On September 6, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) took 43.8% of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, more than double the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU)‘s 17.2%. Turnout was 77.8%, the highest in the state’s history of free elections. The party campaigned on a platform that included a deportation and remigration offensive, and pursuing “all legal avenues” to limit Islamic expression.

Saxony-Anhalt is a broadly rural German state, with a very small migrant population and minimal incentive to campaign to them. While the AfD’s record-breaking result in Saxony-Anhalt had little to do with migrant voters, things will be very different when Berlin goes to the polls on September 20.

An opinion poll published on September 10 puts the AfD on track for 18% of the capital’s vote, double its 9.1% result from 2023. This would put AfD within three points of the lead in a neck-and-neck race, in a city where 42.3% of residents have a migration background.

While the AfD was able to win Saxony-Anhalt without migrant voters, they cannot afford to ignore them in Berlin.

Leer más:
Even if it doesn’t form government, the far-right AfD has shaken Germany’s political establishment to the core

Courting the immigrant vote

The AfD has been chasing the immigrant vote for years, with TikTok and Turkish-language material mainly aimed at people with Russian and Turkish roots. These are long-settled immigrant communities, many of whom are German citizens with voting rights.
The AfD targets them with a message that some experts have characterised as one of assurance: you, the established communities, are not the problem, the new arrivals are.

However, the AfD’s Turkish-language campaigning is not turning into votes. A July 2026 panel work from The German Center for Integration and Migration Research (DeZIM) found the AfD rated the least electable of all parties by voters with a migration background.

Another DeZIM report has highlighted the falling turnout of voters with Turkish, Middle Eastern and North African roots, reading it as a possible warning of longer-term estrangement from the party system as a whole.

A 2025 study on migrant voting preferences throughout Germany put the AfD at 19%, third behind the CDU and SPD. It was, however, the strongest party among voters of Polish origin and among ethnic German resettlers. So the party does win migrant votes, but not currently among the German Turks it is courting this month.

These voters do, however, carry a grievance the mainstream has not addressed. DeZIM’s directors have documented what they call “competition for recognition”: the way groups treated as second-order end up in comparison and conflict with one another, and not against the people ranking them.

Political scientist Özgür Özvatan has traced this dynamic in Turkish-German belonging, where advancement is often pursued and achieved, but does not always turn into widespread, lasting acceptance from mainstream society.

Leer más:
Culture is the far right’s secret weapon – and it’s winning over some of Europe’s most educated youth

Rewarding good behaviour

Something structural sits beneath this, and it is not confined to Germany.

The older far right defined belonging by descent, which has a built-in ceiling. Its potential electorate was fixed and shrank with every naturalisation, while every migrant was a permanent opponent.

What has spread across the continent since 2015 is a different political design, where belonging is earned through conduct. Today’s far-right messaging is not always ethnic or cultural, the message now is: work hard, assimilate, toe the line, and you can belong. Anyone, migrant or otherwise, can cross this boundary through their behaviour.

The French overseas territory of Mayotte shows this design at its clearest. An island territory in the Indian Ocean, Mayotte is 95% Muslim, but it gave far-right candidate Marine Le Pen her best result in the country in 2022, with 42.89% of the first-round vote, up from 2.77% in 2012.

Researchers on the MIGRAF project see this as Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) party deliberately stripping race from its message overseas: on the island, RN does not attack Islam, it attacks migrants from the nearby Comoro Islands.

Leer más:
Populists claim to speak for ‘the people’ – but who are they actually talking about?

French Muslims voting for Le Pen against Muslim migrants might seem unthinkable. However, it makes sense if you consider how the boundary of belonging has changed. The question is not who you are, but which side of a bureaucratic boundary you stand on.

Spain’s far right plays a similar tune in a different key. Speaking in Gran Canaria in 2018, leader of the far-right Vox party Santiago Abascal drew a distinction between different kinds of immigrant: those from Latin America, who share much of Spain’s language, religion and worldview, and those from Islamic countries.

Vox built an international project around this exception, dubbed the “Iberosfera” (Iberosphere). Analysts have interpreted it as a form of “ethnic Hispanicism”.

Sweden has perhaps moved the furthest here, in its decision to place greater legal emphasis on migrants’ conduct or way of life. The Swedish Aliens act, which came into force on July 13, 2026, allows the Swedish Migration Agency can refuse or revoke residence permits on grounds of “deficient conduct”: behaviour that breaks no law but contravenes rules society wishes to uphold.

Legal scholars have highlighted that the standard is too vague to be applied predictably or equally.

Leer más:
Immigration in Sweden: how the country went from one of Europe’s most welcoming, to one of its most restrictive

Acceptance is fickle

A political offer of this kind depends on a far-right party’s voters and members accepting an exception to their principles. Support for such an idea is difficult to maintain, and in Spain, it has caused a deep rift in Vox’s base.

In August 2019, an employers’ association called for recruiting workers abroad, preferably from Latin America. A Vox deputy from Málaga responded by tweeting that it made no difference whether demographic replacement “came wearing Djellabas or carrying machetes”, then deleted the post.

The row ran through the party for years, but in January 2026, Vox quietly removed “Latinos por Abascal” from its website, a campaign launched three years earlier to capture Spain’s Hispanic voters.

Conditional belonging has a short shelf-life. It works as a recruitment device, but when the base radicalises past it, the people who were once welcomed are reclassified as what they were before. Spain is two years ahead of Germany on this cycle.

The AfD leaves itself the same room for manoeuvre, though as things currently stand, its position is not clear. Its Saxony-Anhalt programme puts “remigration” at the centre, but the party insists the term covers only the lawful return of foreigners with no right to remain, rejecting the deportation of German citizens with a migration background as unconstitutional.

However, constitutional lawyers reading the Saxony-Anhalt text see an expulsion policy resting on an ethnic idea of the people. No voters being courted this month – whether in Saxony-Anhalt or in Berlin – have been clearly told which definition will apply.

When Berlin goes to the polls, some voters from migrant backgrounds will decide the warning is not meant for them, but for somebody else. If nothing else, producing that decision is what AfD’s strategy is meant to do.

A weekly e-mail in English featuring expertise from scholars and researchers. It provides an introduction to the diversity of research coming out of the continent and considers some of the key issues facing European countries. Get the newsletter!

Deniz Torcu no recibe salario, ni ejerce labores de consultoría, ni posee acciones, ni recibe financiación de ninguna compañía u organización que pueda obtener beneficio de este artículo, y ha declarado carecer de vínculos relevantes más allá del cargo académico citado.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/14/how-germanys-far-right-afd-is-courting-the-voters-it-promises-to-deport/

Australia’s pipeline of huge data centre projects has raised questions about how much energy and water these giant server farms will use.

These questions aren’t simple to answer because we don’t have the data.

We can’t check water or energy use for individual facilities or inspect national data centre statistics and no operator is obliged to disclose these figures.

That may change. Last month, the National Cabinet agreed to develop mandatory national standards for large data centres, covering energy, water and land use. The legislation is due early next year.

No detail is available, and little has been said about their lifetime environmental footprints, from land clearing to noise issues to electronic waste to greenhouse gas emissions. These must be counted too.

The fastest way to settle arguments about the environmental impact of the data centre boom is to collect and publish the data.

Data centres have existed for decades. But something has changed, and this essential infrastructure is now at the centre of a major policy debate.

This article is part of The Conversation’s series on data centres – what they are, why we need them, and why they’re suddenly so controversial.

Hungry for power

In 2020, data centres were estimated to use about 1.5% of the world’s electricity. But since 2022, the artificial intelligence boom has led to rapid growth.

Australia’s 165 operating data centres use an estimated 3% of the power from the National Electricity Market, Australia’s largest grid.

By the mid 2030s, the Australian Energy Market Operator predicts this will reach roughly 13%. This would put them on par with aluminium smelters.

Where will the water come from?

Water is much harder to quantify. My rough estimate suggests current national water use is a fraction of 1%, tiny compared to agriculture.

It’s not the national figure that matters, but where, when and how much water is taken.

A new data centre drawing 100 megalitres of water annually from a rural catchment may not matter over a wet winter. In a drought it might.

Some centres are proposed for hot, dry areas where water is already a concern, such as Bundey and Tailem Bend in South Australia. Their water use will depend on the cooling technology used.

At most data centres, only the operator has the data to calculate water use. They are not currently required to disclose use. The water utility sees a connection, not what happens inside the fence. Regulators could look, but it seems nobody has asked them to.

Sydney’s data centres currently draw about 3.5 billion litres a year, less than 1% of the city’s water supply. But this could rise to 25% within a decade, according to Sydney Water estimates.

By comparison, industry modelling suggests a figure of 2% by 2030.

This tenfold difference in forecasts for the same city is due to the fact much has to be assumed given the lack of data.

Trade-offs and complexities abound

If a data centre runs on renewables and uses the same water in a closed loop or new direct-to-chip cooling, the impact will be much smaller than using evaporative cooling, where much water is lost.

Similarly, power drawn from fossil-fuel dominated grids means water is used indirectly, as coal and gas plants use lots of water – especially compared to renewables.

The trade-off is direct: less water for cooling usually means more electricity.

The electricity used ends up as heat. Field measurements show downwind air temperatures average 0.7 to 0.9°C warmer.

While energy efficiency is improving and advanced liquid cooling can cut water use by up to 50%, this isn’t a full solution. Australia could build giant water-efficient data centres and still end up with climbing water use.

Lessons from abroad

In Ireland, data centres use 23% of electricity, close to all households combined (28%). But data centre demand is rising fast, jumping 10% last year – while household demand rose 2%. We know this because Ireland’s statistical office measures it. Ireland measures. Australia estimates.

Ireland’s transparency lets policymakers make hard decisions such as limiting new grid connections and requiring the use of renewables to meet 80% of demand.

The main lesson from the United States is that the most intense impact is often local. Communities chosen to host new data centres often push back hard based on issues around noise, energy and water use, and visual impact. Backlash against new data centres is becoming intense in many areas – and bridges political divides.

In Virginia, the constant hum of cooling fans drove local authorities to rewrite zoning rules and reduce noise limits.

Planning for growth

At a national scale, today’s data centres have modest environmental costs and potentially large economic benefits.

But we don’t know what this looks like when translated to local impacts.

The real issue is what’s in the pipeline. Right now, 225 data centres are proposed or under development. If all are approved, this would represent 67 gigawatts of new power demand – a massive jump on the 2.2 gigawatts currently operating.

Some of these projects won’t get up. Over a third of the planned projects listed in 2025 were cancelled. But some will be built. Because company disclosures are voluntary, selective and unaudited, they cannot be compared with each other or checked.

As a result, anxiety is filling the space where data should be.

What should Australia do?

Ideally, new data centres would draw power from new renewables with minimal indirect water use.

At a federal level, authorities want large data centres to source their own clean power. But Queensland and the Northern Territory want to use gas. This issue is yet to be resolved.

For water, maximising efficiency is the mantra. While efficiency is good, it is not enough. Water is extracted, not efficiency. What matters is total use against what is available and how much competition there is.

Energy use is expected to include reporting, a regulator and testing. Water use will need the same, and the standards should include noise, electronic waste and emissions. If, as the industry and government claim, there is no need to worry, neither should object to such standards.

Done poorly, Australia’s data centre boom could suck up scarce water supplies and increase the use of fossil fuels. But if done well, we could grow the industry using clean power and ensuring water use is monitored and minimal.

The difference comes down to having data. Much of the extra data we need to track data centre impact can be gathered by the Australian Bureau of Statistics – just as Ireland has done.

Transparency can help the data centre industry improve its social licence to operate. With data we can see if the largely national and international economic benefits of data centres justify the mostly local environmental costs.

Michael Vardon is affiliated with the Society of Natural Capital Accounting. These views are his own. He has previously worked for the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/14/unsustainable-or-manageable-we-dont-yet-know-how-data-centres-will-impact-australias-environment/

Some of Australia’s most powerful policy institutions are now being led by female economists.

Between 2023 and 2026 came a remarkable run of firsts. Danielle Wood became the first woman to chair the Productivity Commission, Michele Bullock the first female governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), and Jenny Wilkinson the first woman to lead the Australian Treasury.

It might seem as though women economists have suddenly arrived at the top.

Yet these remarkable firsts began much earlier.

Did you know the first economics textbook used in Australian schools was written by a woman? In 1880, the writer, reformer and suffragette Catherine Helen Spence published The Laws We Live Under and it stayed on the curriculum for 20 years.

Or that Australian economist Marion Phillips became the first Australian woman elected to a national parliament – entering Britain’s House of Commons in 1929?

If these stories are unfamiliar, you are probably not alone.

A new book, Power in Numbers: Australian Women in Economics, by economists Melissa Bray and Catie Bradbear, tells the stories of 16 women who helped shape Australian economics.

Review: Power in Numbers: Australian Women in Economics by Melissa Bray and Catie Bradbear (Melbourne University Press)

Where are the women in economics?

Even today, economics remains stubbornly male-dominated. Women make up only around one-third of economists in Australia, and just 17% of economics professors.

Why does this matter? Because who becomes an economist can shape which questions are studied and which policies are recommended.

As Professor Betsey Stevenson writes in the book’s foreword:

Diversity matters because it gives us better perception, a better understanding of problems, of wants and needs, and of potential solutions.

And the pipeline is not encouraging. In the early 1990s, roughly equal numbers of girls and boys studied Year 12 economics. Today, boys outnumber girls by around two to one.

Part of the challenge is economics’ image problem. Reserve Bank research from 2021 found female students were less interested in economics, less certain they would be good at it and less clear about its career paths.

Role models matter and several women in the book supported women coming after them, including through the Women in Economics Network. By making these women and their achievements visible, the book can help younger women imagine a place for themselves in economics.

Their brilliant careers

The range is striking. Trailblazing policy reformer Meredith Edwards was the only woman in her economics honours class. She went on to become a key architect of child support, Austudy and HECS, reforms that affect millions of Australians.

In 2008, Besa Deda became the first female chief economist of an Australian bank at St George Bank. Former RBA assistant governor Luci Ellis later became the first at a big four bank (Westpac) in 2023.

The influence of female economists was not confined to Australia. Persia Campbell pioneered consumer economics in the US, arguing that economic progress should be judged by whether people’s basic needs were met and living standards improved – not just by economic statistics. She later advised US President John F. Kennedy and even had her own television show in the US in 1960s.

These are all exceptionally accomplished women. But that raises an uncomfortable question: how brilliant did a woman have to be just to enter spaces where men already belonged?

Did men have to be quite this brilliant?

Just a glimpse of the challenges

Power in Numbers deliberately does not dwell on the obstacles these women faced. There are glimpses – universities that did not admit women, jobs that were closed to them, and careers built in overwhelmingly male institutions – but the focus stays firmly on achievement.

The result is a celebratory account, rather than an even-handed one. That choice carries a risk: readers still confronting those barriers may fail to see their own struggles reflected in the stories.

The book’s admiring tone also comes through in its use of the women’s first names. At times it feels overly familiar for an account of their professional achievements.

The book would have benefited from photographs, particularly of the historical figures, putting faces to women whose stories have too often remained invisible. And for a book on Australian women in economics, an Australian economist might have been a more natural fit for the foreword.

Many ways to be an economist

Many of the women came from families that valued girls’ education and later found support from mentors and colleagues. But did they all come from similar backgrounds?

Far from it.

Some grew up in a farming community; others found economics by unexpected routes.

Leading businesswoman Jillian Broadbent, a former board member at Qantas, Woolworths and the ASX among others, never had a grand career plan. Yet her career took her from the Reserve Bank to chairing Australia’s Clean Energy Finance Corporation.

Again and again, these women were willing to take a leap when an interesting opportunity appeared, tackle difficult problems and move into unfamiliar territory.

Danielle Wood advises: “Be curious […] Read broadly” and “be brave” enough to defend your views, even when they differ from those above you.

What many also share is a desire to make a positive difference.

Policy reformer Meredith Edwards describes her career philosophy as pursuing positions in academia and the public service

where I believed I could effect improvements in public policy and where my mind and heart were at one.

I particularly enjoyed the questions about each woman’s “superpower”, advice and how she would like to be remembered.

Broadbent stresses looking after your health and not carrying emotional baggage. A similar message recurs: learn from setbacks, move on and keep going.

Taken together, these stories leave a powerful message: there is no single path into economics, and no single way to belong in it.

Duygu Yengin is a co-founder and current Deputy Chair of the Women in Economics Network. She receives no financial benefit from this role.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/14/australias-female-economists-have-been-making-history-for-nearly-150-years-its-time-we-knew-their-stories/

Today marks one year since the Australian government released its National Climate Risk Assessment and the National Adaptation Plan.

These documents were the federal government’s first attempt to identify what is at risk from climate change and how we can adapt to its impacts. The assessment identified 63 nationally significant climate risks – such as risks to the financial system and surging disaster recovery costs – across all sectors and regions.

It came after several other countries – including the United Kingdom, United States, Canada and New Zealand – conducted similar but legislated climate risk assessments.

The Australian Climate Service was provided with A$22.9 million to complete the National Climate Risk Assessment over two years. More than 250 climate risk experts and authors worked on it, producing more than 70 documents detailing the most urgent threats to our nation.

However, the final report was delivered months later than expected. And in the 12 months since its release, Australia has taken little concrete action to address these urgent climate-related risks.

Weather on a warming planet

In 2025, despite the arrival of a La Niña weather pattern that typically reduces global temperatures, the world experienced its third hottest year on record.

Australia also endured its fourth warmest year ever and its hottest ocean temperatures on record. This brought extreme heat during the 2025-26 “whiplash summer”, where flash floods were quickly followed by devastating bushfires that claimed one life and engulfed more than 500 properties – the worst damage since the 2019-20 Black Summer.

Globally, the northern 2026 summer saw deadly heatwaves and wildfires ravage parts of Europe and the US. Glacial melting may have contributed to the catastrophic Nepal-Tibet floods. And the United Nations announced the world was on track to overshoot the critical limit of 1.5°C global warming, with a best case scenario of hitting 1.8ºC by the century’s end.

What the report found

The National Climate Risk Assessment identified 63 nationally significant climate risks across eight key areas, ranging from the economy to defence to the natural environment. It also assessed 11 “priority risks” at four levels of global warming, including the current climate and scenarios of 1.5ºC, 2ºC and 3ºC warming above pre-industrial temperatures.

The report, as our research team noted when it was released, paints a grim picture in which every community in Australia will face the increasing and compounding consequences of climate change. This will almost certainly come in the form of more extreme weather, rather than a smooth transition to a new climate.

Specifically, the report found:

• the financial cost of extreme weather in Australia has already tripled over the past three decades, with disaster recovery spending forecast to surge by seven times by 2090

• deaths from heatwaves alone could quadruple in some capital cities at 3°C of global warming, while floods, bushfires, poor air quality and communicable diseases will become significant health risks

• coastal impacts could affect 1.5 million people by 2050 and three million people by 2090, while some remote communities may be forced to relocate due to extreme heat or sea level rise

• up to 70% of native plant species could be enduring conditions outside their current climate range by 2050, potentially leading to extinction and ecosystem collapse. Coral reefs are most vulnerable due to worsening marine heatwaves and ocean acidification.

Dealing with delays

The National Climate Risk Assessment was set to be released in 2024 but was only made public on September 15 2025. This was at least nine months later than expected and well after the May 2025 federal election.

Since the report was released, the Australian government has made no commitment to conduct or publish any future National Climate Risk Assessments or National Adaptation Plans.

That’s despite planned updates to global climate modelling, economic modelling and census data being at their disposal. So far they have ignored calls to legislate for future risk assessments from the Climate Change Authority and groups such the Australian Stategic Policy Institute and the Investor Group for Climate Change.

No sign of urgency

Australia is making some progress in cleaning up our energy and transport sectors, notably through government schemes for rooftop solar, home batteries and electric vehicles. Nevertheless, we continue to burn unsustainable amounts of coal and gas, exporting vast amounts of polluting greenhouse gases that cause global temperatures to rise.

Since September 2025, when the National Climate Risk Assessment was released, the Australian government has approved at least six coal and gas project extensions. And the government continues to subsidise coal, oil and gas corporations to the tune of at least $14 billion each year.

Research suggests climate damage to coastal communities alone may approach a trillion dollars by 2100. Yet, spending on climate adaptation under the federal Disaster Ready Fund has dropped from the initial commitment of $200 million per year to roughly $140 million in 2026-27.

The National Climate Risk Assessment Future Climate and Hazard Report, of which I was coordinating lead author, identified more than 30 significant gaps in Australia’s climate-related research and expertise.

Yet CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, has announced major staffing cuts which will hamstring our ability to conduct future climate change modelling and research. The government is also reducing funding to the National Environmental Science Program by about $30 million, while even the Australian Climate Service is diverting more than $15 million to a consulting company.

I was one of many scientists and experts who contributed blood, sweat and tears to Australia’s first National Climate Risk Assessment. It is a crucial step forward in our fight against climate change. But it must be followed up with future risk assessments and more funding for climate science and adaptation.

We have a clear picture of the danger ahead. Without an urgent change in course, we will only continue hurtling towards it.

Andrew B. Watkins is a Climate Councillor at the Climate Council.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/14/its-been-one-year-since-australia-assessed-its-national-climate-risk-but-have-we-listened/

Last week, the peak body for Australian universities called on the federal government to introduce concession cards and further discounts to all domestic uni students.

Universities Australia says the measures would ease cost-of-living pressures for students. Under the proposal, international uni students would also receive public transport concessions.

It comes after the peak body released data in June showing, since 2021, students’ basic living expenses jumped by 29%. Universities Australia said this figure was “well above economy-wide inflation” of 24%.

How do concession cards work again?

Concession card holders in Australia need to meet certain eligibility requirements in order to receive them. These requirements might be based on low-income status, disability and age (for pensioners). There are also various concessions for veterans offering different benefits.

Concession card holders receive discounts, subsidised by government, for everyday necessities such as medicines, public transport and utility bills and, in some cases, for car registration.

Some domestic uni students qualify for concession benefits through Health Care cards, Austudy, ABSTUDY or Youth Allowance. However, enrolling in university alone does not mean a student qualifies for these discounts. For uni students, eligibility for public transport discounts also differs between states.

The reality for students

Many uni students have to juggle the costs of tuition, housing, transport and groceries usually while working casually or in a part-time role.

Research published in May found one in three surveyed Australian uni students experience serious financial hardship.

My research with colleagues published last month mirrors these findings.

We surveyed a nationally representative sample of 2,731 people aged 18–24 about their education, wellbeing and finances between 2021 to 2025. About 48% of participants were studying full time and 22% were part time in vocational education, university or another tertiary institution at the time.

Struggling to afford basics

In our survey, food insecurity surfaced as a major problem for young people. This is when someone cannot access affordable, nutritious and culturally appropriate food. The most common cause for food insecurity was a lack of money.

We found, on average, about one in five young Australians experienced food insecurity between 2021 and 2025 – most of whom were students.

Over the five years, respondents who said they couldn’t afford or access healthy or nutritious food fluctuated between 58% and 69%. More than 50% reported they had to skip meals and were worried they would not have enough food to eat. The proportion of young people who went without eating for a whole day ranged from 49% in 2021 to 42% in 2025.

About 82–90% of participants reported experiencing financial difficulty every year. Of course, these pressures are not confined to this age group, and can affect students of all ages.

Another 2026 Australian study surveying university staff showed they observed 51.5% of students going without medical treatment due to financial difficulties.

What is the government currently doing to help?

The government has taken some steps to help with uni costs already. It wiped $3 billion in student HECS-HELP debts and increased rent assistance in 2023 and again in 2024.

At the same time the Job-ready Graduates scheme, which came into effect in 2021, has increased the cost of law and business degrees and doubled the cost of arts degrees.

Easing debt is only one piece of the mosaic of financial distress experienced by many students. These measures don’t necessarily make university financially viable while students are studying.

Financial stress can make it too hard for students to attempt or finish their studies. The government recognises university course completions are associated with lower financial stress for students.

Should more domestic students receive support?

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare estimated about 172,000 students aged between 16–64 received Youth Allowance, Austudy or ABSTUDY payments as of March 2025. The most recently published government data shows 1,086,789 domestic students were enrolled in higher education in 2024. This equates to just under 16% of domestic students receiving Youth Allowance, Austudy or ABSTUDY around this period.

While these initiatives offer students financial relief, it’s worth noting that payments are below the poverty line.

Youth Allowance and ABSTUDY are also subject to parental means-testing. This means if a student is classified as a dependent (typically under the age of 22), their parent or guardian needs to provide their income details in a claim.

This income becomes a factor in determining how much financial support the student can receive, or whether they’re eligible to receive anything. Students are exempted from parental means-testing if their guardians receive particular government allowances.

Usually, students need to be studying full time to receive Austudy and Youth Allowance benefits.

System not up to scratch

Some student unions argue parental means‑testing incorrectly assumes parents or carers have arrangements with their children to support them financially. While some experts say students whose parents earn just above the income threshold may lock them out of payments.

All of this suggests the overall system is inconsistently targeted and not addressing broader cost‑of‑living challenges.

What next?

Expanding concessions to university students will cost money – so far, Universities Australia has not put a price tag on this. So the challenge will be funding concessions in a fiscally-tight environment.

But the federal government’s 2024 Australian Universities Accord also outlines its goal to increase Australia’s tertiary education qualifications from 60% to 80% by 2050. This means we need to find ways to support more students to study.

To reach its target, the government may need to consider easing daily costs for uni students now and into the future.

Lucas Walsh receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/14/1-in-3-uni-students-experience-serious-financial-hardship-could-concession-cards-for-all-help/

The way a product is labelled can change how consumers think about it. “No added sugar” or “99% fat free” can make food sound healthier than it really is.

The same might apply to buy now, pay later schemes. Marketed as a convenient way to pay for purchases over time, they are fundamentally still a form of debt.

Products such as Afterpay, Klarna and Zip (which recently exited the New Zealand market) offer consumers access to items they may not be able to immediately afford.

Speedy approval and an easy checkout add to the appeal, but can also encourage overspending, while missed payments can bring late fees and mounting debt.

Part of the product’s attraction, particularly among younger consumers wary of credit cards, has been the idea that it is different from conventional borrowing.

Our new research set out to interrogate this further: if it feels more like a normal payment, does that affect how people use buy now, pay later? And might better financial literacy protect them?

Debt by another name

Buy now, pay later emerged in the early 2010s and quickly became commonplace in New Zealand. It can now be used for everything from fast fashion and takeaway food to dental treatment.

Typically, consumers borrow relatively small amounts and repay them over four fortnightly instalments, without interest or establishment fees. Providers charge vendors a small percentage (2% to 8%) on each sale, but also earn substantial revenue from late fees charged to consumers.

Approval has traditionally been fast and easy, making these services accessible to people who might struggle to obtain conventional credit.

For years, the law treated this form of borrowing differently, too. Because providers generally charged no interest or credit fees, their products fell outside New Zealand’s main consumer credit law.

That changed in September 2024 when buy now, pay later was brought under the Credit Contracts and Consumer Finance Act. Users gained many protections applying to other borrowers, although providers remain exempt from some requirements applying to conventional credit.

A recent review by Consumer NZ and FinCap concluded those reforms have not reduced financial harm among users. It called for further protections, including mandatory affordability assessments and tighter controls on late fees.

The product indeed still carries risks. Its use has been linked with overspending, financial hardship and using other debt to meet repayments.

Regulation may have changed how this form of credit is legally treated. But that doesn’t necessarily mean consumers have changed how they think about it.

When perceptions guide behaviour

We surveyed young New Zealand adults to investigate how they perceive buy now, pay later, and whether those perceptions were related to how they used it.

The results suggest the marketing message is working. Four in ten respondents didn’t see it as debt, while nearly half thought it carried fewer consequences than other forms of borrowing.

Among users, 43% had used other forms of credit, including credit cards, to meet repayments. Just over half (55%) had incurred late penalties, and nearly one in eight had done so three or more times.

Those who failed to recognise the product as debt were more likely to borrow elsewhere to meet repayments, while those who thought it was cheaper or carried fewer consequences used it more frequently.

The most surprising findings concerned financial literacy. Those who reported receiving financial education were less likely to recognise buy now, pay later as debt, while those with higher financial capability were more likely to use other forms of debt to meet repayments.

Interestingly, those who borrowed elsewhere to make repayments were less likely to incur late fees. This could suggest some consumers recognise the immediate cost of missing a payment, but manage that risk by shifting the debt elsewhere.

Greater debt-related knowledge, however, was associated with better use of the product.

Why might financial education and capability fail to protect consumers in the ways we might expect? One possibility is that people struggle to apply their knowledge in unfamiliar financial contexts.

Learning to look through the label

Our findings point to a larger challenge for financial educators: teaching people to apply what they know about existing financial products to new forms of financial technology.

That’s becoming harder as financial products evolve faster than financial education. Twenty years ago, understanding savings accounts, credit cards, mortgages and managed funds covered much of the financial landscape consumers were likely to encounter.

Today they face buy now, pay later products, cryptocurrencies, non-fungible tokens – digital assets whose ownership is recorded on a blockchain – and exchange-traded funds that allow investors to buy into collections of assets through a single investment.

Educators cannot realistically explain every new product before consumers encounter it. Financial education therefore needs to do something more fundamental: teach people how to look through the label.

Consumers should ask: What obligation am I taking on? What can I lose? What happens if things go wrong? And who benefits if I misunderstand the product?

Financial literacy is still vital. Our findings show debt knowledge and practical money-management skills were associated with better outcomes, including fewer late fees and less reliance on other credit to meet repayments.

But knowing how traditional financial products work is only useful if consumers recognise when those lessons apply to something new. That becomes harder when a product is marketed to feel simpler, safer and different from conventional borrowing.

Financial education therefore needs to equip consumers to recognise the underlying financial relationship, whatever name or technology is attached to it.

Sometimes debt by another name is still debt.

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.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/14/buy-now-pay-later-doesnt-feel-like-debt-for-young-people-that-can-be-a-big-problem/

This week marks five years since US President Joe Biden, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced AUKUS, a trilateral security partnership composed of two parts: Pillar I, the nuclear-powered submarine program, and Pillar II, a collaboration on advanced defence capabilities.

Since then, AUKUS has survived multiple leadership changes and national reviews or public inquiries in all three countries. At a time of heightened geopolitical risk, the case for acquiring the subs to help protect Australia’s access to sea-lanes and contribute to regional stability has endured.

But this milestone needs to be put in context.

For one, when AUKUS was announced on September 15 2021, we had very few details. The actual plans for the delivery of nuclear-powered submarines to Australia came much later, in March 2023.

And AUKUS still has a way to go. We’re barely a tenth of the way into the implementation of the 30-year “Optimal Pathway” for the program in its totality.

We’re at least six years away from receiving our first US-built Virginia-class submarine, and at least 15 years from receiving the first AUKUS-class submarine, to be co-developed and co-produced here and in the United Kingdom.

Still, five years after the initial announcement, it’s worth gauging what Australia has to show for a program the government has said is “too big to fail” and is without a “Plan B”.

We’ve tried to bring clarity to this question by focusing on three indicators of progress:

• how much money Australia has invested so far

• the development of Submarine Rotational Force-West (SRF-W) in Perth

• the state of US submarine production and fleet size.

Though by no means exhaustive, these three metrics offer a snapshot of where the program stands at the moment, and the challenges that must still be overcome.

Read more:
In view of Trump’s review of AUKUS, should Australia cancel the subs deal? We asked 5 experts

1. What Australia has spent so far

Australians are justified in wanting to know how much money their government has invested in AUKUS, and where it has gone.

When the Optimal Pathway was announced in 2023, the Albanese government costed it at 0.15% of GDP annually over the life of the program. This would amount to roughly A$268 billion to A$368 billion over three decades.

Since then, the A$368 billion figure has been widely cited by the media as the ultimate price tag.

Crucially, at the time, a third of this total – around A$122.9 billion – was set aside as contingency funding to absorb the delays and cost pressures that come with a 30-year program. In other words, it may not actually be spent.

Accurately tracking Australia’s overall spending to date is difficult. Since 2023, there has been a flurry of government statements announcing or promising funding to support various aspects of AUKUS over different time frames. These figures are scattered across portfolios, and are sometimes announced and then folded into the forward estimates of the federal budget. Some are projections, rather than down payments.

Both the Liberals and Greens have pressed the government to share updated costings for AUKUS. Budget papers do not offer an itemised account nor a consolidated overall figure for the program so far.

With no central database for AUKUS spending, we set out to build one.

We went through public announcements, portfolio budget statements, annual reports and strategy documents, and attempted to trace everything that’s been spent, announced, promised or projected.

What we’ve come up with hardly qualifies as a ledger. Still, it reveals three important things.

First, the bulk of the funding announced in Australia has gone to infrastructure, across three main sites:

• A$12 billion on the Henderson Defence Precinct, a shipbuilding and submarine maintenance hub on the west coast

• A$8 billion to expand HMAS Stirling so it can host US and UK submarines under SRF-West from 2027, and Australia’s own fleet of submarines from the early 2030s

• A$8.5 billion to the Osborne Nuclear-Powered Submarine Construction Yard, where Australia’s nuclear submarines will be built.

Second, Canberra is investing in the UK and US submarine industrial bases to support the delivery of the Virginia-class and future AUKUS-class submarines to Australia. This reflects the additional demand Australia’s submarines will put on production and maintenance capacity in both countries.

This has included US$2 billion (about A$2.8 billion) to the US in three instalments, with a further US$1 billion (A$1.4 billion) in instalments pledged over the next decade.

Canberra has also paid A$310 million to the UK for components needed to build nuclear submarines and has committed an additional £2.4 billion (about A$4.6 billion) over a decade to expand the UK’s submarine production capacity.

Third, AUKUS will consume a growing share of the Australian defence budget, even if the government follows through on its commitment to increase spending to 3% of GDP by 2033.

In 2023, the Parliamentary Budget Office projected annual AUKUS spending to be roughly A$2.2 billion per year over the program’s first four years, rising to more than A$8 billion annually for the next three decades. This means most of the spending is still to come.

There’s a long list of various capabilities required to meet Australia’s future defence requirements. If the Defence budget does not grow sufficiently and AUKUS eats into those programs, the overall investment in these capabilities could become lopsided.

2. A new submarine base in WA

Until the Virginia-class submarines arrive, we still need to make sure our near-term defence needs are being met. We also need to be ready for when our subs show up.

This is where Submarine Rotational Force-West comes in.

The first phase of the AUKUS program involves frequent visits by US and UK submarines to HMAS Stirling in Perth from next year. These subs won’t be formally based in Australia; they will rotate in and out.

But these aren’t mere pitstops. Australians are being trained in how to maintain the ships and handle their weapons. Some US submarines already have Australians serving onboard. These initiatives are helping to prepare Australia to maintain our own nuclear-powered submarines when they come online.

The US is also setting up local operations to provide services, logistics and operational support to these rotating submarines and their crews. This will be the only location outside US and UK territories in the Indo-Pacific where these subs can receive sophisticated maintenance support.

Crucially, these facilities will be beyond the range of most (though not all) of China’s growing missile capabilities.

Successive National Defence Strategies have emphasised that an enduring US military presence in the region is fundamental to Australia’s security and contributes to regional deterrence. This is also the view of Australia’s closest partners in the region, such as Japan.

This is why leading Australian experts have argued SRF-W is perhaps “the most significant aspect” of AUKUS for Australia’s immediate security interests.

So, even if Australia won’t have its own AUKUS submarines for years, it will become increasingly capable of operating them, while simultaneously embedding a more resilient US naval presence in our region.

As far as near-term payoffs go, this shouldn’t be understated.

3. US submarine availability

Sceptics in both the US and Australia have expressed doubt about Washington’s willingness to sell at least three submarines to Australia beginning in the 2030s, given how much it relies on them and how long it takes to build them.

Indeed, the speed of US submarine production has been under particular scrutiny. The conventional wisdom is production needs to hit around 2.33 boats per year to meet both US and Australian requirements.

There are no consistent public records for the actual production rate, but the estimates are sobering.

New builds have averaged 1.1–1.3 submarines per year since the COVID pandemic, down from a high of 1.9 per year from 2016–19. US Navy leaders anticipate reaching two subs per year by 2032 – still short of the 2.33 goal.

Yet, production rates only tell part of the story. If Australia is supposed to receive in-service submarines from the US, understanding the state and size of the existing fleet is just as important.

In 2016, the US Navy declared it needed a force of 66 submarines to counter growing Chinese and Russian threats – up from a previous requirement of 48.

But since then, the US’ submarine fleet size has gradually declined, with older submarines retiring at a marginally higher rate than their modern replacements (the Virginia-class subs) have been introduced.

This reflects the difficulties Washington has had speeding up production, even with US$15 billion (about A$21 billion) in navy investments since 2018, contributions from the Australian government, and a growing number of Australian companies supporting US shipbuilding.

What’s more, since 2016, between 25–33% of the US submarine fleet has been undergoing maintenance, at significant financial and operational cost. For Australia, addressing that backlog will be as important as boosting US production rates.

Australia is already helping to ease these challenges with investments at Submarine Rotational Force-West and its own shipyards. If the AUKUS partners take full advantage of these developments, this could increase the number of boats available to the US Navy – and, by extension, to Australia.

So, while the US has a mountain to climb to boost sub production, that won’t be the only factor that determines the timeline for Australia’s AUKUS fleet.

Where does this leave Australia?

Of course, these three metrics tell only part of the AUKUS story so far.

Ultimately, however, delivering submarines to Australia is the point of the Optimal Pathway. Our analysis points to both successes and challenges, but at three years into a complex 30-year project, an incomplete picture is probably what we should expect.

Though reliably measuring progress is difficult, it would be disingenuous to say Australia has nothing to show for its investments to date. Important gains have been made in strengthening deterrence and building the workforce and industrial capacity for Australia to maintain and operate a fleet of the most advanced naval systems in the world.

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.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/14/five-years-into-aukus-what-do-we-have-to-show-for-it-weve-measured-progress-on-three-key-metrics/

On September 10, the Australian Federal Police announced the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation received 100,194 reports of online child sexual exploitation in 2025–26. That is about 275 a day – a 21% rise over the year before, and up from 36,600 four years ago.

Read as a measure of how much abuse Australian children are suffering, the figure is alarming. But it’s not an accurate measure. It’s primarily the count of reports made by companies who chose to look for harm occurring on their platforms. This figure is a floor for the harm occurring online.

Two days earlier, the federal government released an exposure draft of its long-awaited digital duty of care bill. The bill would make platforms responsible for a “safe online environment”.

But if passed in its current form, it would not require platforms to look for online harms, nor to tell anyone in Australia what they find if they do.

Where the 100,000 reports come from

According to the Australian Federal Police, most of the reports of online child sexual exploitation come primarily from the United States National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, with the rest from the public and government agencies.

The US centre runs the CyberTipline which received 21.3 million reports in 2025. Some 317 companies made them, and five tech companies made more than three-quarters of the total: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp and Google.

Analysts from the US centre determine which country each report relates to, usually based on the computer’s IP address, and pass it on. Reports that relate to an Australian user, whether an adult sharing illegal material or a child being groomed, are handed to the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation. That is where the bulk of the 100,000 reports came from.

Under American law, US companies must report abusive material once they become aware of it. But nothing makes them look.

According to the US centre, in 2025, Google made 1,461,378 reports, and Facebook 4,907,710. Apple made 296. The number of reports tells you how hard each company looks, not the level of harm occurring.

Why the count is a floor

Because looking is optional, the count moves when companies change their minds.

When Meta switched Facebook Messenger to end-to-end encryption by default in December 2023, Facebook’s reports of online child sexual exploitation fell from 17.8 million in 2023 to 8.6 million in 2024 and 4.9 million in 2025.

The US centre said the fall in reporting was “not because the crimes have stopped, but because some platforms aren’t reporting as they should”.

In 2020–21, companies were in limbo about whether the European Union’s privacy law allowed them to scan for abusive material, and reports of EU users fell by 58% across 18 weeks.

The count misses the services that never look.

Australia’s online watchdog, eSafety, has the power to compel companies to answer questions, through its transparency reporting process. This shows that in the first half of 2025, Google used no tools to detect new abuse material on Meet, Chat, Messages or Gmail, and Apple relied solely on user reports.

Where a company does not look, abuse only gets reported if a victim reports it.

What other countries require

The United States has required this reporting to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children for more than 25 years.

Canada also has had a mandatory reporting law since 2011. Brazil’s Digital Statute for Children and Adolescents came into force in March 2026 and the United Kingdom’s duty started on April 7 2026.

These newer laws exempt companies that already report to the US centre.

Each country compels the platforms based in its own jurisdiction, so coverage extends without anyone reporting twice. Based on investigations I have done as part of my ongoing research, only three Australian companies have voluntarily reported to the US centre in the last two years.

Australia has one reporting law for child abuse material, section 474.25 of the Criminal Code, written in 2004. Its limited scope only applies to Australian internet service and hosting providers, but it requires reporting to the Australian Federal Police.

It does not require anyone to look.

How the duty of care could be strengthened

Australia’s proposed duty of care law is generally strong. But platforms need to be responsible for reporting online child sexual exploitation rather than relying on victims to do so.

Twelve months after the digital duty of care becomes law, the current rules – called the Basic Online Safety Expectations – that tell platforms to proactively detect child abuse material will be repealed. In their place, the draft offers a general duty for platforms to take “reasonably practicable” steps and guidance the eSafety commissioner will publish.

We should put into law the obligation to proactively detect harm and report it.

The word “detect” (or similar) does not appear in the bill, and nothing in it requires a platform to tell the Australian Federal Police, eSafety or anyone else what it finds.

Three specific additions would give Australia a count of its own.

First, a requirement to proactively look for harm occurring on platforms, perhaps gated behind a certain level of risk under the assessment guidelines the duty describes.

Second, every service with Australian users should have to report the child sexual exploitation it detects, grooming included, to an Australian body or global counterpart like the US centre.

Third, name a domestic designated body where reports need to be sent.

None of this would reduce the annual figure. It would likely push the figure up because it would compel services that are not currently required to report.

Until platforms have to look and tell an Australian body what they find, the Australian Federal Police’s annual figures will only reflect how hard American companies voluntarily looked.

Joel Scanlan is the academic co-lead of the CSAM Deterrence Centre, which is a partnership between the University of Tasmania and Jesuit Social Services, which operates Stop It Now! Australia, a therapeutic service providing support to people who are concerned with their own, or someone else’s, feelings towards children. He has received funding from the Australian Research Council, Australian Institute of Criminology, the eSafety Commissioner, Lucy Faithfull Foundation and the Internet Watch Foundation.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/14/australias-digital-duty-of-care-bill-needs-these-three-changes-to-tackle-online-child-sexual-exploitation/

The political firestorm ignited by an episode of One Nation’s satirical animated series Please Explain was one of those rare moments in Australian politics that has brought together Labor, the Coalition, Greens and the crossbench.

The July episode “Don’t Be Hastie” depicted Western Australian Liberal frontbencher and former Australian Defence Force member Andrew Hastie. In it, he’s labelled a “traitor” for testifying against alleged war criminal Ben Roberts-Smith and supporting Labor’s “evil hate speech legislation”.

This sparked a fierce response from Hastie. He called Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce “lying cowards” and demanding they delete the video or explain why he and other veterans are being called traitors.

The video also prompted a spirited response from Tasmanian senator and former soldier Jacqui Lambie. She described the episode as “absolutely disgusting” and called Hanson “nothing less than a bloody coward”.

While the Coalition has wobbled on how to respond to the unprecedented rise of One Nation, Hastie has been one of the few in the Liberal Party to take the fight directly to Hanson.

But this episode reveals more than just a political scuffle. It provides a window into the role of humour in contemporary far-right politics.

As the far right continues to surge in Australia and internationally, understanding the creative and unconventional ways they try to mainstream and normalise their ideas is increasingly important.

Please explain… political cartoons

Please Explain is a 2D animated online cartoon produced by Stepmates Studios for One Nation since 2021. One of its co-creators, Mark Nicholson, is standing as a candidate for the party in the Victorian state election in November.

The series, which draws on the tone and style of the irreverent US animated sitcom South Park, is now in its fourth season. A feature-length spin-off film was released earlier this year.

When One Nation initially commissioned the cartoon, it described the series as a “satirical, animated series that was partly educational, and a whole lot of fun”. It would, the party claimed, “deliver a humorous yet sobering glimpse into the Australian political arena” and reach younger and politically disengaged audiences.

Together, the cartoons have generated millions of views on One Nation’s social media channels. There’s also been extensive secondary media coverage, helping keep the party in the headlines. The cartoons have been incorporated into One Nation’s fundraising and merchandising.

But besides being an attention-grabbing form of political advertising, Please Explain fulfils important political functions for One Nation. The cartoons provide a medium for Hanson and the party to prosecute their arguments, ridicule marginalised communities, and attack their political opponents – all while claiming it’s “just a joke”.

Humour doing serious work

Please Explain is a textbook example of how the contemporary far right seeks to launder extreme and exclusionary ideas through the “seductive force” of humour, fiction and popular culture.

The strategy of seeding far-right ideas in mainstream culture is known as metapolitics. It’s underpinned by the idea that cultural change precedes political change.

Frivolous, playful and ironic forms of communication and expression, such as humorous memes and animations, are increasingly seen by the far right as powerful tools for popularising and mainstreaming their ideas among broader audiences.

The satirical animated world of Please Explain gives One Nation greater freedom to express views it would be reluctant to articulate in other settings.

One Nation was comfortable with a fictionalised Hastie – and by extension, the numerous current and former SAS soldiers who testified against Roberts-Smith – being described as a traitor. But it’s difficult to imagine Hanson making the same claim at a press conference or on the floor of parliament.

Plausible deniability

The use of humour by the far right isn’t limited to One Nation.

Humour is strategically used by the far right around the world to soften ideological messages and make their content more palatable.

In the United States, humour and ridicule have become hallmarks of the Trump administration and MAGA movement. Since 2024, Donald Trump has been an enthusiastic user of AI slop.

He uses it to ridicule his political enemies and opponents, generate attention and engagement and visualise his ideal world.

Humour provides a degree of plausible deniability and strategic ambiguity. It allows the far right to simultaneously dismiss criticism by claiming something is “just a joke” and cast those who take offence as humourless.

This was perfectly illustrated in Hanson’s interview with Chris Kenny on News24. Hanson appeared bemused and bewildered that Hastie was offended by the episode.

She denied referring to Hastie as a traitor. She accused him of “getting his knickers in a knot” and “making a mountain out of a molehill” over “a satirical cartoon”.

This is what gives humour its metapolitical potency. Humour can enable a speaker to test the waters of social acceptability in a way that seems unserious, while simultaneously signalling to audiences that such expression is acceptable.

The far right has used this to try and push the boundaries of what can be said. It shifts perceptions of what is permissible in public discourse to normalise their exclusionary ideas.

Read more:
What is AI slop? Why you are seeing more fake photos and videos in your social media feeds

Time to wrap it up?

The intense and bipartisan reaction to the “Don’t Be Hastie” episode shows that while humour and satire can provide the far right with a shield from criticism and political backlash, that shield is not impenetrable.

Hanson doubled down, dismissing the reaction as a “storm in a teacup” and thanking Hastie for the added publicity. But her deputy leader, Barnaby Joyce, has distanced himself from the episode and apologised to Hastie.

Being seen to mock or denigrate Australian military veterans is dangerous territory for One Nation. Please Explain was commissioned at a time when One Nation was still a fringe minor party. The furore generated by the Hastie episode raises questions about whether the animated series is still fit for purpose.

While the cartoons have certainly helped One Nation spread its message to wide audiences, the irreverent and often deliberately offensive content may be out of step with Hanson and the party’s attempt to position themselves as a viable party of government.

Kurt Sengul receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the NSW government, and the NSW RNA Research & Training Network.

Jordan McSwiney receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the NSW government, and the NSW RNA Research & Training Network.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/14/make-em-laugh-how-one-nation-uses-comedy-to-normalise-harmful-ideas/

Across parts of the internet where young men trade tips on self-improvement, the latest project is scent. Deodorant is out and washing less is in.

These “stinkfluencers” promise that the right aroma will work wonders on attracting a mate.

But while humans can find smells pleasant, or malodorous, or something in between, there’s no evidence we can detect and respond to pheromones, let alone produce one.

Many animals communicate with pheromones, often around sex or marking territory. The problem is what happens when you look for the same sensory hardware in humans.

What is a pheromone?

A pheromone is a chemical messenger made inside the body of one member of a species, such as a cat, that’s secreted or excreted and reliably produces a response in another member of that same species.

It’s like openly broadcasting a chemical signal that is then picked up and acted upon by someone else.

Pheromones were first identified in silk moths back in 1959. That chemical, bombykol, is a sex-attractant released by female silkmoth to draw in mates.

A male silkmoth exposed to this pheromone will beat his wings and walk upwind toward the source. He doesn’t have a choice in the matter and his response is inbuilt, not learnt.

Other animals, such as mice, pigs and cats, release and can sense pheromones. The purpose is usually to attract a mate or mark territory.

Not all animal pheromones have a fragrance

A pheromone isn’t defined by whether you can smell it or by which organ picks it up.

Some pheromones are volatile and smellable. Bombykol, for example, is detected by ordinary smell (olfactory) receptors on the moth’s antennae.

Others aren’t detectable to us at all, such as the feliway diffusers people plug in to chill out their cats.

What makes a chemical a pheromone is the reliability of the response it produces in members of the same species. Not whether it has a fragrance.

Humans don’t have the anatomy to receive the message

For a pheromone to be functional, something has to be able to receive it.

In many four-legged animals, that job falls to the vomeronasal organ, a small structure in the nasal cavity. It’s wired to a dedicated processing station in the brain called the accessory olfactory bulb.

But it doesn’t have to be a dedicated organ. Plenty of pheromones are picked up by the ordinary smelling infrastructure – the lining of the nose in mammals, or, in the case of the silk moth, receptors on the antennae.

Some humans have a vomeronasal pit. But from birth, there are no nerve cells in it connecting to the brain, and no accessory olfactory bulb for a signal to report to.

What’s more, no chemical has ever been found in humans that meets the criteria to be labelled a pheromone.

Can’t sweat do something similar?

So if the signal isn’t there and we couldn’t receive it anyway, could the answer be in our sweat?

Not likely.

For a start, fresh sweat is practically odourless. Sweat is just a mix of 99% water, electrolytes (salts) and then tiny amounts of urea, ammonia and other compounds.

If you stay sweaty and avoid washing yourself, eventually that sweat will provide a cosy breeding ground for bacteria, and that will start to cause a stench. It’s unlikely to be an attractive odour.

But people can find smells attractive, of course. Though this is more likely to be due to positive associations, such as fancying someone or being romantically involved with them.

Read more:
Why humans care so much about body odour, and what it really tells us

What about the T-shirt study?

In a 1995 study that gets a lot of play in the pop-psych and maxxing communities, male students wore a T-shirt for two consecutive nights after not washing with soap or using deodorants or other fragrant products.

Female students sniffed and rated six T-shirts each.

Both groups of students had also given samples for gene testing. Each woman was given three shirts worn by men whose major histocompatibility complex (MHC) genes (the ones her immune system uses to recognise invaders) were similar to her own, and three worn by men whose MHC genes were different.

The main result implied women preferred the smell of T-shirts worn by men with different MHC genes. But, among women taking the contraceptive pill, the preference switched. They rated men with similar genes as smelling better.

The interpetation was that women could sniff out men who are “immune-system compatible.” In other words, people with more variety in their MHC genes have more tools to fight off infection. So being attracted to mates whose MHC genes are different from yours means any resulting children will have stronger immune systems.

The idea didn’t come out of nowhere. Mate choice is influenced by scent in many other vertebrate species, and MHC has a role.

But the study doesn’t hold up well

Despite how T-shirt study caught the public imagination, there are two problems for pheromone maxxing.

First, the results don’t hold up all that well. A 2020 meta analysis of all the studies that tested for MHC-odour effects in humans found no overall effect.

It also found evidence of publication bias. That happens when people get more exited about publishing their positive results, and when journals prefer the eye-catching stories.

We suggest that showering with soap and using deodorant is still the best route to maxxing olfaction-attraction.

Read more:
Would Michelangelo’s David pass a looksmaxxing audit?

Rob Brooks receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Samuel Cornell 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.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/14/skipping-showers-is-the-latest-trend-but-is-there-any-science-to-pheromone-maxxing/

On the night of 17 Nov. 2025, Brazilian federal agents pulled banker Daniel Vorcaro off the tarmac at Sao Paulo’s Guarulhos airport as he prepared to board a private jet. He was initially detained as a flight risk and arrested a few months later on multiple charges of bank fraud, corruption and money laundering. He currently awaits judgment.

Now, less than a month before Brazil’s national elections, the so called “Banco Master crisis” threatens to shake the country’s democracy to its core.

At first glance, it was just a financial scandal. Soon after Vorcaro’s detention, Brazil’s Central Bank ordered the liquidation of his bank, Banco Master, at an unprecedented loss estimated at R$ 47.3 billion (some US$9.5 billion). Around 90% of this sum was paid back to account holders and shareholders by the Credit Guarantee Fund (FGC) – the Brazilian equivalent of United State’s Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) – the largest payout in the institution’s history.

Brazil’s financial system was put under strain. Since 2018, Banco Master had signed contracts to manage and provide services to state and municipal retirement accounts and banking institutions. Although Vorcaro, if found guilty, would hardly become the first Brazilian scammer in a banker’s suit, investigations have shown that his methods were as creative as they were brutal.

To shield Master’s operations from public scrutiny, Vorcaro has alleged built a massive network of economists, influencers, bureaucrats, politicians and judges. Some were hired to vouch for the bank, others were, according to prosecutors, openly bribed to allow shady transactions to take place. Whenever the strategy failed, he would allegedly intimidate and blackmail detractors, including journalists and officials, going as far as to plan to harm them physically.

After ten months of investigation, the Banco Master case points to Vorcaro managing to take the country’s political system hostage. The banker seemingly figured out that Brazil no longer had three branches of government that check one another, but three separately purchasable veto points.

Buying access to all three branches of government allowed Vorcaro to hedge against the state. But he could only pull that off because Brazilian politics had become increasingly dysfunctional over the previous decade.

Brazil’s institutional tug of war

In Brazil, Congress executes budget as much as it legislates. The Supreme Court legislates whenever lawmakers are at a standstill – at times overturning congressional decisions. A weakened president, drowned in public debt and pressured by the other branches, has little leverage to push policy forward. This tug of war has become a trademark of contemporary Brazilian politics.

Legislative aggrandizement harkens back to 2016. During then-president Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment trial, then Speaker of the House Eduardo Cunha discovered that the speakership could be converted from a procedural office into a sword hanging over the presidency. Congressional earmarks became mandatory and rose from R$ 12.9 billion ($2.5 billion) in 2017 to R$ 61 billion ($12 billion) in 2026 – roughly a quarter of all discretionary federal spending. A president can no longer withhold them to discipline a coalition.

Judicial activism ramped up during the former president Jair Bolsonaro administration. The now jailed former president’s permanent conflict with the Supreme Court over pandemic policy, disinformation and speech rights pushed justices into a political role they have never relinquished. While it is undeniable that the Court played a key role in safeguarding Brazil’s democracy from Bolsonaro’s coup attempt in 2022, judicial politics has long crossed the line of democratic normalcy.

And even though current president, Lula da Silva, returned to power in 2023 promising to restore Brazil’s democracy,, the institutional imbalance only worsened. Lula administration supported the Court’s conviction of hundreds of participants in the Jan. 8 2023 assault on Brasília and did not hide its enthusiasm when Bolsonaro and his associates were put behind bars. But the recent coordinated attacks from Trump’s White House and far-right congresspeople have only proven that the Presidency is the weakest link of Brazilian politics.

Vorcaro’s web of influence

Into this arrangement walked a banker with liquidity problems and whose pragmatism spoke louder than ideology. Investigators have mapped an influence network remarkable not just for its size, but also for its ecumenism.

On the political right, Vorcaro is said to have offered luxury perks and cash to several politicians, including former Bolsonaro minister and leader of the right-wing coalition senator Ciro Nogueira. Vorcaro’s money also flowed to Dark Horse, the Bolsonaro biopic: Brazil’s financial intelligence unit reports trace roughly US$12.3 million to the Texas fund managing the film’s budget, including US$1.6 million sent in September 2025 under his son, senator (and presidential candidate) Flávio Bolsonaro’s, request.

Some weeks ago, leaked voice messages from Vorcaro’s phone appeared to show Brazil’s far-right wunderkind, congressman Nikolas Ferreira, reaching out to the banker for what seemed to be political favors.

On the political left, Federal Police allege that Bahia’s senator Jaques Wagner, then Lula’s Senate floor leader, received an apartment in Salvador and R$3.5 million ($700,000). Investigations also showed that, as early as 2018, Bahia’s state governor Rui Costa, who later served as Lula’s Chief of Staff, favored Vorcaro’s businesses by allowing public servants to take high-interest loans linked to Banco Master.

And then there is the Judiciary, where the allegations are gravest and the evidence most treacherous. Supreme Court Justice Dias Toffoli stepped aside from the Banco Master inquiry in February after the press revealed at least R$35 million ($7 million) in payments from Vorcaro-linked funds to a Paraná resort in which he held a stake. Toffoli denies any wrongdoing.

The son of another Supreme Court Justice, Kássio Nunes Marques, received R$281,600 ($56,000) through a consultancy paid by the bank, the investigation shows.

Then we have Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who is often treated as Bolsonaro’s nemesis, facing the most explosive claim: the law firm of his wife, Viviane Barci de Moraes, signed a R$131 million ($25.5 million) contract with Banco Master. Police recovered Vorcaro’s side of conversations with Justice Moraes, which suggest an unusual degree of intimacy between them, even if there is no hard evidence that Moraes acted on any request.

Information on Moraes’s conversations with Vorcaro came from a police report commissioned (and disclosed) by another Supreme Court Justice, André Mendonça, who took over the Banco Master investigations earlier this year. Before being appointed to the Supreme Court in 2022, Mendonça served as Bolsonaro’s Attorney General and Minister of Justice. Now he is at the forefront of an all-out war within the Court’s rival faction, led by Moraes.

Critics on the left have accused Mendonça of weaponizing the Banco Master probe to weaken Moraes and his allies on behalf of the Bolsonaro family’s interests. By doing so, Mendonça further undermines the Court’s legitimacy – which is precisely what the Brazilian far-right has longed for.

The scandal spills over national elections

The irony is that the politicians best positioned to campaign on the Supreme Court’s disgrace are the ones most exposed by the same files. While Flávio Bolsonaro keeps calling for Moraes’s resignation, he has so far failed to explain how he managed to take Vorcaro’s money that should have funded his father’s biopic, but whose actual destination is still unclear.

Meanwhile, Mendonça, himself a pious Evangelical Christian, has become a devotional figure at far-right rallies. His laser-focus on Moraes’s potential wrongdoings – while turning a blind eye to all other political actors that crossed lines to benefit a banker who profited off of pensioners, public servants, and small investors – seem to be Flávio Bolsonaro’s lifeline in what is poised to be one of the tightest Brazilian presidential races to date.

Lula, in turn, has his hands tied. Although he does not seem to be implicated in Vorcaro’s scheme, he kept silent for a long time to avoid being dragged into an institutional crisis that mostly affected the other government branches. He only broke the silence a few days ago, as the rift within the Supreme Court became overt and unsustainable, and demanded every file in the Banco Master case to be unsealed.

It might be too late for Lula to take a stand on yet another corruption scandal that rocks Brazil in electoral season. While Lula’s support of investigations will hardly improve his polling numbers, it may lead to new revelations that could change the race’s outlook.

But the Brazilian presidency is still up for grabs. If a weakened Lula gets reelected in October, he will face a challenge greater than just preserving Brazil’s democracy. The mission of a fourth Lula administration will be to fix an increasingly dysfunctional political system, addressing the mounting grievances and preventing new scandals from further undermining Brazilian politics.

In case Flávio Bolsonaro gets elected, it is likely that the Banco Master scandal will be swept under the rug, but only after he manages to push for the impeachment of his opponents in the Supreme Court. Replacing sitting justices with ideological allies has been an integral part of the far-right’s authoritarian playbook, from Hungary to the United States.

In that case, the banker will have not just funded Brazil’s institutional downfall, but planted the seeds of a full-fledged democratic backsliding.

Guilherme Casarões não presta consultoria, trabalha, possui ações ou recebe financiamento de qualquer empresa ou organização que poderia se beneficiar com a publicação deste artigo e não revelou nenhum vínculo relevante além de seu cargo acadêmico.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/14/banking-scandal-rocks-brazils-politics-and-the-countrys-presidential-election-in-october/

Old age and forgetfulness seem to go hand in hand. But my colleagues and I found that memories actually becomes less precise, not entirely forgotten. Our study, published in the journal Cerebral Cortex, shows how the brain blends related experiences as you age rather than replaying the exact one you need.

Memory is a complicated process. Even when everything’s working as it should, the way people remember specific events has many parts.

Say you have a conversation with a friend. The first stage of memory is when you’re experiencing, feeling and perceiving details of an event as it happens. The second stage involves storing these details in your brain’s file cabinet. The third stage covers when you need to search that file cabinet for just the right file when, a week later, you want to remember that conversation with your friend. This last retrieval stage is what many people think of as memory.

Imagine that when your brain was retrieving information from that conversation with your friend, it accidentally combined details from that conversation with one you had with your spouse that morning. When you then try to remember the conversation with your friend, you actually pull the file for the conversation with your spouse instead. This kind of mix-up might be an example of what happens with the aging brain.

Why it matters

Remembering people and events is important for many social activities. Confusing people’s names can be embarrassing. The fear of confusing memories can even lead to social isolation.

Scientists already know that confusing memories happens more often than forgetting them altogether. What’s less clear is how the brain gets confused.

My team’s study tried to understand when in the memory process these mix-ups happen and how the brain’s memory center, called the hippocampus, plays a role.

The hippocampus is involved in all stages of memory. The patterns of neural firing that occur during the first stage of memory – the initial experience of talking with your friend – often recur while your brain is filing that memory away and later when retrieving it.

For our study, we scanned the brains of young, middle-aged and older adults while they went through those same three stages of memory. While in the scanner, they briefly saw images of a face at the top of the screen and an image of either a scene or an object, such as a forest or an apple, on the bottom of the screen.

We told participants to imagine the person at the top interacting in the scene or with the object. Each image pair served as a separate “event.”

They then relaxed for 20 minutes while we continued to record their brain activity. Finally, they took a memory test in which a face they had previously seen reappeared on top with four images below. Participants had to remember which of those images had previously been paired with the face. We repeated this test several times to gauge how well people remembered links between faces and scenes and objects across events.

We found that older people had more memory mix-ups than young adults. For instance, they were more likely to falsely remember a face that was initially paired with an apple as having been paired with a forest. Older people were also less likely to repeat the same brain activity patterns seen when they first experienced, stored and retrieved a specific memory. Surprisingly, even when older adults did repeat the original brain patterns, they were even more likely to confuse their memories.

Our study provides new evidence that the hippocampus is inappropriately changing memories between different memory phases as one gets older.

What still isn’t known

Research in young adults, including those in our study, suggests that the hippocampus is supposed to engage in the same neural firing patterns when remembering an event as when first experiencing it.

But the older adults who made more memory mix-ups than younger participants showed these same neural patterns. So what is the brain signature when older adults get a memory right? Are other brain regions outside the hippocampus helping? We did not get a good answer for these questions from our study.

What’s next

Researchers are still learning how different brain regions talk to one another. One of the next frontiers in neuroscience is understanding how electrically stimulating the hippocampus prevents memory loss or restores lost memories.

Future interventions might try to strengthen the hippocampus to prevent it from changing a memory after it’s stored. Researchers already have some ideas for this: intensive exercise, mindfulness training, brain stimulation and even recording memory cues on smartphones.

But researchers still need to investigate whether changing the hippocampus can lead to stable, consistent memories over time.

The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.

Ian McDonough receives funding from The National Institutes of Health.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/14/why-does-your-brain-mix-up-memories-a-new-study-examines-how-memories-are-misplaced-in-your-brains-filing-cabinets/

Online shopping has changed what consumers expect from delivery. Goods move between warehouses and stores to reach homes and businesses quickly, often within days or even hours. That speed depends on a vast transportation system and the people who keep it moving.

Our new research on migrant labour in Canada’s trucking industry highlights how the pressure to move goods quickly and at low cost shapes the conditions under which drivers work.

We surveyed 203 immigrant truck drivers online, then interviewed 33 migrant drivers from different countries and with different immigration and employment statuses. We also spoke with 14 people working across the trucking industry.

Across our survey and interviews, drivers described long working days, uneven pay and long stretches away from their families. Some migrant drivers also said their immigration status made it harder to refuse difficult working conditions or speak up when they felt they were being treated unfairly.

Freight rates, schedules, pay structures and contracting arrangements can all determine how much of the pressure reaches the driver.

Competition pushes costs down

Canada’s trucking industry changed after deregulation in the late 1980s. Statistics Canada documented how the 1987 Motor Vehicle Transport Act relaxed restrictions on entering the industry and increased competition between carriers.

Today, large carriers compete alongside smaller companies and owner-operators. Brokers and subcontractors can also create several steps between the company that needs goods moved and the driver who eventually hauls them.

This competition can create an incentive throughout the industry to complete trips as cheaply and efficiently as possible.

One migrant driver described how competition plays out: “There’s a lot of people who are ready to go low for the rate.” If one company is offered $1,500 to move a load, he explained, another might offer $1,300.

Driving is only part of the job

Much of a truck driver’s work happens when the truck is not moving. Drivers inspect their vehicles, wait while trailers are loaded and unloaded, cross borders and deal with traffic, bad weather and mechanical problems. For long-haul drivers, these activities can add hours to a trip.

Many long-haul drivers are paid according to distance travelled. Pay practices vary by company, but a trip can take much longer than the time spent actually driving. A driver may spend hours waiting, completing required inspections or being held up at a border. That time does not always translate into additional pay.

A February 2026 report by Justice for Truck Drivers and the West Coast Trucking Association found that 74 per cent of federally regulated drivers were not paid for all hours worked. Among long-haul drivers, 77 per cent reported unpaid work time. The report also found that 41 per cent of drivers paid by mileage said they were not paid for the full distance they drove.

Under federal labour standards, paying drivers by the mile is legal. Employers must still pay for working time and ensure mileage-based earnings meet at least the federal minimum wage. Required tasks such as vehicle inspections count as work, while some waiting or layover periods may not. Some unpaid time reported by drivers could therefore violate labour standards, although the survey cannot determine whether every unpaid hour was illegal.

Our interviews show what these gaps in compensation can look like from the driver’s perspective. One driver put it simply: “We spend a lot of time on the road; certain times we don’t get paid.”

Another driver described the personal cost of long-haul work: “You sleep on the long road, away from your comfort, away from your family.” At times, he said, “the pay is not even worth the stress.”

Not every participant described trucking this way. Some spoke about good employers, decent incomes and the independence trucking can provide. Concerns about long hours, unpaid waiting time and low pay came up repeatedly, however, especially among temporary migrants.

Immigration status affects workers’ choices

Long hours and unpaid work are not unique to migrant drivers, but for some workers, immigration status can make changing jobs more difficult.

Open work permit holders can change employers, while workers with employer-specific permits must apply for a new permit to do so. Although they may request authorization to start a new job while the application is processed, changing employers can still involve finding a new sponsor, navigating immigration requirements and risking a loss of income.

Several participants told us that this dependence made them more cautious about refusing work, negotiating pay or speaking up about unfair treatment. One driver explained that some immigrants may accept an employer’s offer without negotiating because they need “to make sure you have some food on the table.”

Others described being given less desirable routes, working longer hours, experiencing discrimination or feeling “less secure about speaking up if something is unfair.”

These constraints do not mean migrant drivers have no agency. Some participants still found ways to improve their situation by changing employers, joining worker organizations or becoming owner-operators. But their experiences show that workers do not all have the same bargaining power when problems arise.

Canada has also created a specific open-work-permit pathway for some temporary workers who are being abused or are at risk of abuse in relation to their jobs.

A more sustainable trucking system

Canada’s supply chains depend on truck drivers. Most consumer goods and commodities are delivered by truck at some point, making trucking a major link in the movement of goods.

Addressing unpaid time, wage pressure and difficult working conditions matters for both drivers and the reliability of the system Canadians depend on.

Better enforcement of labour standards, pay that reflects the full time and distance required to complete trips, closer oversight of subcontracting and making it easier for workers to change jobs could improve working conditions in trucking.

A recurring sentiment in our interviews was that drivers’ contribution is often overlooked. As one migrant driver told us: “People don’t really realize how important truck drivers are. Without us, nothing moves.”

Recognizing that contribution also means improving the conditions under which the work is done.

Émile Baril receives funding from the CFREF Migrant Integration in the mid-21st Century: Bridging Divides and from the Institute for Research on Migration and Society (IRMS)

Juliana Tinoco Sampedro receives funding from the Institute for Research on Migration and Society (IRMS)

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/14/canadas-fast-delivery-comes-at-a-cost-for-migrant-truck-drivers/

A recent United Nations report has stated the world will likely overshoot the 1.5 C target by 2030 set out in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement.

Tree planting has become one of the most appealing symbols of climate action. It can be easily accounted for, visible and easy to communicate: more trees means more carbon being absorbed, a cooler planet. Everyone gets the point.

Global initiatives now promise restoration on a vast scale, including the Bonn Challenge goal of restoring 350 million hectares of degraded and deforested land by 2030.

But a tree is not automatically a climate solution, and land without dense tree cover is not necessarily degraded. When tree planting targets natural grasslands, shrublands and savannas, well-meaning efforts can replace one ecosystem with another, reduce water availability and threaten livelihoods.

In 2007, the African Union launched the Great Green Wall Initiative; a plan to stop southern expansion of the Sahara Desert by planting trees and restoring landscapes across 22 countries from Senegal to Djibouti. Yet, almost 20 years later, the initiative has had mixed results.

What truly works is simple: plant trees for restoration in the right ecosystems.

Drylands are active ecosystems

Drylands, including grasslands, shrublands and savannas, are often characterized by what they seem to lack: water, dense vegetation or agricultural potential. Yet they cover about 40 per cent of the Earth’s surface, support billions of people and play an important role in the year-to-year variability of the global carbon cycle — changes in the carbon absorbed and released from one year to the next.

Dryland ecosystems have evolved around low and highly variable rainfall, recurrent drought and disturbance. Native grasses, shrubs, scattered trees and biological soil crusts are not signs of an ecosystem needing restoration. They are parts of a functioning biome.

That distinction matters because global restoration targets can identify these naturally open ecosystems as candidates for tree cover. Ecologists have warned that planting trees to expand into old-growth grasslands and savannas can damage biodiversity and ecosystems rather than restore them. Planting trees may result in more woody cover, but the landscape itself may register ecological and diversity loss.

Why tree planting in drylands can backfire

Firstly, trees use water. In some locations, appropriate native trees can provide shade, habitats, food and carbon storage. The problem is large-scale forestation that ignores the water balance.

Planting ill-suited trees in water-limited ecosystems can substantially reduce the volume of water flowing through rivers or streams and create a trade-off between carbon storage and water supply. The trade-off can affect groundwater levels, downstream ecosystems, farming and household water security.

Secondly, carbon is not the only component to bear in mind. Open vegetation and light-coloured soils often reflect more sunlight than a dark tree canopy. Converting them to forest lowers an area’s albedo — a measure of how much sunlight a surface reflects — and increases how much solar energy is absorbed.

Research shows that albedo change can offset a substantial share of the climate benefits expected from additional tree cover, with especially important consequences in some drylands. Counting tonnes of carbon while ignoring this biophysical effect can exaggerate the benefit of tree planting.

Forms of restoration that work in drylands

Farmer-managed natural regeneration can protect and manage native trees and shrubs that resprout from existing roots, stumps or seeds. In Niger, farmers’ regeneration of white acacia — a thorny tree native to parts of Africa and West Asia — and other useful species helped regreen approximately five million hectares without relying on mass seedling campaigns. Because farmers select and manage the regrowth, the approach can be adapted to crops, livestock and locally valued species.

In Burkina Faso, farmers have also revived and improved zaï, which entails planting pits that collect runoff and concentrate manure or compost around crops. Research on soil and water conservation shows how zaï and related practices can rehabilitate degraded land and improve production under difficult rainfall conditions. Here, restoration is not defined as making the landscape look like a forest. It is defined by recovering soil function, vegetation and livelihoods.

Other places may require protecting native grass cover, managing grazing pressure, restoring seasonal mobility, controlling invasive species, conserving biological soil crusts or assisting the recovery of locally appropriate shrubs and trees. No single technique works for all; you just need to do what works for your situation. That is precisely the point.

Focus on restoring ecosystems, not planting trees

Tree planting can be valuable in deforested ecosystems and where locally appropriate species, water availability, land tenure and long-term ownership align. Growing trees alongside agricultural crops or livestock and allowing plants to naturally regenerate can also be effective in dryland farms. The mistake is turning those successes into a universal rule that equates more trees with a better climate.

Governments and donors should ask whether a project restores the natural ecosystem, protects water and retains native biodiversity before campaigning for tree planting.

Drylands are not failed landscapes. They are distinctive ecosystems that store carbon, sustain biodiversity and support people. We must not force forests where they do not belong and need to start valuing the life already adapted to thrive there.

Joy Kehinde Adebisi receives funding from Western University Graduate Research Funds.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/14/planting-trees-in-the-wrong-places-is-not-a-climate-solution/

Numerous types of thoughts pass through your mind over the course of a day. You may be reminiscing about your last vacation, thinking about a news story, recalling a funny conversation or brainstorming ideas for weekend plans. Not only are these thoughts highly prevalent in everyday life, but they also have wide-ranging impacts on how we function.

Our research shows that different types of thoughts are meaningfully tied to emotional well-being. By understanding these connections, individuals can identify new ways to support and improve their mental health.

This is especially pressing given the global increase in mental-health challenges, compounded by the shortage and burnout of mental-health professionals. Given these challenges, we believe expanding mental-health approaches to include prevention, in addition to intervention, may be important.

Prevention initiatives will require an understanding of how clinically significant thought patterns arise in order to inform effective prevention strategies, which may ultimately prevent everyday stress from turning into mental-health problems.

As a team of cognitive scientists who study mind-wandering and its ties to emotional well-being — as well as the brain and eye-movement patterns that support the wandering mind — we carried out several studies to examine the relationship between thoughts and emotions. In short, we found that what people think about is strongly linked to how they feel.

Thoughts and feelings

In a series of studies, we first set out to understand this relationship in the student population in Canada and the United States. Over the course of a week, we sent several short surveys to individuals every day asking them to report what type of thoughts they think about and how they feel. This allows us to capture their naturalistic thoughts and emotions in the moment as they go about their everyday life.

We found that individuals tend to report worse mood when they experience off-task thoughts, often referred to as mind-wandering (for example, you may be thinking about what to make for dinner tonight while you are at work). In contrast, they tend to report better mood when they feel in control of their thoughts and can choose what to focus on (for example, your thoughts were focused on your partner during an important conversation with them).

Individuals also report better mood when their thoughts flow freely from one topic to another. For example, your thoughts may go from childhood memories to a funny video to an upcoming vacation. The types of thoughts people experience are strongly tied to mood in the moment.

Although these studies were helpful places to start, we were also curious about what the broader body of research found, especially whether the content of people’s thoughts matter for their mood. We identified 76 studies that examined a similar relationship, and performed a systematic review and meta-analysis to see what the overall evidence shows.

Our review found that off-task thoughts are generally linked to feeling worse, especially when these thoughts feel out of an individual’s control, when they are ruminative and when they focus on negative topics. Importantly, thoughts can be linked to better mood, when they focus on the future or positive topics and when they flow freely from topic to topic.

Put simply, what we think about can impact our happiness.

Paying attention to thinking patterns

How can people leverage this knowledge to improve their mental health? An important initial step involves self-awareness, the process of paying attention to your thinking patterns and how it impacts how you feel.

Although our findings suggest that certain types of thoughts are linked to mood variations in the general population, these relationships may be different for each individual. It is crucial to identify the thoughts that positively and negatively impact your own happiness.

The next step is to explore strategies that can change the relationship you experience with your thoughts or directly change those thoughts. First, it’s important to normalize off-task thinking and even negative thoughts; they will arise for almost everyone in a given situation. They are not a “bug” in human thinking, but more likely a feature. Therefore, try adopting a mindful state of awareness, which involves not judging yourself and your thoughts, but instead acknowledging that negative thoughts come and go.

Second, let’s consider ways to increase the types of thoughts that are linked to positive mood and decrease the types of thoughts that are linked to negative mood. For example, if you noticed that ruminative thoughts (for example, on a heated argument with a partner) put you in a negative mood, consider established strategies such as mindfulness, which has been shown to reduce ruminative thoughts.

It’s worth noting that not every strategy works for every type of thought or for everyone; the key is to find what works best for you and the types of thoughts you want to change.

Although we focused mainly on how thoughts can impact emotional well-being, it’s important to note that the opposite can also be true: how you feel may also impact what you think about. These strategies may help alter both thoughts and emotions.

Noticing where thoughts go and learning how to change those thoughts as desired may help people feel happier and prevent everyday stress from developing into more serious mental-health challenges.

Julia Kam receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council

Caitlin Mills receives funding from the National Science Foundation and the Gates Foundation. She is affiliated with AugmentED, a program of AERDF.

Jessica Andrews-Hanna receives funding from the National Institutes of Health.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/14/daydreams-mind-wandering-and-rumination-what-you-think-about-can-affect-your-feelings-and-mood/