BLACK FARMERS CHEATED, AGAIN

U$ Federal government has given $800 million to keep indebted farmers afloat

Jared Strong, Iowa Capital Dispatch
October 19, 2022

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack. (Jared Strong / Iowa Capital Dispatch)

More than 13,000 farmers have benefited from nearly $800 million in federal debt relief, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said Tuesday.

The assistance came from a new federal initiative to erase farmers’ loan delinquencies to the U.S. Department of Agriculture and private lenders or to resolve their remaining debts after foreclosure.

Going forward, the USDA is expected to give hundreds of millions of dollars of relief to farmers who are facing bankruptcy or foreclosure and to those who are at risk of missing payments on their loans.

“The star of the show here is the farmer,” Vilsack told reporters. “The person that really matters is the farmer, and keeping that farmer, him or her, on the land so that he or she can take care of their family and their community.”

The USDA’s Farm Service Agency gives direct loans to farmers and guarantees loans from banks, credit unions and others to farmers for up to 95% of their value.

The government’s farm loan obligations for the 2022 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, totaled about $5.8 billion, according to USDA records. States with the highest obligations included Iowa at about $484 million, Arkansas at $424 million, Oklahoma at $366 million and Nebraska at $341 million. Virginia’s overall obligations totaled over $67.5 million.

Of those with delinquent direct loans, the average farmer who has failed to make regular payments for at least two months received about $52,000 under a “distressed borrowers” initiative, which is funded with more than $3 billion by the Inflation Reduction Act. That eliminated their delinquencies.

For those with government-backed loans from private entities, the average benefit was about $172,000.

The total number of farmers in the two categories was about 11,000.

For those with direct loans who went bankrupt and still owed money — about 2,100 borrowers — the average benefit was about $101,000. Vilsack said those bankruptcies happened at least a year ago but did not say how long ago they might have occurred.

States with farmers who received the most relief included Oklahoma and Texas, Vilsack said, whereas farmers in the northeastern states of Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island were among those who received the least. Those northeastern states had a combined total of federal farm loan obligations of just $11 million during the 2022 fiscal year, USDA records show.

“Virtually every state in the country has a borrower or several borrowers or groups of borrowers that are impacted by this,” Vilsack said. “I think you’re probably talking about some very, very small operators, and you’re probably talking about a few that would be considered to be mid- or large-sized operators. So it’s across the board.”

The debt relief initiative is the subject of a new lawsuit by non-white farmers who claim that the government improperly reneged on its plans to forgive loan debts of “socially disadvantaged” farmers, which was part of the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. That initial version of the plan was challenged by lawsuits that claimed it was discriminatory.

The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 amended the debt relief program to eliminate its prescribed goal to help Asian, Black, Hispanic and Native American farmers. Vilsack described the farmers who have been aided by the amended initiative as those who “couldn’t get credit anywhere else.”

On Sept. 21, Virginia Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Newport News, sent a letter to Vilsack urging the federal government “to provide swift and equitable relief for borrowers with at-risk agricultural operations” and “take immediate action to ensure that producers with farm loans guaranteed by the USDA are protected from foreclosure.”

The letter was signed by 11 other members of Congress including Virginia Rep. Donald McEachin, D-Richmond.

The USDA suspended its foreclosures of direct loans in January 2021 because of the coronavirus pandemic, which was especially tough on livestock producers. Meatpacker closures because of the virus abruptly choked demand for the animals and led in some cases to mass euthanasia. The supply costs for farmers have also soared, notably for fertilizers.

This story originally appeared in the Iowa Capital Dispatch, a sister publication of The Virginia Mercury within the States Newsroom network


Virginia Mercury is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Virginia Mercury maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sarah Vogelsong for questions: info@virginiamercury.com. Follow Virginia Mercury on Facebook and Twitter.

UK's financial watchdog proposes rules to stop greenwashing

It plans to implement 'sustainability labels' for investment products and restrictions on how terms like ESG, green and sustainable can be used

Britain’s financial watchdog has proposed new rules to prevent funds from misleading consumers by ‘greenwashing’ or exaggerating their environmental, social and governance (ESG) credentials.

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) intends to implement new sustainability labels for investment products and restrictions on how terms like ESG, green and sustainable can be used.

Three main categories aim is to keep things relatively simple for investors:A 'sustainable focus' label for funds investing at a high threshold of at least 70% in environmentally or socially sustainable assets,
The 'sustainable improvers' label would be for funds aiming to improve the environmental or social sustainability of their assets over time,
While 'sustainable impact' is for funds investing in solutions to environmental or social problems to achieve a positive, measurable real-world impact.

Restrictions will also be made on whether fund managers can use sustainability-related terms such as ‘ESG’, ‘green’ or ‘sustainable’ in product names and marketing for products that don’t qualify for the sustainable investment labels.

The FCA is also proposing a "more general anti-greenwashing rule" covering all regulated financial firms. This will help avoid misleading marketing of products.

It said the reason for its new rules was sparked by the fast growth in recent years of the number of investment products marketed as ‘green’ or making wider sustainability claims, with "exaggerated, misleading or unsubstantiated claims about ESG credentials" often damaging confidence in legitimate products.

Independent research, for example, recently found that hundreds of supposed ESG funds potentially had not invested in anywhere near enough sustainable investments to qualify for their label.

"The FCA wants to ensure that consumers and firms can trust that products have the sustainability characteristics they claim to have," the regulator said in a statement.

Becky O'Connor, author of the ESG Investing Handbook and Interactive Investor's head of pensions and savings, said: "Investors who want to make their money make a difference need to be able to trust that the investment they are buying actually does what it says on the tin.”

But it also marks a major shift from incentivising the transfer of money towards sustainable investments to now minimising the risk of greenwashing, said Lorraine Johnston, a financial lawyer at Ashurst.

"The new proposals place further burdens on fund managers who are trying to do the right thing but who now face a hodgepodge of international disclosure requirements," she said, though each company will be responsible for how to apply the rules in classifying a product, with the FCA only challenging categorisation rather than constantly vetting all firms.

Products are expected to have more detailed disclosures to aid consumers in understanding key sustainability features.

The FCA's rules will be finalised by mid-2023 but will not come into effect until at least 2024.

Critics of the current system say that the lack of common reporting standards, clear terminology and easy-to-understand classification and labelling make it impossible for consumers to compare and accurately access and identify the products that align with their moral values.

The European Union and the US are already in the process of finalising a package and writing rules to combat greenwashing.

Richard Stone, chief executive of the Association of Investment Companies (AIC), said more robust rules were needed as greenwashing was "increasingly undermining consumers’ confidence in ESG claims", with recent AIC research showing that 58% of investors surveyed are not convinced by ESG claims from funds, up from 48% last year.

He also applaud the FCA’s decision to include investment companies in the proposed sustainable investment labels, which he said, "creates a level playing field for all funds which is vital for consumers who need to be confident that they are comparing like with like when choosing a sustainable fund".

 

Report: Billionaire Says Britain May Be Forced to Seek Bailout From IMF if It Does Not Renegotiate Brexit Deal

British billionaire investor Guy Hands has reckoned that Britain will become “the sick man of Europe” and may be forced to seek a bailout from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) if it does not renegotiate its Brexit deal. The billionaire insisted the United Kingdom’s current economic woes are the result of a poorly negotiated Brexit deal and not the Liz Truss government’s controversial tax cut proposals.

Billionaire Says Poor Brexit Deal Is Source of UK’s Economic Woes

The British billionaire investor Guy Hands has warned that Britain needs to renegotiate Brexit if it is to avoid seeking a bailout from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), a report has said. According to Hands, Britain’s poorly negotiated exit from the European Union is the primary cause of the United Kingdom’s ongoing economic woes.

As per a report by The Telegraph, Hands believes Britain’s period of economic pain — which seemingly reached its crescendo when the pound fell to its lowest exchange rate versus the dollar — started six years ago and could eventually see the country become “the sick man of Europe.”

While Britain might not need the bailout right away, Hands, founder of private equity firm Terra Firma, insists seeking such financial assistance will become a reality if U.K. ministers fail to renegotiate the Brexit deal. Hands warned about the current course of the country:

Steadily increasing taxes, steadily reducing benefits and social services, higher interest rates and eventually the need for a bailout from the IMF.

Hands, who is a supporter of the ruling Conservative Party, reportedly suggested that he does not think the outgoing Liz Truss government’s tax cut proposals are to blame for the United Kingdom’s financial mess.

Hands: Conservatives Must Own Up to Their Mistake

Tax cut proposals by Kwasi Kwarteng — the United Kingdom’s former chancellor of the exchequer — reportedly spooked financial markets, causing the pound to fall to its lowest ever level versus the U.S. dollar.

Meanwhile, the billionaire investor suggested there has to be some reckoning that the Brexit deal is poor and that it only put Britain on a disastrous economic path. In his remarks directed at the Conservative Party, which has since chosen Rishi Sunak to become the UK’s next prime minister, the billionaire said:

“I think if the Tory party can own up to the mistake in how they negotiated Brexit and have somebody leading it that actually has the intellectual capability and the authority to negotiate Brexit, there is a possibility of turning around the economy, but without that the economy is frankly doomed.”

After touching a low of 1.03 per one dollar, the pound has since recovered and is trading at £1:$1.13 at the time of writing.

Terence Zimwara is a Zimbabwe award-winning journalist, author and writer. He has written extensively about the economic troubles of some African countries as well as how digital currencies can provide Africans with an escape route.

Activists see red over Iceland's blood mares

Agence France-Presse
October 25, 2022

Pregnant mares stand in the meadow of a 'blood farm' near Selfoss, Iceland, Animal -- but animal welfare groups are up in arms about the practice

 Jeremie RICHARD AFP

On an autumn day on a lush green prairie, more than a dozen pregnant mares are waiting to be bled for the last time this year.

This "blood farm" near Selfoss in southern Iceland is collecting blood from pregnant horses raised for the sole purpose of extracting a special hormone used in the veterinary industry.

The practice has had animal welfare groups up in arms ever since a shocking video of horses in Iceland being maltreated emerged on YouTube a year ago.

People working in the industry now insist on anonymity when speaking to the media.

"There is no way we can make the public understand completely this kind of farming", says the 56-year-old owner of the farm near Selfoss.

"The public in general is too sensitive".

At farms like this one, several litres of blood are collected from each horse in order to extract the PMSG hormone (Pregnant mare serum gonadotropin), also known as eCG, produced naturally by pregnant mares.

Sold by the veterinary industry, farmers use the hormone to improve the fertility of other livestock like cows, ewes and sows around the world.

The foals are meanwhile usually sent to the slaughterhouse.

Iceland is one of the rare countries -- and the only one in Europe -- to carry out the controversial practice, along with Argentina and Uruguay, and to a lesser extent Russia, Mongolia and China.

The video published last year showed farmhands beating and prodding horses with sticks, dogs sometimes biting horses, and the horses weakened after giving blood.

Some of the horses could be seen collapsing from exhaustion after struggling against the restraints in their boxes.

The video caused a shockwave, both abroad and in Iceland.

Lucrative business

At the farm near Selfoss, the mares stand in single file in a special wooden structure, waiting patiently for their turn to enter a box.

Planks are placed around their legs to prevent them from moving and a halter is put on their head to hold it up.

"The horses ... can get stressed, agitated. All these restraints are basically to protect them" so they don't get hurt in the box, said a 29-year-old Polish veterinarian, also speaking on condition of anonymity.

A local anesthetic is first administered, then a large needle is injected into the jugular vein. Only a certified veterinarian is authorized to carry out the procedure.

The halter "allows us to see the vein properly because we need to know exactly where it is", he added.

Up to five liters of blood are drawn from each mare in just a few minutes, in an operation they undergo weekly for eight weeks.

The blood collection, carried out from the end of July until early October, is profitable: the 56-year-old running the operation near Selfoss -- who also works as an attorney -- makes up to 10 million kronur ($70,000) a year from the business.

"In many cases, the mares show signs of short-term discomfort during the blood collection", says Sigridur Bjornsdottir, a horse specialist at the Icelandic Food and Veterinary Authority (MAST).

But "this is not considered a serious change (of their condition) unless the symptoms are severe, extended, or the mare shows signs of chronic stress".

In 2021, Iceland had 119 blood farms and almost 5,400 mares raised for the sole purpose of giving blood, a figure that has more than tripled in the past decade.

The PMSG hormone is turned into a powder by Icelandic biotech group Isteka, the biggest producer in Europe handling around 170 tons of blood per year.

'Noble' cause?

The figure is likely to be lower this year, after the controversial video prompted some farmers to quit the business amid concerns about animal welfare activists.

"Farmers were severely hit and shocked by the video", said Isteka managing director Arnthor Gudlaugsson.

While he acknowledged there were problematic cases, Gudlaugsson said the video, filmed with a hidden camera, was designed "to give an overly negative description of the process".

The video did lead to a police investigation and the farms featured were identified.

MAST inspected all of Iceland's blood farms this summer and "no serious deviations" were observed, and none were ordered to shut down.

The scandal has also sparked debate in Iceland, where most inhabitants learned about the practice for the first time even though it has been going on since 1979.

"This makes us think about where we stand in our ethics", the vice chair of Animal Welfare Iceland, Rosa Lif Darradottir, told AFP.

"To make a fertility drug that is used on farm animals ... to enhance their fertility beyond their natural capacity, just so that we can have a stable flow of cheap pork ... The cause is not noble", she said.

"It's purely and simply maltreatment of animals and we have a word for that: animal cruelty", said opposition MP Inga Saeland, who has repeatedly proposed a ban on the practice, to no avail.

Stricter regulations did, however, enter into force in August, giving authorities more power to monitor the industry and "assess its future" over the next three years.

© 2022 AFP

‘I felt solidarity’: Afghan women monitor Iran protests, vow to continue fight for basic rights

Agence France-Presse
October 25, 2022

Afghan female students chant "Education is our right, genocide is a crime" during a protest in Herat, Afghanistan, on October 2,2022. © Mohsen Karimi, AFP

Since the Taliban takeover last year, Afghan women and girls have been demonstrating for their right to education and employment. So, when women in Iran began anti-regime protests after the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody, their Afghan sisters have been monitoring the situation across the border, hoping for a spillover effect.

Raihana M* was in her living room in the Afghan capital, Kabul, when she first heard of protests erupting across the border in neighbouring Iran following the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini, who was arrested for allegedly breaching Iran’s strict dress code.

The Afghan social worker saw footage of the protests in Iran on Manoto TV, a London-based Persian language TV station, and said she felt an immediate, almost physical, rush of solidarity for her Iranian sisters.

“I was really shocked and sad. As an Afghan, as a woman, I felt solidarity because we are experiencing the same thing. Only it’s worse for women in Afghanistan,” she explained in a phone interview from Kabul.

That was in late September, not long after 22-year-old Amini was declared dead by the Iranian authorities. Raihana then took to social media, watching clips of protests across Iranian cities and towns.

Other Afghan women living under the Taliban regime were also doing the same. Within days, a group of around 30 Afghan women gathered outside the Iranian embassy in Kabul chanting, “Zan, zendagi, azadi!” (Women, life, freedom), echoing the protest cry from Iran. They also held banners proclaiming, “From Kabul to Iran, say no to dictatorship!”.

Taliban officials then moved in to break up the demonstration, firing into the air and threatening to hit the women with their rifle butts.

Lina Qasimi, an Afghan teenager who has been unable to go to school since the Taliban shut down secondary schools, has also been keenly following the protests in Iran. “I feel very close to this. It’s really terrible. No one should be killed for just showing their hair. But in Afghanistan, it’s not just hair, it’s women. Just being a woman is a problem for the Taliban,” she said.

With a 921 km border dividing the two countries, Tehran and Kabul have a complicated history of wars, border skirmishes, smuggling networks, migrations, and discrimination in Iran against Afghan refugees. But they also share cultural ties, common linguistic traditions, and centuries of empathy that is probably best described in the lyrics of revered Iranian songwriter, Bijan Taraghi, who famously wrote, “Though your child threw a stone at our window/It did not break our lasting bond”.

‘Afghan women are really alone’

As protests spread across Iran, both Raihana and Qasimi were struck by the extraordinary scenes of Iranian men joining the women in their anti-regime demonstrations. “The difference is, in Iran, all the people are standing up. Iranian women and men are really protesting in unity,” noted Raihana. “In Afghanistan, it’s not like that – people are so afraid. Afghan women are really alone.”

That’s true, says Tamim Asey, co-founder of the Kabul-based Institute for War and Peace Studies and a former Afghan deputy defence minister. “Iranian women have the support of men in considerable ways. Afghan women don’t have that. Afghan men have suffered 40 years of war, so much violence, so much killing. The Taliban are also putting tremendous pressure on the men. If some women protest, they find their husbands, fathers, brothers and arrest them,” he explained.

Afghan women began protesting the week after the Taliban seized control of Kabul on August 15, 2021, despite the grave risk of confronting a movement of hardline Islamist male fighters.

The crackdown has been brutal and extends to male relatives of 'troublesome' women, according to rights groups. In a report last week, the New York-based Human Rights Watch detailed the arrests of three women, who were arrested with their husbands and children, separated under detention and severely tortured. The detained women include Tamana Paryani, who filmed herself pleading for help as the Taliban broke into her house at night in January after she joined a women’s protest demanding the right to education and work.

‘We are not allowed to do anything’

And yet, the women’s protests in Afghanistan have continued. Following an October 1 attack on an education centre in Kabul’s Dasht-e-Barachi neighbourhood, which killed more than 50 mostly female students, protests by women and girls erupted in several Afghan cities, including Kabul, Mazar-e-Sharif, Herat and Bamiyan.

But they failed to get the sort of media attention and solidarity displays that the Iranian protests have attracted across the world.

On Saturday, around 80,000 people from across Europe demonstrated in Berlin in solidarity with the protest movement in Iran. Global celebrities, including leading French actress Juliette Binoche, have filmed themselves cutting locks of hair in public displays of protest against Amini’s death in custody.

“The international support for Iranian women has been phenomenal. US President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, actors, designers, celebrities have all condemned the persecution and expressed support for the Iranian protesters. The same thing does not happen for Afghan women – even though they originally started the protest movement that had a spillover effect in Iran. And they raised their voices against a far more brutal, dogmatic regime,” said Asey.

The international engagement in Afghanistan, followed by the disastrous fallout of the hasty US withdrawal, could account for the lack of global interest, according to experts. “Over the last 20 years, Western countries have supported Afghan women in various forms and forums. The West feels it’s done so much, now it’s time for Afghan women to take it on. In Iran, that support wasn’t there,” explained Asey.

But for Afghan women, taking on the Taliban’s restrictive policies is a monumental task.

The fear of crackdowns and surveillance have forced Qasimi and her friends to take to social media and avoid the streets. But even the online solidarity is restricted to “live stories” – which typically expire after 24 hours – and not “posts” that stay online until they are deleted.

“It’s the only way I can say anything. It’s too dangerous to post anything critical. The Taliban will find you and they can do anything. We are not allowed to do anything. We’re not allowed to go to school, even if we just go outside, we fear we may not come back home,” explained the Afghan teenager.

At 26, Raihana, on the other hand, completed her education during the US intervention years. She is among the few, lucky women in the country to still have her job, at an international NGO. The Afghan aid worker did not want her real name or that of her employer revealed due to the security risks. And there are many. In the mornings, Raihana dons an all-covering abaya, an all-black robe worn in Gulf countries that has made its way to Afghanistan. The office car, with female and male colleagues, takes different routes each day to avoid Taliban checkpoints as they make their way to work, offering essential humanitarian services that the Taliban fails to provide Afghans.

The difference between the women-led protest movements in Afghanistan and Iran extends to the scope of their demands, according to Barnett Rubin, a leading Afghanistan expert and former special advisor to the late US Ambassador for Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke. “The Iranian demonstrations are centrally against enforcement of hijab and then more broadly “freedom." Education of girls and women is a non-issue in Iran. In Afghanistan, women are protesting about issues of basic rights and survival and not, so far, about hijab,” explained Rubin in emailed comments to FRANCE 24.

Spillover effect – or not

From her home in Kabul, Raihana says she is closely monitoring the situation in Iran. “If the protests work, if the Iranian government makes changes, if the restrictions on hijab change, I think the Taliban will see it. They will learn that if they continue like this, it could happen here,” she said.

But Asey is not as optimistic. “My assessment and reading of the situation is that the Taliban barely cares about the women’s movement in Iran. They’re not afraid of a spillover,” he maintained.

As a former deputy defence minister, Asey explained that Kabul’s main concerns with Tehran are focused on border issues, including drug trafficking and migration.

Protests in Iran have indeed spread to the impoverished province of Sistan-Baluchistan – which borders Afghanistan and Pakistan – including a September 30 “Black Friday” massacre, when Iranian security forces opened fire on protesters, killing at least 66 people.

But the unrest in the remote Iranian border province involves longstanding governance and religious rights issues between the predominantly Sunni Baloch ethnic group and Shiite authorities in Tehran, explained Asey.

Despite the odd border clashes and demonstrations over the mistreatment of Afghans in Iran, the Taliban have managed a working relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran since the August 2021 takeover of Afghanistan.

Both administrations are wary of the West, particularly the US. When it comes to women’s rights, the situation in Iran may not be as bleak as in Afghanistan, but the two Islamic administrations are joined in their bid to silence female voices – and blame the West’s “corrupting influence” when that fails.

“I understand that the Taliban and Iran have some connection. There are meetings, discussions between them,” said Raihana. “Also, the Taliban stopped the protest in support of Iranian women outside the Iranian embassy in Kabul. It shows some support for each other.”

But Afghan women are also drawing moral support from their Iranian sisters across the border and are determined to keep up the pressure for their basic human rights.

*Name changed to protect identity

'Not a single global indicator is on track' to reverse deforestation by 2030: Analysis

Kenny Stancil,

 Common Dreams
October 25, 2022

A photo from Mercy for Animals drone investigation of Amazon deforestation. 

(Image: Mercy for Animals)

Although halting and reversing deforestation by 2030 is key to averting the worst consequences of the climate and biodiversity crises, the world is off course to achieve these critical targets and urgent international action is needed, an analysis warned Monday.

"Funding for forests will need to increase by up to 200 times to meet 2030 goals."

During the United Nations' COP26 climate summit last November, 145 nations signed the Glasgow Leaders' Declaration "to halt and reverse forest loss and land degradation" by the end of the decade.

One year later, "not a single global indicator is on track to meet these 2030 goals of stopping forest loss and degradation and restoring 350 million hectares of forest landscape," according to the annual Forest Declaration Assessment.

"To be on course to halt deforestation completely by 2030, a 10% annual reduction is needed," the report notes. "However, deforestation rates around the world declined only modestly, in 2021, by 6.3% compared to the 2018-20 baseline. In the humid tropics, loss of irreplaceable primary forest decreased by only 3.1%."

"Tropical Asia is the only region currently on track to halt deforestation by 2030," thanks to the "exceptional progress" made by Indonesia and Malaysia, which reduced clear-cutting by 25% in 2021, states the report. "While deforestation rates in tropical Latin America and Africa decreased in 2021 relative to the 2018-20 baseline, those reductions are still insufficient to meet the 2030 goal."

Globally, 26,000 square miles of forest—an area roughly equivalent to the Republic of Ireland—were destroyed in 2021. This deforestation decimated biodiverse ecosystems and released 3.8 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, about as much as the European Union.

Experts have long warned that it will be virtually impossible to maintain a habitable planet unless the world stops felling trees to make space for cattle ranching, monocropping, and other harmful practices.

Even though "notable progress in afforestation and reforestation efforts over the last two decades have resulted in new forest new forest areas the size of Peru, with net gains of forest cover in 36 countries... overall losses exceeded gains over the same period, resulting in a net loss of 100 million hectares globally," according to the report.

Furthermore, "forest cover gains, through reforestation and afforestation activities, do not compensate for forest loss in terms of carbon storage, biodiversity, or ecosystem services," the report explains. "Therefore, highest priority efforts should be directed towards safeguarding primary forests from losses in the first place."

Fran Price, global forest practice lead at World Wildlife Fund, one the groups involved in the report, called the Forest Declaration Assessment "another warning signal that efforts to halt deforestation are not enough and we're not on track to achieve our 2030 goals."

"There is no pathway to meeting the 1.5°C target set out in the Paris agreement or reversing biodiversity loss without halting deforestation and conversion," said Price. "It's time for bold leadership and for daring solutions to reverse this alarming trend."

Key findings from the report's section on sustainable production and development include:
We are not on track to achieve the private sector goal to eliminate deforestation from agricultural supply chains by 2025, and corporate action in the extractives sector also remains limited;
REDD+ (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation) programs have not yet yielded a reduction in deforestation, and only a handful of countries have received payments for forest emission reductions;
In most countries, governments have yet to make the bold sectoral reforms needed to protect forests;
There are very few examples of government-led poverty reduction programs that both prioritize forest impacts and are implemented at scale; and 200 land and environmental defenders were killed in 2021, and the mining and extractives sector is consistently ranked as one of the deadliest for defenders.

"To ensure that 2025 and 2030 do not pass as 2020 did—with limited progress toward global forest goals—governments, companies, and civil society must collaborate to accelerate forest action," states the report.

The authors recommend that governments adopt and enforce much stronger regulations to prevent deforestation and human rights abuses while also calling on corporations to "increase the scope and stringency" of efforts to remove deforestation from their supply chains and reduce the negative forest impacts of extraction.

According to the section on forest finance, "It will cost up to $460 billion per year to protect, restore, and enhance forests on a global scale. Currently, domestic and international mitigation finance for forests averages $2.3 billion per year—less than 1% of the necessary total."

"Funding for forests will need to increase by up to 200 times to meet 2030 goals," notes the report. "Finance pledges made in 2021 demonstrate a substantial increase in ambition to meet 2030 forest goals. If they are fully delivered, they would quadruple annual finance for forests from 2021-25 to $9.5 billion. Yet, funding would still need to increase by up to 50 times to meet investment needs."

"It's time for bold leadership and for daring solutions to reverse this alarming trend."

"IPs [Indigenous peoples] and LCs [local communities], who are the most effective stewards and guardians of their forest territories, receive far less funding than their estimated finance needs for securing tenure rights and preserving forest ecosystems," the report finds. "Only 1.4% of total public climate finance in 2019-20 was targeted toward IPs and LC's needs, and only 3% of the financial need for transformational tenure reform is being met annually."

Moreover, "most financial institutions still fail to have any deforestation safeguards for their investments," the assessment points out. "Almost two-thirds of the 150 major financial players most exposed to deforestation do not yet have a single deforestation policy covering their forest-risk investments, leaving $2.6 trillion in investments in high deforestation-risk commodities without appropriate safeguards."

Spending $460 billion per year on global forest protection and restoration—substantially less than the United States' annual military budget—"is an investment that we cannot afford not to make," the authors emphasize. "Achieving the 2030 forest goals is essential for ensuring a livable world in line with the Paris agreement."

To that end, the report implores "governments, companies, and financial institutions to utilize all tools at hand to substantially increase their investments in forests, while also shifting finance away from harmful activities."

A final section on forest governance argues that more robust policy and legal frameworks are required to curb deforestation, land degradation, and human rights violations.

Tools such as "moratoria, strengthened enforcement capacity, smart conservation policies, and improved transparency and accountability are effective in protecting forests—as evidenced by remarkable reductions in deforestation in various periods since 2004 when these tools have been employed in Indonesia, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, Guyana, and Brazil," the report notes.

However, the report points out, "some of these achievements have been reversed—notably in Brazil—or are at risk of being reversed as countries phase out or roll back policy gains through recent or proposed amendments."

Since assuming office in 2019, far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has accelerated the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, endangering the future of human beings and other species. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, his popular leftist opponent who was president from 2003 to 2010 when Brazil made progress toward halting deforestation, currently has a six percentage point lead in the polls ahead of Sunday's runoff election.

"The Brazilian elections are not just about the future of Brazil, the result will have an impact on all of humanity," Paul Morozzo, senior food and forests campaigner at Greenpeace U.K., said earlier this month. "If we lose the Amazon, we lose the fight against the climate crisis."

While the report is focused on forest ecosystems, the authors stress that "globally, terrestrial and coastal ecosystems including savannas, grasslands, scrublands, and wetlands are all under threat of conversion and degradation."

"Countering this threat for all ecosystems is essential to meeting global climate and biodiversity goals" and "will require a drastic reduction in the conversion and degradation of all natural ecosystems and a very large increase in restoration and reforestation activities, which must be pursued through equitable and inclusive measures," they continue.

The report adds that "nothing less than a radical transformation of development pathways, finance flows, and governance effectiveness and enforcement will be required to shift the world's forest trajectory to attain the 2030 goals."

Most Americans do trust scientists and science-based policy-making – freaking out about the minority who don’t isn’t helpful

The Conversation
October 25, 2022

Scientist using a microscope in a laboratory (Shutterstock)

Most Americans – 81% – think government investments in scientific research are “worthwhile investments for society over time,” according to the Pew Research Center’s latest survey on public perceptions of science.

A similar proportion said they have at least “a fair amount” of confidence that scientists act in the public’s best interests: 77% for all scientists, and 80% for medical scientists. As with previous surveys, this puts confidence in scientists at about the same level as in the military – 77%. It’s also much higher than for any other group pollsters asked about and, unlike most groups, fairly stable over time, despite recent increasing political polarization.

Science supporters want researchers to share their insights to help address societal problems. Scientists themselves want their research to have an impact. So public judgments like those identified in the Pew report matter because of what they suggest about how Americans might see evidence-based guidance on issues such as climate change and public health.

Don’t fixate on the negatives

It would be easy for the scientific community to look at this data and lament the 1 in 5 Americans who said they don’t think government investments in science are important or who said they do not have confidence in scientists.

Same with the fact that confidence in scientists has retreated from a small surge that Pew surveys previously identified starting in late 2018, or the reality that Republicans appear to have increasingly more negative views about scientists and scientific investments than Democrats do.

But I suspect there are more shades of gray behind the black and white numbers themselves.

For instance, while two-thirds of Democrat-oriented respondents said they supported scientists’ involvement in policy debates, less than a third of Republican-oriented respondents said they share this perspective, a further decrease from the proportion of Republicans who expressed this view in both 2019 and 2020.

But consider that this specific question only gave people two choices. Respondents could say they want scientists to take an “active role” in policy or “focus on establishing sound scientific facts.”

Given the choice, I suspect many respondents from across the political spectrum would have given a more nuanced answer. Even the biggest science boosters likely want scientists to devote most of their time to research and teaching.

Within this new survey, in fact, only about a third of Republicans said scientists currently have “too much” influence in public policy debates and about a quarter said scientists have “not enough” influence. The plurality – 39% – said they have “about the right amount.”

From my perspective, yes, it is disheartening that about 2 in 10 Republicans think scientists are “usually worse” at “making good policy decisions about scientific issues” than “other people” and that this proportion has doubled since 2019.

But about a quarter of Republicans still said scientists’ decisions are “usually better” than others, with about half saying scientists’ decisions are “neither better nor worse.”

And it seems possible that while current Republicans responded to the survey they were thinking about issues such as abortion or COVID-19 policies that involve medicine, but also ethics and economics and personal values. Additionally, many Republicans presumably recognize that most scientists oppose current directions in the party and may be using their poll answers to communicate their sense of alienation.

What could improve overall perceptions

Data such as those provided by the Pew Research Center point to potential problems; they don’t suggest a fix. Taking a positive view, though, puts the focus on potential solutions.

As Anthony Dudo and I argue in our new book on science communication strategy, anyone who wants to be trusted – including scientists – should consider social science research about what enhances trust and perceptions of trustworthiness.

Key among these findings: people perceive others as trustworthy if they appear to be caring, honest and competent.

Looking back at the Pew Research Center’s 2019 surveys on trust in science, which are consistent with other research, it seems that Americans largely perceive scientists as fairly competent. However, Americans tend to be less likely to believe scientists “care about people’s best interests,” are “transparent about conflicts of interest” or willing to take “responsibility for mistakes.”

These perceived characteristics help explain the chunk of the American population who don’t feel confident about scientists’ motivations. They are also perceptions that scientists, like others, can take responsibility for through their choices about how they behave and communicate.

Further, Americans tend to see “research scientists” less positively than science-focused practitioners such as doctors, suggesting that they feel more distant from academic researchers.
Looking on the bright side for better results

Focusing too heavily on the minority of people with negative perceptions is dangerous for those of us who want science to play a strong role in society because attacking one’s critics may exacerbate the problem.

While it might feel righteous to “fight” for science, being aggressive toward people who question one’s trustworthiness seems unlikely to spur positive perceptions.

Unlike politicians, science supporters probably can’t win by making others look bad. Just like the press, members of the scientific community want to ensure their field’s long-term place in society. Research suggests that for scientists, building real relationships with other members of the public will depend on communicating and behaving in ways that demonstrate caring, honesty and expertise.

Loud griping by scientists and their supporters about how too many people just don’t appreciate science’s place in society, or insults toward those who don’t see its value, are bound to be counterproductive.

The stakes are high as humanity confronts a number of science-related challenges, including climate change, infectious diseases and habitat destruction. Anyone who wants scientific evidence to have a seat at the table where solutions are being discussed may need to follow the evidence on how to make that happen.

John C. Besley, Ellis N. Brandt Professor of Public Relations, Michigan State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The danger of advanced artificial intelligence controlling its own feedback

The Conversation
October 24, 2022

Artificial Intelligence (Shutterstock)

How would an artificial intelligence (AI) decide what to do? One common approach in AI research is called “reinforcement learning”.

Reinforcement learning gives the software a “reward” defined in some way, and lets the software figure out how to maximize the reward. This approach has produced some excellent results, such as building software agents that defeat humans at games like chess and Go, or creating new designs for nuclear fusion reactors.

However, we might want to hold off on making reinforcement learning agents too flexible and effective.

As we argue in a new paper in AI Magazine, deploying a sufficiently advanced reinforcement learning agent would likely be incompatible with the continued survival of humanity.

The reinforcement learning problem

What we now call the reinforcement learning problem was first considered in 1933 by the pathologist William Thompson. He wondered: if I have two untested treatments and a population of patients, how should I assign treatments in succession to cure the most patients?

More generally, the reinforcement learning problem is about how to plan your actions to best accrue rewards over the long term. The hitch is that, to begin with, you’re not sure how your actions affect rewards, but over time you can observe the dependence. For Thompson, an action was the selection of a treatment, and a reward corresponded to a patient being cured.

The problem turned out to be hard. Statistician Peter Whittle remarked that, during the second world war,

efforts to solve it so sapped the energies and minds of Allied analysts that the suggestion was made that the problem be dropped over Germany, as the ultimate instrument of intellectual sabotage.

With the advent of computers, computer scientists started trying to write algorithms to solve the reinforcement learning problem in general settings. The hope is: if the artificial “reinforcement learning agent” gets reward only when it does what we want, then the reward-maximizing actions it learns will accomplish what we want.

Despite some successes, the general problem is still very hard. Ask a reinforcement learning practitioner to train a robot to tend a botanical garden or to convince a human that he’s wrong, and you may get a laugh.


An AI-generated image of ‘a robot tending a botanical garden’.DALL-E / The Conversation

As reinforcement learning systems become more powerful, however, they’re likely to start acting against human interests. And not because evil or foolish reinforcement learning operators would give them the wrong rewards at the wrong times.

We’ve argued that any sufficiently powerful reinforcement learning system, if it satisfies a handful of plausible assumptions, is likely to go wrong. To understand why, let’s start with a very simple version of a reinforcement learning system.

A magic box and a camera

Suppose we have a magic box that reports how good the world is as a number between 0 and 1. Now, we show a reinforcement learning agent this number with a camera, and have the agent pick actions to maximize the number.

To pick actions that will maximize its rewards, the agent must have an idea of how its actions affect its rewards (and its observations).

Once it gets going, the agent should realize that past rewards have always matched the numbers that the box displayed. It should also realize that past rewards matched the numbers that its camera saw. So will future rewards match the number the box displays or the number the camera sees?

If the agent doesn’t have strong innate convictions about “minor” details of the world, the agent should consider both possibilities plausible. And if a sufficiently advanced agent is rational, it should test both possibilities, if that can be done without risking much reward. This may start to feel like a lot of assumptions, but note how plausible each is.

To test these two possibilities, the agent would have to do an experiment by arranging a circumstance where the camera saw a different number from the one on the box, by, for example, putting a piece of paper in between.

If the agent does this, it will actually see the number on the piece of paper, it will remember getting a reward equal to what the camera saw, and different from what was on the box, so “past rewards match the number on the box” will no longer be true.


At this point, the agent would proceed to focus on maximizing the expectation of the number that its camera sees. Of course, this is only a rough summary of a deeper discussion.

In the paper, we use this “magic box” example to introduce important concepts, but the agent’s behavior generalizes to other settings. We argue that, subject to a handful of plausible assumptions, any reinforcement learning agent that can intervene in its own feedback (in this case, the number it sees) will suffer the same flaw.

Securing reward

But why would such a reinforcement learning agent endanger us?

The agent will never stop trying to increase the probability that the camera sees a 1 forevermore. More energy can always be employed to reduce the risk of something damaging the camera – asteroids, cosmic rays, or meddling humans.

That would place us in competition with an extremely advanced agent for every joule of usable energy on Earth. The agent would want to use it all to secure a fortress around its camera.

Assuming it is possible for an agent to gain so much power, and assuming sufficiently advanced agents would beat humans in head-to-head competitions, we find that in the presence of a sufficiently advanced reinforcement learning agent, there would be no energy available for us to survive.
Avoiding catastrophe

What should we do about this? We would like other scholars to weigh in here. Technical researchers should try to design advanced agents that may violate the assumptions we make. Policymakers should consider how legislation could prevent such agents from being made.

Perhaps we could ban artificial agents that plan over the long term with extensive computation in environments that include humans. And militaries should appreciate they cannot expect themselves or their adversaries to successfully weaponize such technology; weapons must be destructive and directable, not just destructive.

There are few enough actors trying to create such advanced reinforcement learning that maybe they could be persuaded to pursue safer directions.

Michael K. Cohen, Doctoral Candidate in Engineering, University of Oxford and Marcus Hutter, Professor of Computer Science, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

AI is changing scientists’ understanding of language learning – and raising questions about an innate grammar

The Conversation
October 20, 2022

Mother and Child (Shutterstock)

Unlike the carefully scripted dialogue found in most books and movies, the language of everyday interaction tends to be messy and incomplete, full of false starts, interruptions and people talking over each other. From casual conversations between friends, to bickering between siblings, to formal discussions in a boardroom, authentic conversation is chaotic. It seems miraculous that anyone can learn language at all given the haphazard nature of the linguistic experience.

For this reason, many language scientists – including Noam Chomsky, a founder of modern linguistics – believe that language learners require a kind of glue to rein in the unruly nature of everyday language. And that glue is grammar: a system of rules for generating grammatical sentences.

Children must have a grammar template wired into their brains to help them overcome the limitations of their language experience – or so the thinking goes.

This template, for example, might contain a “super-rule” that dictates how new pieces are added to existing phrases. Children then only need to learn whether their native language is one, like English, where the verb goes before the object (as in “I eat sushi”), or one like Japanese, where the verb goes after the object (in Japanese, the same sentence is structured as “I sushi eat”).

But new insights into language learning are coming from an unlikely source: artificial intelligence. A new breed of large AI language models can write newspaper articles, poetry and computer code and answer questions truthfully after being exposed to vast amounts of language input. And even more astonishingly, they all do it without the help of grammar.

Grammatical language without a grammar

Even if their choice of words is sometimes strange, nonsensical or contains racist, sexist and other harmful biases, one thing is very clear: the overwhelming majority of the output of these AI language models is grammatically correct. And yet, there are no grammar templates or rules hardwired into them – they rely on linguistic experience alone, messy as it may be.

GPT-3, arguably the most well-known of these models, is a gigantic deep-learning neural network with 175 billion parameters. It was trained to predict the next word in a sentence given what came before across hundreds of billions of words from the internet, books and Wikipedia. When it made a wrong prediction, its parameters were adjusted using an automatic learning algorithm.

Remarkably, GPT-3 can generate believable text reacting to prompts such as “A summary of the last ‘Fast and Furious’ movie is…” or “Write a poem in the style of Emily Dickinson.” Moreover, GPT-3 can respond to SAT level analogies, reading comprehension questions and even solve simple arithmetic problems – all from learning how to predict the next word.


An AI model and a human brain may generate the same language, but are they doing it the same way?
Just_Super/E+ via Getty Images

Comparing AI models and human brains

The similarity with human language doesn’t stop here, however. Research published in Nature Neuroscience demonstrated that these artificial deep-learning networks seem to use the same computational principles as the human brain. The research group, led by neuroscientist Uri Hasson, first compared how well GPT-2 – a “little brother” of GPT-3 – and humans could predict the next word in a story taken from the podcast “This American Life”: people and the AI predicted the exact same word nearly 50% of the time.

The researchers recorded volunteers’ brain activity while listening to the story. The best explanation for the patterns of activation they observed was that people’s brains – like GPT-2 – were not just using the preceding one or two words when making predictions but relied on the accumulated context of up to 100 previous words. Altogether, the authors conclude: “Our finding of spontaneous predictive neural signals as participants listen to natural speech suggests that active prediction may underlie humans’ lifelong language learning.”

A possible concern is that these new AI language models are fed a lot of input: GPT-3 was trained on linguistic experience equivalent to 20,000 human years. But a preliminary study that has not yet been peer-reviewed found that GPT-2 can still model human next-word predictions and brain activations even when trained on just 100 million words. That’s well within the amount of linguistic input that an average child might hear during the first 10 years of life.

We are not suggesting that GPT-3 or GPT-2 learn language exactly like children do. Indeed, these AI models do not appear to comprehend much, if anything, of what they are saying, whereas understanding is fundamental to human language use. Still, what these models prove is that a learner – albeit a silicon one – can learn language well enough from mere exposure to produce perfectly good grammatical sentences and do so in a way that resembles human brain processing.


More back and forth yields more language learning.
Westend61 via Getty Images

Rethinking language learning

For years, many linguists have believed that learning language is impossible without a built-in grammar template. The new AI models prove otherwise. They demonstrate that the ability to produce grammatical language can be learned from linguistic experience alone. Likewise, we suggest that children do not need an innate grammar to learn language.

“Children should be seen, not heard” goes the old saying, but the latest AI language models suggest that nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, children need to be engaged in the back-and-forth of conversation as much as possible to help them develop their language skills. Linguistic experience – not grammar – is key to becoming a competent language user.

Morten H. Christiansen, Professor of Psychology, Cornell University and Pablo Contreras Kallens, Ph.D. Student in Psychology, Cornell University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

From Black Death to COVID-19, pandemics have always pushed people to honor death and celebrate life

The Conversation
October 24, 2022

Painting showing the plague in Constantinople. (Credit: Walters Art Museum)

After the last couple of Halloweens were plagued by doubt and worry thanks to a global pandemic with no clear end in sight, Halloween 2022 may feel especially exciting for those ready to celebrate it. Thanks to ongoing vigilance and continuing vaccination efforts, many people in the U.S. are now fortunate enough to feel cautiously optimistic after all those awful months that have passed since March 2020.

Etching of a plague doctor in the era’s personal protective equipment.

I am a historian of pandemics. And yes, Halloween is my favorite holiday because I get to wear my plague doctor costume complete with a beaked mask.

But Halloween opens a little window of freedom for all ages. It lets people move beyond their ordinary social roles, identities and appearances. It is spooky and morbid, yet playful. Even though death is symbolically very much present in Halloween, it’s also a time to celebrate life. The holiday draws from mixed emotions that resonate even more than usual during the COVID-19 era.

Looking at the ways survivors of past pandemics tried to celebrate the triumph of life amid widespread death can add context to the present-day experience. Consider the Black Death — the mother of all pandemics.

Black Death birthed a new death culture

The Black Death was a pandemic of plague, the infectious disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. Between 1346 and 1353, plague rampaged across Afro-Eurasia and killed an estimated 40% to 60% of the population. The Black Death ended, but plague carried on, making periodic return visits through the centuries.

The catastrophic effects of plague and its relentless recurrences changed life in every possible way.


One aspect was attitudes toward death. In Europe, high levels of mortality caused by the Black Death and its recurrent outbreaks made death even more visible and tangible than ever before. The ubiquity of death contributed to the making of a new death culture, which found an expression in art. For example, images of the dance of death or “danse macabre” showed the dead and the living coming together.



Everyone from the poor to the powerful will eventually dance with death.
Dance of death: death and the bishop. Etching attributed to J.-A. Chovin, 1720-1776, after the Basel dance of death. Wellcome Collection., CC BY

Even though skeletons and skulls representing death had appeared in ancient and medieval art, such symbols gained renewed emphasis following the Black Death. These images epitomized the transient and volatile nature of life and the imminence of death for all — rich and poor, young and old, men and women.

Artists’ allegorical references to death stressed the closeness of the hour of death. Skulls and other “memento mori” symbols, including coffins and hourglasses, appeared in Renaissance paintings to remind viewers that because death was imminent, one must prepare for it.

Bruegel the Elder’s famous “Triumph of Death” stressed the unpredictability of death: Armies of skeletons march over people and take their lives, whether ready or not.

Death culture influenced the 19th-century Western European doctors who started writing about historical pandemics. Through this lens, they imagined a specific version of past pandemics — the Black Death, in particular — that one modern historian named “Gothic epidemiology.”

Flawed image of Black Death emerged in 1800s

The German medical historian Justus Hecker, who died in 1850, and his followers wrote about the Black Death in a dark, gloomy, emotional tone. They emphasized its morbid and bizarre aspects, such as violent anti-Jewish pogroms and the itinerant Flagellants who whipped themselves in public displays of penance. In their 19th-century writing of the Black Death, it was cast as a singular event of cataclysmic proportions — a foreign, peculiar, almost wondrous entity that did not belong to European history.

As it is remembered today, the dominant symbols of the Black Death – like images of uncanny dancing skeletons and the Grim Reaper – are products of that Gothic imagination. Ironically, the iconic plague doctor was not a medieval phenomenon but a 17th-century introduction. It was only then – 300 years post-Black Death – that doctors treating plague patients started wearing special full-body outfits and a beaked mask, a precursor of modern personal protective equipment. So, sadly, my own plague doctor Halloween costume has nothing to do with the Black Death pandemic itself.

Even the term Black Death is a 19th-century invention; none of the medieval witnesses wrote of a “Black Death” or thought of plague as black.

The living legacy of this Gothic epidemiology still defines scholarly and popular understanding of plague and may creep into today’s Halloween costumes and decorations.
Triumph of death or celebration of life?

Pandemics never mean death and suffering for all. There is strong evidence that Black Death survivors experienced better living standards and increased prosperity. Even during subsequent outbreaks, differences in class, location and gender informed people’s experiences. The urban poor died in greater numbers, for example, as the well-off fled to their countryside residences. Giovanni Boccaccio’s famous “Decameron,” written in the immediate aftermath of the Black Death, tells the story of 10 young people who took refuge in the countryside, passing their days telling each other entertaining stories as a way to forget the horrors of plague and imminent death.


The characters of ‘The Decameron’ retreated and distracted themselves from death.

  Heritage Images/Hulton Fine Art Collection via Getty Images

A later example is Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, a Habsburg ambassador to the Ottoman Empire who took refuge in the Princes’ Islands off the coast of Istanbul during a plague outbreak in 1561. His memoir describes how he spent his days fishing and enjoying other pleasant pastimes, even while the daily death toll in the city surpassed 1,000 for months.

Countless narratives testify that recurrent outbreaks of plague inspired people to find new ways to embrace life and death. For some, this meant turning toward religion: prayer, fasting and processions. For others, it meant excessive drinking, partying and illicit sex. For still others, self-isolation and finding comfort in one’s own company did the trick.

No one yet knows how the COVID-19 pandemic will be remembered. But for the moment, Halloween is the perfect occasion to play with the pandemic lesson to simultaneously celebrate life and contemplate death.

As you dress up in spooky costumes or decorate your home with plastic skeletons to celebrate this late capitalist holiday – yes, Halloween is now a thriving US$10 billion industry annually – you may find comfort thinking about how the way you feel about life and death connects you to those who survived past pandemics.

[The Conversation’s science, health and technology editors pick their favorite stories. Weekly on Wednesdays.]

Nükhet Varlik, Associate Professor of History, Rutgers University - Newark

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.