Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew King, Senior Lecturer in Climate Science, ARC Centre of Excellence for 21st Century Weather, The University of Melbourne

It’s the height of summer and many Australians have already experienced heatwaves, heavy rains and even significant bushfires over the Christmas and New Year period. But could we be in for something different as summer draws to a close?

Lower sea surface water temperatures in the central Pacific Ocean are leading to speculation about a La Niña event starting to form, raising the risk of wet weather. That would be unusual because La Niña events typically start in winter and get going properly in spring, before “decaying” in late summer and autumn.

Given the time of year, it would be hard for a proper La Niña event to get going now. But the Bureau of Meteorology’s outlook does point to a probable wet end to summer over most areas of Australia.

As the climate continues to change, there are challenges in monitoring and predicting El Niño and La Niña events. The best source of information is the Bureau’s outlooks as they encapsulate lots of climate information and don’t just focus on one driver of Australia’s climate.

What is a La Niña event and are we heading into one?

La Niña events are characterised by below-average temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean and warmer waters in the west nearer to Australia. They often, but not always, bring wetter conditions for eastern and northern Australia. In contrast El Niño events, which are at the opposite end of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), usually bring drier weather to most of the continent.

If a La Niña is on the horizon, many of us – especially people working in agriculture, emergency management and water resources – are keen to know in advance.

Since early last year, there has been speculation about a La Niña forming. The metrics used to determine if we are in an El Niño or La Niña (or somewhere in between) have been close – but not quite at the La Niña threshold – for much of the time over the past few months.

At the moment, some of the indicators used to track the state of the Pacific are just breaching the thresholds used for a La Niña event. This has led to discussion in some media outlets that we’re heading into a “rare summer La Niña”.

It’s worth noting that a criterion for a La Niña event is sustained cooler-than-normal conditions in the central Pacific, because there is some week-to-week fluctuation in sea surface temperatures. We are not yet close to having the three months of below average temperatures in the central Pacific that would often be required to declare a La Niña event.

In autumn, the variability in tropical Pacific Ocean temperatures starts to settle down, so it would be very hard for a La Niña to start in January and be maintained through to April. Indeed, we often see blips of warmer or cooler conditions at this time of year.

The Bureau of Meteorology has not declared a La Niña and instead notes that the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is currently “neutral”“ (neither El Niño nor La Niña), albeit with some indices drifting close to La Niña thresholds. Any unofficial declaration of a La Niña is jumping the gun.

Tracking drivers of climate variability in a warming world

Keeping track of how the drivers of Australia’s climate are evolving is tricky. Climate change makes it even more complicated.

The rapid warming of our oceans means the characteristics of La Niña events may well be changing. Just identifying if we are in a La Niña is trickier than it used to be, so new measures to keep track of ENSO may become more useful.

Also, by warming the planet through our greenhouse gas emissions, we may be changing other aspects of La Niña events and their effects on Australian weather and climate.

At the moment, it’s hard to see any such changes because we don’t have lots of real-world La Niña events to study and detect trends. However, some studies suggest we should expect more strong La Niña events and stronger rainfall responses as we keep warming the planet.

Australia’s complex climate

La Niña is just one of many factors that can affect Australia’s weather.

Ocean temperature and wind patterns in the Indian Ocean, Southern Ocean and tropics all combine to influence our day-to-day weather. While La Niña events are often wetter on average, cooler waters in the Eastern Pacific do not guarantee rainfall and floods.

Our recent study of the unusually wet 2022 in Eastern Australia (the most recent La Niña period), found La Niña can help promote the background conditions needed for heavy rainfall, such as more onshore winds over Eastern Australia.

But it is the chaotic, and sometimes unlucky, behaviour of the day-to-day weather systems such as tropical cyclones, highs, lows and cold fronts that ultimately bring the extreme weather. Therefore, it is foolish to look at climate drivers such as La Niña in isolation to forecast the weather and climate.

This is why the Bureau is moving away from forecasts that focus on individual climate drivers like La Niña and are instead emphasising their long-range forecast, which takes into account all the drivers of Australia’s weather.

This shift in communication of climate information is partly due to an effort to end sensationalist reporting on El Niño and La Niña that can lead to public misunderstanding.

Unfortunately, a reduction in information on El Niño and La Niña from the Bureau risks a vacuum that may be filled with unofficial climate statements.

The Bureau’s long-range forecasts are the best source of information for Australians wishing to know what weather and climate conditions the next few months may bring.

Andrew King receives funding from the ARC Centre of Excellence for 21st Century Weather and the National Environmental Science Program.

Kimberley Reid receives funding from the ARC Centre of Excellence for 21st Century Weather.

– ref. La Niña back this summer? Not likely – and unofficial declarations are jumping the gun – https://theconversation.com/la-nina-back-this-summer-not-likely-and-unofficial-declarations-are-jumping-the-gun-246778

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Frank Bongiorno, Professor of History, ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National University

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a gaffe as a “blunder, an instance of clumsy stupidity, a ‘faux pas’.” It evokes a sense of triviality rather than high seriousness. If one’s clumsiness results in the outbreak of war, it would not usually be considered a mere gaffe.

Nor are gaffes ordinarily seen to result from the unworthy impulses of spite or cruelty. No one would call Robodebt a gaffe. It was far worse than that. Gaffes normally imply absentmindedness rather than deliberation.

So, what are the gaffes that have been most significant in Australian political history? What are the blunders that have mattered?

Bungled from the start

The Commonwealth of Australia was founded on a blunder.

The governor-general of the day, Lord Hopetoun, commissioned William Lyne as the first prime minister of Australia. Hopetoun had only recently arrived in Australia, and as there would be no federal election until March 1901, an interim government needed to be formed in the meantime.

Lyne had recently become premier of New South Wales, the most populous of the colonies. To a newcomer unversed in local politics, making him prime minister seemed like a good idea.

But Lyne had been a longstanding opponent of federation of the colonies and was deeply unpopular with those who had worked for years to bring it about. Leading politicians, such as Edmund Barton, refused to serve in his cabinet.

Lyne returned his commission. The episode has been called the Hopetoun Blunder.

Words defying logic

Gaffes, however, often tend to be more about words than actions.

One of the most memorable to have occurred in the Australian parliament was on October 19 1955. Herbert Vere Evatt was leader of the opposition and had overseen – and helped trigger – a split in the Labor Party.

Entangled in that crisis was the defection the previous year of Soviet spies Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov, and Evatt’s clumsy handling of the matter.

Early in a speech delivered to the House of Representatives, Evatt reported he had written to the Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, who had assured him the documents Petrov had taken from the Soviet embassy in Canberra had been forged under the “instructions of persons interested in the deterioration of the Soviet-Australian relations and in discrediting their political opponents”. One of the documents in question implicated Evatt’s staffers in passing information to the Soviets.

Read more:
The Petrov affair: how a real-life Cold War defection became a soothing spy story for anxious Australians

It seemed incredible an Australian political leader would write to a Soviet politician in such terms. What did he expect Molotov to say? That the documents delivered by a man who had betrayed the Soviet Union, and which disclosed the existence of Soviet espionage in Australia, were authentic?

Evatt’s speech was greeted with grim faces from those behind him, and raucous laughter from the government benches and Labor defectors. One of those who had split from Labor, Stan Keon, wanted to know if the letter had been addressed “Dear Boss”. Another from the government benches interjected “he’s nuts”.

Most so-called gaffes do not have such serious reverberations. They sound silly and reflect poorly on whoever made them, but the political cycle quickly moves on.

In this case, Evatt’s gaffe mattered. It destroyed what remained of his credibility and prompted some to question not only his judgement but also his sanity.

Following a closely fought election in 1954, it provided an opening for Robert Menzies to call an early election in 1955, which he won in a landslide. It paved the way for another 17 years of Coalition rule.

On cakes and recessions

It is hard to think of any gaffe in recent Australian political history that mattered quite as much.

John Hewson undoubtedly committed a gaffe during the 1993 election campaign in a television interview with Mike Willesee, when he was asked how his proposed Goods and Services Tax would apply to a cake.

Hewson’s answer weaved this way and that – in a manner that complicated rather than simplified. He probably would have lost the election anyway, but it didn’t help.

In other instances, a gaffe subsequently acquires importance because it comes to stand for some larger story about the times or the person who committed it.

Paul Keating’s remark at a 1990 media conference announcing the country had entered a recession was accompanied by the memorable remark “this is the recession Australia had to have”.

It looked like a gaffe. It smelt like a gaffe. It clung to Keating as a clumsy attempt by an arrogant politician to absolve himself of responsibility for the sad state of the economy.

Yet, in the eyes of many commentators a few years on, it didn’t look quite so bad.

A recession was inevitable following the boom in asset prices of the 1980s. Almost all developed economies had one in the early 1990s.

An effect of the recession is that it brought inflation down to the levels achieved by countries such as the United States and United Kingdom in the early 1980s, which became the foundation for several decades of high economic performance by Australia.

I do not share this rosy view: the recession had catastrophic economic and social effects. But the combination of events is a reminder that what might look like a bad gaffe in one context can look rather different in another.

Keating’s 1986 remark in a radio interview with John Laws that unless the country turned around its balance-of-payments problems, it would become a “banana republic”, also looked like a gaffe.

Prime Minister Bob Hawke was deeply unhappy with what Keating had said, but in retrospect, it provided the government with cover for imposing greater economic discipline on the public.

Labor won the 1987 election that followed, just as Keating’s “recession” gaffe turned out to be a milestone on his way to the prime ministership and victory in 1993.

Symptoms of larger problems

More recently, Scott Morrison’s 2019 “I don’t hold a hose, mate” comment during the Black Summer bushfires merely seemed a bit clumsy, and much less of a big deal than his having taken a holiday in Hawaii when so much of the country was on fire. At worst, it reflected a lack of judgement about the seriousness of the situation back in Australia.

In the years that followed, it came to mean more, becoming for critics emblematic of his prime ministership.

His remark that COVID vaccination was “not a race” acted in tandem with the earlier statement.

Together they seemed to epitomise a complacent leader unwilling to lead. Labor made hay with this material as the 2022 election approached.

The search for gaffes can be trivialising. As we enter another election season, we can expect the media to spend at least as much time on the hunt for gaffes as they do on policy substance.

Burned in 2022, Albanese will be swotting up on the Reserve Bank cash rate and the present level of unemployment to the second decimal point in preparation for his own Hard Quiz-style ordeal.

He will probably get them right, too. But that will tell us precisely nothing about whether his government deserves a second term and, if it gets one, whether it will make anything of it.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this story stated Evatt’s speech was subject to laughter from the opposition benches. This was a gaffe from the author. The laughter came from government benches and the copy has been updated to reflect this. The article also corrects Scott Morrison’s quote to the exact wording, from “I don’t hold the hose” to “I don’t hold a hose”.

Frank Bongiorno does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. ‘I don’t hold a hose, mate’: Australia’s political history is full of gaffes. Here are some of best (or worst) – https://theconversation.com/i-dont-hold-a-hose-mate-australias-political-history-is-full-of-gaffes-here-are-some-of-best-or-worst-241919

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Talitakuum Ekandjo, Lecturer, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

Imagine starting your workday with an AI assistant that not only helps you write emails but also tracks your productivity, suggests breathing exercises, monitors your mood and stress levels and summarises meetings.

This is not a futuristic scenario. Workplaces globally are already quietly transforming into AI-powered environments, with 75% of knowledge workers using AI tools such as Microsoft Copilot, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft Viva Insights, according to recent Microsoft data.

Most (85%) find these tools effective at prioritising tasks. A growing “bring your own AI” trend has also seen 78% of employees introducing their own AI solutions to find relief from endless emails, meeting overloads and blurred work-life boundaries.

As part of my research, I explored how the use of AI assistants works out in practice and how it is transforming our work experiences.

The study is based on interviews and self-reflection journals kept by workers across government, technology, education and finance sectors in New Zealand. My focus is on Microsoft Viva Insights, a productivity assistant which leverages AI to analyse work habits, offer personalised recommendations to optimise workflows and encourage healthier routines in the workplace.

My findings highlight benefits but also reveal a stark contrast between AI’s promises and workplace realities.

Potential for productivity and wellbeing

For many workers, the AI assistant offered tangible benefits. They discovered it could guide them into setting goals and prioritising tasks. As a result, they felt they could allocate their time and efforts more efficiently and effectively, which transformed how they tackle workloads.

The AI assistant functioned as a self-monitoring and reflection tool. Workers described it as a “dashboard”, “safety net” and “tracker” that helped them notice work patterns they might otherwise overlook. For example, by consolidating key meeting documents, the AI assistant helped them stay organised, prepared and efficient.

Beyond improved productivity, workers also discovered unexpected personal benefits. Some found that following the breathing exercise suggestions created a “settling feeling” and served as a “good reminder” to prioritise self care and not solely focus on work. Workers also described the AI assistant’s potential to facilitate interaction among “introverted” or “less socially active” team members.

However, the findings also revealed significant limitations.

The AI rigidity trap

Workers frequently found the AI assistant oversimplified the messy, interconnected and fluid nature of modern work, especially because it does not know about or understand the demands in other parts of workers’ lives.

The AI assistant’s suggestions often proved impractical for roles that demand constant availability and real-time collaboration. John, a software developer whose AI assistant regularly blocks off “focus time”, explained:

I cannot have any notifications off. My job right now […] a lot of it is collaborative and working with other people.

Kyle, an applications support manager, echoed this sentiment:

Booking focus time is lovely in theory, but I never have two hours free on my calendar. I’ve looked at different ways of properly focusing attention, for example shutting down the email, but people end up at your desk. So, focus time isn’t necessarily focus time.

Digital overwhelm and distraction

Workers found interacting with the AI assistant was an additional task to manage and its multiple interaction channels could be overwhelming. The effort and time needed to “interact with or research these tools to try and make them better” often felt counterproductive as it took time away from actual work.

The AI assistant’s personalised nature also raised privacy concerns. Workers indicated they were “always suspicious” because they never quite knew who is reading and analysing their data. The mood-tracking feature, which invites workers to pick an emoji from a menu of expressions that most closely matches their mood, exposes this privacy dilemma.

Workers mentioned they “do the smiley faces” but are “always a bit worried” when selecting frowning faces because they are not entirely sure if anyone is recording and judging them.

AI assistants hold immense potential, but their success depends on how well they align with the complex nature of work.

My research suggests workers are most likely to embrace these tools when they feel a sense of agency and understanding. As AI continues to reshape our workplaces, the key will be creating technology that serves humans and adapts to their work realities.

The most effective AI will not be the most powerful but the most flexible and adaptable to accommodate diverse roles and role-specific work patterns. To foster trust and acceptance, workers need to be given control to determine what data the AI assistant uses when making suggestions in specific work scenarios.

Finally, data transparency is crucial to ensuring workers’ confidence that their privacy is respected, and their data is used ethically.

Talitakuum Ekandjo does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Beyond the hype: what workers really think about workplace AI assistants – https://theconversation.com/beyond-the-hype-what-workers-really-think-about-workplace-ai-assistants-245662

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Thomas Klassen, Professor, School of Public Policy and Administration, York University, Canada

Justin Trudeau has resigned after more than nine years as Canada’s 23rd prime minister. Parliament will be prorogued and will resume sitting on March 24. Trudeau says he made his decision over the holidays after discussions with his family.

During his time in office, the federal government has been extraordinarily active on social policy. From legalizing cannabis, permitting medical aid in dying, introducing dental care, pharmacare and government-subsidized child care, Trudeau reimagined what Canadians can expect from their government.

The son of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Canada’s 15th prime minister, leaves office never having tasted electoral defeat.

He was successful in his first run for elected office as a member of Parliament in 2008, at his run for the leadership of the Liberal Party in 2013 and in his first national election when he became prime minister in 2015.

The 2015 election is one for the history books as the Liberal Party under Trudeau entered the race with just 36 seats and was widely expected to remain on the sidelines. But due in part to the “sunny ways” campaign that Trudeau ran, along with his energy and likeability, the party breezed to a massive majority with 184 seats.

Trudeau also earned worldwide praise for appointing a cabinet that was gender-balanced, a policy he continued throughout his years in office.

Minority governments, Donald Trump

Trudeau’s Liberals were re-elected in 2019 and 2021, although both times to minority governments that required support in Parliament from the left-leaning New Democratic Party.

Trudeau dealt with three American presidents, most notably with Donald Trump during the president’s first term in office when the North American Free Trade Agreement was renegotiated.

After Trump’s re-election in November 2024, the president-elect has repeatedly mocked Trudeau, calling him governor of the 51st American state — comments that most Canadians find deeply offensive.

Read more:
Canada as a 51st state? Republicans would never win another general election

The COVID-19 pandemic transpired during Trudeau’s time in office. As with other social policies, Trudeau’s Liberals instituted a range of mandates to protect public health. Trudeau also invoked the Emergency Measures Act that allowed the federal government to exercise extraordinary powers to clear protesters that were blocking parts of Ottawa for weeks in February 2022.

Uphill battle

Trudeau’s resignation comes after members of his own party lost faith during the past several months in his ability to win a fourth mandate as leader heading into the anticipated October 2025 election. But the Liberals, with or without Trudeau, face an uphill battle after nearly a decade in power.

Winning a fourth consecutive term is rare in Canada. Only two prime ministers — Wilfrid Laurier and John A. Macdonald — have done so, and both accomplished the feat more than a century ago when the political landscape had fewer parties.

By resigning now, rather than battling his own party and then enduring what appears will be certain defeat in the next election, Trudeau leaves political life on a relative high note despite his unpopularity in the polls and among some in his own party. The shock resignation of one of his closest cabinet colleagues, Chrystia Freeland, likely played a role in his decision.

Read more:
Chrystia Freeland’s resignation seems carefully aimed at removing a sitting prime minister

Perhaps Trudeau took to heart the example of United States President Joe Biden, who sought to run for one additional term, only to be forced to withdraw at the last moment by his own party. Critics have argued Biden’s efforts to hang on and his last-minute reversal contributed to the defeat of Kamala Harris and the loss of the White House to Donald Trump.

Personal toll

During Trudeau’s time in office, his marriage ended — as his own parents’ marriage did decades ago while Pierre Trudeau was in power. Two of his children are teenagers, while one is a pre-teen. Trudeau has in the past remarked: “The best days of my life are the ones I’ve spent outside with my kids.”

He will now have more time with his family.

Read more:
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau assumes a new role — single dad, just like his own father

Still young at age 53, Trudeau could begin a second public life as the late U.S. president, Jimmy Carter, did following his four years in the Oval Office. Or he could largely withdraw from the public sphere and pursue a private sector career.

No matter what Trudeau’s future holds, he leaves an indelible mark on Canada — especially on its social policies.

Thomas Klassen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Justin Trudeau quits: How his focus on social policy will be his legacy – https://theconversation.com/justin-trudeau-quits-how-his-focus-on-social-policy-will-be-his-legacy-246730

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Muhammad Usman, Head of Quantum Systems and Principal Research Scientist, CSIRO

In recent years, the field of quantum computing has been experiencing fast growth, with technological advances and large-scale investments regularly making the news.

The United Nations has designated 2025 as the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology.

The stakes are high – having quantum computers would mean access to tremendous data processing power compared to what we have today. They won’t replace your normal computer, but having this kind of awesome computing power will provide advances in medicine, chemistry, materials science and other fields.

So it’s no surprise that quantum computing is rapidly becoming a global race, and private industry and governments around the world are rushing to build the world’s first full-scale quantum computer. To achieve this, first we need to have stable and scalable quantum processors, or chips.

What is a quantum chip?

Everyday computers – like your laptop – are classical computers. They store and process information in the form of binary numbers or bits. A single bit can represent either 0 or 1.

By contrast, the basic unit of a quantum chip is a qubit. A quantum chip is made up of many qubits. These are typically subatomic particles such as electrons or photons, controlled and manipulated by specially designed electric and magnetic fields (known as control signals).

Unlike a bit, a qubit can be placed in a state of 0, 1, or a combination of both, also known as a “superposition state”. This distinct property allows quantum processors to store and process extremely large data sets exponentially faster than even the most powerful classical computer.

There are different ways to make qubits – one can use superconducting devices, semiconductors, photonics (light) or other approaches. Each method has its advantages and drawbacks.

Companies like IBM, Google and QueRa all have roadmaps to drastically scale up quantum processors by 2030.

Industry players that use semiconductors are Intel and Australian companies like Diraq and SQC. Key photonic quantum computer developers include PsiQuantum and Xanadu.

Qubits: quality versus quantity

How many qubits a quantum chip has is actually less important than the quality of the qubits.

A quantum chip made up of thousands of low-quality qubits will be unable to perform any useful computational task.

So, what makes for a quality qubit?

Qubits are very sensitive to unwanted disturbances, also known as errors or noise. This noise can come from many sources, including imperfections in the manufacturing process, control signal issues, changes in temperature, or even just an interaction with the qubit’s environment.

Being prone to errors reduces the reliability of a qubit, known as fidelity. For a quantum chip to stay stable long enough to perform complex computational tasks, it needs high-fidelity qubits.

When researchers compare the performance of different quantum chips, qubit fidelity is one of the crucial parameters they use.

How do we correct the errors?

Fortunately, we don’t have to build perfect qubits.

Over the last 30 years, researchers have designed theoretical techniques which use many imperfect or low-fidelity qubits to encode an abstract “logical qubit”. A logical qubit is protected from errors and, therefore, has very high fidelity. A useful quantum processor will be based on many logical qubits.

Nearly all major quantum chip developers are now putting these theories into practice, shifting their focus from qubits to logical qubits.

In 2024, many quantum computing researchers and companies made great progress on quantum error corrections, including Google, QueRa, IBM and CSIRO.

Quantum chips consisting of over 100 qubits are already available. They are being used by many researchers around the world to evaluate how good the current generation of quantum computers are and how they can be made better in future generations.

For now, developers have only made single logical qubits. It will likely take a few years to figure out how to put several logical qubits together into a quantum chip that can work coherently and solve complex real-world problems.

What will quantum computers be useful for?

A fully functional quantum processor would be able to solve extremely complex problems. This could lead to revolutionary impact in many areas of research, technology and economy.

Quantum computers could help us discover new medicines and advance medical research by finding new connections in clinical trial data or genetics that current computers don’t have enough processing power for.

They could also greatly improve the safety of various systems that use artificial intelligence algorithms, such as banking, military targeting and autonomous vehicles, to name a few.

To achieve all this, we first need to reach a milestone known as quantum supremacy – where a quantum processor solves a problem that would take a classical computer an impractical amount of time to do.

Late last year, Google’s quantum chip Willow finally demonstrated quantum supremacy for a contrived task – a computational problem designed to be hard for classical supercomputers but easy for quantum processors due to their distinct way of working.

Although it didn’t solve a useful real-world problem, it’s still a remarkable achievement and an important step in the right direction that’s taken years of research and development. After all, to run, one must first learn to walk.

What’s on the horizon for 2025 and beyond?

In the next few years, quantum chips will continue to scale up. Importantly, the next generation of quantum processors will be underpinned by logical qubits, able to tackle increasingly useful tasks.

While quantum hardware (that is, processors) has been progressing at a rapid pace, we also can’t overlook an enormous amount of research and development in the field of quantum software and algorithms.

Using quantum simulations on normal computers, researchers have been developing and testing various quantum algorithms. This will make quantum computing ready for useful applications when the quantum hardware catches up.

Building a full-scale quantum computer is a daunting task. It will require simultaneous advancements on many fronts, such as scaling up the number of qubits on a chip, improving the fidelity of the qubits, better error correction, quantum software, quantum algorithms, and several other sub-fields of quantum computing.

After years of remarkable foundational work, we can expect 2025 to bring new breakthroughs in all of the above.

Muhammad Usman receives funding from the Australian Defence and Australian Army.

– ref. 2025 will see huge advances in quantum computing. So what is a quantum chip and how does it work? – https://theconversation.com/2025-will-see-huge-advances-in-quantum-computing-so-what-is-a-quantum-chip-and-how-does-it-work-246336

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hunter Bennett, Lecturer in Exercise Science, University of South Australia

Reformer pilates is steadily growing in popularity, with new studios opening regularly in major cities all over the world.

But what exactly is reformer pilates? And how does it compare with regular pilates and other types of exercise?

Classes aren’t cheap so let’s look at the potential benefits and drawbacks to help you decide if it’s right for you.

Pilates with special equipment

Pilates is a mode of exercise that focuses on core stability and flexibility, while also addressing muscular strength and endurance, balance and general fitness. At first glance, it might look a bit like yoga, with some more traditional weight training components thrown in.

Reformer pilates uses a piece of equipment called a “reformer”. This looks like a narrow bed that slides along a carriage, has straps to hold onto, and has adjustable springs that add resistance to movement. You perform pilates on the reformer to target specific muscle groups and movement patterns.

The reformer was first designed to help people recover from injuries. However, it has now become common for general fitness and even sports performance.

Unlike normal pilates, also known as “mat pilates”, which only uses your body weight, the reformer adds resistance, meaning you can change the difficulty according to your current level of fitness.

This not only provides a way to overload your muscles, but can make the exercise session more aerobically demanding, which has been proposed to improve cardiovascular fitness.

What are the benefits of reformer pilates?

Despite being around for decades, there is surprisingly little research looking at the benefits of reformer pilates. However, what we have seen so far suggests it has a similar effect to other modes of exercise.

Reformer pilates has been shown to help with weight loss, cause some small increases in muscle mass, and enhance cognitive function. All of these benefits are commonly seen when combining weight training and cardio into the same routine.

Similarly, among older adults, it has been shown to improve strength, enhance flexibility and may even reduce the risk of falling.

From a rehabilitation perspective, there is some evidence indicating reformer pilates can improve shoulder health and function, reduce lower back pain and increase flexibility.

Finally, there is some evidence suggesting a single session of reformer pilates can improve two key markers of cardiovascular health, being flow-mediated dilation and pulse wave velocity, while also improving cholesterol and insulin levels. This suggests reformer pilates could lead to long-term improvements in heart and metabolic health, although more research is needed to confirm this.

However, there are some key things to consider when discussing these benefits. Most of this research is quite exploratory and comes from a very small number of studies. So we do not know whether these findings will apply to everyone.

Very few studies compared reformer pilates to other types of exercise. Therefore, while it can improve most aspects of health and function, it’s unlikely reformer pilates provides the optimal mode of exercise for each individual component of physical fitness.

Traditional weight training, for example, will likely cause larger improvements in strength than reformer pilates. Similarly, stretching will probably make you more flexible. And running or cycling will make you fitter.

However, if you want a type of exercise that gives you broad overall health benefits, it could be a good option.

What are the downsides of reformer pilates

Reformer pilates is not for everyone.

First and foremost, classes can be expensive compared to other fitness options. You need to be doing at least two to three sessions per week of any type of exercise to maximise the benefits. So even if you can find a class for A$20 or $30, paying for two or three classes a week (or buying a weekly or monthly subscription) is a significant outlay.

Second, it’s not as accessible as other exercise. Even if you can afford it, not every town or suburb has a reformer pilates studio.

Third, the effectiveness of your workout is likely to be impacted by how competent your instructor is. There are a host of different pilates qualifications you can get in Australia, and some take much less time than others. With this in mind, it might be best to look for accredited pilates instructors, although this will further reduce the number of options you have available.

Finally, there is a learning curve. While you will get better over time, the exercise will likely be less effective during those first few weeks (or months) when you are getting used to the machine and the movements.

Is it right for you?

Reformer pilates can be a great addition to your fitness routine, especially if you’re looking for a low-impact way to build strength and flexibility.

But if you have more specific goals, you might need a more specific mode of exercise. For example, if you need to get stronger to improve your ability to manage your daily life, then strength training is probably your best bet. Likewise, if your goal is to run a marathon, you will get more specific benefits from running.

The cost and availability of reformer pilates make it less accessible for some people. With this in mind, if you are after similar benefits at a lower price point, mat pilates might be a better option. Not only does it have evidence suggesting it can improve strength and fitness, but it is something you can do at home if you find a good resource (YouTube could be a good sttarting point here).

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. What is reformer pilates? And is it worth the cost? – https://theconversation.com/what-is-reformer-pilates-and-is-it-worth-the-cost-244634

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Carla Archibald, Research Fellow, Conservation Science, Deakin University

Eating rabbit, camel, carp, feral cat, deer and cane toad might sound extreme to some, but it’s gaining attention as a solution to tackle the growing impact of invasive species.

Now, Tony Armstrong hosts the ABC series Eat the Invaders, inspired by artist Kirsha Kaechele’s 2019 cookbook and MONA exhibition Eat the Problem.

Over the course of the series, Armstrong talks to chefs, conservationists, Indigenous Elders, researchers, food producers and the general public to explore the idea of eating these species to reduce their populations.

Over each of the six episodes, the show features a different invasive species, transforming them from something perceived as an unwanted pest into a desirable food you may order off a menu.

Invasive species in Australia

Episode one poetically begins at ground zero of the rabbit invasion, Barwon Park in Winchelsea, Victoria, where 24 rabbits were introduced in 1859.

Ever since, invasive species like the rabbit have caused significant harm in Australia, now impacting 82% of our threatened species – a rate much higher than global norms. Feral cats and foxes are responsible for the deaths of 2.6 billion native vertebrates annually.

Invasive species disproportionately affect Indigenous lands in Australia compared to the global average, emphasising their cultural toll.

In the agricultural sector, invasive species cause significant damage, and cost Australian producers up to A$5.3 billion in management costs and losses annually.

Cane toads have toxic skin that poisons native predators like goannas, crocodiles and quolls, who lack natural defences.

To combat this, researchers are testing innovative solutions, such as “cane toad sausages”, to train native mammals and reptiles to avoid the toxic toads.

Could invasive species belong on our plates too?

I’ll eat a cow, but not a camel

While we may accept animals like cows, chickens or pigs as food, species like rabbit, camel and carp remain off the menu for many Australians.

This is a form of cognitive dissonance, where we perceive some animals as pests but are also hesitant at the idea of turning them into food.

Adding invasive species back into culinary culture can increase public awareness of invasive species, assist in early detection and response efforts, and boost local economies.

Re-branding invasive species as a culinary opportunity isn’t a new concept. Carp is often sold in America under the name “copi”.

This idea is explored during episode three, as a marketing company is given an opportunity to re-brand cane toad meat. The final hypothetical product is a packaged “toad nugget” product called “Croaky Crunchers”.

Eating invasive species

A central theme of Eat the Invaders is that eating invasive species is good for the environment, while also being delicious.

Armstrong meets up with the Country Women’s Association to learn about how rabbits were once common on Australian dinner tables, while cooking a tomato and rabbit stew.

Carp is a staple food in China and Europe but is rarely found in Australian supermarkets.

Here, carp appears in fish and chips and as part of an experimental dish at MONA, served with invasive weeds and “edible plastic” made from corn flour and the invasive plant kudzu.

Bob Katter might not be the first person you’d expect to make a cameo, but it makes sense given far-north Queensland is one of the most densely populated regions for cane toads in Australia.

The main challenge with eating cane toads is the risk of bufotoxin, which is toxic to humans. Armstrong meets a former chef who prepares and eats cane toad – but Armstrong can’t get the meat safety-tested to try it himself.

Establishing safe processing, like Japan’s fugu system of safely processing the tetrodotoxin poison from puffer fish, could help to create an export market for toads. This might benefit conservation by reducing pressure on native frogs harvested in Indonesia and Vietnam.

The show stops short of serving feral cats on the menu at MONA.

Instead, Armstrong travels to Kiwirrkurra Country in the Gibson Desert and joins the Kiwirrkurra rangers and cat hunters who protect wildlife like the vulnerable greater bilby by hunting feral cats.

They show him how the feral cats are prepared as food. He told the Guardian “it tasted like the most delicious rotisserie chicken I’ve ever had”.

Worth the watch

Changing our diets is a simple yet powerful way to tackle Australia’s extinction crisis. Eat the Invaders creatively explores this idea.

Armstrong’s style is approachable and engaging for people who are unfamiliar with the impact of invasive species. Especially as he himself is trying many of these species for the first time.

The show balances perspectives on food, conservation, Indigenous knowledge, and consumer experiences, creating a well-rounded narrative.

Throughout the show, Armstrong highlights the profound impact of invasive species on Indigenous Australians’ connection to Country, and how these species disrupt ecosystems and threaten culturally significant totem species.

While eating invasive species is innovative, it’s not a standalone solution.

As invasive species spread, management often shifts from eradication to long-term control. Policy contradictions, like deer being protected under some laws but considered threats in others, complicate management efforts.

Promoting invasive species consumption through eating them could help, but risks creating a business case to maintain or even expand invasive populations, undermining eradication goals.

Eat the Invaders is on the ABC from tonight.

Carla Archibald does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Cane toads on the barbie? How eating invasive species might help manage them – https://theconversation.com/cane-toads-on-the-barbie-how-eating-invasive-species-might-help-manage-them-246042

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Frank Bongiorno, Professor of History, ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National University

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a gaffe as a “blunder, an instance of clumsy stupidity, a ‘faux pas’.” It evokes a sense of triviality rather than high seriousness. If one’s clumsiness results in the outbreak of war, it would not usually be considered a mere gaffe.

Nor are gaffes ordinarily seen to result from the unworthy impulses of spite or cruelty. No one would call Robodebt a gaffe. It was far worse than that. Gaffes normally imply absentmindedness rather than deliberation.

So, what are the gaffes that have been most significant in Australian political history? What are the blunders that have mattered?

Bungled from the start

The Commonwealth of Australia was founded on a blunder.

The governor-general of the day, Lord Hopetoun, commissioned William Lyne as the first prime minister of Australia. Hopetoun had only recently arrived in Australia, and as there would be no federal election until March 1901, an interim government needed to be formed in the meantime.

Lyne had recently become premier of New South Wales, the most populous of the colonies. To a newcomer unversed in local politics, making him prime minister seemed like a good idea.

But Lyne had been a longstanding opponent of federation of the colonies and was deeply unpopular with those who had worked for years to bring it about. Leading politicians, such as Edmund Barton, refused to serve in his cabinet.

Lyne returned his commission. The episode has been called the Hopetoun Blunder.

Words defying logic

Gaffes, however, often tend to be more about words than actions.

One of the most memorable to have occurred in the Australian parliament was on October 19 1955. Herbert Vere Evatt was leader of the opposition and had overseen – and helped trigger – a split in the Labor Party.

Entangled in that crisis was the defection the previous year of Soviet spies Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov, and Evatt’s clumsy handling of the matter.

Early in a speech delivered to the House of Representatives, Evatt reported he had written to the Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, who had assured him the documents Petrov had taken from the Soviet embassy in Canberra had been forged under the “instructions of persons interested in the deterioration of the Soviet-Australian relations and in discrediting their political opponents”. One of the documents in question implicated Evatt’s staffers in passing information to the Soviets.

Read more:
The Petrov affair: how a real-life Cold War defection became a soothing spy story for anxious Australians

It seemed incredible an Australian political leader would write to a Soviet politician in such terms. What did he expect Molotov to say? That the documents delivered by a man who had betrayed the Soviet Union, and which disclosed the existence of Soviet espionage in Australia, were authentic?

Evatt’s speech was greeted with grim faces from those behind him, and raucous laughter from the opposition benches and Labor defectors. One of those who had split from Labor, Stan Keon, wanted to know if the letter had been addressed “Dear Boss”. Another from the government benches interjected “he’s nuts”.

Most so-called gaffes do not have such serious reverberations. They sound silly and reflect poorly on whoever made them, but the political cycle quickly moves on.

In this case, Evatt’s gaffe mattered. It destroyed what remained of his credibility and prompted some to question not only his judgement but also his sanity.

Following a closely fought election in 1954, it provided an opening for Robert Menzies to call an early election in 1955, which he won in a landslide. It paved the way for another 17 years of Coalition rule.

On cakes and recessions

It is hard to think of any gaffe in recent Australian political history that mattered quite as much.

John Hewson undoubtedly committed a gaffe during the 1993 election campaign in a television interview with Mike Willesee, when he was asked how his proposed Goods and Services Tax would apply to a cake.

Hewson’s answer weaved this way and that – in a manner that complicated rather than simplified. He probably would have lost the election anyway, but it didn’t help.

In other instances, a gaffe subsequently acquires importance because it comes to stand for some larger story about the times or the person who committed it.

Paul Keating’s remark at a 1990 media conference announcing the country had entered a recession was accompanied by the memorable remark “this is the recession Australia had to have”.

It looked like a gaffe. It smelt like a gaffe. It clung to Keating as a clumsy attempt by an arrogant politician to absolve himself of responsibility for the sad state of the economy.

Yet, in the eyes of many commentators a few years on, it didn’t look quite so bad.

A recession was inevitable following the boom in asset prices of the 1980s. Almost all developed economies had one in the early 1990s.

An effect of the recession is that it brought inflation down to the levels achieved by countries such as the United States and United Kingdom in the early 1980s, which became the foundation for several decades of high economic performance by Australia.

I do not share this rosy view: the recession had catastrophic economic and social effects. But the combination of events is a reminder that what might look like a bad gaffe in one context can look rather different in another.

Keating’s 1986 remark in a radio interview with John Laws that unless the country turned around its balance-of-payments problems, it would become a “banana republic”, also looked like a gaffe.

Prime Minister Bob Hawke was deeply unhappy with what Keating had said, but in retrospect, it provided the government with cover for imposing greater economic discipline on the public.

Labor won the 1987 election that followed, just as Keating’s “recession” gaffe turned out to be a milestone on his way to the prime ministership and victory in 1993.

Symptoms of larger problems

More recently, Scott Morrison’s 2019 “I don’t hold the hose, mate” comment during the Black Summer bushfires merely seemed a bit clumsy, and much less of a big deal than his having taken a holiday in Hawaii when so much of the country was on fire. At worst, it reflected a lack of judgement about the seriousness of the situation back in Australia.

In the years that followed, it came to mean more, becoming for critics emblematic of his prime ministership.

His remark that COVID vaccination was “not a race” acted in tandem with the earlier statement.

Together they seemed to epitomise a complacent leader unwilling to lead. Labor made hay with this material as the 2022 election approached.

The search for gaffes can be a trivialising. As we enter another election season, we can expect the media to spend at least as much time on the hunt for gaffes as they do on policy substance.

Burned in 2022, Albanese will be swotting up on the Reserve Bank cash rate and the present level of unemployment to the second decimal point in preparation for his own Hard Quiz-style ordeal.

He will probably get them right, too. But that will tell us precisely nothing about whether his government deserves a second term and, if it gets one, whether it will make anything of it.

Frank Bongiorno does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. ‘I don’t hold the hose, mate’: Australia’s political history is full of gaffes. Here are some of best (or worst) – https://theconversation.com/i-dont-hold-the-hose-mate-australias-political-history-is-full-of-gaffes-here-are-some-of-best-or-worst-241919

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kelsie Boulton, Senior Research Fellow in Child Neurodevelopment, Brain and Mind Centre, University of Sydney

Neurodevelopmental conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism affect about one in ten children. These conditions impact development, behaviour and wellbeing.

But children with these conditions and their caregivers often can’t get the support they need. Families report difficulties accessing health-care providers and experience long wait lists to receive care.

Digital tools, such as apps and websites, are often viewed as a solution to these gaps. With a single click or a download, families might be able to access information to support their child.

There are lots of digital tools available, but it’s hard to know what is and isn’t useful. Our new study evaluated freely available digital resources for child neurodevelopment and mental health to understand their quality and evidence base.

We found many resources were functional and engaging. However, resources often lacked evidence for the information provided and the claimed positive impact on children and families.

This is a common problem in the digital resource field, where the high expectations and claims of impact from digital tools to change health care have not yet been realised.

What type of resources?

Our study identified 3,435 separate resources, of which 112 (43 apps and 69 websites) met our criteria for review. These resources all claimed to provide information or supports for child neurodevelopment, mental health or wellbeing.

Resources had to be freely available, in English and have actionable information for children and families.

The most common focus was on autism, representing 17% of all resources. Resources suggested they provided strategies to promote speech, language and social development, and to support challenging behaviours.

Other common areas included language and communication (14%), and ADHD (10%).

Resources had various purposes, including journalling and providing advice, scheduling support, and delivering activities and strategies for parents. Resources delivered information interactively, with some apps organising content into structured modules.

Resources also provided options for alternative and assistive communication for people with language or communication challenges.

Most apps were functional and accessible

Our first question was about how engaging and accessible the information was. Resources that are hard to use aren’t used frequently, regardless of the information quality.

We evaluated aesthetics, including whether digital tools were easy to use and navigate, stylistically consistent, with clean and appealing graphics for users.

Most resources were rated as highly engaging, with strong accessibility and functionality.

But many lacked quality information

We ranked resources on various features from 1 (inadequate) to 5 (excellent), with a ranking of 3 considered acceptable. These ratings looked at how credible the resource was and whether there was evidence supporting it.

Despite their functionality, 37% of reviewed apps did not meet the minimum acceptable standards for information quality. This means many apps could not be recommended. Most websites fared better than apps.

There also wasn’t a lot of scientific evidence to suggest using either apps or digital resources actually helped families. Studies show long-term engagement with digital tools is rare, and downloads don’t correspond to frequent usage or benefits.

Digital tools are often viewed as a panacea to health-care gaps, but the evidence is yet to show they fill such gaps. Digital health is a fast-moving field and resources are often made available before they have been properly evaluated.

What should you look for in digital resources?

We found the highest quality resources were developed in collaboration with institutions, such as health, university or government groups.

One highly rated resource was the Raising Children’s Network and the associated app, Raising Healthy Minds. These are co-developed with a university and hospital, and by people with appropriate qualifications.

This resource provides information to support children’s overall health, development and wellbeing, with dedicated sections addressing neurodevelopmental needs and concerns.

Our research shows parents can assess whether digital resources are high quality by checking they are:

• factually correct. Look for where the app or resource is getting its information. Does the author have the qualifications and training to provide the information? Are they a registered health expert who is accountable to a regulatory body (such as AHPRA, the Australian Health Practitioners Regulation Agency) for providing information that does not cause harm?

• consistent across multiple credible sources, such as health institutions.

• linked to supporting information. Look for reliable links to reputable institutions. Links to peer-reviewed scientific journals are often helpful as those articles will also usually describe the limitations of the research presented.

• up-to-date. Apps should be frequently updated. For websites, dates of update are usually found on the homepage or at the bottom of individual pages.

Beware of red flags

Some things to watch out for are:

• testimonials and anecdotes without evidence and scientific links to back the anecdotes up. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

• no information provided about conflicts of interest. Organisations gain when you click on their links or take their advice (financial, reputation and brand development). Think about what they gain when you use their information to help keep a balanced perspective.

Remember, the app’s star rating doesn’t mean it will contain factual information from a reliable source or be helpful for you and your child.

The role of digital tools

Digital tools won’t usually replace a health professional, but they can support care in many different ways. They may be used to help to educate and prepare for meetings, and to collaborate with health providers.

They may also be used to collect information about daily needs. Studies show reporting on sleep in children can be notoriously difficult, for example. But tracking sleep behaviour with actigraphy, where movement and activity patterns are measured using a wearable device, can provide information to support clinical care. With the promise of artificial intelligence, there will also be new opportunities to support daily living.

Our findings reflect a broader problem for digital health, however. Much investment is often made in developing products to drive use, with spurious claims of health benefits.

What’s needed is a system that prioritises the funding, implementation and evaluation of tools to demonstrate benefits for families. Only then may we realise the potential of digital tools to benefit those who use them.

Kelsie Boulton receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council and the Cerebral Palsy Alliance Research Foundation for research into neurodevelopmental conditions.

Adam Guastella receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council and Australian Research Council for research into neurodevelopmental conditions. He is director of the Clinic for Autism and Neurodevelopmental Research and scientific chair of Neurodevelopment Australia, a scientific group seeking to improve the knowledge and supports for all people with neurodevelopmental conditions.

– ref. Can apps and digital resources support your child with autism or ADHD? Here’s what to look for – https://theconversation.com/can-apps-and-digital-resources-support-your-child-with-autism-or-adhd-heres-what-to-look-for-241468

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By April Reside, Lecturer in Conservation, The University of Queensland

Australia has already lost at least 100 species since European colonisation. Across land and freshwater habitats, 1,657 species are currently threatened with the same fate. Their populations have fallen 2-3% every year over the last quarter century.

The accelerating loss of species is one of the greatest environmental challenges of our time. Losing biodiversity threatens cultural values, economic stability and society’s wellbeing.

Like many nations, Australia has pledged to stem these losses. We have signed international commitments to restore nature and halt species extinctions.

These are noble and necessary goals. But at present, we lack an understanding of the sheer size, range of options – and expense of the challenge.

In our new research, we estimate the costs of bringing Australia’s threatened species back to their potential ranges. Rather than being limited by current spend on conservation, we calculated what it would cost to fully recover Australia’s threatened species across their viable range.

Our cost models are designed to also be used at different resolutions and scales, from small urban parks up to landscape scale. We found the costs vary greatly, from very low to more than A$12,600 per hectare for areas where intensive efforts such as habitat restoration through tree planting and weed removal would benefit species.

To undo all the human-induced damage and bring nature roaring back across their viable continental range would come with a staggering cost – A$583 billion per year, every year, for at least 30 years. That’s 25% of our GDP.

This, obviously, is infeasible. But it shows the extent of 200 years of human impacts on nature in Australia.

Importantly, it is a cautionary tale for what further damage will cost to repair. And – more positively – it gives us a way to cost and plan for species recovery at local or regional levels.

Australian biodiversity – globally significant, widely threatened

Of the world’s 195 nations, just 17 are mega-biodiverse – nations with very high numbers of species found nowhere else. Australia is one of them.

Unfortunately, feral predators, clearing for agriculture, widespread change to Indigenous fire regimes and other human impacts have caused among the greatest biodiversity losses on the planet in recent history.

Unsurprisingly, the need for species recovery are greatest – and most expensive – in the east and south-west of Australia, where impacts on biodiversity have been most significant. Tackling threats in these regions is particularly challenging and costly.

Previous estimates of the cost of recovering these species are orders of magnitude smaller. That’s because these estimates tended to focus on preventing extinction, rather than achieving full species recovery. Many previous estimates also excluded key expenses such as planning, labour and contingencies.

Why is full recovery so expensive?

Full species recovery would require widespread action across most of the continent, especially to manage fire, weed species and invasive predators (cats and foxes) and herbivores (rabbits, deer and more).

We were surprised to learn that the single most expensive measure across the continent wasn’t replanting native habitat or controlling cats and foxes. It’s tackling invasive weeds, such as blackberry and lantana.

At least 470 plant species are threatened by invasive weeds. The worst are “transformer” weeds – vigorous species such as invasive buffel and gamba grasses able to smother entire habitats, out-competing native plants and stopping seed-eating birds, such as the golden-shouldered parrot, squatter pigeon and black-throated finch, from finding food.

Controlling weeds accounts for 81% of our total costs. This is because weeds cover such large areas of Australia.

We acknowledge that full recovery of all of Australia’s threatened species at a continental scale is financially, technically and socially unfeasible. Policymakers need to balance nature restoration with other priorities.

Importantly, recovery actions must take place in a collaborative manner, with First Nations custodians and other land managers and stakeholders.

Bite-sized efforts for nature

Reversing Australia’s trajectory of biodiversity decline will require a range of different efforts across all regions and sectors. It’s important to clearly see the scale of the challenge we face – not to make it insurmountable, but so we can take steps in the right direction.

Our research offers bite-sized ways for organisations, environment groups and governments at all levels to take steps towards the repair of our species and native ecosystems. It provides digestible, local-scale options useful for planners, as well as important (and doable) actions that provide the most benefit threatened species for the resources available.

For example, some recovery efforts are relatively inexpensive per hectare and crucial for native species survival, such as reintroducing ecological burning regimes, and controlling cats and foxes. These type of efforts are often higher priority.

This is exactly what’s being done at Pullen Pullen Station in southwest Queensland, where feral cat control and better fire management are safeguarding the tiny populations of the night parrot – long thought extinct.

How recovering threatened species helps us too

Funding the restoration of nature is good not just for threatened species, but for us as well.

Restoring nature takes a huge effort, which means it would, for instance, involve up to one million people working full time for 30 years. Many of these jobs would be in rural and regional communities.

If implemented collaboratively, farmers could benefit greatly. For farmers, weeds and introduced animals such as mice and rabbits are a constant thorn in their side.

Introduced animals and plants cost billions each year. In the past, many weed-control programs have been done to benefit agriculture, as weeds can also sicken or kill livestock.

Restoration of habitat would, we estimate, store an extra 11 million tonnes of carbon each year, helping Australia towards net zero.

If successful, these efforts could reverse the long-term damage done to our native species and help create new, more sustainable and biodiverse pathways for Australia’s future.

We hope our work helps governments and other organisations see what’s possible and necessary when setting goals for nature and to guide nature related decision making.

The worsening plight of Australia’s biodiversity poses a direct and costly threat to meeting conservation targets. And the most cost-effective action is to avoid further damage.

We depend on nature and nature depends on us. We need to find new solutions for enabling social and economic progress without further harm to our natural world.

April Reside has received funding from the Australian Research Council, Queensland’s Department of Environment, Science and Innovation, and Hidden Vale Research Station.
This research was funded by the Australian government’s National Environmental Science Programme through the Threatened Species Recovery Hub, project 7.7

James Watson has received funding from the Australian Research Council, National Environmental Science Program, South Australia’s Department of Environment and Water, Queensland’s Department of Environment, Science and Innovation as well as from Bush Heritage Australia, Queensland Conservation Council, Australian Conservation Foundation, The Wilderness Society and Birdlife Australia. He serves on the scientific committee of BirdLife Australia and has a long-term scientific relationship with Bush Heritage Australia and Wildlife Conservation Society. He serves on the Queensland government’s Land Restoration Fund’s Investment Panel as the Deputy Chair.

Josie Carwardine receives funding from the Australian government Department of Environment, Energy and Climate Change, and the Queensland Department of Environment, Tourism, Science and Innovation.

– ref. Fully recovering Australia’s threatened species would cost 25% of GDP. We can’t do it all at once – so let’s start here – https://theconversation.com/fully-recovering-australias-threatened-species-would-cost-25-of-gdp-we-cant-do-it-all-at-once-so-lets-start-here-245669

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Daniel Eldridge, Senior Lecturer in Chemistry, Swinburne University of Technology

It’s summertime, and for many of us that means plenty of time outside – and, unfortunately, mosquitoes.

The combination of the increase in temperature and plenty of water is ideal for these blood-sucking insects to make their presence felt.

In the best-case scenario, they are a pest, delivering a highly unpleasant sting. At the other end of the spectrum, they are vectors for diseases responsible for more human fatalities than any other animal on Earth.

To keep them at bay, many of us will reach for the bottle of insect repellent or citronella candles in order to avoid the bite and incessant itching that comes with it. But how do these repellents actually work?

A complex interplay

A great deal of research has gone into understanding how and why female mosquitoes – they are the ones that bite us – are attracted to people.

There is evidence showing they are attracted to the carbon dioxide we exhale, lactic acid found in our sweat, and a variety of other skin odours and volatile compounds we give off. The interplay between all these factors is quite complex.

To ward off mosquitoes, physical barriers such as netting make for the best protection. However, while you might put netting around a backdoor patio and barbecue, doing this for any large space is simply not practical.

This is where repellents come in.

DEETerrent

There are a variety of mosquito repellents available.

The most tried-and-true products are based on a substance called N,N-diethyl-meta-toluamide, more commonly referred to as DEET.

This molecule has been commercially available since 1957, after the United States military discovered it was an effective insect repellent.

DEET is often used as a point of comparison for studies investigating alternatives. Studies show that, provided they are used according to direction, DEET products are safe and effective.

For example, it is recommended that when required, sunscreen is applied before the repellent. DEET products are not recommended for infants.

The exact mechanism by which DEET repels mosquitoes and other insects is still explored today.

Many studies link its success to mosquitoes having receptors that sense the presence of DEET, deterring them from closely approaching our skin. Some investigations suggest that when DEET is detected, it inhibits mosquitoes’ attraction to us, while others show evidence that mosquitoes “smell and avoid” DEET.

There are also numerous reports demonstrating mosquitoes don’t bite when they land on DEET-treated skin. This is because DEET acts as a contact-based repellent and conveys a chemical message to mosquitoes to leave. Studies suggest that DEET likely works through a combination of the processes described here.

Effective alternatives

Another more recent family of mosquito repellent products rely on an active ingredient called picaridin (or icaridin).

The current consensus is that picaridin products are safe, and highly effective. For many, they are considered appealing as they don’t have as strong a scent as DEET.

Picaridin products have been reported to be equally effective as DEET, or in some cases, even slightly superior, though the outcome depends on their concentration too.

The other repellent regularly reported as being effective is para-menthane-3,8-diol (PMD).

This is produced by chemical treatment of oil of lemon eucalyptus.

Untreated, this oil isn’t effective at repelling mosquitoes. However, several studies have shown that PMD is an effective mosquito repellent.

The ability of these repellents to deter mosquitoes is dose dependent.

In all cases, it’s important that an appropriate dose is applied, with re-application sometimes required to keep protection to a maximum. The performance of these products varies according to many other variables too, including the species of mosquito.

What about citronella?

Citronella products, including candles and topical formulations, are popular choices for keeping mosquitoes away.

However, in systematic testing, these have been shown to be far less effective than DEET.

Studies have also shown that citronella candles don’t fend off mosquitoes as much as you might like.

There are many other repellent products on the market.

Given the widespread interest in preventing mosquito bites, natural remedies abound. It’s important to recognise that natural isn’t necessarily more effective and it isn’t necessarily safer.

In most reported studies, DEET and picaridin are reported as having the greatest duration of protection (of the order of hours) and greatest effect on the mosquitoes. They are more thoroughly tested than many alternatives.

When others are tested, they are often found wanting.

One study described sound-based devices as being the repellent equivalent of snake oil. And although repellent bracelets contain working ingredients, they are largely ineffective in that form. This is because of insufficient concentrations of the active ingredient being “emitted”.

When it comes to preventing disease transmission via mosquitoes, the benefits of the proven repellents far outweigh the risks.

Daniel Eldridge does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. How do mosquito repellents work? A chemistry expert explains – https://theconversation.com/how-do-mosquito-repellents-work-a-chemistry-expert-explains-244403

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Milad Haghani, Senior Lecturer of Urban Risk & Resilience, UNSW Sydney

If someone bumps into us on the footpath or in the mall, we’re generally quite forgiving. We instinctively apologise or step aside, and usually don’t scream at, stalk, or attack the other person.

But put us in a car, and something changes. People who appear calm in everyday life suddenly tailgate, honk, or shout at strangers. Problems at work or home can suddenly explode in the form of righteous anger toward other road users.

Road rage increases crash risk, and victims of road rage incidents often have children in the car with them.

So, why does driving bring out the worst in us? And more importantly, what can we do about it?

Road rage remains common

Recent surveys indicate road rage remains common in Australia.

In September 2024, insurer NRMA reported a survey of 1,464 of its members in two states found many had witnessed road rage incidents such as:

• tailgating (71%)
• drivers beeping other drivers (67%)
• drivers gesturing angrily at other drivers (60%)
• drivers deliberately cutting in front of other vehicles (58%)
• drivers getting out of their car to confront to confront another driver (14%)
• stalking (10%)
• physical assault (4%).

Another insurer, Budget Direct, reported last year on a survey of 825 people that found about 83% had experienced shouting, cursing, or rude gestures from other people on the road (up by 18% since 2021).

And of the female respondents, 87% reported they’d copped this kind of behaviour from other road users.

Common triggers for driver anger include tailgating, perceived rudeness (such as not giving a “thank you” wave), and witnessing another person driving dangerously.

Aggressive driving behaviours tend to be more common in younger, male drivers.

Road rage is a global problem, with studies finding road rage remains common in places such as Japan, the US, New Zealand and the UK, but the degree varies significantly from country to country.

Who is more likely to fly into a rage on the road?

Some of us are more likely than others to fly into a rage while driving. One way researchers measure this is via a testing tool known as the Driving Anger Scale.

Data from many studies using this test show drivers who are more prone to anger in general are more likely to turn that anger into aggression. They get annoyed by more things, are quicker to act on their feelings, take more risks, and as a result, are more likely to be involved in anger-related crashes.

Research suggests that while female drivers experience anger just as much as male drivers, they are less likely to act on it in a negative way.

Female drivers tend to feel more intense anger in certain situations, such as when faced with hostile gestures or traffic obstructions, compared to their male counterparts.

What can I do to reduce my road rage?

In a car, we’re physically separated from others, which creates a sense of distance and anonymity – two factors that lower our usual social filters. Encounters feel fleeting.

There’s a good chance you won’t be held accountable for what you or say or do, compared to if you were outside the car. And yet, we perceive the stakes as high because mistakes or bad decisions on the road can have serious consequences.

This mix of isolation, stress, and the illusion of being in a bubble is a perfect recipe for heightened frustration and anger.

Research suggests techniques drawn from cognitive behavioural therapy may help.

These include learning to identify when you are starting to feel angry, trying to find alternative explanations for other people’s behaviour, using mindfulness and relaxation and trying to move away from the trigger.

The American Automobile Association also suggests you can reduce road rage incidents by being a more considerate driver yourself – always use your indicator, avoid cutting others off and maintain a safe distance from other cars.

Try to stay calm when other drivers are angry, and allow extra time in your journey to reduce stress.

If driving anger is a frequent issue, consider seeking support or anger management resources.

Avoiding — or at least being aware of — anger rumination can make a big difference. This happens when someone replays anger-inducing events, like being cut off in traffic, over and over in their mind. Instead of letting it go, they dwell on it, fuelling their frustration and making it harder to stay calm.

Recognising this pattern and shifting focus — like taking a deep breath or distracting yourself — can help stop anger from escalating into aggression.

More broadly, public awareness campaigns highlighting the link between anger and risky driving could also encourage more drivers to seek help.

The next time you get behind the wheel, try to remember the other driver, the cyclist, or pedestrian is just another person — someone you might pass on the street without a second thought.

We’re often good at forgiving minor missteps in non-driving contexts. Let’s try to bring that same patience and understanding to the road.

Milad Haghani does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Even calm people can fly into a rage behind the wheel. Here’s how to curb your road rage – before it’s too late – https://theconversation.com/even-calm-people-can-fly-into-a-rage-behind-the-wheel-heres-how-to-curb-your-road-rage-before-its-too-late-244402

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Albert Van Dijk, Professor, Water and Landscape Dynamics, Fenner School of Environment & Society, Australian National University

Last year, Earth experienced its hottest year on record − for the fourth year in a row. Rising temperatures are changing the way water moves around our planet, wreaking havoc on the water cycle.

The 2024 Global Water Monitor Report released today shows how these changes are driving extreme events around the world. Our international team of researchers used data from thousands of ground stations and satellites to analyse real-time information on weather and water underground, in rivers and in water bodies.

We found rainfall records are being broken with increasing regularity. For example, record-high monthly rainfall totals were achieved 27% more frequently in 2024 than at the start of this century. Record-lows were 38% more frequent.

Water-related disasters caused more than 8,700 deaths and displaced 40 million people in 2024, with associated economic losses topping US$550 billion (A$885 billion). The number and scale of extreme weather events will continue to grow, as we continue pump greenhouse gases into an already overheated atmosphere. The right time to act on climate change was about 40 years ago, but it’s not too late to make a big difference to our future.

Humanity in hot water

Warmer air can hold more moisture; that’s how your clothes dryer works. The paradoxical consequence is that this makes both droughts and floods worse.

When it doesn’t rain, the warmer and drier air dries everything out faster, deepening droughts. When it rains, the fact the atmosphere holds more moisture means that it can rain heavier and for longer, leading to more floods.

Ferocious floods

Torrential downpours and river floods struck around the world in 2024.

In Papua New Guinea in May and India in July, rain-sodden slopes gave way and buried thousands of people alive. Many will never be found.

In southern China in June and July, the Yangtze and Pearl Rivers flooded cities and towns, displacing tens of thousands of people and causing more than US$500 million (A$805 million) in crop damages.

In Bangladesh in August, heavy monsoon rains and dam releases caused river flooding. More than 5.8 million people were affected and at least one million tonnes of rice were destroyed.

Meanwhile, Storm Boris caused major flooding in Central Europe in September, resulting in billions of euros in damage.

Across western and central Africa, riverine floods affected millions of people from June to October, worsening food insecurity in an already vulnerable region.

In Spain, more than 500 millimetres of rain fell within eight hours in late October, causing deadly flash floods.

Devastating droughts

Other parts of the world endured crippling drought last year.

In the Amazon Basin, one of the Earth’s most vital ecosystems, record low river levels cut off transport routes and disrupted hydropower generation. Wildfires driven by the hot and dry weather burned through more than 52,000 square kilometres in September alone, releasing vast amounts of greenhouse gases.

In southern Africa, drought reduced maize production by more than 50%, leaving 30 million people facing food shortages. Farmers were forced to cull livestock as pastures dried up. The drought also reduced hydropower output, leading to widespread blackouts.

A rapidly changing climate

Over recent years, we have become used to being told the year just gone was the warmest on record. We will be told the same thing many times more in years to come.

Air temperatures over land in 2024 were 1.2°C warmer than the average between 1995 and 2005, when the temperature was already 1°C higher than at the start of the industrial revolution. About four billion people in 111 countries – half of the global population − experienced their warmest year yet.

The clear and accelerating trend of rising temperatures is speeding up an increasingly intense water cycle.

What can be done?

The Global Water Monitor report adds to a growing pile of evidence that our planet is changing rapidly.

Further change is already locked in. Even if we stopped releasing greenhouse gases today, the planet would continue warming for decades. But by acting now we still have time to avoid the worst impacts.

First, we need to cut greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as possible. Every tonne of greenhouse gas we do not release now will help reduce future heatwaves, floods and droughts.

Second, we need to prepare and adapt to inevitably more severe extreme events. That can mean stronger flood defences, developing more drought-resilient food production and water supplies, and better early warning systems.

Climate change is not a problem for the future. It’s happening right now. It’s changing our landscapes, damaging infrastructure, homes and businesses, and disrupting lives all over the world.

The real question isn’t if we should do something about it — it’s how quickly we still can.

The following people collaborated on the 2024 report: Jiawei Hou and Edison Guo (Australian National University), Hylke Beck (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi-Arabia), Richard de Jeu (Netherlands), Wouter Dorigo and Wolfgang Preimesberger (TU Wien, Austria), Andreas Güntner and Julian Haas (Research Centre For Geosciences, Germany), Ehsan Forootan and Nooshin Mehrnegar (Aalborg University, Denmark), Shaoxing Mo (Nanjing University, China), Pablo Rozas Larraondo and Chamith Edirisinghe (Haizea Analytics, Australia) and Joel Rahman (Flowmatters, Australia).

Albert Van Dijk does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Relentless warming is driving the water cycle to new extremes, the 2024 global water report shows – https://theconversation.com/relentless-warming-is-driving-the-water-cycle-to-new-extremes-the-2024-global-water-report-shows-246131

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Milo Gough, Lecturer in History, University of Manchester

Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown, is celebrated as a city founded to resettle freed slaves in the 1790s. Over the following century, it became a truly cosmopolitan port city as people from across western Africa and the Americas made it their home.

But Freetown’s British colonial rulers struggled to acclimatise. Many were plagued by deadly fevers that earned West Africa its reputation in Europe as the “white man’s grave”.

By the turn of the 20th century, the intensifying racism of colonialism, coupled with the emergence of the new field of tropical medicine, led to the construction of Hill Station, an experimental, racially segregated settlement built in the mountains four miles south of Freetown.

This was more than simply a public health measure to protect the white colonists. It was an abandonment of Freetown – an exit strategy from a city that was seen by this colonial elite as diseased, overcrowded and dangerous. The writer and journalist Graham Greene was highly critical of these motives in his travelogue, Journey Without Maps (1936):

England had planted this town [Freetown], the tin shacks and the Remembrance Day posters, and had then withdrawn up the hillside to smart bungalows, with wide windows and electric fans and perfect service … They had planted their seedy civilization and then escaped from it as far as they could.

Now, more than a century later, a proposed masterplanned city in Sierra Leone called Sherbro Island City is raising questions about the nature of modern urban developments – questions that resonate with my research in Freetown’s public archives about the story of Hill Station.

The people behind Sherbro Island City, including English actor Idris Elba, are anything but colonial types. And in a country that is almost always portrayed as a place of violence and suffering – epitomised by its civil war in the 1990s and the devastating Ebola outbreak from 2014 to 2016 – the more optimistic headlines generated by Sherbro Island City are welcome. Its plans for an “afro-dynamic eco-city” promise long-term growth for Sierra Leone and the wider region.

But like Hill Station, this development – to be built on Sherbro Island, around 75 miles (120km) south of Freetown – has been planned for a small international elite. It is marketed as being clean and sanitary, with state-of-the-art “smart infrastructure” – in contrast to the perception of Freetown, like many other major African cities, as dirty, chaotic and perpetually malfunctioning.

Abuzz with anticipation

In 2019, I was in Freetown conducting research into the history of the city. On the day my fieldwork was wrapping up, Idris Elba landed for his first visit to his father’s homeland. Freetown had been buzzing with the news of his arrival. Everyone wanted to catch a glimpse of Sierra Leone’s own superstar.

On his week-long trip, Elba was busy. Events and photo opportunities swirled around a ritualistic centre piece: the presentation of citizenship by the country’s president, Julius Maada Bio. Elba was understandably enamoured by Sierra Leone and the welcome he received. Speaking to a BBC correspondent, he proclaimed that “the son of the soil is coming back to fertilise the soil”.

In fact, his plans to “fertilise” Sierra Leone were already in motion before this trip. Elba had set up a company called Sherbro Alliance Partners (SAP) earlier in 2019 with his childhood friend, Siaka Stevens – grandson of Sierra Leone’s dictatorial post-colonial president, also called Siaka Stevens.

That same year, SAP signed a memorandum of understanding with President Bio to build Sherbro Island City, envisaged as a thriving hub of improved infrastructure, tourism, media, healthcare and eco technologies.

The Insights section is committed to high-quality longform journalism. Our editors work with academics from many different backgrounds who are tackling a wide range of societal and scientific challenges.

The project has moved slowly over the past five years, but recently gathered some momentum. Lloyd’s of London and Octopus Energy have been announced as project partners. These corporate tie-ins, alongside Elba’s stardom, have given Sherbro Island City enough clout to garner global media attention.

Many journalists and commentators have praised Elba and Stevens for their capacity to “dream big”. Braima Koroma, director of research and training at the Sierra Leone Urban Research Centre in Freetown, told me that “local communities, government officials and potential investors seem to be excited about the vision of creating a modern, eco-friendly urban centre. There’s a palpable sense of anticipation surrounding the promises of job creation, improved infrastructure and increased foreign investment.”

On the other hand, Koroma told me the project’s “focus on luxury and exclusivity” has prompted “worry about the risk of exacerbating socioeconomic inequality” – suggesting the optimism generated by Sherbro Island City and desire for development in Sierra Leone may have obscured questions about the desirability of a hyper-modern city designed to attract a wealthy, globalised elite and provide returns for mobile foreign capital. The majority of Sierra Leoneans, who live on an average of just US$560 (£422) a year, will be economically locked out of this exclusive urban enclave.

A very different built environment

Much of my time in Sierra Leone was spent at the public archive building, which is located within the country’s most historic university, Fourah Bay College. One day, I was on the back of an okada (motorcycle taxi) on the steep mountain road up to the archive when I got a call from Alfred, one of the archivists, reminding me it was closed for a national holiday.

Taking advantage of a day away from dusty colonial-era documents, I redirected the driver up to the neighbourhood of Hill Station, as it is still called today, on the main road into the mountains overlooking Freetown.

At first glance, Hill Station appears an unremarkable neighbourhood of Freetown. Large compounds hide behind breeze block walls, and corrugated-iron houses hang on to the steep sides of the ridge on which Hill Station is perched.

However, a short walk off the main road reveals a very different built environment. Amid the red dirt roads and thriving palm and kapok trees, vast wooden bungalows are hoisted up on top of stilts. In varying states of decay and heavily modified with corrugated-iron extensions, these bungalows are still owned by the government and inhabited by civil servants and their families.

On my stroll through Hill Station, the neighbourhood was very quiet aside from several men finishing off the big job of painting one of the bungalows in pastel green. While only 12 of these colonial homes remain, at its peak Hill Station consisted of about 30 bungalows.

This mountain settlement, its first stage completed in 1904, was connected to Freetown’s city centre by a narrow-gauge railway that operated to suit the hours of the few government officials who lived in Hill Station and commuted into the city each day. After returning in the evening (the last train up was at 6:30pm), British colonial officials drank together and played billiards at the recreational club. At weekends they played tennis, watched by their wives and children.

The bungalows, club and railway were built at great expense – around £86,000, roughly equivalent to £9 million today – to provide a new way of life for this handful of white colonial officials, businessmen and their families who had previously resided in the city. This was a huge project that catered for a tiny white elite – by 1911, only 90 people out of Freetown’s total population of about 40,000 lived in Hill Station.

Investment on this scale was highly unusual in Britain’s African colonies, which were usually run on shoestring budgets. The colonial government rationalised it as a response to the discovery in the late 1890s that Anopheles mosquitoes were the vector of malaria.

But African people were identified as the “reservoir” of the disease and so, according to this logic, white people would be safe from disease if they spent the night – when mosquitoes were feeding – away from them. This understanding of disease prevention is characteristic of a period that saw a hardening of the racial hierarchy in British West Africa around monolithic categories of whiteness and blackness.

Escaping their ‘seedy civilisation’

To colonial officials and medical experts, the settlement of Hill Station was associated with whiteness, health and modernity. Its opposite was the city of Freetown, associated with blackness, dirt and disease. The hard binary of white-black and mountain-coast forged by the construction of Hill Station was new. But it was built on older ideas of disease transmission, race and landscape.

While I walked among the bungalows of Hill Station, a breeze blew across the ridge providing me with some relief from the hot and humid stillness that characterised Freetown’s city centre. More than a century ago, this breeze was highly prized by colonial medical officers as ventilation was thought to circulate “healthy” air.

The Hill Station bungalows were designed to harness the breeze. All four sides were lined with windows that could be opened to encourage the movement of air. But contrary to the aim of preventing the spread of malaria, the windows were not equipped with mosquito screens, as officials thought screens would prevent air flow.

Concrete foundations held iron stilts that raised the bungalows more than two metres from the ground. This functioned to distance occupants from the dangerous miasmas that were thought to emanate from the ground.

The idea that “bad air” was the cause of health problems remained central to the medical geography of empire even after the discovery of new tropical medicines. Freetown, perceived as insanitary and overpopulated, was understood as a hotbed of enervating miasmas that left white colonial officials vulnerable to contracting deadly fevers.

From the ridge, I looked down to the west over Lumley Beach, south towards the mountains of the Freetown peninsula, and east over the city centre. Freetown sprawled over the undulating terrain, pushing up tightly against the Atlantic coastline. From this same location, colonial officials would have surveyed the territory and perhaps felt secure in their place at the top of the colonial hierarchy.

In the 1890s, the governor of colonial Sierra Leone, Frederick Cardew, justified the construction of Hill Station because of the “exhilarating and bracing” sensory experience of walking along this ridgeline. He marvelled at a view that “could hardly be surpassed in any part of the world in range and beauty”.

Even after Sierra Leone gained independence in 1961, Hill Station has remained a site of state power. Adjacent to the old bungalows is the president’s official residence and the various high commissions of old imperial nations, all hidden behind high walls and barbed wire.

But earlier this year, several senior civil servants and their families were evicted from their Hill Station bungalows after the government of Sierra Leone granted Turkey and Saudi Arabia plots of land to build new embassies. Their bungalows are now slated for demolition.

The destruction of Freetown’s colonial-era built environment, including the once ubiquitous 19th-century Krio bode ose (board houses), has been a consistent feature of Freetown’s postcolonial period. Many locals, looking resolutely towards a better tomorrow, do not mourn the loss of the material aftermaths of colonialism. Yet the unchecked churn of urban development can also mean some important lessons from history are forgotten.

Sierra Leone’s ‘afro-dynamic ecocity’

The foundational idea of architects Foster + Partners for Sherbro Island City is to make it “afro-dynamic” – as encapsulated by its leaf motif, loosely inspired by the shape of Sherbro island. According to the marketing material, this leaf shows the way in which the city is both “connected to Africa” and “rooted in community”.

Having been a slave boat harbour in the 18th century, Sherbro island would go on to become an important colonial port. However, by the latter half of the 20th century, it was a remote and overlooked part of post-colonial Sierra Leone. The new architectural vision for Sherbro Island City doesn’t reference this history – but within the shiny publicity material, there are some echoes of Hill Station’s relationship with Freetown.

Back in October 1902, the Public Works Department erected signs in the vicinity of the proposed site, with one reading: “Warning. Any person found squatting, erecting huts, or planting on this and adjacent lands from this date will be PROSECUTED and EJECTED.”

While Sherbro Island City will also be built on land used by existing communities, SAP claims the new city will benefit the island’s population of around 40,000 people. But Bankolay Theodore Turay, a Sierra Leonean scholar based at the Centre for Housing and Sustainable Development at the University of Lagos, Nigeria, is sceptical. He explained to me that he is “not aware of any compensation process that has taken place for communities that will be dispossessed of their land, and those that will be relocated from the community”.

Sherbro Island City will exist on a separate legal footing from the rest of the nation as a special economic zone, and promises huge tax incentives to investors. It appears that it will be a private city, even if not in name, managed by business people and shaped by the interests of foreign capital.

The architects’ images conform to an aesthetic of globalised modernity. Where the bungalows of Hill Station were constructed from imported prefabricated materials that conformed to a pan-imperial style, CGI renderings of Sherbro Island City imagine a hyper-modern city of glass and steel that appears to have little to do with its locale.

Foster + Partners says it has “not engaged in any detailed designs at this stage, which will be shaped by input from several stakeholders including local communities”. It adds that all of the designs “are rooted in sustainability and a respect for the communities we design for”.

Turay told me that, regardless of SAP’s claims that the city will have minimal environmental impact, “construction work does not come without environmental issues, without changing the special dynamics of the community” in an area with an “ecological footprint that is very, very low”.

In an interview in 2023, SAP’s co-founder Stevens described how the idea for the new city first germinated while he was on holiday at a luxury beach resort in Dubai. He recalled thinking: “I wish I could make my country like this one day.”

It looks like Sherbro Island City will, like Hill Station, be a city for the elite. Fosters + Partners’ preview book describes five “character profiles” of potential residents of, and visitors to, the city. These are a tourist family from Europe, two renowned health professionals and young parents, a South African digital nomad living between Dubai and Singapore, a recent Harvard graduate, and a successful actor and DJ.

These profiles suggest the city will be for diverse people from all over the world, but with one condition: they must be well-off.

Africa’s masterplanned cities

Sherbro Island City is not the first masterplanned city for Africa in the 21st century. Over the past 20 years, similar plans for new cities have cropped up throughout the continent.

Perhaps the most notable is Eko Atlantic City in Nigeria. First announced in 2003, the Eko Atlantic project has radically altered the geography of Nigeria’s largest city, Lagos. Built on 6.5 million square miles of reclaimed land, it protrudes into the Atlantic Ocean from what was Bar Beach. Its first few skeletal tower blocks have changed the skyline of downtown Lagos.

Other projects on the continent have been less successful. Kenya’s Konza Technopolis, conceived in 2009, is still a work-in-progress street grid 50 miles outside the capital, Nairobi. Meanwhile, Ghana’s Hope City project got no further than computer-generated images of glowing towers before being cancelled.

And then there is Senegal’s Akon City, the brainchild of Senegalese-American rapper Akon. Six years after it was announced with great fanfare, Akon City is little more than a half-built welcome centre. Some parallels to the Sherbro Island City project are evident: both are backed by global superstars, and both promise to transform the fortunes of small and often overlooked west African nations.

Turay said his first reaction to the Sherbro Island City plans was: “Is this is going to be another Akon city?” Such city-scale projects require vast amounts of capital and organisation, and many flounder facing this harsh reality.

However, not all of these projects are mirages. As South African professor of urban planning Vanessa Watson has described, cities in Africa have become the latest frontier for speculative real estate investment. This trend sped up hugely after the global financial crisis of 2007–08 as, since then, interest rates have generally been very low and capital has sought out riskier investments with potentially higher yields.

The rise of a foreign capital-led, speculative real estate market in African cities has been widely celebrated. Many urban residents across the continent see visions for modernity and new concrete structures as evidence of development, investment, and change for the better.

Comments on Eko Atlantic update videos, for example, show great pride in these ambitious plans from people who will probably never afford to live in the city’s luxury apartments. Similarly, in Sierra Leone, many people appear optimistic about the prospect of a hyper-modern city that promises development in the form of investment, jobs and infrastructure.

However, according to Braima Koroma: “There are also voices of caution. Community members and environmental activists have raised concerns about the potential displacement of residents and the environmental impact of large-scale construction.” He suggests these concerns “underline the importance of ensuring that the development is inclusive, and takes into account the needs and rights of local populations”.

Exit schemes

Beyond Sierra Leone, in countries where city-scale projects have progressed further, concerns about their potential for entrenching inequality have been communicated in different ways. The Nigerian photographer Christopher Obuh’s series of images of Eko Atlantic City, No City for Poor Man, asks viewers to reflect on the unevenness of this speculative urbanism by showing the process of construction that is usually obscured by slick videos, glossy CGI renderings and marketing speak.

In an article about Eko Atlantic, journalist Katie Jane Fernelius argued that this new city is less about developing innovative solutions to the pressing problems of a changing climate, urban overcrowding and a lack of investment, and more a place of elite moneymaking where capital can be made liquid and free-flowing. In her view, Eko Atlantic City is likely to further entrench the highly unequal status quo.

Inequality was vital to the colonial system. European empires depended on the construction of rigid hierarchies, most often around ideas of race. More recently, harsh inequalities have again become a defining feature of the world since the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s.

The speculative urbanism of the 21st century recycles colonial logics in the form of protected compounds, private suburbs and gated communities. These spatial fixes to the challenge of living amid the masses are supported by other fixes to the “problem” of regulation, such as special economic zones, freeports and tax havens.

In his 2022 book Adventure Capitalism, Raymond Craib describes libertarian schemes to carve out spaces beyond the regulatory systems of the nation-state, from private islands to seasteads and space colonies. These extreme forms of exit have largely remained imaginary – yet these exit plans are significant in themselves, as they tell us how the wealthy envision the future.

In using his stardom to mobilise investment in Sierra Leone, I’m sure Idris Elba genuinely wants to uplift the homeland of his father. But it feels problematic that many of the most ambitious attempts at urban development in Africa, and across the world, appear to manifest largely through “exit schemes”.

The Conversation has contacted representatives for Idris Elba, Sherbro Alliance Partners and Eko Atlantic, offering them the opportunity to comment on issues raised in this article. By the time of publication, we had not received a response from any of these parties.

For you, more from our Insights series:

• I investigated millions of tweets from the Kremlin’s ‘troll factory’ and discovered classic propaganda techniques reimagined for the social media age

• The overshoot myth: you can’t keep burning fossil fuels and expect scientists of the future to get us back to 1.5°C
  

• How the world’s first open-source digital map of mass graves could help bring justice to victims in Ukraine and other war zones

• Novelist J.G. Ballard was experimenting with computer-generated poetry 50 years before ChatGPT was invented
  

To hear about new Insights articles, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value The Conversation’s evidence-based news. Subscribe to our newsletter.

Milo Gough has received funding from the AHRC through CHASE DTP.

– ref. From a colonial hill town to Idris Elba’s island masterplan: what do these Sierra Leone developments tell us about urban elites? – https://theconversation.com/from-a-colonial-hill-town-to-idris-elbas-island-masterplan-what-do-these-sierra-leone-developments-tell-us-about-urban-elites-233714

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Milo Gough, Lecturer in History, University of Manchester

Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown, is celebrated as a city founded to resettle freed slaves in the 1790s. Over the following century, it became a truly cosmopolitan port city as people from across western Africa and the Americas made it their home.

But Freetown’s British colonial rulers struggled to acclimatise. Many were plagued by deadly fevers that earned West Africa its reputation in Europe as the “white man’s grave”.

By the turn of the 20th century, the intensifying racism of colonialism, coupled with the emergence of the new field of tropical medicine, led to the construction of Hill Station, an experimental, racially segregated settlement built in the mountains four miles south of Freetown.

This was more than simply a public health measure to protect the white colonists. It was an abandonment of Freetown – an exit strategy from a city that was seen by this colonial elite as diseased, overcrowded and dangerous. The writer and journalist Graham Greene was highly critical of these motives in his travelogue, Journey Without Maps (1936):

England had planted this town [Freetown], the tin shacks and the Remembrance Day posters, and had then withdrawn up the hillside to smart bungalows, with wide windows and electric fans and perfect service … They had planted their seedy civilization and then escaped from it as far as they could.

Now, more than a century later, a proposed masterplanned city in Sierra Leone called Sherbro Island City is raising questions about the nature of modern urban developments – questions that resonate with my research in Freetown’s public archives about the story of Hill Station.

The people behind Sherbro Island City, including English actor Idris Elba, are anything but colonial types. And in a country that is almost always portrayed as a place of violence and suffering – epitomised by its civil war in the 1990s and the devastating Ebola outbreak from 2014 to 2016 – the more optimistic headlines generated by Sherbro Island City are welcome. Its plans for an “afro-dynamic eco-city” promise long-term growth for Sierra Leone and the wider region.

But like Hill Station, this development – to be built on Sherbro Island, around 75 miles (120km) south of Freetown – has been planned for a small international elite. It is marketed as being clean and sanitary, with state-of-the-art “smart infrastructure” – in contrast to the perception of Freetown, like many other major African cities, as dirty, chaotic and perpetually malfunctioning.

Abuzz with anticipation

In 2019, I was in Freetown conducting research into the history of the city. On the day my fieldwork was wrapping up, Idris Elba landed for his first visit to his father’s homeland. Freetown had been buzzing with the news of his arrival. Everyone wanted to catch a glimpse of Sierra Leone’s own superstar.

On his week-long trip, Elba was busy. Events and photo opportunities swirled around a ritualistic centre piece: the presentation of citizenship by the country’s president, Julius Maada Bio. Elba was understandably enamoured by Sierra Leone and the welcome he received. Speaking to a BBC correspondent, he proclaimed that “the son of the soil is coming back to fertilise the soil”.

In fact, his plans to “fertilise” Sierra Leone were already in motion before this trip. Elba had set up a company called Sherbro Alliance Partners (SAP) earlier in 2019 with his childhood friend, Siaka Stevens – grandson of Sierra Leone’s dictatorial post-colonial president, also called Siaka Stevens.

That same year, SAP signed a memorandum of understanding with President Bio to build Sherbro Island City, envisaged as a thriving hub of improved infrastructure, tourism, media, healthcare and eco technologies.

The Insights section is committed to high-quality longform journalism. Our editors work with academics from many different backgrounds who are tackling a wide range of societal and scientific challenges.

The project has moved slowly over the past five years, but recently gathered some momentum. Lloyd’s of London and Octopus Energy have been announced as project partners. These corporate tie-ins, alongside Elba’s stardom, have given Sherbro Island City enough clout to garner global media attention.

Many journalists and commentators have praised Elba and Stevens for their capacity to “dream big”. Braima Koroma, director of research and training at the Sierra Leone Urban Research Centre in Freetown, told me that “local communities, government officials and potential investors seem to be excited about the vision of creating a modern, eco-friendly urban centre. There’s a palpable sense of anticipation surrounding the promises of job creation, improved infrastructure and increased foreign investment.”

On the other hand, Koroma told me the project’s “focus on luxury and exclusivity” has prompted “worry about the risk of exacerbating socioeconomic inequality” – suggesting the optimism generated by Sherbro Island City and desire for development in Sierra Leone may have obscured questions about the desirability of a hyper-modern city designed to attract a wealthy, globalised elite and provide returns for mobile foreign capital. The majority of Sierra Leoneans, who live on an average of just US$560 (£422) a year, will be economically locked out of this exclusive urban enclave.

A very different built environment

Much of my time in Sierra Leone was spent at the public archive building, which is located within the country’s most historic university, Fourah Bay College. One day, I was on the back of an okada (motorcycle taxi) on the steep mountain road up to the archive when I got a call from Alfred, one of the archivists, reminding me it was closed for a national holiday.

Taking advantage of a day away from dusty colonial-era documents, I redirected the driver up to the neighbourhood of Hill Station, as it is still called today, on the main road into the mountains overlooking Freetown.

At first glance, Hill Station appears an unremarkable neighbourhood of Freetown. Large compounds hide behind breeze block walls, and corrugated-iron houses hang on to the steep sides of the ridge on which Hill Station is perched.

However, a short walk off the main road reveals a very different built environment. Amid the red dirt roads and thriving palm and kapok trees, vast wooden bungalows are hoisted up on top of stilts. In varying states of decay and heavily modified with corrugated-iron extensions, these bungalows are still owned by the government and inhabited by civil servants and their families.

On my stroll through Hill Station, the neighbourhood was very quiet aside from several men finishing off the big job of painting one of the bungalows in pastel green. While only 12 of these colonial homes remain, at its peak Hill Station consisted of about 30 bungalows.

This mountain settlement, its first stage completed in 1904, was connected to Freetown’s city centre by a narrow-gauge railway that operated to suit the hours of the few government officials who lived in Hill Station and commuted into the city each day. After returning in the evening (the last train up was at 6:30pm), British colonial officials drank together and played billiards at the recreational club. At weekends they played tennis, watched by their wives and children.

The bungalows, club and railway were built at great expense – around £86,000, roughly equivalent to £9 million today – to provide a new way of life for this handful of white colonial officials, businessmen and their families who had previously resided in the city. This was a huge project that catered for a tiny white elite – by 1911, only 90 people out of Freetown’s total population of about 40,000 lived in Hill Station.

Investment on this scale was highly unusual in Britain’s African colonies, which were usually run on shoestring budgets. The colonial government rationalised it as a response to the discovery in the late 1890s that Anopheles mosquitoes were the vector of malaria.

But African people were identified as the “reservoir” of the disease and so, according to this logic, white people would be safe from disease if they spent the night – when mosquitoes were feeding – away from them. This understanding of disease prevention is characteristic of a period that saw a hardening of the racial hierarchy in British West Africa around monolithic categories of whiteness and blackness.

Escaping their ‘seedy civilisation’

To colonial officials and medical experts, the settlement of Hill Station was associated with whiteness, health and modernity. Its opposite was the city of Freetown, associated with blackness, dirt and disease. The hard binary of white-black and mountain-coast forged by the construction of Hill Station was new. But it was built on older ideas of disease transmission, race and landscape.

While I walked among the bungalows of Hill Station, a breeze blew across the ridge providing me with some relief from the hot and humid stillness that characterised Freetown’s city centre. More than a century ago, this breeze was highly prized by colonial medical officers as ventilation was thought to circulate “healthy” air.

The Hill Station bungalows were designed to harness the breeze. All four sides were lined with windows that could be opened to encourage the movement of air. But contrary to the aim of preventing the spread of malaria, the windows were not equipped with mosquito screens, as officials thought screens would prevent air flow.

Concrete foundations held iron stilts that raised the bungalows more than two metres from the ground. This functioned to distance occupants from the dangerous miasmas that were thought to emanate from the ground.

The idea that “bad air” was the cause of health problems remained central to the medical geography of empire even after the discovery of new tropical medicines. Freetown, perceived as insanitary and overpopulated, was understood as a hotbed of enervating miasmas that left white colonial officials vulnerable to contracting deadly fevers.

From the ridge, I looked down to the west over Lumley Beach, south towards the mountains of the Freetown peninsula, and east over the city centre. Freetown sprawled over the undulating terrain, pushing up tightly against the Atlantic coastline. From this same location, colonial officials would have surveyed the territory and perhaps felt secure in their place at the top of the colonial hierarchy.

In the 1890s, the governor of colonial Sierra Leone, Frederick Cardew, justified the construction of Hill Station because of the “exhilarating and bracing” sensory experience of walking along this ridgeline. He marvelled at a view that “could hardly be surpassed in any part of the world in range and beauty”.

Even after Sierra Leone gained independence in 1961, Hill Station has remained a site of state power. Adjacent to the old bungalows is the president’s official residence and the various high commissions of old imperial nations, all hidden behind high walls and barbed wire.

But earlier this year, several senior civil servants and their families were evicted from their Hill Station bungalows after the government of Sierra Leone granted Turkey and Saudi Arabia plots of land to build new embassies. Their bungalows are now slated for demolition.

The destruction of Freetown’s colonial-era built environment, including the once ubiquitous 19th-century Krio bode ose (board houses), has been a consistent feature of Freetown’s postcolonial period. Many locals, looking resolutely towards a better tomorrow, do not mourn the loss of the material aftermaths of colonialism. Yet the unchecked churn of urban development can also mean some important lessons from history are forgotten.

Sierra Leone’s ‘afro-dynamic ecocity’

The foundational idea of architects Foster + Partners for Sherbro Island City is to make it “afro-dynamic” – as encapsulated by its leaf motif, loosely inspired by the shape of Sherbro island. According to the marketing material, this leaf shows the way in which the city is both “connected to Africa” and “rooted in community”.

Having been a slave boat harbour in the 18th century, Sherbro island would go on to become an important colonial port. However, by the latter half of the 20th century, it was a remote and overlooked part of post-colonial Sierra Leone. The new architectural vision for Sherbro Island City doesn’t reference this history – but within the shiny publicity material, there are some echoes of Hill Station’s relationship with Freetown.

Back in October 1902, the Public Works Department erected signs in the vicinity of the proposed site, with one reading: “Warning. Any person found squatting, erecting huts, or planting on this and adjacent lands from this date will be PROSECUTED and EJECTED.”

While Sherbro Island City will also be built on land used by existing communities, SAP claims the new city will benefit the island’s population of around 40,000 people. But Bankolay Theodore Turay, a Sierra Leonean scholar based at the Centre for Housing and Sustainable Development at the University of Lagos, Nigeria, is sceptical. He explained to me that he is “not aware of any compensation process that has taken place for communities that will be dispossessed of their land, and those that will be relocated from the community”.

Sherbro Island City will exist on a separate legal footing from the rest of the nation as a special economic zone, and promises huge tax incentives to investors. It appears that it will be a private city, even if not in name, managed by business people and shaped by the interests of foreign capital.

The architects’ images conform to an aesthetic of globalised modernity. Where the bungalows of Hill Station were constructed from imported prefabricated materials that conformed to a pan-imperial style, CGI renderings of Sherbro Island City imagine a hyper-modern city of glass and steel that appears to have little to do with its locale.

Foster + Partners says it has “not engaged in any detailed designs at this stage, which will be shaped by input from several stakeholders including local communities”. It adds that all of the designs “are rooted in sustainability and a respect for the communities we design for”.

Turay told me that, regardless of SAP’s claims that the city will have minimal environmental impact, “construction work does not come without environmental issues, without changing the special dynamics of the community” in an area with an “ecological footprint that is very, very low”.

In an interview in 2023, SAP’s co-founder Stevens described how the idea for the new city first germinated while he was on holiday at a luxury beach resort in Dubai. He recalled thinking: “I wish I could make my country like this one day.”

It looks like Sherbro Island City will, like Hill Station, be a city for the elite. Fosters + Partners’ preview book describes five “character profiles” of potential residents of, and visitors to, the city. These are a tourist family from Europe, two renowned health professionals and young parents, a South African digital nomad living between Dubai and Singapore, a recent Harvard graduate, and a successful actor and DJ.

These profiles suggest the city will be for diverse people from all over the world, but with one condition: they must be well-off.

Africa’s masterplanned cities

Sherbro Island City is not the first masterplanned city for Africa in the 21st century. Over the past 20 years, similar plans for new cities have cropped up throughout the continent.

Perhaps the most notable is Eko Atlantic City in Nigeria. First announced in 2003, the Eko Atlantic project has radically altered the geography of Nigeria’s largest city, Lagos. Built on 6.5 million square miles of reclaimed land, it protrudes into the Atlantic Ocean from what was Bar Beach. Its first few skeletal tower blocks have changed the skyline of downtown Lagos.

Other projects on the continent have been less successful. Kenya’s Konza Technopolis, conceived in 2009, is still a work-in-progress street grid 50 miles outside the capital, Nairobi. Meanwhile, Ghana’s Hope City project got no further than computer-generated images of glowing towers before being cancelled.

And then there is Senegal’s Akon City, the brainchild of Senegalese-American rapper Akon. Six years after it was announced with great fanfare, Akon City is little more than a half-built welcome centre. Some parallels to the Sherbro Island City project are evident: both are backed by global superstars, and both promise to transform the fortunes of small and often overlooked west African nations.

Turay said his first reaction to the Sherbro Island City plans was: “Is this is going to be another Akon city?” Such city-scale projects require vast amounts of capital and organisation, and many flounder facing this harsh reality.

However, not all of these projects are mirages. As South African professor of urban planning Vanessa Watson has described, cities in Africa have become the latest frontier for speculative real estate investment. This trend sped up hugely after the global financial crisis of 2007–08 as, since then, interest rates have generally been very low and capital has sought out riskier investments with potentially higher yields.

The rise of a foreign capital-led, speculative real estate market in African cities has been widely celebrated. Many urban residents across the continent see visions for modernity and new concrete structures as evidence of development, investment, and change for the better.

Comments on Eko Atlantic update videos, for example, show great pride in these ambitious plans from people who will probably never afford to live in the city’s luxury apartments. Similarly, in Sierra Leone, many people appear optimistic about the prospect of a hyper-modern city that promises development in the form of investment, jobs and infrastructure.

However, according to Braima Koroma: “There are also voices of caution. Community members and environmental activists have raised concerns about the potential displacement of residents and the environmental impact of large-scale construction.” He suggests these concerns “underline the importance of ensuring that the development is inclusive, and takes into account the needs and rights of local populations”.

Exit schemes

Beyond Sierra Leone, in countries where city-scale projects have progressed further, concerns about their potential for entrenching inequality have been communicated in different ways. The Nigerian photographer Christopher Obuh’s series of images of Eko Atlantic City, No City for Poor Man, asks viewers to reflect on the unevenness of this speculative urbanism by showing the process of construction that is usually obscured by slick videos, glossy CGI renderings and marketing speak.

In an article about Eko Atlantic, journalist Katie Jane Fernelius argued that this new city is less about developing innovative solutions to the pressing problems of a changing climate, urban overcrowding and a lack of investment, and more a place of elite moneymaking where capital can be made liquid and free-flowing. In her view, Eko Atlantic City is likely to further entrench the highly unequal status quo.

Inequality was vital to the colonial system. European empires depended on the construction of rigid hierarchies, most often around ideas of race. More recently, harsh inequalities have again become a defining feature of the world since the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s.

The speculative urbanism of the 21st century recycles colonial logics in the form of protected compounds, private suburbs and gated communities. These spatial fixes to the challenge of living amid the masses are supported by other fixes to the “problem” of regulation, such as special economic zones, freeports and tax havens.

In his 2022 book Adventure Capitalism, Raymond Craib describes libertarian schemes to carve out spaces beyond the regulatory systems of the nation-state, from private islands to seasteads and space colonies. These extreme forms of exit have largely remained imaginary – yet these exit plans are significant in themselves, as they tell us how the wealthy envision the future.

In using his stardom to mobilise investment in Sierra Leone, I’m sure Idris Elba genuinely wants to uplift the homeland of his father. But it feels problematic that many of the most ambitious attempts at urban development in Africa, and across the world, appear to manifest largely through “exit schemes”.

The Conversation has contacted representatives for Idris Elba, Sherbro Alliance Partners and Eko Atlantic, offering them the opportunity to comment on issues raised in this article. By the time of publication, we had not received a response from any of these parties.

For you, more from our Insights series:

• I investigated millions of tweets from the Kremlin’s ‘troll factory’ and discovered classic propaganda techniques reimagined for the social media age

• The overshoot myth: you can’t keep burning fossil fuels and expect scientists of the future to get us back to 1.5°C
  

• How the world’s first open-source digital map of mass graves could help bring justice to victims in Ukraine and other war zones

• Novelist J.G. Ballard was experimenting with computer-generated poetry 50 years before ChatGPT was invented
  

To hear about new Insights articles, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value The Conversation’s evidence-based news. Subscribe to our newsletter.

Milo Gough has received funding from the AHRC through CHASE DTP.

– ref. From a colonial hill town to Idris Elba’s island masterplan: what do these Sierra Leone developments tell us about urban elitism? – https://theconversation.com/from-a-colonial-hill-town-to-idris-elbas-island-masterplan-what-do-these-sierra-leone-developments-tell-us-about-urban-elitism-233714

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Milo Gough, Lecturer in History, University of Manchester

Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown, is celebrated as a city founded to resettle freed slaves in the 1790s. Over the following century, it became a truly cosmopolitan port city as people from across western Africa and the Americas made it their home.

But Freetown’s British colonial rulers struggled to acclimatise. Many were plagued by deadly fevers that earned West Africa its reputation in Europe as the “white man’s grave”.

By the turn of the 20th century, the intensifying racism of colonialism, coupled with the emergence of the new field of tropical medicine, led to the construction of Hill Station, an experimental, racially segregated settlement built in the mountains four miles south of Freetown.

This was more than simply a public health measure to protect the white colonists. It was an abandonment of Freetown – an exit strategy from a city that was seen by this colonial elite as diseased, overcrowded and dangerous. The writer and journalist Graham Greene was highly critical of these motives in his travelogue, Journey Without Maps (1936):

England had planted this town [Freetown], the tin shacks and the Remembrance Day posters, and had then withdrawn up the hillside to smart bungalows, with wide windows and electric fans and perfect service … They had planted their seedy civilization and then escaped from it as far as they could.

Now, more than a century later, a proposed masterplanned city in Sierra Leone called Sherbro Island City is raising questions about the nature of modern urban developments – questions that resonate with my research in Freetown’s public archives about the story of Hill Station.

The people behind Sherbro Island City, including English actor Idris Elba, are anything but colonial types. And in a country that is almost always portrayed as a place of violence and suffering – epitomised by its civil war in the 1990s and the devastating Ebola outbreak from 2014 to 2016 – the more optimistic headlines generated by Sherbro Island City are welcome. Its plans for an “afro-dynamic eco-city” promise long-term growth for Sierra Leone and the wider region.

But like Hill Station, this development – to be built on Sherbro Island, around 75 miles (120km) south of Freetown – has been planned for a small international elite. It is marketed as being clean and sanitary, with state-of-the-art “smart infrastructure” – in contrast to the perception of Freetown, like many other major African cities, as dirty, chaotic and perpetually malfunctioning.

Abuzz with anticipation

In 2019, I was in Freetown conducting research into the history of the city. On the day my fieldwork was wrapping up, Idris Elba landed for his first visit to his father’s homeland. Freetown had been buzzing with the news of his arrival. Everyone wanted to catch a glimpse of Sierra Leone’s own superstar.

On his week-long trip, Elba was busy. Events and photo opportunities swirled around a ritualistic centre piece: the presentation of citizenship by the country’s president, Julius Maada Bio. Elba was understandably enamoured by Sierra Leone and the welcome he received. Speaking to a BBC correspondent, he proclaimed that “the son of the soil is coming back to fertilise the soil”.

In fact, his plans to “fertilise” Sierra Leone were already in motion before this trip. Elba had set up a company called Sherbro Alliance Partners (SAP) earlier in 2019 with his childhood friend, Siaka Stevens – grandson of Sierra Leone’s dictatorial post-colonial president, also called Siaka Stevens.

That same year, SAP signed a memorandum of understanding with President Bio to build Sherbro Island City, envisaged as a thriving hub of improved infrastructure, tourism, media, healthcare and eco technologies.

The Insights section is committed to high-quality longform journalism. Our editors work with academics from many different backgrounds who are tackling a wide range of societal and scientific challenges.

The project has moved slowly over the past five years, but recently gathered some momentum. Lloyd’s of London and Octopus Energy have been announced as project partners. These corporate tie-ins, alongside Elba’s stardom, have given Sherbro Island City enough clout to garner global media attention.

Many journalists and commentators have praised Elba and Stevens for their capacity to “dream big”. Braima Koroma, director of research and training at the Sierra Leone Urban Research Centre in Freetown, told me that “local communities, government officials and potential investors seem to be excited about the vision of creating a modern, eco-friendly urban centre. There’s a palpable sense of anticipation surrounding the promises of job creation, improved infrastructure and increased foreign investment.”

On the other hand, Koroma told me the project’s “focus on luxury and exclusivity” has prompted “worry about the risk of exacerbating socioeconomic inequality” – suggesting the optimism generated by Sherbro Island City and desire for development in Sierra Leone may have obscured questions about the desirability of a hyper-modern city designed to attract a wealthy, globalised elite and provide returns for mobile foreign capital. The majority of Sierra Leoneans, who live on an average of just US$560 (£422) a year, will be economically locked out of this exclusive urban enclave.

A very different built environment

Much of my time in Sierra Leone was spent at the public archive building, which is located within the country’s most historic university, Fourah Bay College. One day, I was on the back of an okada (motorcycle taxi) on the steep mountain road up to the archive when I got a call from Alfred, one of the archivists, reminding me it was closed for a national holiday.

Taking advantage of a day away from dusty colonial-era documents, I redirected the driver up to the neighbourhood of Hill Station, as it is still called today, on the main road into the mountains overlooking Freetown.

At first glance, Hill Station appears an unremarkable neighbourhood of Freetown. Large compounds hide behind breeze block walls, and corrugated-iron houses hang on to the steep sides of the ridge on which Hill Station is perched.

However, a short walk off the main road reveals a very different built environment. Amid the red dirt roads and thriving palm and kapok trees, vast wooden bungalows are hoisted up on top of stilts. In varying states of decay and heavily modified with corrugated-iron extensions, these bungalows are still owned by the government and inhabited by civil servants and their families.

On my stroll through Hill Station, the neighbourhood was very quiet aside from several men finishing off the big job of painting one of the bungalows in pastel green. While only 12 of these colonial homes remain, at its peak Hill Station consisted of about 30 bungalows.

This mountain settlement, its first stage completed in 1904, was connected to Freetown’s city centre by a narrow-gauge railway that operated to suit the hours of the few government officials who lived in Hill Station and commuted into the city each day. After returning in the evening (the last train up was at 6:30pm), British colonial officials drank together and played billiards at the recreational club. At weekends they played tennis, watched by their wives and children.

The bungalows, club and railway were built at great expense – around £86,000, roughly equivalent to £9 million today – to provide a new way of life for this handful of white colonial officials, businessmen and their families who had previously resided in the city. This was a huge project that catered for a tiny white elite – by 1911, only 90 people out of Freetown’s total population of about 40,000 lived in Hill Station.

Investment on this scale was highly unusual in Britain’s African colonies, which were usually run on shoestring budgets. The colonial government rationalised it as a response to the discovery in the late 1890s that Anopheles mosquitoes were the vector of malaria.

But African people were identified as the “reservoir” of the disease and so, according to this logic, white people would be safe from disease if they spent the night – when mosquitoes were feeding – away from them. This understanding of disease prevention is characteristic of a period that saw a hardening of the racial hierarchy in British West Africa around monolithic categories of whiteness and blackness.

Escaping their ‘seedy civilisation’

To colonial officials and medical experts, the settlement of Hill Station was associated with whiteness, health and modernity. Its opposite was the city of Freetown, associated with blackness, dirt and disease. The hard binary of white-black and mountain-coast forged by the construction of Hill Station was new. But it was built on older ideas of disease transmission, race and landscape.

While I walked among the bungalows of Hill Station, a breeze blew across the ridge providing me with some relief from the hot and humid stillness that characterised Freetown’s city centre. More than a century ago, this breeze was highly prized by colonial medical officers as ventilation was thought to circulate “healthy” air.

The Hill Station bungalows were designed to harness the breeze. All four sides were lined with windows that could be opened to encourage the movement of air. But contrary to the aim of preventing the spread of malaria, the windows were not equipped with mosquito screens, as officials thought screens would prevent air flow.

Concrete foundations held iron stilts that raised the bungalows more than two metres from the ground. This functioned to distance occupants from the dangerous miasmas that were thought to emanate from the ground.

The idea that “bad air” was the cause of health problems remained central to the medical geography of empire even after the discovery of new tropical medicines. Freetown, perceived as insanitary and overpopulated, was understood as a hotbed of enervating miasmas that left white colonial officials vulnerable to contracting deadly fevers.

From the ridge, I looked down to the west over Lumley Beach, south towards the mountains of the Freetown peninsula, and east over the city centre. Freetown sprawled over the undulating terrain, pushing up tightly against the Atlantic coastline. From this same location, colonial officials would have surveyed the territory and perhaps felt secure in their place at the top of the colonial hierarchy.

In the 1890s, the governor of colonial Sierra Leone, Frederick Cardew, justified the construction of Hill Station because of the “exhilarating and bracing” sensory experience of walking along this ridgeline. He marvelled at a view that “could hardly be surpassed in any part of the world in range and beauty”.

Even after Sierra Leone gained independence in 1961, Hill Station has remained a site of state power. Adjacent to the old bungalows is the president’s official residence and the various high commissions of old imperial nations, all hidden behind high walls and barbed wire.

But earlier this year, several senior civil servants and their families were evicted from their Hill Station bungalows after the government of Sierra Leone granted Turkey and Saudi Arabia plots of land to build new embassies. Their bungalows are now slated for demolition.

The destruction of Freetown’s colonial-era built environment, including the once ubiquitous 19th-century Krio bode ose (board houses), has been a consistent feature of Freetown’s postcolonial period. Many locals, looking resolutely towards a better tomorrow, do not mourn the loss of the material aftermaths of colonialism. Yet the unchecked churn of urban development can also mean some important lessons from history are forgotten.

Sierra Leone’s ‘afro-dynamic ecocity’

The foundational idea of architects Foster + Partners for Sherbro Island City is to make it “afro-dynamic” – as encapsulated by its leaf motif, loosely inspired by the shape of Sherbro island. According to the marketing material, this leaf shows the way in which the city is both “connected to Africa” and “rooted in community”.

Having been a slave boat harbour in the 18th century, Sherbro island would go on to become an important colonial port. However, by the latter half of the 20th century, it was a remote and overlooked part of post-colonial Sierra Leone. The new architectural vision for Sherbro Island City doesn’t reference this history – but within the shiny publicity material, there are some echoes of Hill Station’s relationship with Freetown.

Back in October 1902, the Public Works Department erected signs in the vicinity of the proposed site, with one reading: “Warning. Any person found squatting, erecting huts, or planting on this and adjacent lands from this date will be PROSECUTED and EJECTED.”

While Sherbro Island City will also be built on land used by existing communities, SAP claims the new city will benefit the island’s population of around 40,000 people. But Bankolay Theodore Turay, a Sierra Leonean scholar based at the Centre for Housing and Sustainable Development at the University of Lagos, Nigeria, is sceptical. He explained to me that he is “not aware of any compensation process that has taken place for communities that will be dispossessed of their land, and those that will be relocated from the community”.

Sherbro Island City will exist on a separate legal footing from the rest of the nation as a special economic zone, and promises huge tax incentives to investors. It appears that it will be a private city, even if not in name, managed by business people and shaped by the interests of foreign capital.

The architects’ images conform to an aesthetic of globalised modernity. Where the bungalows of Hill Station were constructed from imported prefabricated materials that conformed to a pan-imperial style, CGI renderings of Sherbro Island City imagine a hyper-modern city of glass and steel that appears to have little to do with its locale.

Foster + Partners says it has “not engaged in any detailed designs at this stage, which will be shaped by input from several stakeholders including local communities”. It adds that all of the designs “are rooted in sustainability and a respect for the communities we design for”.

Turay told me that, regardless of SAP’s claims that the city will have minimal environmental impact, “construction work does not come without environmental issues, without changing the special dynamics of the community” in an area with an “ecological footprint that is very, very low”.

In an interview in 2023, SAP’s co-founder Stevens described how the idea for the new city first germinated while he was on holiday at a luxury beach resort in Dubai. He recalled thinking: “I wish I could make my country like this one day.”

It looks like Sherbro Island City will, like Hill Station, be a city for the elite. Fosters + Partners’ preview book describes five “character profiles” of potential residents of, and visitors to, the city. These are a tourist family from Europe, two renowned health professionals and young parents, a South African digital nomad living between Dubai and Singapore, a recent Harvard graduate, and a successful actor and DJ.

These profiles suggest the city will be for diverse people from all over the world, but with one condition: they must be well-off.

Africa’s masterplanned cities

Sherbro Island City is not the first masterplanned city for Africa in the 21st century. Over the past 20 years, similar plans for new cities have cropped up throughout the continent.

Perhaps the most notable is Eko Atlantic City in Nigeria. First announced in 2003, the Eko Atlantic project has radically altered the geography of Nigeria’s largest city, Lagos. Built on 6.5 million square miles of reclaimed land, it protrudes into the Atlantic Ocean from what was Bar Beach. Its first few skeletal tower blocks have changed the skyline of downtown Lagos.

Other projects on the continent have been less successful. Kenya’s Konza Technopolis, conceived in 2009, is still a work-in-progress street grid 50 miles outside the capital, Nairobi. Meanwhile, Ghana’s Hope City project got no further than computer-generated images of glowing towers before being cancelled.

And then there is Senegal’s Akon City, the brainchild of Senegalese-American rapper Akon. Six years after it was announced with great fanfare, Akon City is little more than a half-built welcome centre. Some parallels to the Sherbro Island City project are evident: both are backed by global superstars, and both promise to transform the fortunes of small and often overlooked west African nations.

Turay said his first reaction to the Sherbro Island City plans was: “Is this is going to be another Akon city?” Such city-scale projects require vast amounts of capital and organisation, and many flounder facing this harsh reality.

However, not all of these projects are mirages. As South African professor of urban planning Vanessa Watson has described, cities in Africa have become the latest frontier for speculative real estate investment. This trend sped up hugely after the global financial crisis of 2007–08 as, since then, interest rates have generally been very low and capital has sought out riskier investments with potentially higher yields.

The rise of a foreign capital-led, speculative real estate market in African cities has been widely celebrated. Many urban residents across the continent see visions for modernity and new concrete structures as evidence of development, investment, and change for the better.

Comments on Eko Atlantic update videos, for example, show great pride in these ambitious plans from people who will probably never afford to live in the city’s luxury apartments. Similarly, in Sierra Leone, many people appear optimistic about the prospect of a hyper-modern city that promises development in the form of investment, jobs and infrastructure.

However, according to Braima Koroma: “There are also voices of caution. Community members and environmental activists have raised concerns about the potential displacement of residents and the environmental impact of large-scale construction.” He suggests these concerns “underline the importance of ensuring that the development is inclusive, and takes into account the needs and rights of local populations”.

Exit schemes

Beyond Sierra Leone, in countries where city-scale projects have progressed further, concerns about their potential for entrenching inequality have been communicated in different ways. The Nigerian photographer Christopher Obuh’s series of images of Eko Atlantic City, No City for Poor Man, asks viewers to reflect on the unevenness of this speculative urbanism by showing the process of construction that is usually obscured by slick videos, glossy CGI renderings and marketing speak.

In an article about Eko Atlantic, journalist Katie Jane Fernelius argued that this new city is less about developing innovative solutions to the pressing problems of a changing climate, urban overcrowding and a lack of investment, and more a place of elite moneymaking where capital can be made liquid and free-flowing. In her view, Eko Atlantic City is likely to further entrench the highly unequal status quo.

Inequality was vital to the colonial system. European empires depended on the construction of rigid hierarchies, most often around ideas of race. More recently, harsh inequalities have again become a defining feature of the world since the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s.

The speculative urbanism of the 21st century recycles colonial logics in the form of protected compounds, private suburbs and gated communities. These spatial fixes to the challenge of living amid the masses are supported by other fixes to the “problem” of regulation, such as special economic zones, freeports and tax havens.

In his 2022 book Adventure Capitalism, Raymond Craib describes libertarian schemes to carve out spaces beyond the regulatory systems of the nation-state, from private islands to seasteads and space colonies. These extreme forms of exit have largely remained imaginary – yet these exit plans are significant in themselves, as they tell us how the wealthy envision the future.

In using his stardom to mobilise investment in Sierra Leone, I’m sure Idris Elba genuinely wants to uplift the homeland of his father. But it feels problematic that many of the most ambitious attempts at urban development in Africa, and across the world, appear to manifest largely through “exit schemes”.

The Conversation has contacted representatives for Idris Elba, Sherbro Alliance Partners and Eko Atlantic, offering them the opportunity to comment on issues raised in this article. By the time of publication, we had not received a response from any of these parties.

For you, more from our Insights series:

• I investigated millions of tweets from the Kremlin’s ‘troll factory’ and discovered classic propaganda techniques reimagined for the social media age

• The overshoot myth: you can’t keep burning fossil fuels and expect scientists of the future to get us back to 1.5°C
  

• How the world’s first open-source digital map of mass graves could help bring justice to victims in Ukraine and other war zones

• Novelist J.G. Ballard was experimenting with computer-generated poetry 50 years before ChatGPT was invented
  

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Milo Gough has received funding from the AHRC through CHASE DTP.

– ref. From a colonial hill town to Idris Elba’s island masterplan: what two Sierra Leone developments a century apart tell us about urban elitism – https://theconversation.com/from-a-colonial-hill-town-to-idris-elbas-island-masterplan-what-two-sierra-leone-developments-a-century-apart-tell-us-about-urban-elitism-233714