China dominates the world in its overseas development finance into power plants, mines, dams, and other infrastructure. However, while many projects sail through, a good many get stalled. The results have less to do with Beijing and more with the strength of the host country partners. There is a complex dance between governments, elites, and bureaucrats to win the best “deal” with China, including Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects. These deals may benefit not just the economy, but also may empower one of these three actors. 

Over decades, billions of small lentil-sized plastic pellets, called nurdles, flooded out of the wastewater pipes of Formosa Plastic’s plant in Calhoun Texas into the Gulf of Mexico. For decades, Diane Wilson, a fourth-generation fisherwoman in a rural fishing town called Seadrift, has been tracking and collecting data on the company’s nurdle pollution. In 2019, after three years of constant sampling, she and her scrappy volunteers won a dramatic legal victory with a consent decree mandating 50 million in penalties for past pollution and fines if they do not clean up previous pollution or maintain zero discharge of plastic.

We should be outraged by sexuality education’s colonialist connections. As a researcher and trainer based in the UK, I see how deeply blatant colonialist influences run in the field of sex education. The British empire was obsessed with the sexualities of their subjects and imagined their societies to be exotic licentious places where upper class British men could live out illicit fantasies. Yet, at the same time, these societies were deemed to be wells of immorality that needed Victorian moral education. These dual imaginaries were used to justify colonialism itself as a force to civilize non-western bodies and sexualities, and remain as ideas which echo in more contemporary discourses around controlling population and HIV.

Climate security is an essential conceptual framework to understand the global interplay of biophysical and socioeconomic forces that threaten our planet. Indeed, it is so important that new currents of science, politics, and advocacy make refining definitions a necessity.

The Sahel region of Africa is a semi-arid, arc-shaped landmass that stretches 3,860 kilometres from Senegal across portions of Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, and even Sudan. It is also the most neglected and conflict-ridden part of the planet, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council.

The massive floods, heat waves, raging wildfires, and devastating droughts of 2021 brought the present reality of climate change’s catastrophic impacts on people and ecosystems home to our doorsteps.