It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Tuesday, May 12, 2026
How can renewable energy be most efficiently integrated into the electric grid?
Renewable energy–based distributed energy resources (DERs) such as solar panels and electric vehicles can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but their integration in distribution grids introduces challenges due to the variable output of renewables and insufficient energy storage capacity. A study in IET Renewable Power Generation assessed DERs’ effects on the vulnerability of low-voltage distribution systems (the final stage of the electric grid that delivers power from distribution transformers to homes and other buildings).
Results indicated that although use of solar panels and electric vehicles lowers emissions and costs, it causes voltage regulation challenges. Overvoltage happens during the day with the increased solar energy generation, but undervoltage occurs at night due to vehicle charging demand and no solar energy generation. Use of community-scale battery energy storage systems was the most viable solution for mitigating the technical vulnerabilities imposed on distribution networks by DERs. Moreover, they were approximately 52% more cost-effective than individual household battery installations.
“Cleaner energy brings new grid challenges, making coordinated storage essential for voltage stability,” said corresponding author Khalil Gholami, PhD, of Deakin University, in Australia.
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About the Journal IET Renewable Power Generation is a fully open-access journal which serves as a forum for the presentation of novel research, development and applications of renewable energy. We publish works pertaining to any renewable energy source, enabling technologies such as storage systems and systems integration methods, and studies of relevant techno-economic issues.
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In a conservation approach designed to protect as many different species and ecosystems as possible, the study found that 46% of all people worldwide would live inside or within 10 kilometres of a conservation area. This patchwork of small farms inside the Pululahua volcanic crater, Ecuador, is within a protected landscape shaped by local livelihoods.
For better or worse, a huge number of people will be affected by efforts to achieve ‘30x30’ - the internationally-agreed conservation goal to protect and conserve at least 30% of the world’s land and seas by 2030. How many people, and who they are, will depend on which aspects of nature are prioritised for protection - but in all scenarios this human context must be a key consideration if plans are to succeed for both people and nature.
That’s the message of a new report published today in the journal Nature Communications, led by researchers at the University of Cambridge Conservation Research Institute and involving a diverse international team of researchers and practitioners.
The team considered three approaches to conservation that would enable the world to reach 30x30, with the aim of reversing the decline of nature and boosting our resilience to climate change.
In an approach designed to protect as many different species and ecosystems as possible, they found that 46% of all people worldwide would live inside or within 10 kilometres of a conservation area.
Other approaches would affect fewer people overall, but a higher proportion would be socially vulnerable, showing that implementation choices profoundly shape both the number and social profile of people affected.
Living in or close to conservation areas can have positive, negative or neutral implications for livelihoods and wellbeing. Potential benefits include securing a sustainable supply of clean water or access to cultural sites, whereas costs can include people being prevented from living in an area or using it to collect resources.
The final impacts of new conservation areas will depend on how they are designed and managed. For example, there is a major difference between a strict national park and an Indigenous protected area. Whichever approach is taken, making sure that local people do not lose out will require substantial investment, and processes to give local people a voice in decision-making, says the team.
“If you look at where new conservation sites might be located, these are not empty landscapes - often a lot of people live there, especially in countries like the UK. Planning land-use change to achieve national and global conservation targets must consider the impacts on local people,” said Professor Chris Sandbrook, Director of the University of Cambridge Conservation Research Institute and senior author of the report.
He added: “As an example, recent debates about whether to establish a new National Park in Wales highlight the balance that needs to be struck. While supporters say it could reduce flooding, lock up carbon and improve access to nature, critics fear tourism will overload local infrastructure, loss of farmland, and potential impacts on future housing availability.”
Protected natural spaces, when properly implemented, can benefit local people. For example, forests can prevent flooding, wildflowers can support insects that pollinate crops, wild harvesting can sustain local livelihoods, and access to natural spaces is important for human wellbeing.
“In addition to local benefits, protected natural areas can take carbon out of the atmosphere and help mitigate climate change, which at a grand scale is hugely important for us all. In many cases, however, it’s the people who live closest to conservation areas who tend to experience the downsides,” said Dr Javier Fajardo, a researcher in the University of Cambridge Conservation Research Institute and first author of the report.
He added: “If the global conservation target is achieved in the right way it could be really beneficial for people as well as nature. It’s an ambitious target, and to get there we need an equally ambitious commitment to supporting local people who are central to achieving it.”
The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework sets out an ambitious pathway to achieving the vision of a world living in harmony with nature by 2050. The 30x30 goal is part of this Framework. 196 countries, including the UK, made formal commitments to reach this target during the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP15) in 2022.
With only four years left to go and less than 20% of global land and sea protected, the team expects efforts to achieve the 30x30 target will now ramp up significantly. There are ongoing debates about which areas of land and sea should be conserved, and how to ensure successful implementation across the world.
Alternative approaches
The team also considered two other theoretical approaches to achieving 30x30, to explore how different priorities might shape social outcomes. The second focuses on protecting large areas of habitat - mainly in the Amazon and the Congo - that provide natural ‘services’ for people around the world, like nutrient cycling and carbon capture. The third prioritises areas with important conservation value that are governed and managed by Indigenous Peoples and local communities.
While these alternative approaches would affect significantly fewer people than one focused on protecting the most species, a higher proportion of the people impacted would be very poor, and vulnerable in various ways.
The team says there is no ‘socially optimal’ approach to conserving nature - the impact on people will vary wildly depending on the priorities by which land is chosen for protection and how the selected sites are governed and managed.
Wind pump at How Hill National Nature Reserve, UK. Water levels are carefully managed to strike a balance between nature and food production in the area.
Credit
C. Sandbrook
Small-scale fishing activity on the rocky coast of Tayrona National Natural Park, Colombia brings income to locals living within a protected coastal landscape.
Credit
Javier Fajardo
Tea estates spread right up to the boundary of Kibale National Park, Uganda.
Credit
C Sandbrook
Children in a small canoe on Limoncocha lagoon, Limoncocha Biological Reserve, Ecuador, where daily life is closely tied to protected wetland ecosystems.
A woman on Isla del Sol, Bolivia, overlooking Lake Titicaca with the Cordillera Real in the background, where local lives are closely connected to high-altitude landscapes.
CORVALLIS, Ore. – Restoring dry forests in the Pacific Northwest, shaped by frequent low-intensity fire and widely spaced trees, often means thinning dense stands that accumulated after decades of fire suppression. This can make forests healthier and more resilient to wildfire, but it can raise concerns about protecting wildlife that depend on dense tree cover, including the northern spotted owl.
A new study by researchers at Oregon State University and the U.S. Forest Service and just published in Forest Ecology & Management, suggests that restoration of landscapes that historically burned frequently through planned, controlled fire does not have to conflict with spotted owl conservation.
The study, led by Jeremy Rockweit, a postdoctoral student at Oregon State, identified forest areas used by the northern spotted owl for nesting and roosting that were more and less likely to persist through fire. They have now incorporated their findings into maps that could help land managers decide what areas of the landscape would benefit from a light or heavy-handed approach to forest restoration.
“This research is important for land managers trying to better balance wildlife conservation and forest restoration, and shows that protecting spotted owls and restoring fire‑resilient forests don’t have to be competing goals,” said Rockweit, who prior to earning his doctorate at Oregon State spent 17 years monitoring spotted owls in California and Oregon.
Before European settlement, western U.S. landscapes adapted to frequent fire were shaped and sustained by repeated burning. At this time, areas that previously burned at lower severity tended to reburn at lower severity and areas previously burned at higher severity tended to reburn at higher severity.
Historically, topography played a key role in determining fire severity levels. Sheltered locations near drainage bottoms often burned less frequently or at lower severity, supporting denser stands of closed-canopy, older forests. Upper slope areas, which are more exposed, burned more frequently or at higher severity.
During the last century, fire suppression has allowed dense, closed canopy forests to expand, including to these upper slope locations and today’s landscapes are less resilient and resistant to fire. This has happened at a time when fire seasons are getting longer, hotter and drier.
In the Pacific Northwest, northern spotted owls, a federally threatened species that for decades have been at the center of controversy over balancing conservation and timber production, tend to nest and roost in closed-canopy forest. Recent increases in wildfire activity in the spotted owl’s range has become the most significant threat to old forests used by spotted owls, research has found.
For the new study, researchers combined long-term spotted owl monitoring data beginning in the 1980s and data mapping fires from 1985 to 2022 to identify “fire refugia” for spotted owls. Fire refugia are locations within a burned landscape that burn less frequently or severely than the surrounding area because of their position in the landscape. They can be thought of as “islands,” where old forest structure can be sustained through multiple fires to help species and biodiversity survive.
The research focused on two regions: the eastern Cascades in Washington and the Klamath in southwestern Oregon and northwestern California. The research team modeled past fires that occurred under what researchers called moderate and extreme fire weather conditions, with the different level determined by temperatures and wind speeds at the time of the fires.
They found that forest suitable for spotted owl nesting and roosting was more likely to persist through fire when it occurred in those sheltered locations, whereas nesting and roosting forest was least persistent when it occurred higher upslope, such as along ridgetops. These patterns were consistent across both regions.
“Our maps could be used by managers to plan restoration-based activities that benefit landscape resilience and spotted owl conservation because spotted owls in these regions appear to benefit from some amount of habitat heterogeneity,” Rockweit said.
Under extreme fire conditions, the study found that both regions are expected to lose suitable spotted owl nesting and roosting habitat.
“These insights have important implications for land managers and shift the focus from a desire to retain as much nesting and roosting forest as possible to one of recognizing the inherent value of ecologically and topographically diverse landscapes for spotted owls,” Rockweit said.
Co-authors of the paper are Meg Krawchuk, Oregon State College of Forestry; David Bell, U.S. Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station; Katie Dugger, Oregon State College of Agricultural Sciences; and Damon Lesmeister, Oregon State and U.S. Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station.
Isotope analysis of gas from geothermal springs in Zambia could show that a new continental rift is forming, scientists say. Unexpectedly high helium isotope ratios indicate that a weakness in the Earth’s crust has broken through to reach the mantle beneath. This rift could eventually become a new tectonic plate boundary. In the meantime, opportunities for geothermal energy could boost local economies.
“The hot springs along the Kafue rift of Zambia have helium isotope signatures which indicate that the springs have a direct connection with the Earth’s mantle, which lies between 40 and 160km below the Earth’s surface,” said Prof Mike Daly of the University of Oxford, an author of the article in Frontiers in Earth Science. “This fluid connection is evidence that the fault boundary of the Kafue Rift is active and therefore the Southwest African Rift Zone is too — and may be an early indication of the break-up of sub-Saharan Africa.”
The bubbling gun
The Kafue Rift is part of a 2,500km long zone of rifts that runs from Tanzania to Namibia and may reach the mid-Atlantic ridge. The scientists’ attention was drawn to it by topography that suggested a possible new rift, as well as high levels of geothermal anomalies and hot springs. But to confirm a new rift, scientists would need to show that it had broken through the Earth’s crust: evidence that fluids had escaped from the liquid mantle to the surface.
“A rift is a large break in the Earth’s crust that creates subsidence and associated elastic uplift,” said Daly. “A rift may become a plate boundary, but commonly a rift’s activity ceases before the point of lithospheric break-up and plate boundary formation.”
The scientists visited eight geothermal wells and springs across Zambia: six in the suspected rift zone, and two outside it. They took samples of gas from freely bubbling water, and analyzed these in the laboratory to identify the isotopes of each element present. Isotopes are different forms of an element, which are present in different proportions in the crust and in the mantle. So by testing the isotopes present in the gas, the scientists could detect the presence of gas derived from mantle fluids at the surface. They compared these to readings taken from the East African Rift System, an ancient, well-established rift.
The Earth on the move
The scientists found that the gas from the Kafue Rift, but not the gas from the springs outside the rift, contained a ratio of helium isotopes comparable to samples taken from the East African Rift System. The helium couldn’t have come from the atmosphere, because the ratios of helium isotopes weren’t consistent with those found in the air, or just from the crust, because there was too much of the mantle-sourced helium isotope present for that. The Kafue Rift samples also contained a proportion of carbon dioxide consistent with carbon dioxide found in mantle fluids. Helium isotopes provide a signal of early-stage rifting: using the East African Rift System as a model, scientists predict that with time, carbon dioxide will become more prominent as volcanic centers develop.
The discovery that the Kafue Rift is active could have important economic implications. Early-stage rifts can provide geothermal energy and access to helium and hydrogen where they are not diluted by the volcanic gases. However, it could have even more significant implications for the future shape of Africa.
“Many of the features of the Great Rift Valley of Kenya offer compelling reasons why East Africa should ultimately become a line of major continental break-up,” said Daly. “But the rate of rifting of the East African Rift System is slow. On almost all sides of Africa there are mid-ocean ridges tending to inhibit east-west or north-south extension, so break-up and spreading does seem to struggle to establish itself. The Southwestern African Rift System could be an alternative. It has the required rift-related features, and regional basement fabrics — inherent weaknesses in the crust — favorably aligned to the surrounding mid-ocean ridges and continental geomorphology. This relationship may offer a much lower strength threshold for continental break-up.”
“However, this study is based on helium analyses from one general area in the Southwest African Rift System, which is thousands of kilometers long,” cautioned Daly. “This early study is being followed by more extensive studies, the next step of which will be completed this year.”
Credit: Goryukaku from Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=globals+learner&title=Special%3AMediaSearch&type=image
Promoting the acquisition of the host country's language is crucial for integrating immigrants into society, as it fosters social harmony, economic contribution, and mutual understanding among the citizens. With an increase in Japan’s foreign resident population, supporting their integration into local communities is a major issue. However, in Japan, many municipalities, instead of hiring professional language teachers, rely on volunteers to provide language instructions.
Exploring the issue, Associate Professor Bettina Gildenhard from the Faculty of Global Communications, Doshisha University, conducted a study to investigate how volunteer-led Japanese language classes work within broader policy frameworks and everyday community settings. While previous research has often examined language policies and teaching practices separately, this study serves as a link between both. It examines the tensions between personal initiatives, national language policies, and the quest for professionalism that shape the microcosm of local Japanese classes run by volunteers. The findings were made available online in the journal Japan Forum on April 24, 2026.
The study used two approaches: a review of the top-down language policy process through an analysis of published documents and an in-depth examination of the actual process through practical research. Government documents show that since the early 2000s, national and local policies have increasingly incorporated volunteers into providing formal language education, despite limited investment in professional teaching positions. Additionally, the research also draws in participant observation, interviews with volunteers, and reflection on training programs, thus providing a comprehensive view of both top-down policies and on-ground realities.
The author’s personal motivation also plays an important role in shaping this research. Her involvement in volunteer language support arose from a desire to better understand the multicultural coexistence and integration of foreign residents. Her direct participation in these classes proved to be more effective in critically reflecting upon the role of volunteers themselves. “What began as an effort to support language learning gradually became an opportunity to question how volunteers are positioned within the system,” she explains.
A key concept observed was “semi-professionalism.” Training programs in Japan are designed to improve teaching quality while preparing volunteers to take on a more structured, professional-like role. In this context, volunteers function as “quasi-professionals,” meaning they are not formally certified teachers but are trained and expected to deliver lessons with a similar level of responsibility and consistency. Many volunteers enjoy teaching, and many migrants also expect to be taught by “teachers.” When too much emphasis is placed on formal language instruction, however, migrants are mainly viewed as non-native speakers rather than as fellow community members. Similarly, volunteers who enjoy engaging with foreign residents and wish to develop new activities might be pushed into a teaching role they do not wish to assume.
Overall, the research highlights internal debates regarding teaching methods and professionalism between volunteers and demands for a more bala nced approach. It suggests increasing investment in professional language educators along with continued support for volunteer initiatives. It also reflects on recognizing the value of volunteers while also addressing structural gaps, which can help create a more effective and diverse system. Thus, aligning policy with practice and community engagement can prove to be essential in supporting foreign residents as active participants in Japanese society.
About Associate ProfessorBettina Gildenhard from Doshisha University Dr. Bettina Gildenhard is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Global Communications, Doshisha University, Japan. She earned her PhD from the University of Heidelberg, Germany, and her work focuses on humanities & social sciences, including language education for migrants, community-based learning, and multicultural studies. To date, she has published more than 6 research articles, exploring policies, methods, and initiatives for multicultural integration.
Funding information NA
Media contact: Organization for Research Innovation Doshisha University Kyotanabe, Kyoto 610-0394, JAPAN E-mail：jt-ura@mail.doshisha.ac.jp
Volunteering in Local Japanese Classes - Insights into a Microcosm between Personal Initiatives, National Language Policies and the Quest for Professionalism
