Five decisive actions to transform Europe’s NCD monitoring systems: “What gets measured gets prioritised”

A new policy paper highlights key areas for advancing data-driven policymaking to curb the rising burden of non-communicable diseases (NCDs), setting the stage for a more effective and equitable healthcare in Europe

Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares Carlos III (F.S.P.)

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A new policy paper published in The Lancet Regional Health – Europe calls for decisive action to transform how Europe monitors noncommunicable diseases (NCDs). Developed jointly by Joint Action on Cardiovascular Diseases and Diabetes (JACARDI), Joint Action Prevent Non-Communicable Diseases (JA PreventNCD), and the WHO Regional Office for Europe (WHO/Europe), the paper sets out five priority actions to strengthen health monitoring systems across the region, an essential step to curb the rising burden of NCDs and mental health and ensure more effective, equitable healthcare.

The publication, titled “Strengthening non-communicable diseases monitoring systems in Europe through a multistakeholder collaborative approach: a key priority for advancing data-driven policymaking”, comes at a critical momentum after the Fourth United Nations High-Level Meeting on NCDs and Mental Health. “Europe has a unique opportunity, and responsibility, to recommit to data-driven health governance and sustained investment in resilient NCD monitoring systems”, the authors explain in the publication.

A call to action: five priorities for 2025 and beyond

The publication highlights five critical areas where action is needed to make monitoring systems stronger, fairer, and more effective. It calls for collecting data that is truly inclusive and disaggregated, so that inequalities become visible and can be addressed. It stresses the importance of solid governance, clear legal frameworks, and long-term investment to ensure that progress is sustained.

Monitoring, the authors argue, should also be embedded in real-time policymaking, so that information directly shapes decisions and drives accountability. Civil society, communities, people with lived experience, and marginalized groups should have a meaningful voice in this process, making sure that data reflects people’s lived realities. And finally, the paper points to the need for stronger collaboration across sectors, greater sharing of knowledge, and more capacity building to secure lasting impact.

“Tackling NCDs is one of five priorities of WHO/Europe’s Second European Programme of Work, co-created with 53 Member States and shaped through broad public consultations, including with health professionals, people living with NCDs and civil society. Effective action on NCDs hinges on good data. Europe can lead by example and showcase collaborative and inclusive approaches together with key stakeholders, including EU Joint Actions”, said Dr Gundo Weiler, Director of the Division of Prevention and Health Promotion at WHO Regional Office for Europe.

The challenge: gaps between commitments and reality

An estimated 80% of NCDs are considered preventable through effective public health policies and early detection strategies. These figures underscore the urgent need for a paradigm shift from a model centred on diagnostics and treatment to one rooted in prevention, health promotion, and evidence-based screening. 

Despite great efforts in international commitments, progress at the national level has been inconsistent. Monitoring systems remain fragmented, overly reliant on short-term projects, or challenged by limited governance and insufficient investment. This has created a critical gap between ambitious global targets and their translation into actionable national policies.

The policy paper identifies persistent data gaps, structural weaknesses, and opportunities for innovation. It emphasizes that monitoring is not just about collecting data, it is about ensuring that information is used in real time to drive policy reform, accountability, and equity.

Lessons from Europe

The authors underline that too often, NCD monitoring efforts have been ad hoc, reliant on external funding or driven by individual champions. This has led to uneven coverage, lack of comparability between countries, and persistent blind spots when it comes to the health of groups living in vulnerable situations, such as migrants, minorities, and people with disabilities.

Without data that is disaggregated and reflects disparities, inequalities remain invisible and policies risk reinforcing exclusion. The authors argue that equity must be at the center of all future monitoring efforts.

“It is a moral and ethical imperative to advocate for and generate more inclusive data. Data should be systematically disaggregated by age, sex, gender, geography, socioeconomic status, disability, ethnic and migration background to reveal territorial disparities and enable place-based interventions”, unfolds Dr Benedetta Armocida, from the Department of Cardiovascular, Endocrine-metabolic Diseases and Aging at Istituto Superiore di Sanità-ISS, Rome (Italy) and Coordinator of JACARDI.

“We should begin to view data not merely as numbers, but as reflections of human lives and rights: each data point tells a story, and data becomes truly powerful when it shifts narratives, amplifies the voices of those too often overlooked, and holds systems accountable. Data must be observed critically and translated into policies that strengthen health systems. Without inclusive monitoring, structural inequities remain concealed, and the most vulnerable remain invisible—one data point, one life, one missed opportunity at a time”, adds Dr Armocida.  

At the same time, the authors highlight successful innovations and good practices emerging from European Joint Actions, such as JACARDI and JA PreventNCD, demonstrating that progress is possible when commitments are matched by clear governance, adequate investment, and cross-sector collaboration.

“Across Europe we already see solutions that work. Joint Actions like JA PreventNCD and JACARDI help countries align methods, share tools and learn faster from each other. That is how we improve comparability between countries and make monitoring more useful for prevention and health promotion, including by showing more clearly where inequalities persist,” says Professor Knut-Inge Klepp, from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, Oslo and Scientific Coordinator of JA PreventNCD.

“But we have to treat monitoring as core infrastructure, not an extra task. It needs stable funding, clear governance and the ability to produce data that is timely and inclusive. If monitoring depends on short-term projects or individual champions, it will remain uneven. If it is institutionalized, it can guide priorities, strengthen accountability and help sustain progress over time,” adds Klepp.

Europe has both a responsibility and an opportunity to lead the way in building stronger, more inclusive health information systems that can serve as a global benchmark. Doing so will be critical not only to reducing premature mortality from NCDs by one-third by 2030, but also to ensuring health equity and resilience in the face of future challenges. “Because what gets measured gets prioritised. What gets disaggregated gets addressed. And what gets institutionalised can be sustained”, conclude the authors.

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Journal

The Lancet

DOI

10.1016/j.lanepe.2025.101553 

Article Title

Strengthening non-communicable diseases monitoring systems in Europe through a multistakeholder collaborative approach: a key priority for advancing data-driven policymaking

Article Publication Date

12-Dec-2025

 

Subnational income inequality: Regional successes may hold key to addressing widening gap globally

International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis

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A new study visualizes three decades of income inequality data, the most comprehensive worldwide mapping to be done at a subnational level. The results confirm worsening income inequality for areas with over 3.6 billion inhabitants but also reveals hidden ‘bright spots’ where policy may be closing the gap.

Income inequality is one of the most important measures of economic health, social justice, and quality of life. More reliably trackable than wealth inequality, which was recently given a gloomy report card by the G20, income inequality is particularly relevant to immediate economic relief, mobility and people’s everyday standard of living.

The new study, from an international team led by Aalto University and Cambridge University, and also including IIASA authors, is the first to comprehensively map three decades of income inequality data in 151 nations around the world. Despite finding that income inequality is worsening for half the world’s people, the study also indicates that effective policy may be helping to bridge the gap in regions such as Latin America, highlighting ‘bright spots’ in administrative areas that account for around a third of the global population.

“This research gives us much more detail than the existing datasets, allowing us to zoom in on specific regions within countries,” says lead authors, Matti Kummu, from Aalto University. “This is significant because in many countries national data would tell us that inequality has not changed much over the past decades, while subnational data tells a very different story.”

The new data is particularly relevant in light of recent failings around wealth inequality, given that it could help shed light on what policy levers might be pulled to address inequality in the short-term.

“We have vastly more complete data on income than we do on wealth, which tends to be much harder to uncover and track,” explains co-lead author Daniel Chrisendo, Assistant Professor at Cambridge University. “Especially given that income inequality leads to wealth inequality, it’s critical to tackle both forms, but income inequality is perhaps the easiest to address from an immediate policy perspective.”

The study, published in Nature Sustainability and the new global subnational Gini coefficient (SubNGini) dataset, spanning 1990-2023, is publicly accessible online. Global annual data and trends can be explored visually using an Online Tool, which enables users to explore how income inequality has played out in regions around the globe and also download the data for further analyses.

This study complements earlier work by IIASA authors that used subnational household survey data to reveal persistent gaps in living standards across 75 low- and middle-income countries, underlining how inequalities in basic services and material wellbeing often mirror income disparities at finer geographic scales.

Pinpointing the role of policy
“By revealing where inequality is worsening and where it is being successfully reduced, this dataset helps policymakers move from broad national strategies to much more tailored, locally grounded interventions. This level of precision is essential if we want to design policies that actually reach the people who need them most,” notes coauthor Roman Hoffmann, who leads the Migration and Sustainable Development Research Group in the IIASA Population and Just Societies Program.

There are many examples where regional efforts have shone more brightly than is revealed by national statistics, say the researchers. However, India, China, and Brazil all present interesting case studies that affect large swathes of the global population. In India, for example, relative success in the south is linked to sustained investments in public health, education, infrastructure and economic development that have benefited the local population more broadly.

Meanwhile, in China, market-oriented reforms and open-door policy have driven economic growth and dramatically reduced poverty since the 1990s, but the authors point out that this growth has been uneven, likely due to the Chinese government’s ‘Hukou’ policy limiting rural migrants' access to urban services. In response, the government has implemented various policy measures, such as regional development programs and relaxed Hukou restrictions to address disparities and support internal migrants.

In Brazil, the mapping shows a potential correlation between reduced inequality and a regional cash transfer program providing cash to poor families on condition of their children attending school and receiving vaccinations.

Income inequality rising for half the world’s people
Relative income growth for the world’s poorest 40% is one of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), yet the study confirms the collective failure to meet this goal by 2030.

“Unfortunately, not only are we quite far from that goal, but the trend for rising inequality is actually stronger than we thought,” says Kummu.

The researchers are now expanding the data visualization to encompass a vast range of other socioeconomical indicators, from how populations are aging, to life expectancy and time spent in schooling, to improved access to drinking water using the extensive new datasets slated for public launch in 2026. The authors hope the new datasets can be used to better understand, for example, the linkages between development and environmental changes. The recent study revealed links between more unequal regions and lower ecological diversity, which they would like to explore further.

“It’s ambitious, but to have subnational, high quality data spanning over three decades is crucial to understand different social responses to environmental changes and vice versa. It gives us the means to start understanding the causalities, not just the correlations, and with that comes the power to make better decisions,” Kummu concludes.

Reference
Chrisendo, D., Niva, V., Hoffmann, R., Masoumzadeh Sayyar, M., Rocha, J., Sandström, V., Solt, F., & Kummu, M. (2025). Rising income inequality across half of global population and socioecological implications. Nature Sustainability DOI: 10.1038/s41893-025-01689-4

 

About IIASA:
The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) is an international scientific institute that conducts research into the critical issues of global environmental, economic, technological, and social change that we face in the twenty-first century. Our findings provide valuable options to policymakers to shape the future of our changing world. IIASA is independent and funded by prestigious research funding agencies in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. www.iiasa.ac.at

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Journal

Nature Sustainability

DOI

10.1038/s41893-025-01689-4 

Article Title

Rising income inequality across half of global population and socioecological implications

Article Publication Date

5-Dec-2025

 

The Showgirl's Rebirth: Taylor Swift’s shift from introspection to optimistic confidence

Seven scholars dissect Swift

Cambridge University Press

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Insights into the hidden histories and deeper meanings of Taylor Swift’s latest album are published in a special roundtable of the journal Public Humanities, published by Cambridge University Press. The journal challenged several Swift scholars to write articles on her latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, when it was released. The resulting seven interdisciplinary research articles reveal a new era for the singer, and what happens when a larger-than-life superstar finds the love of her life.

 

The Life of a Showgirl
Written during the final leg of Swift’s record-setting Eras Tour, The Life of a Showgirl was the most streamed album of 2025, yet many called the writing lazy and uninspired, particularly compared to her recent, more introspective albums. Monique McDade, Assistant Professor at Oregon State University, argues that this is simply a new character for Swift, which is an adjustment for the listener. The album offers a curated narrative about performance and its potential to overwhelm an artist’s life. It ends with a seasoned showgirl advising a younger ingenue to stay away from the stage, yet she will not listen and the cycle will begin again.

Jacob Adler, Michelle Croteau and Kira Rao-Poolla of UC Berkeley also note the shift in persona, noting that Swift has shifted from teen country singer and girl-next-door to a less relatable showgirl. In the titular album track, she even sings: “You don’t know the life of a showgirl, babe // And you’re never ever gonna”. The authors question whether a career built upon relatability can shift to selling her success, and if she can continue to sustain her audience as her world becomes less accessible to the fanbase. 

 

The Fate of Ophelia
The key to the jarring difference between Swift’s last two albums lies in the opening track, “The Fate of Ophelia”, argues Dr Alexandra Doyle of Northeastern State University. Her previous album, The Tortured Poets Department, sees Swift in the throes of Ophelia’s darkness, but in The Life of a Showgirl she is rescued by new love. Ophelia is a literary heroine who, like many others, turns to madness and meets a tragic fate, but in Swift’s latest work, she has regained her own power, bought the rights to her own music and is her own boss.

Delving deeper into the opening track, Dr Jeffrey R. Wilson Director of the Harvard Law School Writing Centre, writes that this is Swift’s Shakesperean love letter to fiancé, Travis Kelce, an anti-Hamlet compared to previous moody, philosophical boyfriends. The central couplet of the song is in iambic pentameter: “You took me out of my grave and saved / My heart from the fate of Ophelia”. Wilson shines a light on the similarities in Ophelia and Swift’s narratives, yet where the former is largely sidelined with the focus on Hamlet, Swift centres herself in the story.

 

Opalite
Two articles focus on the song “Opalite”. Ryan W. Davis of Brigham Young University writes that opalite, Kelce’s birthstone, symbolises a happiness that was not passively discovered but actively created. The song itself says: “you had to make your own sunshine”. On the other hand, Chelsey Hamm of Christopher Newport University reads the song differently. The chord progression evokes the 1950s and doo-wop and she argues this “musical nostalgia” reflects on a larger cultural nostalgia in America at the moment.

 

Eldest Daughter
Tracks five on Swift’s albums are famously her most vulnerable and personal songs, often ballads about heartbreak or deep self-reflection. Before The Life of a Showgirl was announced, Swift declared it was an infectiously joyful album and many fans worried about what that would mean for Track 5. Lisa D. Andres of Duke University writes that the track, “Eldest Daughter” retains the vulnerability but redefines it, changing the prophecy and offering hope and reassurance to the listener. She argues that in previous Track 5s the character replaced their mask by the end of the song, but on this latest album, Swift is confident enough to show her true self. Andres concludes that: “Not once in this song—or the entire album—does Swift express doubt or wonder if she’s enough.”

 

The Of the Moment roundtable of Public Humanities publishes today, ahead of Taylor Swift’s birthday on 13 December.

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Journal

Public Humanities

Article Title

Taylor Swift (Public Humanities' Version)

Article Publication Date

12-Dec-202

 

Jeonbuk National University researcher proposes a proposing a two-stage decision-making framework of lithium governance in Latin America

This study covers divergent paths, ranging from market-oriented approaches to rhetorical nationalization, taken by Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, and Mexico

Jeonbuk National University, Sustainable Strategy team, Planning and Coordination Division

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This study highlights the reasons behind the divergent responses of lithium-rich Latin American countries despite their shared economic incentives for greater state control.

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Credit: Seungho Lee from Jeonbuk National University

The evolving global order, intense geopolitical competition, and anxiety over supply chain vulnerabilities in this century have led to urgent concerns over supply chain resilience as well as national security. Amidst these upheavals, governments across the globe are making substantial efforts to reaffirm control over strategic sectors, especially in the field of critical minerals. Notably, lithium has become strategically highly important owing to its use in lithium–ion batteries for technologies aimed at decarbonization, including electric vehicles (EVs) and renewable energy storage systems. The demand for lithium in EV production is expected to grow atleast 7.6-fold in the present decade.

This emerging trend has put a focus on Latin American nations with abundant lithium resources, including Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, and Mexico. As a result, all these countries are comprehensively reassessing their lithium governance strategies. While Chile prioritizes combining private investment with strategic oversight, Argentina and Brazil maintain decentralized and market-oriented approaches. In contrast, Bolivia and Mexico are inclined to adopt a radical state-led model, encompassing a fiscal regime with policies that directly influence production and largely rhetorical nationalization, respectively. These highly divergent paths pursued by different nations raise the question: What explains variants in resource nationalism in Latin America’s lithium industry despite shared structural incentives and favorable external conditions for state intervention?

In a new study, researcher Seungho Lee, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies at Jeonbuk National University, has addressed this question via a two-stage decision-making framework. His findings were made available online on 5 June 2025 and have been published in Volume 24 of the journal The Extractive Industries and Society on 1 December 2025.

Dr. Lee highlights the major findings of his work. “First, global commodity price cycles and strategic competition create external pressures and opportunities for state intervention, the effects of which are mediated by the industrial maturity of each country’s lithium sector. Second, domestic political settlements ultimately determine the extent and form of state involvement.”
 

The findings of this study carry important implications for external actors who want to engage in the Latin American lithium sector. They underscore the importance for multinational firms and foreign governments of recognizing the complex and heterogeneous nature of lithium governance regimes across the region. Engagement strategies should be calibrated both to external conditions and the level of industrial maturity, and to the political settlements that shape each country’s lithium sector—both at the national and subnational levels.
 

"Given lithium’s strategic importance and the geographic concentration of its reserves and production, global demand for the mineral is expected to continue rising.In this context, the present work provides a useful starting point for examining how states navigate the interplay between external pressures and domestic structural constraints in governing lithium industries,” concludes Dr. Lee.

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About Jeonbuk National University

Founded in 1947, Jeonbuk National University (JBNU) is a leading Korean flagship university.Located in Jeonju, a city where tradition lives on, the campus embodies an open academic community that harmonizes Korean heritage with a spirit of innovation.Declaring the “On AI Era,” JBNU is at the forefront of digital transformationthrough AI-driven education, research, and administration.JBNU leads the Physical AI Demonstration Project valued at around $1 billion and spearheads national innovation initiatives such as RISE (Regional Innovation for Startup and Education) and the Glocal University 30, advancing as a global hub of AI innovation.

Website: https://www.jbnu.ac.kr/en/index.do

About the author

Dr. Seungho Lee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies at Jeonbuk National University. Before joining the university, he was as an Associate Research Fellow in the Americas Team at Korea Institute for International Economic Policy. His research focuses on Latin American political economy, international trade, and East Asia–Latin America relations. He holds a B.Sc. in Economics from University of Warwick, an M.Sc. in Latin American Studies from University of Oxford, and a Ph.D. in International Studies from Seoul National University.

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Journal

The Extractive Industries and Society

DOI

10.1016/j.exis.2025.101697 

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

What Explains Variants in Resource Nationalism in Latin America’s Lithium Industry?

Article Publication Date

11-Dec-2025