Around 40% of the EU’s population lives within 50 kilometres of the coast, and large parts of the continent’s economy, climate resilience and wellbeing depend on healthy oceans and seas. Yet despite this close connection, understanding of how the ocean works – and how human activity impacts it – remains limited. “You have
A ship with a crane floats in the Mediterranean sun at a marina in Marseille, France. The crane whirs as it hauls waste from the seabed and, when the wire breaks the surface, the gripper at the end is clutching a rubber tyre covered in algae. As the day advances, rusted metal ship
Stefan Wolff, University of Birmingham and Tetyana Malyarenko, National University Odesa Law Academy In a surprise announcement on February 10, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said that his administration was preparing to hold presidential elections before the middle of May. Alongside these elections, he is reported to be planning to hold a referendum on
Being prepared for emerging infectious diseases is not only about responding to emergencies. It also means having the right research systems in place every day, so that new knowledge can be generated quickly and shared across borders when needed. This is the ambition behind the European Clinical Research Alliance on Infectious Diseases (Ecraid),
For Dr Pavla Bouchalová, a cancer researcher in the department of biochemistry at Masaryk University in Brno, Czechia, answering complex questions about how colorectal tumours behave requires access to data, samples and analytical tools that go far beyond a single laboratory. Through an EU-backed initiative called canSERV, Bouchalová’s team gained access to colorectal cancer
Florian Bonnet, Ined (Institut national d’études démographiques); Carlo Giovanni Camarda, Ined (Institut national d’études démographiques); France Meslé, Ined (Institut national d’études démographiques), and Josselin Thuilliez, Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) For over a century and a half, life expectancy has steadily increased in the wealthiest countries. Spectacular climbs in longevity have
Georgios Samaras, King’s College London A year into Donald Trump’s second presidency, he is pressing ahead with a volatile agenda that tests the limits of the international order. Europe, by contrast, looks disorganised in the face of the threats Trump is making to annex Greenland and strategically hesitant overall. Rather than setting out
Outside the mountain town of Sabiñánigo in northern Spain, an abandoned chemical factory stands on land still scarred by decades of Lindane production – a pesticide now banned worldwide – which left behind thousands of tonnes of toxic waste. Production ended in the 1980s, but the pesticide’s main by-product, hexachlorocyclohexane (HCH), continues to
Francesco Grillo, Bocconi University European leaders must agree on how to respond to the accusation that their continent faces “civilizational erasure”. These were the strongest words used in the most strongly-worded national security strategy ever released by a US government, making it clear that allyship is no longer a given. And yet, what
When Professor Alicja Krzemień set out to turn one of Poland’s largest coal-mining waste heaps into a thriving meadow, she faced an uphill battle. Together with fellow researchers in an EU-funded collaboration called RECOVERY, her team revitalised the barren terrain at the Janina mine in Libiąż, southern Poland. They applied soil substitutes, aiming