reefs will exist in the future,” said Cornwall.

Whitney Isenhower has an account with Democrats Abroad but is not an active member.

– ref. Heat-resistant corals could help reefs adapt to climate change – https://theconversation.com/heat-resistant-corals-could-help-reefs-adapt-to-climate-change-279508

May 5, 2026

After a year of Reform UK in local government, the cracks are starting to show

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Vladimir Bortun, Lecturer in Politics, University of Oxford

Reform UK is expected to expand its foothold in local government in England this week. More than 5,000 seats across 136 councils are being contested, making this one of the largest electoral tests in recent years. It builds on Reform’s breakthrough in 2025, when the party took control of ten local authorities – its first real experience of power.

For scholars of populism, this moment could be revealing. Years of research have focused heavily on the rhetoric of populism, its voter base, and the interaction between the two.

But far less attention has been paid to what populists actually do once in office. Where such research exists, it tends to focus on national governments, with only a small body examining local politics. Local government, however, is where political promises get a quick reality check.

The gap between Reform’s “pro-workers” rhetoric and its party elite’s relatively privileged and pro-business backgrounds has been noted. But the party’s first year in local government provides an opportunity to see whether the social groups it claims to represent also tend to benefit from its exercise of power.

While systematic data on the Reform-led councils is yet to be collected, their track record so far has revealed signs of where this party’s interests might lie – and of what a UK government led by Reform might look like.

Energy: big donors or local interests?

According to a recent report, climate commitments have been scaled back across Reform-run councils. Net-zero targets have been scrapped and climate language removed from policy documents. These decisions align with the party’s broader critique of climate policy as economically burdensome.

It also aligns with the party’s fossil fuel donors, who account for more than two-thirds of Reform’s financial backing. However, it does not necessarily align with the interests of the communities in the councils that it runs.

A good case in point is fracking. Despite its well-known risks to water and air quality, as well as concerns over earthquakes and warming effects, Reform’s leadership has endorsed fracking. The party has pledged to legalise it if it comes into government.

The country, however, is not as keen. According to the most recent polling, only 28% of people in Britain support fracking, compared to 46% opposing it. A survey last year found that nothing puts off Reform supporters more than the party’s ties to the fossil fuel industry. Farmers – 40% of whom now support Reform – have a longstanding scepticism about fracking due to its potential impact on their crops.

In fact, in two other Reform council areas – Lancashire and Scarborough, local representatives have broken from the national party line on fracking. This reflects a broader tension between the interests of its elite backers and those of its popular base.

Social care: when ‘populism’ meets the welfare state

Those contradictions also become visible in the field of social care. In Derbyshire, the Reform-led council’s plan to shut eight care homes was called a “betrayal of local people”. Similar plans in Lancashire entailed the closure of five public care homes as well as five day centres, with residents moved to the private sector.

What is striking is not just the direction of policy, but also the political reaction to it. The privatisation plans in Lancashire were eventually abandoned due to strong local opposition, which came not only from rival parties, but also from Reform grassroots members.

This underlines an insight often missing from populism research: the category of “ordinary people” is not a unified social group. It also indicates the unpopularity of an economic agenda that, with its emphasis on further deregulation, privatisation and tax cuts, might seem to be Thatcherism’s unfinished business.

Taxation: from promises to practice

Reform’s neoliberal outlook on the economy is reflected in the range of tax cuts pledged in its 2024 manifesto. Ahead of the local elections last year, several Reform candidates reiterated these pledges, vowing either to freeze or cut council tax.

The opposite has happened, though. As reported recently, nine Reform councils raised Band D council tax for 2026-27 by an average of 3.94%. And while that was lower than the overall average increase of 4.86%, it shows that – when confronted with budgetary constraints – Reform is willing to follow the same fiscal patterns as other mainstream parties. In other words, by increasing what is ultimately a regressive tax that disproportionately affects poorer households.

This dynamic echoes once again the discrepancy between the party’s “populist” image and its neoliberal, austerity-prone policy agenda.

council tax bill with credit cards and bank notes. — Householders in Reform-led councils may have been handed a council tax rise they were not expecting.
Yau Ming Low/Shutterstock

Reform’s track record in these areas of policymaking points to a broader conclusion. Much of the existing literature treats populism primarily as a discursive phenomenon – a way of framing politics in terms of “the people” versus “the elite”.

But Reform’s experience in local government shows that its actual politics might in fact tilt towards the interest of the latter. This is precisely where current research remains scant.

On the eve of a new round of local elections, Reform is likely to extend its presence across councils in England. But its first year in power already suggests that “the people” it claims to represent are not necessarily the same people who benefit from its rise to power.

Vladimir Bortun 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. After a year of Reform UK in local government, the cracks are starting to show – https://theconversation.com/after-a-year-of-reform-uk-in-local-government-the-cracks-are-starting-to-show-282035

May 5, 2026

Biological invasions can cause severe animal suffering

Source: The Conversation – France – By Thomas George Evans, Principal Investigator, Freie Universität Berlin

Yellow crazy ants (_Anoplolepis gracilipes_), or Maldive ants, are among the world’s 100 most invasive species. Roman Prokhorov/iNaturalist, CC BY-NC

Biological invasions occur when organisms such as animals and plants are introduced by people to regions of the world where they do not naturally occur. In these new locations, these organisms are referred to as “alien species”.

Biodiversity is the variety of all living organisms on earth. It is the interconnected web of life that is a wonder to behold – it is also vital for people, providing the foundation for happy, healthy lives.

Biological invasions can be severely damaging to biodiversity. Alien species interact with native species in many different ways. For example, they often compete with native species for resources such as food.

This can cause declines in the abundance of native wildlife and, in some cases, the permanent loss of native species (their global extinction).

The European fox has been introduced to Australia, where it preys on native animals. It has caused the extinction of several small mammal species.
Fourni par l’auteur

The number of alien species being introduced to new regions continues to rise. Hence, identifying and managing their impacts on native biodiversity is a global conservation priority. A great deal of research has been published on this topic.

However, biological invasions can cause another type of impact that is far less comprehensively studied and managed. These are impacts that cause the suffering of animals.

Animal welfare and sentience

Animal welfare is defined by the World Organisation for Animal Health as

“the physical and mental state of an animal in relation to the conditions in which it lives and dies”.

Sentience is the ability to experience feelings and sensations, such as pain, fear and anxiety. It is now widely recognised that many different types of animals are sentient. In the United Kingdom, the welfare of these sentient animals is protected under the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022.

Biological invasions affect the welfare of sentient animals

Biological invasions result in interactions between organisms (including plants and animals) that can severely harm the welfare of the animals involved. For example, the avian vampire fly (Philornis downsi) was accidentally introduced to the Galápagos Islands from South America several decades ago.

It lays its eggs in the eyes of fledgling native birds. When they hatch, the larvae feed on the soft tissue around the eyes and nares (nostrils) of the birds. This causes wounds, infection and death.

There are no native insects that cause these welfare impacts on the Galápagos archipelago.

A dead nestling bird with enlarged nares (nostrils) caused by larvae of the avian vampire fly, which crawl inside the nares to feed on soft tissue.
Andrew Katsis/Wikipedia, CC BY

Cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) is a highly flammable grass species that has been introduced to western USA from Eurasia.

Across the Great Basin, it increases the frequency, size and intensity of wildfires, and the number of individual animals that they kill. These animals include greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus).

Greater sage-grouse are burnt by wildfires caused by cheatgrass, which is a flammable alien plant species.
Joegrzybowski/iNaturalist, CC BY-NC

House mice (Mus musculus) were accidentally introduced to Gough Island in the South Atlantic Ocean by sailors in the 19th century.

They attack and eat ground-nesting Tristan albatrosses (Diomedea dabbenena). Having evolved on the island in the absence of predators, the albatrosses are naive to the threat posed by the predatory mice – hence, they do not evade predation.

While this is a biodiversity impact (the mice have caused the albatross population to decrease), it is also an animal welfare impact, as demonstrated by these images. House mice have also recently been recorded attacking albatrosses on Midway Atoll.

Welfare impacts are poorly understood

The animal welfare impacts of biological invasions are a neglected research topic. Few studies have explicitly attempted to identify and describe them.

Hence, we do not have a good understanding of the extent and severity of the animal suffering they cause. Furthermore, we do not understand how this suffering occurs, which animals are most severely affected, and how best to protect them.

Frameworks for biological invasions

Frameworks are conceptual tools that provide standardised systems and rules which can be applied to make sense of complex processes. They can be useful for structuring data on wildlife, including data on the impacts of biological invasions.

Several frameworks have been developed that assess the biodiversity impacts of biological invasions. However, no frameworks have been developed to explicitly assess their animal welfare impacts.

Our research, recently published in the journal Nature Communications, introduces a new framework to assess the animal welfare impacts of biological invasions. This framework is called the Animal Welfare Impact Classification for Invasion Science (AWICIS).

The AWICIS framework

AWICIS assesses impacts on animals that are sentient and protected by UK animal welfare legislation. These are mainly vertebrate animals, although some invertebrate animals are also protected, including Cephalopods (octopuses, cuttlefish and squid).

AWICIS assesses welfare impacts affecting both native and alien animals. This is significant, as research on biological invasions tends to focus on impacts affecting native animals. Our framework recognises that alien animals can also suffer from welfare impacts caused by biological invasions.

While biodiversity research focuses on impacts affecting the survival of species, AWICIS focuses on impacts affecting individual animals.

It identifies “relative changes to the welfare of an individual animal” that are caused by a biological invasion.

To do this, the framework uses five “impact severity” categories (i – v) to quantify the harm caused by a biological invasion on a given animal. It also categorises welfare impacts by type using 11 impact categories. For example, these categories include the “transmission of disease” from one animal to another, and “predation” of one animal by another.

House finches have been introduced from the west coast of the USA to the east coast. They suffer from avian conjunctivitis, which they have spread to other garden birds in the state of New York, including purple martins. Avian conjunctivitis causes blindness, starvation and death.
Coleen Lawlor/iNaturalist, CC BY-NC

Indicators are used in animal welfare science to provide evidence of impacts affecting the welfare of animals.

AWICIS uses three different indicators:

The physical appearance of an animal (e.g., dead or injured animals)
The behaviour of an animal (e.g., lethargic animals suffering from diseases)
Measurable physiological functions that provide insights into the welfare of an animal (e.g., elevated levels of stress hormones produced by an animal).

The welfare impacts of ant invasions

We used AWICIS to assess the welfare impacts of ant invasions. Many different ant species have been introduced to regions of the world where they would not naturally occur. Some use acid to attack and kill animals.

Red imported fire ants attacking an insect in Texas, USA. These ants are capable of killing much larger animals, including fledgling birds and hatchling turtles.
evvobevvo/iNaturalist, CC BY-NC

Using AWICIS we found several of these ant species to cause the most severe category of welfare impact on many types of animals. Ground nesting animals were often affected, including fledgling birds and hatchling alligators and turtles.

Ants can take a long time to kill an animal, so they can cause a great deal of suffering in the process. Unfortunately, these ant species have been introduced by humans to many locations worldwide, including numerous islands and several regions of the USA.

This means that their severe welfare impacts are an ongoing, global phenomenon. Hence, many animals have suffered, and many more will do so in the future as a result of our actions (introducing ants to places where they do not belong).

Preventing the introduction of ants (and other organisms) to new environments is crucial if we are to stop biological invasions from causing unnecessary and severe animal welfare impacts.

A more complete picture of the impacts of biological invasions

It is well known that biological invasions are problematic for biodiversity – they threaten the survival of native species. The socio-economic impacts of biological invasions have also been well studied – these are impacts that affect human health and wellbeing.

In our study, we shed light on a third major type of impact caused by biological invasions – animal welfare. Hence, our study provides evidence for the impacts of biological invasions on “One Health”, which is a term used to recognise that the health of the environment, people and animals is interconnected.

AWICIS is available online

Researchers wishing to report and assess the animal welfare impacts of biological invasions can use the AWICIS Assessment Template.

Observations by researchers studying the biodiversity impacts of biological invasions will also be useful to establish the extent and severity of these animal welfare impacts. Hence, they are encouraged to report these observations using the AWICIS Assessment Template.

Thomas George Evans a reçu des financements de Animal Welfare Initiative et German Research Foundation (DFG).

– ref. Biological invasions can cause severe animal suffering – https://theconversation.com/biological-invasions-can-cause-severe-animal-suffering-281845