EU agricultural policy could have major co-benefits for climate and biodiversity

International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis

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Caption: Win-Win Areas across EU-27 countries (a) Share of agricultural areas in which de-intensification of farming practices can deliver biodiversity and climate benefits with minimal cost. (b) Aligning CAP support with win-win areas could achieve greater biodiversity gains and carbon sequestration. The dashed line is the EU average planned CAP support for de-intensification measures. Countries are ranked by their share of win-win areas. Values reflect total planned annual budgets for extensification measures divided by utilized agricultural area. The figures represent comparable but simplified averages. 

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Credit: IIASA / LAMASUS

A new policy brief, produced as part of the LAMASUS project, highlights that strategic agricultural de-intensification in the EU could help reduce agricultural carbon emissions by nearly a third and considerably improve biodiversity recovery.

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is the European Union’s agricultural policy framework, focused on tackling climate change, protecting natural resources, and enhancing biodiversity. Recent research, conducted by the LAMASUS consortium, shows that strategic de-intensification of agriculture could produce major co-benefits for climate, biodiversity, and farm profitability.

“While the environmental benefits of reducing intensive farming practices — such as using less fertilizer and pesticides, keeping fewer animals per hectare, and growing crops less frequently — are well recognized within the research community, our study goes further by identifying specific win-win areas where co-benefits for both climate and biodiversity can be achieved at minimal economic cost,” says Leopold Ringwald, coauthor of the study and researcher at the IIASA Integrated Biosphere Futures Research Group.

The study reveals several important insights with strategic implications for EU agricultural policy:

• Strategic de-intensification on 7.0% of EU agricultural land— in win-win areas—could reduce agricultural emissions by 4.9%, equivalent to a total reduction of an estimated 12 million tons of CO₂-equivalent per year. This would represent around 3.9% of the EU’s 2030 total mitigation target for agriculture, forestry and other land use, while entailing a 2.0% annual reduction in total agricultural production value.
• In win-win areas, investing at least €350 per hectare is estimated to increase the variety and abundance of native species by 1%. This is a significant figure. For comparison, European biodiversity intactness improved by just 1.1% between 2000 and 2018.
• Scientists identified three countries with above-average shares of win-win areas but below-average planned support per hectare for de-intensification — Poland, Austria, and Slovenia. In particular, Poland and Austria have over 50% of their agricultural land classified as intensively used. Redirecting funds toward these areas could improve biodiversity and climate outcomes per euro spent.
• Result-based payments could offer a promising way forward enabling flexible, outcome-oriented support while encouraging uptake where environmental returns are highest.  Restructuring the de-intensification-focused direct payments and eco-schemes might enable further environmentally friendly outcomes at potentially low production value losses.

The researchers further highlight the fact that foreseen CAP funding does not always align with regions where de-intensification would be most effective, emphasizing the need to ensure that policy efforts are focused where they deliver the greatest impact and achieve climate and biodiversity goals without compromising food security. 

The study identifies five key CAP policy areas that could help foster agricultural de-intensification. Those include: fertilisation policies promoting the use of organic fertilizers instead of synthetic ones; grassland and grazing policies focused on improving biodiversity and soil health; landscape conservation measures; plant protection policies promoting biological pest control instead of insecticide; low-input farming systems and self-sustaining agriculture.

What is LAMASUS?

LAMASUS is a Horizon Europe project aimed at facilitating the achievement of climate neutrality in the EU. It includes 17 partners from eight European countries — Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Poland, Spain, Norway and Switzerland.

Reference:

Krisztin, T., Ringwald, L., Balkovic, J., Cornford, R., Freund, C., Havlík, P., Lauerwald, R., O’Connor, L., Renhart, A., Tan, E., Visconti, P. (2025) Maximizing CAP impact: Advancing Climate, Biodiversity, and Farm Profitability Through Strategic Action.

 

Who’s feeding babies peanuts early? Too often, not low-income or minority parents

Feeding peanut-containing foods early cuts allergy risk, but guidance isn’t reaching all families

Northwestern University

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• Survey of 3,000 parents shows major racial, income gaps in early peanut feeding

• Only 36% of Hispanic and 42% of Black parents fed peanuts by age 1, vs. 51% of white parents

• Many Black, Hispanic and low-income parents don’t get peanut-feeding tips from doctor

• Since 2017, national guidelines have advised early peanut feeding to reduce allergy risk

CHICAGO --- Introducing peanut-containing foods to infants can dramatically reduce the risk of peanut allergies later in childhood. But many parents — particularly those who are Black, Hispanic, lower-income or have less formal education — aren’t receiving this potentially lifesaving guidance from their pediatrician and are introducing peanuts at much lower rates, reports a large new Northwestern Medicine study.

The study surveyed in 2021 a nationally representative sample of over 3,000 U.S. parents of children aged seven to 42 months. By the time their child turned one, 51% of white respondents had introduced peanut-containing foods, compared to 42% of Black, 36% of Hispanic and 35% of Asian American parents. Early introduction was also significantly more common among high-income and college-educated parents.

When it came to advice on when and how to introduce peanuts, only about half of Black and Hispanic parents said their pediatrician brought it up, compared to nearly two-thirds of white parents. Just as concerning, only 29% of Black parents believed peanut introduction before 12 months would help prevent peanut allergies, compared to 53% of white parents.

These disparities are especially troubling because children from low-income and minority families already experience higher rates of food allergies and more severe outcomes.

“Our findings suggest that families from racial and ethnic minority groups and those with lower incomes are less likely to receive accurate, timely guidance from their primary care provider on how to introduce peanut during infancy,” said first author Dr. Christopher Warren, assistant professor of preventive medicine (epidemiology) at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

“It’s surprising how inequitable implementation of guidelines remains, especially given how safe and effective early peanut feeding appears to be,” Warren added.

According to Warren, this is the first study to closely examine how the food allergy prevention guidance parents reportedly receive from their child’s doctor varies based on race, income and other background factors.

The findings were published July 8 in the journal Academic Pediatrics.

What parents need to know

Since 2017, national guidelines have recommended introducing peanut-containing foods around 4 to 6 months of age — a major shift prompted by a landmark clinical trial that showed early introduction cuts peanut allergy risk by more than 80%. Before that, parents were often told to delay peanut feeding out of concern it might trigger allergies.

Peanut allergy, which can be life-threatening, is on the rise and now affects an estimated 2% of U.S. children. Strong evidence from randomized trials shows that early and frequent exposure to peanut products, alongside other complementary foods, helps prevent peanut allergy later in childhood, especially in babies with risk factors like eczema or egg allergy.

The guidelines recommend offering peanut-containing products — such as smooth peanut butter thinned with water or infant-safe peanut puffs — after other developmentally appropriate foods have been successfully introduced.

Closing the gap
To make early peanut introduction more equitable, Warren said primary care providers, especially those serving underserved communities, need better tools and resources.

“We know that parents and primary care providers have limited time together during well-child visits, and many other topics compete for attention,” Warren said. “That’s why it’s essential that both groups are equipped with high-quality information and simple, effective guidance.”

Linguistically and culturally tailored handouts can also help parents feel more confident introducing peanut safely at home, Warren added. And larger policy efforts, such as adding peanut-containing products to WIC food packages, could improve access for low-income families.

With about 40% of U.S. infants insured through Medicaid, Warren said Medicaid state programs could also be key in scaling education and outreach.

Other Northwestern University authors that supported the study are Dr. Alanna Stinson, Dr. Waheeda Samady, Dr. Lucy Bilaver, Dr. Sai Nimmagadda and Dr. Ruchi Gupta.

This study titled, “Disparities in Caregiver-reported Knowledge, Attitudes, Behaviors and Guidance regarding Primary Prevention of Peanut Allergy,” was funded by Food Allergy Research and Education (FARE) AWD001529.

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Journal

Academic Pediatrics

DOI

10.1016/j.acap.2025.102874 

Article Title

Disparities in Caregiver-reported Knowledge, Attitudes, Behaviors and Guidance regarding Primary Prevention of Peanut Allergy

Article Publication Date

8-Jul-2025

 

Processing our technological angst through humor

Associate Professor Benjamin Mangrum’s new book explores how we use comedy to cope with the growth of computer technology in modern life

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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In his new book “The Comedy of Computation,” MIT literature professor Benjamin Mangrum explores how we deal with our doubts and fears about computing through humor.

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Credit: Courtesy of Stanford University Press; Allegra Boverman

Cambridge, MA – The first time Steve Jobs held a public demo of the Apple Macintosh, in early 1984, scripted jokes were part of the rollout. First, Jobs pulled the machine out of a bag. Then, using speech technology from Samsung, the Macintosh made a quip about rival IBM’s mainframes: “Never trust a computer you can’t lift.”

There’s a reason Jobs was doing that. For the first few decades that computing became part of cultural life, starting in the 1950s, computers seemed unfriendly, grim, and liable to work against human interests. Take the 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” in which the onboard computer, HAL, turns against the expedition’s astronauts. It’s a famous cultural touchstone. Jobs, in selling the idea of a personal computer, was using humor to ease concerns about the machines.

“Against the sense of computing as cold and numbers-driven, the fact that this computer was using voice technology to deliver jokes made it seem less forbidding, less evil,” says MIT scholar Benjamin Mangrum.

In fact, this dynamic turns up throughout modern culture, in movies, television, fiction, and the theater. We often deal with our doubts and fears about computing through humor, whether reconciling ourselves to machines or critiquing them. Now, Mangrum analyzes this phenomenon in a new book, “The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence,” published this month by Stanford University Press.

“Comedy has been a form for making this technology seem ordinary,” says Mangrum, an associate professor in MIT’s literature program. “Where in other circumstances computing might seem inhuman or impersonal, comedy allows us to incorporate it into our lives in a way that makes it make sense.”

 

Reversals of fortune

Mangrum’s interest in the subject was sparked partly by William Marchant’s 1955 play, “The Desk Set” — a romantic comedy later turned into a film starring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy — which queries, among other things, how office workers will co-exist alongside computers.

Perhaps against expectations, romantic comedies have turned out to be one of the most prominent contemporary forms of culture that grapple with technology and its effects on us. Mangrum, in the book, explains why: Their plot structure often involves reversals, which sometimes are extended to technology, too. Computing might seem forbidding, but it might also pull people together.

“One of the common tropes about romantic comedies is that there are characters or factors in the drama that obstruct the happy union of two people,” Mangrum observes. “And often across the arc of the drama, the obstruction or obstructive character is transformed into a partner, or collaborator, and assimilated within the happy couple’s union. That provides a template for how some cultural producers want to present the experience of computing. It begins as an obstruction and ends as a partner.”

That plot structure, Mangrum notes, dates to antiquity and was common in Shakespeare’s day. Still, as he writes in the book, there is “no timeless reality called Comedy,” as the vehicles and forms of it change over time. Beyond that, specific jokes about computing can quickly become outmoded. Steve Jobs made fun of mainframes, and the 1998 Nora Ephron comedy “You’ve Got Mail” got laughs out of dial-up modems, but those jokes might leave most people puzzled today.

“Comedy is not a fixed resource,” Mangrum says. “It’s an ever-changing toolbox.”

Continuing this evolution into the 21st century, Mangrum observes that a lot of computational comedy centers on an entire category of commentary he calls “the Great Tech-Industrial Joke.” This focuses on the gap between noble-sounding declared aspirations of technology and the sometimes-dismal outcomes it creates.

Social media, for instance, promised new worlds of connectivity and social exploration, and has benefits people enjoy — but it has also generated polarization, misinformation, and toxicity. Technology’s social effects are complex. Whole televisions shows, such as “Silicon Valley,” have dug into this terrain.

“The tech industry announces that some of its products have revolutionary or utopian aims, but the achievements of many of them fall far short of that,” Mangrum says. “It’s a funny setup for a joke. People have been claiming we’re saving the world, when actually we’re just processing emails faster. But it’s a mode of criticism aimed at big tech, since its products are more complicated.”

 

A complicated, messy picture

“The Comedy of Computation” digs into several other facets of modern culture and technology. The notion of personal authenticity, as Mangrum observes, is a fairly recent and modern construct in society — and it’s another sphere of life that collides with computing, since social media is full of charges of inauthenticity.

“That ethics of authenticity connects to comedy, as we make jokes about people not being authentic,” Mangrum says.

For his part, Mangrum emphasizes that his book is an exploration of the full complexity of technology, culture, and society.

“There’s this really complicated, messy picture,” Mangrum says. “And comedy sometimes finds a way of experiencing and finding pleasure in that messiness, and other times it neatly wraps it up in a lesson that can make things neater than they actually are.”

Mangrum adds that the book focuses on “the combination of the threat and pleasure that’s involved across the history of the computer, in the ways it’s been assimilated and shaped society, with real advances and benefits, along with real threats, for instance to employment. I’m interested in the duality, the simultaneous and seemingly conflicting features of that experience.”

 

Study could lead to LLMs that are better at complex reasoning

Researchers developed a way to make large language models more adaptable to challenging tasks like strategic planning or process optimization

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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CAMBRIDGE, MA – For all their impressive capabilities, large language models (LLMs) often fall short when given challenging new tasks that require complex reasoning skills.

While an accounting firm’s LLM might excel at summarizing financial reports, that same model could fail unexpectedly if tasked with predicting market trends or identifying fraudulent transactions.

To make LLMs more adaptable, MIT researchers investigated how a certain training technique can be strategically deployed to boost a model’s performance on unfamiliar, difficult problems.

They show that test-time training, a method that involves temporarily updating some of a model’s inner workings during deployment, can lead to a sixfold improvement in accuracy. The researchers developed a framework for implementing a test-time training strategy that uses examples of the new task to maximize these gains.

Their work could improve a model’s flexibility, enabling an off-the-shelf LLM to adapt to complex tasks that require planning or abstraction. This could lead to LLMs that would be more accurate in many applications that require logical deduction, from medical diagnostics to supply chain management.

“Genuine learning — what we did here with test-time training — is something these models can’t do on their own after they are shipped. They can’t gain new skills or get better at a task. But we have shown that if you push the model a little bit to do actual learning, you see that huge improvements in performance can happen,” says Ekin Akyürek PhD ’25, lead author of the study.

Akyürek is joined on the paper by graduate students Mehul Damani, Linlu Qiu, Han Guo, and Jyothish Pari; undergraduate Adam Zweiger; and senior authors Yoon Kim, an assistant professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); and Jacob Andreas, an associate professor in EECS and a member of CSAIL. The research will be presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning.

 

Tackling hard domains

LLM users often try to improve the performance of their model on a new task using a technique called in-context learning. They feed the model a few examples of the new task as text prompts which guide the model’s outputs.

But in-context learning doesn’t always work for problems that require logic and reasoning.

The MIT researchers investigated how test-time training can be used in conjunction with in-context learning to boost performance on these challenging tasks. Test-time training involves updating some model parameters — the internal variables it uses to make predictions — using a small amount of new data specific to the task at hand.

The researchers explored how test-time training interacts with in-context learning. They studied design choices that maximize the performance improvements one can coax out of a general-purpose LLM.

“We find that test-time training is a much stronger form of learning. While simply providing examples can modestly boost accuracy, actually updating the model with those examples can lead to significantly better performance, particularly in challenging domains,” Damani says.

In-context learning requires a small set of task examples, including problems and their solutions. The researchers use these examples to create a task-specific dataset needed for test-time training.

To expand the size of this dataset, they create new inputs by slightly changing the problems and solutions in the examples, such as by horizontally flipping some input data. They find that training the model on the outputs of this new dataset leads to the best performance.

In addition, the researchers only update a small number of model parameters using a technique called low-rank adaption, which improves the efficiency of the test-time training process.

“This is important because our method needs to be efficient if it is going to be deployed in the real world. We find that you can get huge improvements in accuracy with a very small amount of parameter training,” Akyürek says.

 

Developing new skills

Streamlining the process is key, since test-time training is employed on a per-instance basis, meaning a user would need to do this for each individual task. The updates to the model are only temporary, and the model reverts to its original form after making a prediction.

A model that usually takes less than a minute to answer a query might take five or 10 minutes to provide an answer with test-time training, Akyürek adds.

“We wouldn’t want to do this for all user queries, but it is useful if you have a very hard task that you want to the model to solve well. There also might be tasks that are too challenging for an LLM to solve without this method,” he says.

The researchers tested their approach on two benchmark datasets of extremely complex problems, such as IQ puzzles. It boosted accuracy as much as sixfold over techniques that use only in-context learning.

Tasks that involved structured patterns or those which used completely unfamiliar types of data showed the largest performance improvements.

“For simpler tasks, in-context learning might be OK. But updating the parameters themselves might develop a new skill in the model,” Damani says.

In the future, the researchers want to use these insights toward the development of models that continually learn.

The long-term goal is an LLM that, given a query, can automatically determine if it needs to use test-time training to update parameters or if it can solve the task using in-context learning, and then implement the best test-time training strategy without the need for human intervention.

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This work is supported, in part, by the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and the National Science Foundation.

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DOI

10.48550/arXiv.2411.07279 

 

Koalas spend only 1% of their life on the ground – but it’s killing them

Society for Experimental Biology

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Koala in the wild with a custom-built collar containing a GPS logger and accelerometer.

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Credit: Dr Ami Fadhillah Amir Abdul Nasir

Koalas are a nationally endangered and iconic species in Australia, yet their populations are rapidly declining due to habitat loss, fragmentation, and disease, and very little is known about the fine-scale movements of koalas – especially when they’re on the ground. New research reveals that koalas only spend around 10 minutes per day on the ground, but this ground-time is associated with two-thirds of recorded koala deaths.

“Koalas are mostly tree-dwelling, but due to extensive land clearing, they’re increasingly forced to travel on the ground, which puts them at serious risk of injury and death,” says Gabriella Sparkes, a PhD student at the university of Queensland, Australia. “I wanted to better understand what koalas do during these ground movements.”

Previous research has shown that around 66% of all koala deaths occur while they’re on the ground, mostly due to dog attacks and vehicle strikes, yet surprisingly little is known about their ground-based behaviour. “We don’t yet have a clear understanding of how often koalas come down from trees, how far or fast they move, how long they stay on the ground, or what influences those decisions,” says Ms Sparkes. “These are critical knowledge gaps if we want to identify high-risk areas or times and develop strategies to reduce threats during these vulnerable moments.”

To analyse koala movement, Ms Sparkes and her team fitted wild koalas with collars containing GPS loggers and six-axis accelerometers in a landscape that has largely been cleared for farming. Their locations were recorded every five minutes, which increased to five-second bursts during ground travel.

The accelerometers allowed Ms Sparkes to identify distinct types of movement, such as walking, climbing and sitting, and this helped her to classify both tree-based and ground-based behaviour patterns on a fine-scale. “When paired with GPS tracks, this gives us an incredibly detailed view of how koalas move through their habitat,” says Ms Sparkes.

This research has revealed that, unsurprisingly, koalas spend most of their time in trees, sleeping and feeding – but the true scale of their tree-hugging was shocking. “What surprised us was how infrequently and briefly they use the ground—just 2-3 times per night, averaging around 10 minutes in total, or less than 1% of their day,” says Ms Sparkes.

They also found that koalas on the ground move with very little urgency. “They spent nearly as much time sitting and pausing as they did walking, and only about 7% of their time on the ground was spent bounding,” says Ms Sparkes. “This may indicate that koalas are carefully assessing their environment as they move, possibly evaluating trees before selecting one to climb, or it may reflect the energetic costs of bounding.”

This study is the first to document these fine-scale ground movements in wild koalas, and it opens new questions about how they navigate increasingly fragmented habitats. “We’re now looking at environmental features that influence how long koalas stay in trees,” says Ms Sparkes. “If we can identify the kinds of trees or habitat conditions that encourage koalas to remain in trees for longer, we may be able to design or manage landscapes in ways that reduce the need for ground travel.”

Based on these findings, Ms Sparkes and her team hope to influence the direction of koala conservation efforts, which could include prioritising certain vegetation types, improving canopy connectivity, or reducing gaps between safe trees—all of which could help keep koalas off the ground and out of the danger zone.

These findings help to provide a much clearer picture of koala behaviour, which can help to guide more effective habitat management and reduce the risk of fatalities in critical areas. “This research is just one piece of the puzzle, but it adds an important layer to our understanding of how koalas interact with increasingly human-altered environments,” says Ms Sparkes.

This research is being presented at the Society for Experimental Biology Annual Conference in Antwerp, Belgium on the 9th July 2025.

Koala release video [VIDEO] |

A koala being released after fitting a custom collar to record movement and behaviour. We release the koala 20 metres away from the tree to capture explosive bounding movements for later analysis.

Credit

Gabriella Sparkes

Koala in the wild with a custom-built collar containing a GPS logger and accelerometer.

Credit

Dr Ami Fadhillah Amir Abdul Nasir

 

Forum with alcohol industry ties shows significant bias in reviews of health research

A new study, published in Addiction, shines a light on how industries associated with health harms—such as tobacco, fossil fuels, and in this case, alcohol—can distort the evaluation of scientific research through industry-friendly commentary. 

University of Victoria

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A new study, published in Addiction, shines a light on how industries associated with health harms—such as tobacco, fossil fuels, and in this case, alcohol—can distort the evaluation of scientific research through industry-friendly commentary. 

A team of researchers led by UVic’s Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research (CISUR), analyzed 268 critiques of alcohol and health studies published online since 2010 by the International Scientific Forum on Alcohol Research, or ISFAR. 

ISFAR describes themselves as an international group of “invited physicians and scientists who are specialists in their fields and committed to balanced and well researched analysis regarding alcohol and health.” However, members have continuing alcohol-industry connections, says Tim Stockwell, CISUR scientist, professor emeritus at UVic’s psychology department, and co-author of the study. 

“Although ISFAR has long-standing ties to the alcohol industry, it is still frequently quoted in the media as an authoritative voice on matters relating to alcohol and health,” says Stockwell.  “We had observed their critiques seemed to favour studies finding health benefits from alcohol, and to be critical of those that said otherwise. We set out to test this impartially and comprehensively.” 

The researchers’ hypotheses were confirmed, whether using data generated by human coders or by computer-based text analysis of the ISFAR critiques. The team found studies supporting an industry-friendly narrative were ten times more likely to receive a positive review from ISFAR than those suggesting otherwise. Notably, ISFAR’s favorability ratings were completely unrelated to the studies’ level of scientific merit as assessed by an independent expert who was not otherwise involved in the project. 

“This analysis confirms the impression that ISFAR is an industry-friendly echo chamber whose critiques are determined more by whether they like the conclusions contained in research papers than by scientific merit,” says Stockwell. “We’ve seen this playbook before with the tobacco industry trying to discredit science around smoking’s harms.” 

It’s a reminder that we need to be mindful of where our information is coming from and who is paying for its creation, says Stockwell. 

Read the study The International Scientific Forum on Alcohol Research (ISFAR) critiques of alcohol research: Promoting health benefits and downplaying harms 

 

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DOI

10.1111/add.70132 

Article Title

The International Scientific Forum on Alcohol Research (ISFAR) critiques of alcohol research: Promoting health benefits and downplaying harms

Article Publication Date

9-Jul-2025