Renewed talk of no-longer-secret negotiations between the Kremlin and the White House over a plan to end the war in Ukraine that heavily favours Russia adds to a broader sense of doom in Kyiv and among its western partners.
Coupled with the fallout from a sweeping corruption scandal among Ukraine’s elites and stalling efforts in Brussels to provide additional financial aid to Kyiv, a storm is brewing that may lead to Moscow prevailing in its war of aggression.
However, this is not a foregone conclusion. Ukraine is having a very difficult time at the moment on various fronts. The fall of Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine is a question of when, not if, and of how many men both sides will lose before Russia captures the ruins of the city.
Russia has also upped pressure on the Zaporizhian part of the front and around Kherson on the coast. It is very likely that the Kremlin will continue to push its current advantages, with fighting possibly increasing in the north again around Ukraine’s second-largest city of Kharkiv.
For now, the war of attrition clearly favours Russia. But from a purely military perspective, neither the fall of Pokrovsk nor further Russian territorial gains elsewhere spell the danger of an imminent Ukrainian collapse.
However, war is never solely a military endeavour – it also requires political will and financial resources. A more existential threat to Ukraine’s war effort, therefore, is the continuing fallout from the corruption scandal. Here, too, certainties are few and far between.
A characteristic feature of political scandals in Ukraine is the difficulty of predicting the reaction of Ukrainian society. Some incidents can become a trigger for large-scale protests that lead to massive change.
This was the case with the Euromaidan revolution in 2014. The revolution triggered a chain of events, from the annexation of Crimea to the Russian-proxy occupation of parts of the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, to the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Other political crises pass without major upheaval. This was the case with the dismissal of the popular commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian army, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, in 2024. Widely seen as a possible challenger to Volodymyr Zelensky in future presidential elections, Zaluzhnyi was subsequently sent into exile as Ukraine’s ambassador to London.
So far, the current corruption scandal has not sparked mass protests in Ukraine. Nor has there been a very harsh response from European leaders. But the fact that virtually all of Zelensky’s inner circle is involved in corruption, according to Ukraine’s national anti-corruption bureau (Nabu), has forced the president to launch a comprehensive response.
Sanctions were imposed on Timur Mindich, Zelensky’s long-term friend and business partner, who fled the country just hours before Nabu raids on November 10. Then, a week after the latest scandal broke, Ukraine’s parliament dismissed the ministers of justice and energy, German Galushchenko and Svitlana Hrynchuk, who were both involved in the scandal.
Meanwhile, Zelensky himself has embarked on a whistle-stop diplomatic tour of European capitals to shore up support for his beleaguered government and country.
He managed to secure deliveries of US liquefied natural gas imports from Greece, which should help Ukraine through the difficult winter months. A landmark military deal with France also promises improved air defences for Ukraine in the short term, and the delivery of 100 fighter jets over the next decade.
Important as they are, these are stopgap measures rather than game changers. And not even all the necessary stopgap measures are done deals. The EU and its member states are still prevaricating on an urgently needed loan to Ukraine. If this loan does not materialise, Kyiv will run out of money in February to pay its soldiers, civil servants and pensioners.
In the meantime, Zelensky is also facing pressure from his own parliamentary faction, Servant of the People. He will be keen to present his tour of Europe to them as a vote of confidence by his western allies. Yet he may also still have to offer the resignation of his longtime ally Andrii Yermak, who was also implicated in the latest corruption scandal.
As head of the presidential office, Yermak is sometimes considered the de facto ruler of Ukraine. Dismissing him would probably please Zelensky’s domestic and foreign critics. Not doing so, on the other hand, should not be seen as a sign of strength. The very fact that the position of such a key ally is up for discussion is a further sign that Zelensky’s political power is, perhaps, fatally weakened.
Moving forward
Critically missing in all of this are three things. The first is a Ukrainian succession plan. Opposition politicians like former president Petro Poroshenko and former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko are as unpopular as they are tainted by allegations of corruption during their reigns.
There is no clear route to replacing Zelensky if he refuses to step down. And even if he were replaced, a broader-based coalition government is unlikely to find a magic wand to turn Ukraine’s precarious military situation around.
The second unknown is the White House and its dealings with the Kremlin. Apparently, a 28-point US-Russia peace plan is in the making. Yet again, this plan requires major concessions from Ukraine on territory and the future size of its army, while providing no effective security guarantees.
European foreign ministers have been quick to insist that any peace plan needs Ukrainian and European backing. But their appetite to push back hard may be waning. If Kyiv’s western allies get the sense that Ukraine and Zelensky are lost causes, militarily and politically, they may cut their losses and retrench.
This would probably see these countries beef up their own defences and sign up to a US-backed plan that trades Ukrainian land and sovereignty for the extremely slim prospects of Russia accepting such a bargain.
The third critical unknown is whether Putin will cut a deal or drag out negotiations with Trump and push on regardless in Ukraine. Putin’s past track record of playing for time speaks for itself.
Recent comments by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov that there were no new developments to announce on a possible peace plan also strongly suggest that there has been no change in the Kremlin’s approach. Given what is apparently on the table, even if Putin were inclined to make a deal, it would hardly be of comfort for Kyiv and Brussels.
The danger for Kyiv and its European partners is that talk of Ukraine’s political and military collapse turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The consequence of that – Kyiv’s submission to a Russian peace dictate – would be the result of the dysfunctional nature of Ukraine’s domestic politics and the fecklessness of western support as much as any collusion between Trump and Putin.
Stefan Wolff is a past recipient of grant funding from the Natural Environment Research Council of the UK, the United States Institute of Peace, the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK, the British Academy, the NATO Science for Peace Programme, the EU Framework Programmes 6 and 7 and Horizon 2020, as well as the EU’s Jean Monnet Programme. He is a Trustee and Honorary Treasurer of the Political Studies Association of the UK and a Senior Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Centre in London.
Tetyana Malyarenko receives funding from the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University and the Research Council of Norway (project WARPUT, 361835, implemented by Norwegian Institute of International Affairs)
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Michael Smith, Associate Professor of Psychology, Northumbria University, Newcastle
In Gateshead, north-east England, a solar park provides electricity for a mine water heat pump that provides district heating. Graeme J Baty/Shutterstock
This has enormous potential as a sustainable energy source. Schemes such as the mine water district heat network in Gateshead, in north-east England, are already providing low-carbon, cheaper heat and hot water to residential homes.
To maximise the full potential of this energy source by developing new schemes and expanding existing ones, it is critical that people have trust in new energy systems and are motivated to connect to them. This will speed up the number of homeowners signing up.
Communities built around former coal mines tend to have higher levels of socioeconomic disadvantage compared to other areas of the UK, with more social housing. Mine water district heating is a potential source of cheaper energy for these communities, but social housing residents must be involved in the transition to new, sustainable energy systems. This will ensure a smooth transition and avoid people feeling like new systems are being imposed on them.
In our new research, we interviewed 18 Gateshead residents about what a switch to mine water heating would mean for them.
We spoke to people from a community where homes are scheduled to move from gas heating to the mine water district heat network. Residents told us about their awareness of mine water heat, their motivations to connect and resources which could support them through the transition. We heard from social housing tenants, homeowners, private renters and landlords to understand how specific issues would affect different people’s lives and homes.
Our participants had limited awareness of mine water heat. Only around a third of participants in our study had previously heard of district heat networks. People had a range of incorrect assumptions about how they work. Improving awareness is clearly needed to enable homeowners to make informed decisions about whether to adopt the new technology. This could involve working with residents to design resources to increase their understanding and ensure that the issues most important to residents are addressed.
Residents we interviewed liked the idea of cleaner, greener energy, but many people said cost would be a barrier unless the mine water heat is cheaper than gas. They would happily “do their bit” for the environment, but not if it means higher bills.
The Angel of the North sculpture is built on the site of a former colliery and commemorates the region’s coal mining history. PJ_Photography/Shutterstock
One homeowner, a woman in her 70s, told us: “We like to do our bit with recycling and trying to save on energy costs, but that’s a luxury. If you’re a pensioner, you can’t. You don’t have unlimited resources … it shouldn’t [cost] any more than an ordinary gas boiler.”
The people we spoke to were proud that heat is being produced from old mines. They felt it connected the area’s coal mining heritage to a more sustainable future. Our participants liked the idea of generating energy from the disused mines in the area. When another 38-year-old resident discovered that the heat came from mine water, they said it “feels like a waste that we haven’t been tapping into that sooner”.
Community co-creation
Mine water district heating schemes provide an opportunity to involve communities in their energy futures. Community engagement ensures that people feel network expansion is being done with them, and not to them.
Raising awareness is important, but that isn’t enough to increase trust and acceptance. Addressing incorrect assumptions that sustainable energy will inherently be more expensive for consumers is key.
In Gateshead, there are cost savings through cheaper energy bills and no maintenance costs to the consumer. Communication of this information to consumers is vital to overcome resistance.
Building a narrative linked to the legacy of energy from coal mines can resonate with communities who are proud of their coal mining heritage. However, that needs to be achieved without glorifying mining history, because so many communities were adversely affected by the consequences of mine closures.
Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
Michael Smith receives funding from Innovate UK and Northern Net Zero Accelerator.
Faye Doughty 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.
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to make today’s artificial intelligence (AI) systems work at the scale required to keep advancing. They require enormous amounts of memory to ensure all their processing chips can quickly share all the data they generate in order to work as a unit.
The chips that have mostly been powering the deep-learning boom for the past decade are called graphics processing units (GPUs). They were originally designed for gaming, not for AI models where each step in their thinking process must take place in well under a millisecond.
Each chip contains only a modest amount of memory, so the large language models (LLMs) that underpin our AI systems must be partitioned across many GPUs connected by high-speed networks. LLMs work by training an AI on huge amounts of text, and every part of them involves moving data between chips – a process that is not only slow and energy-intensive but also requires ever more chips as models get bigger.
For instance, OpenAI used some 200,000 GPUs to create its latest model, GPT-5, around 20 times the number used in the GPT-3 model that powered the original version of Chat-GPT three years ago.
To address the limits of GPUs, companies such as California-based Cerebras have started building a different kind of chip called wafer-scale processors. These are the size of a dinner plate, about five times bigger than GPUs, and only recently became commercially viable. Each contains vast on-chip memory and hundreds of thousands of individual processors (known as cores).
The idea behind them is simple. Instead of coordinating dozens of small chips, keep everything on one piece of silicon so data does not have to travel across networks of hardware. This matters because when an AI model generates an answer – a step known as inference – every delay adds up.
The time it takes the model to respond is called latency, and reducing that latency is crucial for applications that work in real-time, such as chatbots, scientific-analysis engines and fraud-detection systems.
Wafer-scale chips alone are not enough, however. Without a software system engineered specifically for their architecture, much of their theoretical performance gain simply never appears.
The deeper challenge
Wafer-scale processors have an unusual combination of characteristics. Each core has very limited memory, so there is a huge need for data to be shared within the chip. Cores can access their own data in nanoseconds, but there are so many cores on each chip over such a large area that reading memory on the far side of the wafer can be a thousand times slower.
Limits in the routing network on each chip also mean that it can’t handle all possible communications between cores at once. In sum, cores cannot access memory fast enough, cannot communicate freely, and ultimately spend most of their time waiting.
Wafer-scale chips get slowed down by communication delays. Brovko Serhii
We’ve recently been working on a solution called WaferLLM, a joint venture between the University of Edinburgh and Microsoft Research designed to run the largest LLMs efficiently on wafer-scale chips. The vision is to reorganise how an LLM runs so that each core on the chip mainly handles data stored locally.
In what is the first paper to explore this problem from a software perspective, we’ve designed three new algorithms that basically break the model’s large mathematical operations into much smaller pieces.
These pieces are then arranged so that neighbouring cores can process them together, handing only tiny fragments of data to the next core. This keeps information moving locally across the wafer and avoids the long-distance communication that slows the entire chip down.
We’ve also introduced new strategies for distributing different parts (or layers) of the LLM across hundreds of thousands of cores without leaving large sections of the wafer idle. This involves coordinating processing and communication to ensure that when one group of cores is computing, another is shifting data, and a third is preparing its next task.
These adjustments were tested on LLMs like Meta’s Llama and Alibaba’s Qwen using Europe’s largest wafer-scale AI facility at the Edinburgh International Data Facility. WaferLLM made the wafer-scale chips generate text about 100 times faster than before.
Compared with a cluster of 16 GPUs, this amounted to a tenfold reduction in latency, as well as being twice as energy efficient. So whereas some argue that the next leap in AI performance may come from chips designed specifically for LLMs, our results suggest you can instead design software that matches the structure of existing hardware.
In the near term, faster inference at lower cost raises the prospect of more responsive AI tools capable of evaluating many more hypotheses per second. This would improve everything from reasoning assistants to scientific-analysis engines. Even more data-heavy applications like fraud detection and testing ideas through simulations would be able to handle dramatically larger workloads without the need for massive GPU clusters.
The future
GPUs remain flexible, widely available and supported by a mature software ecosystem, so wafer-scale chips will not replace them. Instead, they are likely to serve workloads that depend on ultra-low latency, extremely large models or high energy efficiency, such as drug discovery and financial trading.
Meanwhile, GPUs aren’t standing still: better software and continuous improvements in chip design are helping them run more efficiently and deliver more speed. Over time, assuming there’s a need for even greater efficiency, some GPU architectures may also adopt wafer-scale ideas.
More powerful AI could unlock new types of drug discovery. Simplystocker
The broader lesson is that AI infrastructure is becoming a co-design problem: hardware and software must evolve together. As models grow, simply scaling out with more GPUs will no longer be enough. Systems like WaferLLM show that rethinking the software stack is essential for unlocking the next generation of AI performance.
For the public, the benefits will not appear as new chips on shelves but as AI systems that will support applications that were previously too slow or too expensive to run. Whether in scientific discovery, public-sector services or high-volume analytics, the shift toward wafer-scale computing signals a new phase in how AI systems are built – and what they can achieve.
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.
The resounding victories in recent elections by Democrats Zohran Mamdani in New York, Abigail Spanberger in Virginia and Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey has reinvigorated the party after a dismal year since Donald Trump became president.
The victories were not a mandate for a sharp ideological shift to the left. This may be true for Mamdani, but it is not for Spanberger and Sherrill, since both are mainstream centrist Democrats. The main reason for the victories can be seen in the chart below.
Trends in presidential job approval and Donald Trump’s handling of the economy 2025:
The data comes from successive polls in the United States conducted by YouGov on behalf of the Economist magazine. All three candidates focused on the issue of the US economy which proved to be a winning strategy since it is clear the economy strongly affects Donald Trump’s job approval ratings.
As the president’s ratings on the economy decline, so does his job approval ratings. The result is that the Republicans took the blame for failing to deal with the issue.
The midterm Congressional elections in the US are due to take place in November 2026. Given the strong relationship between the economy and support for the president, it is interesting to examine how the economy is likely to influence support for the Democrats in those elections.
To investigate this, we can look at elections to the House of Representatives over a long period, given that they occur every two years.
The graph below compares the number of House seats won by the Democrats and economic growth in the US in all 40 House elections since 1946. Economic growth is weighted so that the Democrats benefit from high growth when they control the House but are penalised by this when the Republicans are in control.
This also works in reverse with low growth producing a poor electoral performance for the party when Democrats are in charge and a good performance when the Republicans are in control.
The relationship between economic growth and House seats won by Democrats 1946 to 2024:
The impact of the economy on voting in these elections is clearly quite strong, but the number of House seats won declines as the party’s majority gets larger. This is what is known as a “ceiling” effect meaning that when the majority is very large it is difficult to win more seats even in a thriving economy.
But this relationship can nonetheless be used to develop a forecasting model of the seats likely to be captured by the party in midterm elections next year.
When forecasting seats, an additional factor to consider is the inertia of party support over successive elections. If the Democrats did well in one year, they were likely to do well two years later.
For example, in 2008 when Barack Obama won the presidential election, the Democrats captured 233 House seats and the Republicans 202. In the following midterm election in 2010 the party won 257 seats while the Republicans won 178 and so the Democrats retained control of the House.
At the moment the House has a Republican majority of 219 against 213 Democrats. So Republican control is quite vulnerable to a surge in support for the Democrats.
Multiple regression analysis
The forecasting model involves a multiple regression analysis. This uses several variables to predict the behaviour of a specific variable – in this case the number of House seats won by the Democrats.
In addition to the two variables already mentioned, approval ratings and the performance of the economy, the fact that the incumbent president is a Republican is included in the modelling as well since this influences the vote for the Democrats.
We know the number of House seats from the 2024 election and the fact that Trump is a Republican, so to forecast Democrat House seats we need a prediction for economic growth in 2026.
The Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis provides data which forecasts growth in the US economy up to 2028. It predicts that growth in real terms will be 1.8% in 2026 – and when this is included in the modelling, the overall forecast from these variables is 80% accurate.
If a variable is a perfect predictor of House seats it would score 1.0 and if it failed to predict any seats at all it would score 0. The impact of growth on seats when the Democrats controlled the House was 0.75, the inertia effect of past Democrat seats was 0.26 and Trump’s presidency was 0.19.
Low growth boosts Democrats’ prospects
Clearly economic growth dominates the picture showing that low growth rates next year will strengthen the Democrat challenge. This is likely to happen since a recent IMF report suggests that US growth is likely to slow next year.
Actual and predicted House seats in elections 1946 to 2026:
The third chart shows the relationship between Democratic House seats predicted by the model and the actual number of seats won by the party. The predictions track the actual number of Democrat House seats fairly closely and so the forecast should be reasonably accurate
It should be noted that all forecasting models are subject to significant errors. As the chart shows, the predicted number of seats is not the same as the actual number and if something unforeseen happens the predictions could be wrong. That said, however, the forecast is that the Democrats will win 223 seats – an increase of ten over their performance in 2024. This will give them enough to hand them control of the House.
Paul Whiteley has received funding from the British Academy and the ESRC.
The pancreas is essential for staying alive and healthy. This small organ sits behind the stomach and has two main jobs. It produces digestive enzymes that break down food and hormones such as insulin and glucagon that control blood sugar.
Everyday habits such as heavy drinking and unhealthy eating can gradually damage the pancreas. Once injured, the consequences can be serious and include inflammation, diabetes and, in some cases, cancer.
Several common lifestyle factors can put the pancreas under strain:
1. Alcohol
Regular heavy drinking is one of the leading causes of pancreatitis. Acute pancreatitis causes severe abdominal pain, nausea and vomiting and often needs hospital care. Repeated episodes can develop into chronic pancreatitis, where long-lasting inflammation and scarring permanently reduce pancreatic function. This can lead to malabsorption of fats, vitamins and other nutrients, diabetes and a higher risk of pancreatic cancer. Researchers have several theories about how this damage occurs.
Alcohol can cause digestive enzymes such as trypsin, which normally work in the small intestine, to activate inside the pancreas before they reach the gut. Instead of digesting food, they digest pancreatic tissue and trigger severe inflammation.
Alcohol also makes pancreatic juices thicker and stickier. These thicker fluids can form protein plugs that harden into stones and block tiny ducts. Over time this causes irritation, scarring and the loss of pancreatic cells. When the pancreas breaks down alcohol it produces a toxic chemical called acetaldehyde that irritates and damages cells and triggers inflammation.
Alcohol also encourages the release of chemical messengers that switch on inflammation and keep it active. This makes tissue damage more likely.
Guidelines recommend drinking no more than 14 units of alcohol per week. It is safest to spread this across several days and to avoid binge drinking.
2. Smoking
Smoking increases the risk of both acute and chronic pancreatitis. Acute pancreatitis develops suddenly with severe pain and sickness. Chronic pancreatitis develops over many years and repeated inflammation causes permanent damage. Several studies show that the more someone smokes, the higher the risk. Another study found that quitting significantly reduces risk, and after about 15 years the risk can fall close to that of a non smoker.
Smoking is also strongly linked to pancreatic cancer. Scientists do not yet fully understand every mechanism, but laboratory studies show that nicotine can trigger sudden increases in calcium inside pancreatic cells. Too much calcium harms cells and worsens inflammation. Tobacco smoke also contains carcinogens that damage DNA.
One of the earliest genetic changes in pancreatic cancer involves a gene called Kras, which acts like a switch that controls how cells grow. In more than 90 percent of pancreatic cancers this gene is mutated, which locks the growth switch in the on position and encourages uncontrolled cell growth.
3. Diet
Diet affects the pancreas in several ways. Eating a lot of saturated fat, processed meat or refined carbohydrates raises the risk of pancreatic problems.
One major cause of acute pancreatitis is gallstones. Gallstones can block the bile duct and trap digestive enzymes inside the pancreas. When enzymes build up they begin to damage the organ. Diet contributes to gallstone formation because high cholesterol levels make bile more likely to form stones.
Another type of fat in the blood is triglycerides. When triglycerides rise to very high levels, large fat particles known as chylomicrons can clog tiny blood vessels in the pancreas. This reduces oxygen supply and triggers the release of harmful fatty acids that irritate pancreatic tissue.
Frequent spikes in blood sugar from high sugar foods also strain the pancreas. Constant surges in insulin over time reduce insulin sensitivity and may increase the risk of pancreatic cancer.
4. Obesity
Obesity increases the risk of acute pancreatitis, chronic pancreatitis and pancreatic cancer. Fat can accumulate in and around the pancreas, a condition called pancreatic steatosis or non-alcoholic fatty pancreatic disease. This build up can replace healthy cells and weaken the organ.
Excess body fat also increases levels of pro-inflammatory molecules such as TNF-alpha and IL-6, creating long-lasting inflammation that supports tumour growth. Obesity disrupts insulin sensitivity and hormone signals from fat tissue. Gallstones are more common in people who are obese and can increase the risk of pancreatitis.
5. Physical inactivity
A sedentary lifestyle worsens insulin resistance and forces the pancreas to produce more insulin. Without activity to help muscles absorb glucose, the pancreas remains under constant strain. This metabolic stress increases susceptibility to diabetes and pancreatic cancer.
Physical activity may lower pancreatic cancer risk both directly and indirectly. It supports immune function, improves cell health, reduces obesity and lowers type 2 diabetes risk. Regular movement strengthens antioxidant defences and increases the activity of disease fighting immune cells.
Adults are encouraged to include strength training at least twice a week and to aim for 150 minutes of moderate activity or 75 minutes of vigorous activity each week.
Because pancreatic conditions can be life threatening, recognising early symptoms is important. Seek medical advice if you have persistent abdominal pain, unexplained weight loss, loss of appetite, nausea or vomiting that do not settle, jaundice, greasy or foul smelling stools or chronic fatigue.
Many risks are modifiable. Limiting alcohol intake, quitting smoking, eating a diet rich in fruit, vegetables and whole grains and being physically active all reduce the likelihood of pancreatic disease. Even small changes such as choosing plant-based protein or cutting back on sugary drinks help lighten the load on this vital organ.
By understanding how the pancreas becomes damaged and by noticing symptoms early, you can take simple steps to protect it. Look after your pancreas and it will look after you.
Dipa Kamdar 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.
The scandal of the religious-run Magdalene laundries, where young women deemed to have offended the moral code of the Catholic Church were incarcerated and put to work, is a stain on the public history of the Irish state. It has taken years of campaigning to bring this injustice to light.
Even now, it is more than feasible that further revelations will emerge. They did in 2012, when amateur historian Catherine Corliss uncovered evidence of a mass grave containing the remains of 796 infants at St Mary’s mother-and-baby home in Tuam, Co Galway.
Overall, it is estimated that a minimum of 10,000 women were sent to the institutions in the years from the founding of the state in 1922 to the closure of the final Magdalene laundry in 1996. Most were forced into unpaid, brutalising work in the profitable laundry system.
The new documentary, Testimony, directed by Aoife Kelleher, takes up where earlier campaigning films left off. Its most notable progenitor is Sex in a Cold Climate (1998), in which four women narrated to-camera their memories of the laundries. It was as shocking then as now to see elderly, dignified, smartly dressed women weeping at the memory of having their children taken from them.
The trauma they endured is unimaginable. Sex in a Cold Climate was the inspiration for The Magdalene Sisters in 2002. Since then, Philomena (2013), based on the real story of Philomena Lee, who also speaks in Testimony, shone a light on the trade in babies, many of them to homes in the US, perpetrated by the Magdalene institutions in collusion with the Irish state.
Most recently, Small Things Like These (2024), adapted from the novella by Claire Keegan, asked its viewers what they would have done if they had been confronted with the truth of what was going on in those grim buildings.
The trailer for Testimony.
Testimony alternates to-camera interviews with survivors with the history of how the group, Justice for Magdalenes, was founded. We follow this collection of determined campaigners as they take on the Irish government and force them to acknowledge their historic complicity in this story.
Recognising that descriptions of slow, detailed legal work do not make for dynamic viewing, the filmmakers rely on explaining the legal process through the key figure of the Irish human rights lawyer, Maeve O’Rourke, an articulate, engaging presence on screen.
At the same time, the documentary acknowledges that the true heroes are the women whose stories of abuse and exploitation are as harrowing as when they were first heard. Regrettably, now as previously, the religious orders declined to participate.
Testimony is effectively a two-part film. One “ending” comes in at around the 55-minute mark with the triumphant arrival of a group of 220 Magdalene survivors and their families to a civic reception in Dublin. As the coaches roll in, they are greeted by cheering members of the public. This deeply moving sequence draws its strength from the women’s own emotions as they take in the faces and placards among the crowds. As one says: “That for me was my healing.”
The film then restarts with the stories of the children who were trafficked out of the state, interweaving this with the campaigners’ attempts to force the government into offering appropriate recompense. This segment opens with footage of the discovery of the Tuam burials and again returns to the voices of survivors, both mothers and children, including Philomena Lee. It also touches on the illegal vaccine trials conducted on children born in the homes.
Deprived of a similarly cathartic ending to the first segment, the film concludes by imploring the Irish government and the religious institutions to make available all the records held on the Magdalene laundries.
Testimony will never reach the audiences that fictional films on the subject can. At the same time, this campaigning documentary is an essential reminder of a society’s efforts to contain female sexuality, particularly that of its most vulnerable members. It is equally a demonstration of how the law can be used to fight injustice. We needn’t be so complacent as to assume none of this could happen again.
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Ruth Barton 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.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Estrella Luna-Diez, Associate Professor in Plant Pathology, School of Biosciences, University of Birmingham
The mighty Feanedock Oak in Derbyshire has provided an anchor habitat for many lifeforms, including people, for more than 200 years.Lucy Neal, CC BY-NC-SA
The Feanedock Oak stands out so clearly in Derbyshire’s section of the National Forest, you’d think it was calling to you. Surrounded by open fields, hawthorn hedges and young beech forest, a majestic old oak like this anchors the English countryside.
As the highest expression of our woodlands, oaks support more life in the UK than any other native tree. At the foot of the Feanedock oak, you can hear and see – at a glance – wrens, blackbirds, spiders, squirrels, song thrush, hoverflies, butterflies, blackcaps, woodlouse, ants and chiffchaffs. For more than two centuries, it has provided an anchor habitat, including for humans – a tumbled-down dwelling lies under its shade.
How well any English oak (Quercus robur) thrives affects everything living on and around it, from canopy to soil. In recent years of heat and drought, the Feanedock Oak has lost two large boughs.
In the summer of 2023, dendrochronologists – who research and date trees through their growth rings – took samples from the tree’s trunk to study its “healthy” and “poor” years of growth. They counted 195 rings but did not get to the centre of the tree – so it was probably seeded in the early 19th century, if not earlier. As a sapling, it would have greeted Derbyshire miners walking across the fields from nearby villages to work in the newly-dug coal shafts or the many industrial potteries in the area.
More than 200 years later, in July 2023, the Feanedock Oak (now measuring around 120 feet) played a central role in Ring of Truth. This creative collaboration between tree scientists and artists from the Walking Forest collective imagined a legal case set in the year 2030 between a claimant, the oak (in whose shadow the case was heard), and the UK government.
Ring of Truth’s imagined court case is heard at the Timber Festival, July 2023. RB Films, CC BY-NC-SA
The counsel for the claimant – real-life rights of nature lawyer Paul Powlesland – set out his argument to the judge and jury, claiming the government had breached legal obligations set out in the 2008 Climate Change Act. Scientists from the University of Birmingham – including one of us (Bruno) – acted as expert witnesses, bringing evidence of the threats posed to the tree from increased heat, atmospheric CO₂, soil damage and disease.
After hearing all the evidence, the assembled audience – in the role of jury – voted for their verdict. Many were acutely conscious that the claimant had been standing in this spot far longer than anyone else present – a silent witness to the damage done by humans on the environment and landscape. They ordered the secretary of state for climate and ecological breakdown (as the job is known in 2030) to cease breaching legal obligations to protect this and all “anchor oaks”, and the communities that thrive or suffer with them.
That powerful moment under the Feanedock Oak opened a door to a deeper question: how and what do trees remember?
Until recently, little was known about how memory might function in long-lived organisms like trees which experience decades, even centuries, of shifting environmental pressures. So this is what our multidisciplinary research collaboration – featuring artworks, performances and even a musical composition as well as groundbreaking science – set out to discover.
On the Memory of Trees, by Scott Wilson, was composed using data collated by the Membra project.
How trees’ memories work
For trees, memory is not a metaphor but a biological reality, written into their cells. One of the most remarkable forms this takes is epigenetic memory: the ability of a tree to record its life experiences and allow those experiences to shape its future, without changing the sequence of its DNA.
As Membra (full name: Understanding Memory of UK Treescapes for Better Resilience and Adaptation), we’ve studied a number of ecologically vital and culturally significant UK species including oak, ash, hazel, beech and birch. Together, they have helped us understand how trees register and respond to environmental stress, offering a powerful glimpse into how their memories are carried through woodlands.
At the heart of this process is DNA methylation, where chemical tags known as methyl groups are added to the tree’s DNA over time. While not rewriting the genetic code, they do alter how it is read. These chemical signatures can turn genes on or off, dial responses up or down, and fundamentally shift how a tree grows, adapts, or defends itself. In oaks, for example, long-term drought exposure over decades is associated with changes in DNA methylation, suggesting that trees may adjust their gene expression in response to repeated stress.
These epigenetic memories may allow trees to respond more quickly to drought, disease or climate extremes, and could even be passed to the next generation. In some plant species, this kind of inheritance is well documented, but in long-lived trees, it remains an open question – one with critical implications for forest regeneration and resilience.
The Insights section is committed to high-quality longform journalism. Our editors work with academics from many different backgrounds who are tackling a wide range of societal and scientific challenges.
So far, our research has shown trees respond to stress in ways that can extend well beyond the immediate event. Exposure to drought or high CO₂, for example, can leave lasting marks on a tree’s growth and internal chemistry, and may shape how it responds to future conditions. But the strength of this memory appears to depend on the nature of the stress: it is more pronounced when the stress is particularly strong, such as disease, or when it occurs repeatedly over time, such as chronic drought.
A surprising result came from oak, where we observed that DNA methylation itself changes depending on the time of year – with methylation levels lowest in early spring, then increasing as the seasons progress. This suggests the imprinting of memory in trees may be far more dynamic than previously thought, and that the timing of stress events within the growing season could influence how strongly that memory is encoded.
All our studied species and associated environmental conditions have now been sequenced. In every case, we have found evidence of these memories of past stresses. In ash trees, for example, we’ve begun to detect methylation changes linked to ash dieback pressure, offering clues as to how trees regulate their defences over time as a disease progresses.
Trees are certainly resilient. They bend, adapt and endure, holding the memory of storms and seasons within their very bodies. But even their deep-rooted strength has limits. The challenges they now face are faster, more frequent and more severe than at any point in their evolutionary history.
This means what we are learning from their memories is not just a story of survival, but a warning. They are telling us there could come a point when they can no longer cope.
Even young trees remember
It is easy to be awed by a centuries-old oak. But what often goes unnoticed is the quiet crisis beneath the canopy. Across many UK woodlands, the next generation is missing.
Surveys show steep declines in most species of young trees (seedlings and saplings) due to a growing list of pressures: prolonged drought, warming temperatures, shifting herbivore populations, and an expanding wave of pests and pathogens. According to a study of nine sites in England and Scotland, co-authored by one of us (Bruno) and currently under review, the sapling mortality rate has increased from 16.2% in the period up to 2000 to 30.9% two decades later.
In some species such as elm and now ash, diseases have brought populations close to the point of lack of regeneration – when a woodland can no longer sustain itself. To counter this threat, young trees must be highly adaptable – not just in form, but at the molecular level. At Membra, scientists are exploring whether young trees imprint environmental stress more readily than older ones, and whether that memory, recorded through changes in DNA methylation, influences their survival.
One way we have tested such transgenerational changes is to expose trees (oak and hazel) to the elevated levels of CO₂ that are expected in the UK by 2050. This was done in the Birmingham Institute for Forest Research (Bifor) facility in a Staffordshire woodland – one of the world’s largest climate change experiments, where tree “arrays” (circular patches of woodland) are exposed to 150 parts per million (ppm) of CO₂ above ambient concentrations.
Membra’s research there has found that the offspring of trees exposed to these CO₂ levels respond very differently to further environmental stressors – in ways that can make them more resilient. For example, acorns from CO₂-exposed oaks were notably larger and their seedlings showed both faster growth and improved resistance to pathogens like powdery mildew – a strong sign that environmental conditions experienced by parent trees can shape offspring resilience.
To date, molecular analysis shows the inherited memory of this exposure is imprinted in the tree genes that are involved in defence mechanisms. The direct link with resilience should be identified in the next few years as our data analysis progresses.
Strikingly, these beneficial effects were most pronounced during “mast” years, when trees produce a bumper crop of seeds, suggesting that the reproductive cycles of mature oaks as well as resource availability are key to the oaks’ successful inheritance of stress-adaptive traits. Similarly, seedlings from oak trees that had undergone repeated drought exposure have shown increased drought tolerance – which suggests some trees may “prime” their offspring to be more resilient in the face of repeated climate stress.
Our work also shows that young trees can be artificially primed for resilience. For instance, early treatment with certain natural compounds enhances oak seedlings’ resistance to powdery mildew disease, triggering biochemical and transcriptional responses that allow them to mount a faster and stronger defence. This priming acts like a kind of immunological memory – in this case not inherited but induced – and could potentially open up new avenues for improving forest health and regeneration.
Importantly, species differ widely in how they pass on environmental experiences to their progeny. Hazel trees subjected to the same elevated CO₂ conditions in the Bifor woodland produced both smaller nuts and seedlings that often failed to thrive after germination. So, rather than assuming a one-size-fits-all strategy for seed sourcing, forestry managers may need to tailor decisions based on species-specific responses to past environmental stresses. Recognising the importance of parental environmental history, especially for stressors like drought, could shape how we select and prepare the next generation of trees.
This may also mean rethinking how and when we collect seeds. In species such as oak, collecting from mast years may improve the odds of transmitting beneficial adaptive traits. In all cases, understanding how trees’ memory works, not just within a tree’s lifetime but across generations, offers a crucial tool for building more adaptive, resilient treescapes in this rapidly changing world.
Tree rings such as those sampled from the Feanedock Oak record much more than just a tree’s age. They hold evidence of how trees respond to changing climates, rising carbon levels and extreme events.
Studies using these natural archives (the rings) have shown that rising atmospheric CO₂ is already changing how trees grow and photosynthesise. In some oaks, it has led to faster growth and more carbon being stored – a hopeful sign.
But this acceleration may come with hidden costs. Trees that grow quickly not only reach maturity sooner but may also die younger, potentially limiting the long-term stability of forest carbon storage.
And these shifts are not just a concern for the trees themselves – they ripple outward. Faster growth can alter forest structure, affecting biodiversity and resilience. In the UK and globally, trees face an escalating cascade of challenges including pollution, drought, storms and disease – and increasingly, these pressures overlap.
Understanding how different trees’ memories will mediate their responses to new, more stressful conditions is key to predicting which species will thrive, adapt or decline. Artificially priming young trees by exposing them early to stress may enhance their memory and survival.
In recent years, a wave of tree planting, often tied to carbon offsetting schemes, is rapidly reshaping landscapes across much of the UK. National and local governments have launched large-scale initiatives such as the England Tree Action Plan. These programmes aim to restore canopy cover, improve biodiversity and contribute to net-zero goals. Local authorities, environmental charities, landowners and corporate offsetting partners are among those overseeing the planting, with guidance and funding provided by the Forestry Commission and Defra.
However, the choice of species is often constrained by budget and availability, which can result in limited diversity and mismatches between trees and local ecological conditions. Fast-growing species like sycamore, alder, and hybrid poplar are frequently used, while slower-growing native species with deeper ecological value may be underrepresented.
Planting trees without understanding their long-term ecological roles – or their capacity to remember and adapt – also risks repeating old mistakes that could compromise long-term resilience. Selecting the right trees to face future climate threats requires more than just numbers. A forest full of fast-growing, short-lived trees may have a very different effect on the local ecosystem than one with long-lived, memory-bearing individuals. In the worst-case scenario, such woodlands will fail to regenerate and die out.
Climate models indicate a future of warmer, wetter winters and hotter, drier summers in the UK, which will challenge many native species. Diseases such as ash dieback have already transformed landscapes, with over 80% of ash trees expected to be lost in many areas. This is not just a loss of a species but a loss of the biodiversity that depends on it.
Our work highlights the value of sourcing seed from trees that have survived historic drought and understanding how memory, resilience and adaptation are embedded in the biology of many older individuals. Future woodlands will need to blend ancient wisdom with modern science, combining genetic diversity, environmental memory and community stewardship to thrive.
This legal shift complements the scientific insight from Membra: that mature woodlands, with deep memory and biodiversity, are not replaceable. And as Ring of Truth’s imagined court case made clear, it is a travesty if trees such as the Feanedock Oak are thought of as little more than machines to extract human-created carbon from the atmosphere.
Their social, cultural and ecological roles are vast. Listening to Indigenous and local communities with long-held tree knowledge, and empowering tree guardians in cities and villages alike, is vital to fostering a meaningful public practice of tree stewardship.
As one Walking Forest participant put it, time spent with trees creates space and renewed agency for surviving the climate and nature crises: “We are like trees. The stronger we root and allow ourselves, like them, to be nurtured by those around us, the better we are at withstanding the strongest of storms”.
Another said: “I see the bigger picture now, of how we are related to the forest – at one with nature because we too are part of the ecosystem.”
By weaving together artistic performance, scientific insight and ancestral knowledge, the Walking Forest collective has sought to expand how we understand our relationship with woodlands – connecting women, trees and ecological justice across time.
One powerful example is the 107-year-old Monterey Pine planted by suffragette Rose Lamartine Yates, the last known survivor of a historic arboretum planted by women activists at Eagle House in Batheaston, Somerset. A place of recovery for women who were politically active as part of the suffrage movement, this was the home of the Blathwayt family – and known as the Suffragettes’ Retreat.
Suffragettes Adela Pankhurst and Annie Kenney at Eagle House in Batheaston, Somerset, in 1910. Linley Blathwayt/Wikimedia
Between April 1909 and July 1911, at least 47 trees were planted in the grounds of Eagle House to commemorate individual suffragists and suffragettes, many of whom had been imprisoned and tortured. The arboretum afforded the suffragettes an opportunity to imagine the future into which their young trees would grow.
The trees were all bulldozed in the late 1960s to make way for a housing estate – other than Lamartine Yates’s Monterey Pine, planted in 1909, which survives to this day, protected in a private garden. The seeds of this tree are a touchstone of Walking Forest: we have gathered and propagated them, shared them with communities, and created performances and ceremonies that honour the tree’s legacy – connecting past and future generations (of trees and people) in a project to create a woodland that mirrors the original Eagle House arboretum.
Since 2018, Walking Forest artists have travelled overland to UN climate talks to gift seeds from the Monterey Pine to women and youth activists, climate negotiators, Indigenous community leaders and environmental campaigners – connecting with them in this story of resilience and renewal.
In another act of collective mourning and protest, a 100-year-old silver birch cut down for the HS2 rail link was carried through Coventry by more than 40 women during Coventry’s year as City of Culture in 2021. The act made visible the loss of ancient woodland and connected it with human grief, resistance and care.
These stories are not isolated. Across the UK, trees have become flashpoints for protest and protection – from the Sycamore Gap tree at Hadrian’s Wall to Sheffield Council’s felling of more than 5,000 healthy street trees between 2014 and 2018 as part of road maintenance.
Walking Forest has collaborated with Membra not only to share scientific knowledge but to offer new ways of knowing through storytelling, ritual and creative action. As climate pressures grow, so too does public awareness of how irreplaceable mature trees are.
We are still only beginning to uncover the complexity of tree memory. Future research may reveal exactly how memory is transferred between generations, how trees prepare for challenges they’ve never seen, and how entire forests might adapt together.
But our collaboration between scientists, artists and communities is already helping to shift how people think about trees, from passive backdrop to learning beings. Through this work, we understand that trees are not just survivors – they are storytellers, record keepers and even teachers.
As our understanding of their memory deepens, so too does our responsibility to listen, learn and act. The future of forests depends not just on what trees can remember, but on what we choose not to forget.
A recent return to the Feanedock Oak, two years after its case was argued in Ring of Truth, found the tree still standing but visibly altered. Its two large, fallen limbs lay cloaked in bramble and nettle. But under its canopy, foxes burrowed, birds sang and fruit trees flowered.
Though imbalanced, this grand old oak holds its ground – a tree of memory and now a symbol of care. We will return again and again to honour its survival, and admire its provision for so many other species in the natural world. The tree reminds us that people need ways to anchor ourselves too, as we navigate uncertain times ahead.
Estrella Luna-Diez receives funding from UK Research & Innovation (UKRI) and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).
Anne-Marie Culhane receives funding from UKRI and the NERC.
Bruno Barcante Ladvocat Cintra receives funding from the NERC.
Additional thanks to Lucy Neal, member of the Walking Forest collective, for her written and photographic contributions to this article. Lucy was the creator of Ring of Truth, performed at the Timber Festival in July 2023.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Estrella Luna-Diez, Associate Professor in Plant Pathology, School of Biosciences, University of Birmingham
The mighty Feanedock Oak in Derbyshire has provided an anchor habitat for many lifeforms, including people, for more than 200 years.Lucy Neal, CC BY-NC-SA
The Feanedock Oak stands out so clearly in Derbyshire’s section of the National Forest, you’d think it was calling to you. Surrounded by open fields, hawthorn hedges and young beech forest, a majestic old oak like this anchors the English countryside.
As the highest expression of our woodlands, oaks support more life in the UK than any other native tree. At the foot of the Feanedock oak, you can hear and see – at a glance – wrens, blackbirds, spiders, squirrels, song thrush, hoverflies, butterflies, blackcaps, woodlouse, ants and chiffchaffs. For more than two centuries, it has provided an anchor habitat, including for humans – a tumbled-down dwelling lies under its shade.
How well any English oak (Quercus robur) thrives affects everything living on and around it, from canopy to soil. In recent years of heat and drought, the Feanedock Oak has lost two large boughs.
In the summer of 2023, dendrochronologists – who research and date trees through their growth rings – took samples from the tree’s trunk to study its “healthy” and “poor” years of growth. They counted 195 rings but did not get to the centre of the tree – so it was probably seeded in the early 19th century, if not earlier. As a sapling, it would have greeted Derbyshire miners walking across the fields from nearby villages to work in the newly-dug coal shafts or the many industrial potteries in the area.
More than 200 years later, in July 2023, the Feanedock Oak (now measuring around 120 feet) played a central role in Ring of Truth. This creative collaboration between tree scientists and artists from the Walking Forest collective imagined a legal case set in the year 2030 between a claimant, the oak (in whose shadow the case was heard), and the UK government.
Ring of Truth’s imagined court case is heard at the Timber Festival, July 2023. RB Films, CC BY-NC-SA
The counsel for the claimant – real-life rights of nature lawyer Paul Powlesland – set out his argument to the judge and jury, claiming the government had breached legal obligations set out in the 2008 Climate Change Act. Scientists from the University of Birmingham – including one of us (Bruno) – acted as expert witnesses, bringing evidence of the threats posed to the tree from increased heat, atmospheric CO₂, soil damage and disease.
After hearing all the evidence, the assembled audience – in the role of jury – voted for their verdict. Many were acutely conscious that the claimant had been standing in this spot far longer than anyone else present – a silent witness to the damage done by humans on the environment and landscape. They ordered the secretary of state for climate and ecological breakdown (as the job is known in 2030) to cease breaching legal obligations to protect this and all “anchor oaks”, and the communities that thrive or suffer with them.
That powerful moment under the Feanedock Oak opened a door to a deeper question: how and what do trees remember?
Until recently, little was known about how memory might function in long-lived organisms like trees which experience decades, even centuries, of shifting environmental pressures. So this is what our multidisciplinary research collaboration – featuring artworks, performances and even a musical composition as well as groundbreaking science – set out to discover.
On the Memory of Trees, by Scott Wilson, was composed using data collated by the Membra project.
How trees’ memories work
For trees, memory is not a metaphor but a biological reality, written into their cells. One of the most remarkable forms this takes is epigenetic memory: the ability of a tree to record its life experiences and allow those experiences to shape its future, without changing the sequence of its DNA.
As Membra (full name: Understanding Memory of UK Treescapes for Better Resilience and Adaptation), we’ve studied a number of ecologically vital and culturally significant UK species including oak, ash, hazel, beech and birch. Together, they have helped us understand how trees register and respond to environmental stress, offering a powerful glimpse into how their memories are carried through woodlands.
At the heart of this process is DNA methylation, where chemical tags known as methyl groups are added to the tree’s DNA over time. While not rewriting the genetic code, they do alter how it is read. These chemical signatures can turn genes on or off, dial responses up or down, and fundamentally shift how a tree grows, adapts, or defends itself. In oaks, for example, long-term drought exposure over decades is associated with changes in DNA methylation, suggesting that trees may adjust their gene expression in response to repeated stress.
These epigenetic memories may allow trees to respond more quickly to drought, disease or climate extremes, and could even be passed to the next generation. In some plant species, this kind of inheritance is well documented, but in long-lived trees, it remains an open question – one with critical implications for forest regeneration and resilience.
The Insights section is committed to high-quality longform journalism. Our editors work with academics from many different backgrounds who are tackling a wide range of societal and scientific challenges.
So far, our research has shown trees respond to stress in ways that can extend well beyond the immediate event. Exposure to drought or high CO₂, for example, can leave lasting marks on a tree’s growth and internal chemistry, and may shape how it responds to future conditions. But the strength of this memory appears to depend on the nature of the stress: it is more pronounced when the stress is particularly strong, such as disease, or when it occurs repeatedly over time, such as chronic drought.
A surprising result came from oak, where we observed that DNA methylation itself changes depending on the time of year – with methylation levels lowest in early spring, then increasing as the seasons progress. This suggests the imprinting of memory in trees may be far more dynamic than previously thought, and that the timing of stress events within the growing season could influence how strongly that memory is encoded.
All our studied species and associated environmental conditions have now been sequenced. In every case, we have found evidence of these memories of past stresses. In ash trees, for example, we’ve begun to detect methylation changes linked to ash dieback pressure, offering clues as to how trees regulate their defences over time as a disease progresses.
Trees are certainly resilient. They bend, adapt and endure, holding the memory of storms and seasons within their very bodies. But even their deep-rooted strength has limits. The challenges they now face are faster, more frequent and more severe than at any point in their evolutionary history.
This means what we are learning from their memories is not just a story of survival, but a warning. They are telling us there could come a point when they can no longer cope.
Even young trees remember
It is easy to be awed by a centuries-old oak. But what often goes unnoticed is the quiet crisis beneath the canopy. Across many UK woodlands, the next generation is missing.
Surveys show steep declines in most species of young trees (seedlings and saplings) due to a growing list of pressures: prolonged drought, warming temperatures, shifting herbivore populations, and an expanding wave of pests and pathogens. According to a study of nine sites in England and Scotland, co-authored by one of us (Bruno) and currently under review, the sapling mortality rate has increased from 16.2% in the period up to 2000 to 30.9% two decades later.
In some species such as elm and now ash, diseases have brought populations close to the point of lack of regeneration – when a woodland can no longer sustain itself. To counter this threat, young trees must be highly adaptable – not just in form, but at the molecular level. At Membra, scientists are exploring whether young trees imprint environmental stress more readily than older ones, and whether that memory, recorded through changes in DNA methylation, influences their survival.
One way we have tested such transgenerational changes is to expose trees (oak and hazel) to the elevated levels of CO₂ that are expected in the UK by 2050. This was done in the Birmingham Institute for Forest Research (Bifor) facility in a Staffordshire woodland – one of the world’s largest climate change experiments, where tree “arrays” (circular patches of woodland) are exposed to 150 parts per million (ppm) of CO₂ above ambient concentrations.
Membra’s research there has found that the offspring of trees exposed to these CO₂ levels respond very differently to further environmental stressors – in ways that can make them more resilient. For example, acorns from CO₂-exposed oaks were notably larger and their seedlings showed both faster growth and improved resistance to pathogens like powdery mildew – a strong sign that environmental conditions experienced by parent trees can shape offspring resilience.
To date, molecular analysis shows the inherited memory of this exposure is imprinted in the tree genes that are involved in defence mechanisms. The direct link with resilience should be identified in the next few years as our data analysis progresses.
Strikingly, these beneficial effects were most pronounced during “mast” years, when trees produce a bumper crop of seeds, suggesting that the reproductive cycles of mature oaks as well as resource availability are key to the oaks’ successful inheritance of stress-adaptive traits. Similarly, seedlings from oak trees that had undergone repeated drought exposure have shown increased drought tolerance – which suggests some trees may “prime” their offspring to be more resilient in the face of repeated climate stress.
Our work also shows that young trees can be artificially primed for resilience. For instance, early treatment with certain natural compounds enhances oak seedlings’ resistance to powdery mildew disease, triggering biochemical and transcriptional responses that allow them to mount a faster and stronger defence. This priming acts like a kind of immunological memory – in this case not inherited but induced – and could potentially open up new avenues for improving forest health and regeneration.
Importantly, species differ widely in how they pass on environmental experiences to their progeny. Hazel trees subjected to the same elevated CO₂ conditions in the Bifor woodland produced both smaller nuts and seedlings that often failed to thrive after germination. So, rather than assuming a one-size-fits-all strategy for seed sourcing, forestry managers may need to tailor decisions based on species-specific responses to past environmental stresses. Recognising the importance of parental environmental history, especially for stressors like drought, could shape how we select and prepare the next generation of trees.
This may also mean rethinking how and when we collect seeds. In species such as oak, collecting from mast years may improve the odds of transmitting beneficial adaptive traits. In all cases, understanding how trees’ memory works, not just within a tree’s lifetime but across generations, offers a crucial tool for building more adaptive, resilient treescapes in this rapidly changing world.
Tree rings such as those sampled from the Feanedock Oak record much more than just a tree’s age. They hold evidence of how trees respond to changing climates, rising carbon levels and extreme events.
Studies using these natural archives (the rings) have shown that rising atmospheric CO₂ is already changing how trees grow and photosynthesise. In some oaks, it has led to faster growth and more carbon being stored – a hopeful sign.
But this acceleration may come with hidden costs. Trees that grow quickly not only reach maturity sooner but may also die younger, potentially limiting the long-term stability of forest carbon storage.
And these shifts are not just a concern for the trees themselves – they ripple outward. Faster growth can alter forest structure, affecting biodiversity and resilience. In the UK and globally, trees face an escalating cascade of challenges including pollution, drought, storms and disease – and increasingly, these pressures overlap.
Understanding how different trees’ memories will mediate their responses to new, more stressful conditions is key to predicting which species will thrive, adapt or decline. Artificially priming young trees by exposing them early to stress may enhance their memory and survival.
In recent years, a wave of tree planting, often tied to carbon offsetting schemes, is rapidly reshaping landscapes across much of the UK. National and local governments have launched large-scale initiatives such as the England Tree Action Plan. These programmes aim to restore canopy cover, improve biodiversity and contribute to net-zero goals. Local authorities, environmental charities, landowners and corporate offsetting partners are among those overseeing the planting, with guidance and funding provided by the Forestry Commission and Defra.
However, the choice of species is often constrained by budget and availability, which can result in limited diversity and mismatches between trees and local ecological conditions. Fast-growing species like sycamore, alder, and hybrid poplar are frequently used, while slower-growing native species with deeper ecological value may be underrepresented.
Planting trees without understanding their long-term ecological roles – or their capacity to remember and adapt – also risks repeating old mistakes that could compromise long-term resilience. Selecting the right trees to face future climate threats requires more than just numbers. A forest full of fast-growing, short-lived trees may have a very different effect on the local ecosystem than one with long-lived, memory-bearing individuals. In the worst-case scenario, such woodlands will fail to regenerate and die out.
Climate models indicate a future of warmer, wetter winters and hotter, drier summers in the UK, which will challenge many native species. Diseases such as ash dieback have already transformed landscapes, with over 80% of ash trees expected to be lost in many areas. This is not just a loss of a species but a loss of the biodiversity that depends on it.
Our work highlights the value of sourcing seed from trees that have survived historic drought and understanding how memory, resilience and adaptation are embedded in the biology of many older individuals. Future woodlands will need to blend ancient wisdom with modern science, combining genetic diversity, environmental memory and community stewardship to thrive.
This legal shift complements the scientific insight from Membra: that mature woodlands, with deep memory and biodiversity, are not replaceable. And as Ring of Truth’s imagined court case made clear, it is a travesty if trees such as the Feanedock Oak are thought of as little more than machines to extract human-created carbon from the atmosphere.
Their social, cultural and ecological roles are vast. Listening to Indigenous and local communities with long-held tree knowledge, and empowering tree guardians in cities and villages alike, is vital to fostering a meaningful public practice of tree stewardship.
As one Walking Forest participant put it, time spent with trees creates space and renewed agency for surviving the climate and nature crises: “We are like trees. The stronger we root and allow ourselves, like them, to be nurtured by those around us, the better we are at withstanding the strongest of storms”.
Another said: “I see the bigger picture now, of how we are related to the forest – at one with nature because we too are part of the ecosystem.”
By weaving together artistic performance, scientific insight and ancestral knowledge, the Walking Forest collective has sought to expand how we understand our relationship with woodlands – connecting women, trees and ecological justice across time.
One powerful example is the 107-year-old Monterey Pine planted by suffragette Rose Lamartine Yates, the last known survivor of a historic arboretum planted by women activists at Eagle House in Batheaston, Somerset. A place of recovery for women who were politically active as part of the suffrage movement, this was the home of the Blathwayt family – and known as the Suffragettes’ Retreat.
Suffragettes Adela Pankhurst and Annie Kenney at Eagle House in Batheaston, Somerset, in 1910. Linley Blathwayt/Wikimedia
Between April 1909 and July 1911, at least 47 trees were planted in the grounds of Eagle House to commemorate individual suffragists and suffragettes, many of whom had been imprisoned and tortured. The arboretum afforded the suffragettes an opportunity to imagine the future into which their young trees would grow.
The trees were all bulldozed in the late 1960s to make way for a housing estate – other than Lamartine Yates’s Monterey Pine, planted in 1909, which survives to this day, protected in a private garden. The seeds of this tree are a touchstone of Walking Forest: we have gathered and propagated them, shared them with communities, and created performances and ceremonies that honour the tree’s legacy – connecting past and future generations (of trees and people) in a project to create a woodland that mirrors the original Eagle House arboretum.
Since 2018, Walking Forest artists have travelled overland to UN climate talks to gift seeds from the Monterey Pine to women and youth activists, climate negotiators, Indigenous community leaders and environmental campaigners – connecting with them in this story of resilience and renewal.
In another act of collective mourning and protest, a 100-year-old silver birch cut down for the HS2 rail link was carried through Coventry by more than 40 women during Coventry’s year as City of Culture in 2021. The act made visible the loss of ancient woodland and connected it with human grief, resistance and care.
These stories are not isolated. Across the UK, trees have become flashpoints for protest and protection – from the Sycamore Gap tree at Hadrian’s Wall to Sheffield Council’s felling of more than 5,000 healthy street trees between 2014 and 2018 as part of road maintenance.
Walking Forest has collaborated with Membra not only to share scientific knowledge but to offer new ways of knowing through storytelling, ritual and creative action. As climate pressures grow, so too does public awareness of how irreplaceable mature trees are.
We are still only beginning to uncover the complexity of tree memory. Future research may reveal exactly how memory is transferred between generations, how trees prepare for challenges they’ve never seen, and how entire forests might adapt together.
But our collaboration between scientists, artists and communities is already helping to shift how people think about trees, from passive backdrop to learning beings. Through this work, we understand that trees are not just survivors – they are storytellers, record keepers and even teachers.
As our understanding of their memory deepens, so too does our responsibility to listen, learn and act. The future of forests depends not just on what trees can remember, but on what we choose not to forget.
A recent return to the Feanedock Oak, two years after its case was argued in Ring of Truth, found the tree still standing but visibly altered. Its two large, fallen limbs lay cloaked in bramble and nettle. But under its canopy, foxes burrowed, birds sang and fruit trees flowered.
Though imbalanced, this grand old oak holds its ground – a tree of memory and now a symbol of care. We will return again and again to honour its survival, and admire its provision for so many other species in the natural world. The tree reminds us that people need ways to anchor ourselves too, as we navigate uncertain times ahead.
Estrella Luna-Diez receives funding from UK Research & Innovation (UKRI) and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).
Anne-Marie Culhane receives funding from UKRI and the NERC.
Bruno Barcante Ladvocat Cintra receives funding from the NERC.
Additional thanks to Lucy Neal, member of the Walking Forest collective, for her written and photographic contributions to this article. Lucy was the creator of Ring of Truth, performed at the Timber Festival in July 2023.
Source: The Conversation – UK – By Parveen Akhtar, Senior Lecturer: Politics, History and International Relations, Aston University
Just 74 days into her new role as home secretary, Shabana Mahmood has unveiled what she calls “the most substantial reform to the UK’s asylum system in a generation”.
Immigration is currently viewed as the most important issue facing the country, followed by the economy. While many, especially within the Labour party, have long found border control an awkward terrain, Mahmood’s stance is unambiguous: “I just don’t know why we’ve got ourselves in a tangle talking about migration controls on the left of politics … it’s really pretty fundamental to the way a lot of our voters think.”
Her proposals are, broadly, intended to deter illegal immigration by making the UK a less attractive destination for asylum seekers. Mahmood has proposed, among other things: making refugee status more temporary, reforming human rights legislation to make it harder for illegal migrants to remain in the UK and suspending UK visas for countries that refuse to accept returned migrants.
Some on the left of Labour have already condemned the proposals. But figures on the political right have applauded Mahmood’s assertion that uncontrolled asylum and immigration are contributing to social division.
Beyond the policy substance, Mahmood’s Commons delivery attracted praise from the right: confident, assured and like a future leader. Former Conservative minister Michael Gove has called Mahmood the “standout figure” of the current government, describing her as having “a totally coherent worldview”.
How did Mahmood, who once stated that she personally supported a general amnesty for all undocumented workers, become the face of a hardline Labour migration policy, lauded by the political right?
Journey of a politician
Born in Birmingham, to Kashmiri Pakistani Muslim parents, Mahmood spent part of her early childhood in Saudi Arabia, where her father worked as a civil engineer, before returning to Birmingham.
Her family life was steeped in politics. Her father chaired the Birmingham Labour Party and was known locally as an honest broker who mediated neighbourhood disputes. Her mother ran the family’s corner shop – giving Mahmood a “shopkeeper’s daughter” background reminiscent of another formidable woman in British politics. She cites Margaret Thatcher as one of her heroes, alongside Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan’s first female prime minister.
Her political consciousness sharpened after 9/11. She found herself being held “accountable” by strangers for events thousands of miles away. She had experienced racism before, her first encounter was at age eight. But the post-9/11 shift was of a different magnitude, which she described as a “shock to the system”.
Elected in 2010 as one of the first female Muslim MPs, she quickly entered the shadow cabinet. She avoided frontbench roles under Jeremy Corbyn, citing incompatible economic views. Under Keir Starmer, she served as national campaign coordinator and worked closely with strategist Morgan McSweeney. She is also seen as having played a significant role in the crucial 2021 Batley and Spen byelection.
Mahmood speaks openly about her British Muslim identity and the sense of responsibility that comes with public visibility. “You have to accept the broader role that you have to play,” she has said, noting that many British Muslims instinctively look to her as a representative figure.
And yet, Mahmood’s own electoral base has shifted dramatically. Her majority in Birmingham Ladywood fell from nearly 30,000 in 2019 – one of the largest in the country – to just 3,400 in 2024, after a strong challenge from an independent pro-Gaza candidate.
She has also faced strong criticism for her abstention from a November 2023 vote on an amendment to the King’s Speech calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
Mahmood has in recent years assumed a markedly tougher line on immigration. This shift is reflected as much in her language and style, as in the policies she is advocating. Her presentation leans heavily into a no-nonsense, get-the-job-done approach.
She has stressed that she is the “the child of immigrants” whose parents “came here legally” and played by the rules. She establishes a firm boundary between lawful migration and the illegal immigration she argues now defines the broken asylum system.
Reputational shield?
Before becoming home secretary, she had already earned admiration for her handling of what was arguably the most daunting early assignment of the 2024 Labour government. As justice secretary, she faced a prison system running at 99% capacity. She introduced an early release programme that risked perceptions of being “soft on crime,” yet navigated the controversy with minimal turbulence.
A trained barrister who once dreamed of becoming “Kavanagh QC”, Mahmood brings legal expertise and a rule-of-law approach to immigration debates. Themes of “fairness” and “public consent” appear throughout her asylum policy proposals.
Her style is precise, technocratic and intellectually disciplined. These are qualities which help Labour toughen its immigration platform without appearing purely performative.
But Mahmood also plays a symbolic role. When political parties move rightwards on immigration, they often place minority politicians in prominent roles to provide a “reputational shield”. This allows them to advance stricter policies while deflecting accusations of intolerance.
Conservative governments spent more than a decade deploying this strategy in the Home Office. Sajid Javid, Priti Patel and Suella Braverman all embodied the dynamic. Labour, historically, has placed far fewer minorities in top portfolios, which makes Mahmood’s appointment all the more notable. In some respects, Labour now appears to be adopting an approach previously associated with its opponents.
Despite her experience in electoral strategy, Mahmood insists the asylum reforms are not an attempt to win back Reform UK voters or to position Labour tactically. Instead, she frames them as a response to “the genuine concerns of the British people” and an effort to rebuild trust in a system that has lost public confidence. It is a gamble that places the weight of Labour’s promise of competence squarely on the Home Office, and on Mahmood’s ability to deliver it.
Parveen Akhtar has previously received funding from the Economic and Social Research Council and the British Academy
During the first COVID-19 lockdown, we were both mothers trying to stay sane. Our chats often revolved around nappies, feeding, sleep deprivation and motherhood chaos. Between laughter and exhaustion, cloth nappies kept coming up in conversation.
Just the thought of all that laundry was enough to make us tired. Sure they would help reduce the 4,000–6,000 disposable nappies sent to landfill per child each year, but would they be detrimental to our wellbeing?
Perhaps our initial hesitation stemmed from the prevalent narrative that sustainability means sacrifice. You do something because it’s good for the planet, but that often comes at a cost to you: eat less meat, fly less, buy less stuff. When a sustainable choice feels like a daily sacrifice, it’s no surprise people end up quitting.
Yet something about cloth nappies felt different. As we became familiar with the online community of #ClothBumMums, the tone was refreshingly upbeat. These mums were driven to use cloth nappies because they enjoyed doing so, not because they felt guilty about throwing away reusables. They certainly didn’t appear to be missing the convenience of throwaway nappies. If anything, they radiated happiness and beamed with pride.
Curious about this, we set out to explore what was going on behind the scenes. Our study captured the daily experiences of 27 mothers using cloth nappies. Over seven days, participants recorded their routines through visual and verbal diaries, followed by group discussions where they reflected on their journey.
Our findings flipped the sacrifice narrative completely. Yes, the early days might be daunting. As one mum told us: “Sometimes it can be quite a lot of work, and I’ve always said that to people, especially in the early days of having a baby … If it’s too much for you and it’s proving detrimental to your mental health, buy a disposable.”
But once parents developed their own systems over time — figuring out routines, storage and washing hacks — a transformation occurred. This was evident during our focus group conversations following the seven-day diary period, when many mums said they had started to find joy and reassurance in the process. “The rest of the house can be absolute chaos, but my nappy box is tidy,” one told us, “and that makes me really, really happy.”
The joy of reusables
Through these stories, we identified the “wellbeing cycle of sustainable engagement”. This pattern starts with initial motivation, followed by a trial-and-error phase when the challenges can temporarily lower wellbeing.
However, once people establish effective routines — the mastery stage — wellbeing spikes significantly. This cycle often ends with advocacy, where parents become champions of the practice, helping others to get started.
Underpinning this process is what we call the “burden–reward paradox”: chores that once felt like a burden, once under control, can become a source of pride and satisfaction. What once looked like inconvenience transforms into a symbol of capability, care and purpose. Another parent told us:
I love it … I like it when there’s a big pile of nappies and they’re all dry enough, and I’m watching TV stuffing them … [I] definitely enjoy the washing of nappies more than I thought I would – definitely a niche hobby, I think.
Using cloth nappies can be a joyful experience for parents and baby. Soft Light/Shutterstock
In the case of cloth nappies at least, our research challenges the sacrifice-based narrative of eco-environmental messaging. Guilt or pressure might encourage people to start making sustainable choices – but only when these choices bring joy, happiness, pride or a sense of purpose are these actions likely to last.
And the environmental benefits are hard to ignore. UK children go through the equivalent of roughly 700 million car miles a year in disposable nappies. Switching to reusables, even for part of the time, can make a real dent in household emissions.
By flipping the sacrifice-based narrative, brands, campaigners and policymakers can be more serious about sustaining long-term green behaviour. Rather than telling people what to give up, show them what they can gain: wellbeing, confidence and community.
The lesson here goes far beyond nappies. As author Isabel Losada writes in The Joyful Environmentalist, sustainability doesn’t have to be grim or guilt-ridden. It can be creative, empowering – even joyful. The #ClothBumMum community illustrates that positive emotions — pride, mastery, connection — can be more powerful motivators than guilt or sacrifice.
So, perhaps it’s time we stop asking people to sacrifice things for the planet — and start showing them how living sustainably can feel good. Cloth nappies may seem like a niche item, but they hold a powerful insight: when sustainability is joyful not duty, everyone wins.
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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.
