Environment & Biodiversity

№ 2026-57 · October 2026 · 20 min

Escaping the Pollution–Poverty Trap

Forty-eight countries, 36 of them in sub-Saharan Africa, are trapped in two or more degradation cycles, and they hold 78% of the world's extremely poor. Polluting cooking fuel, missing sanitation and forest loss move together even among countries at the same income. Fifty-two countries escaped at least one cycle after 2000, through clean-cooking drives, sanitation campaigns and forest recovery, and cut extreme poverty by a median 26 points, more than twice as much as those that stayed trapped. Air pollution is the cycle growth has not broken.

№ 2026-47 · October 2026 · 17 min

The Geography of Human Pollution Exposure

Pollution and people concentrate in the same places: the average person breathes air 1.53 times dirtier than the average inhabited square kilometre. But most of a city's pollution is not its own — in the median city the background 165 km away is 79% as polluted as the centre, and the wind carries city smoke downwind. Exposure is most unequal by income: 41.7 µg/m³ for lower-middle-income countries, 3.2 times the high-income level — so clean air needs regional, not just urban, action.

№ 2026-34 · October 2026 · 17 min

Mapping the Interdependencies of Twenty-First-Century Risk

Across 191 countries and 18 indicators, about half of what makes risks travel together is poverty: average link strength halves once income is held constant. What survives is a tighter web centred on conflict, displacement, resource dependence and rapid population growth. Countries stressed in three or more domains are almost all unstable, and the hubs point to where intervention breaks the most links at once.

№ 2026-33 · October 2026 · 17 min

S-Curves Against the Clock

Electric-car sales are on an S-curve that takes them from 10% to 90% in about ten years, and solar power in about seventeen, but the energy system's low-carbon share is moving at a pace that would take 170 years. A transparent race model shows that keeping peak warming below 2°C needs the whole system to move at roughly wind's pace, and below 1.7°C at solar's. The budget for 1.5°C runs out around 2028 on every path.

№ 2026-27 · October 2026 · 17 min

The Pollution–Climate Risk Nexus

Extreme wildfires have more than doubled in two decades, methane rose at record pace in 2020–21 as warming wetlands released more, and ozone already cuts global soybean yields by about an eighth. Mapping five pollution–climate feedback loops shows where each can be cut most cheaply, from leaking gas wells to cooking stoves.

№ 2026-24 · October 2026 · 18 min

The Polycrisis Apocalypse

What if the polycrisis outran humanity's capacity to manage it? The Polycrisis Apocalypse, a term coined by H Heuristics, names a slow collapse of industrial civilisation followed by centuries of regression. Past collapses, a stress-versus-repair model readers can run and today's ledger of ten crisis domains show how it could happen, and what keeps it hypothetical.

№ 2026-10 · September 2026 · 20 min

Climate Litigation Goes South

Climate litigation was a northern sport: a Dutch foundation, a German grandmother, an American youth cohort. In the past decade the centre of gravity has shifted south, where courts have ordered governments to implement their own climate laws, blocked coal plants and deforestation, and written a right to a stable climate into constitutions that never mentioned it.