Six hundred and thirty-nine of the missing were at work on hydropower projects when the mountain came down.

That figure sits inside a bigger one: 1,130 dead and nearly 4,500 unaccounted for a week after a glacier on Nepal’s Langtang Lirung fractured at around 5,200 metres on 26 August. The ice took rock with it, the rock became a debris flow, and the flow ran through Rasuwa, Nuwakot, Dhading and Kavre, into the Kathmandu Valley and across the border, where it buried the Gyirong crossing into Tibet.

Beijing has said the glacier gave way because of long-term warming. Daanish Mustafa, professor of critical geography at King’s College London, told Anadolu this week that the official account will have to stand until independent scientists can get to the site, which will take time.

What he is more confident about is the shape of the event. In the high Himalaya and the Karakoram, he argues, a disaster like this is always coming. The ground moves, the ice moves, and nothing anyone builds will alter that. Nobody could have prevented it.

That sounds like fatalism. It is the opposite.

The mountain sets the hazard, but the map of the dead is drawn by people

Mustafa has spent three decades studying what he calls hazardscapes: the idea that a flood or a landslide is only half natural. The other half is the pattern of roads, settlements, canals and power stations that decides who is standing in the way when the water arrives. On that reading, the question to ask of Langtang is not why the glacier failed. It is why so many people were positioned directly beneath it, and what put them there.

The answer, in part, is electricity. Nepal’s valleys are threaded with hydropower schemes, and the workers who staff them live and sleep at the bottom of steep gorges by the water they are there to harness. A debris flow does not need to breach a dam to be lethal to the people around one. But Mustafa’s warning goes further than the workforce.

Dams in high mountains, he told Anadolu, amplify and accentuate the damage from events like this one. A surge of ice and rock that meets a reservoir has somewhere new to go, and something new to break.

He names the countries that should be listening. India, China and Pakistan are all in the middle of building large dams in exactly this environment, on rivers fed by the same unstable ice. Nepal’s toll is counted in the hundreds and low thousands. Put the same avalanche above a major reservoir with cities downstream, and Mustafa’s estimate is that the deaths would be counted in millions.

There is a familiar reflex after a disaster of this size, which is to promise that it will not happen again. Mustafa’s point is that it will, and that the useful work lies elsewhere. He lists what actually helps: public education, evacuation drills, communication systems that survive the first minutes of a flood, and monitoring that notices when a glacier begins to shift.

None of it is glamorous. All of it is cheaper than a dam, and all of it assumes that the mountain will do what mountains do.

The harder conversation is about the dams themselves, and whether the power they promise is worth the exposure they create. That is a political choice dressed up as an engineering one. Warming may have loosened the ice on Langtang Lirung, but warming did not decide where the turbines went.

Professor Daanish Mustafa is Professor in Critical Geography in the Department of Geography at King’s College London. His work on water, hazards and climate risk in South Asia has shaped Pakistan’s climate strategy and the UN’s flood response there, and keeps returning to one question: why disasters strike the people they do.

Sixty years after reformers first vowed to tear down the asylum, psychiatric hospitals still hold 62 per cent of the world’s mental health beds and swallow nearly half of all mental health spending. Only 9 per cent of countries have completed the move away from them. The services meant to replace them receive just 11 per cent of the money. The great closure never quite arrived.

That failure sits at the heart of a new argument from researchers at King’s College London. Working with colleagues in Brazil and Chile, they trace how deinstitutionalisation - the movement to close large psychiatric hospitals and build care in the community - began as a political revolt.

To its founders, the asylum was a machine for stripping people of citizenship. Closing it was democratic repair. Half a century on, they argue, that unfinished revolt has been repackaged as a delivery problem.

Somewhere along the way, though, the revolt became a spreadsheet. Global mental health now measures reform in bed reductions, coverage rates and workforce targets. Those numbers matter, yet they only capture what can be counted. They miss the person discharged from hospital into a shelter with less freedom than before. They miss the community service that keeps the old custodial routines running behind a friendlier front door.

Researchers call the first problem transinstitutionalisation. Anyone who has watched it happen calls it abandonment.

The paper’s sharpest move is geographical. Histories of deinstitutionalisation usually orbit the United States and Western Europe, where underfunded closures left people homeless and early idealism curdled into austerity. Yet in South America, the authors show, closing the asylum meant something else.

In Brazil, the anti-asylum movement grew out of the struggle against dictatorship; campaigners tied the end of confinement to the return of democracy itself, and built a national network of community mental health centres to prove the connection.

Argentina passed a rights-based mental health law in 2010, a generation after its own dictatorship had persecuted the psychiatrists who experimented with alternatives.

Chile’s community psychiatry flourished in the early 1970s. The coup crushed it. It returned decades later, dressed in the sober language of cost-effectiveness.

These histories widen what reform can mean. Where the global agenda sees a region of unmet need and treatment gaps, the authors see a tradition of thinking about madness and democracy that the rest of the world could learn from.

They propose three shifts: treat deinstitutionalisation as a historical process rather than a technical fix; stop assuming the North Atlantic is the template every country must follow; and take seriously what patients and survivors know about institutions. People who have lived inside these systems are theorists of them, the paper argues, and their knowledge belongs in the design of whatever comes next.

The stakes are concrete. Involuntary treatment remains routine across much of the world. And where hospitals have closed, coercion has often survived the building that housed it, migrating into shelters and supported housing. Counting beds will never detect that migration, let alone stop it.

The asylum was a building. The logic that filled it - the sorting of people into those who decide and those who are decided for - travels light. The real question for mental health reform is no longer how fast countries can empty their hospitals. It is what kind of citizenship awaits people on the other side of the gate.

Montenegro, C., Szabzon, F., Bowen, S. and da Mosto, D. (2026) ‘Why Deinstitutionalisation Still Matters: Reclaiming a Contested Horizon in Global Mental Health’. PLOS Mental Health
https://journals.plos.org/mentalhealth/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmen.0000699

Dr Cristian Montenegro is Senior Lecturer in Critical Global Health in the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine at King’s College London, where he leads a Wellcome-funded project on psychiatric deinstitutionalisation in Chile and Brazil.

Felipe Szabzon is a researcher in the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine at King’s College London, working between the UK and Brazil on mental health policy and social medicine.

Dr Sofía Bowen is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine at King’s College London, studying work, mental health and citizenship in Santiago, Chile.

Delia da Mosto is a doctoral researcher in the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine at King’s College London, with a focus on community mental health care.

For 65 years the Indus Waters Treaty did something almost nothing else in India-Pakistan relations managed. It held.

It survived three wars, the nuclear tests of 1998, Kargil and Mumbai. Then, on 23 April 2025, a day after militants killed 26 people near Pahalgam in Jammu and Kashmir, India announced the treaty was in abeyance. Pakistan, which irrigates more than nine tenths of its farmland from the Indus system, said any diversion of its water would be treated as an act of war.

That is the headline story, and it is real. But Udisha Saklani, a geographer at King’s College London, argues that the more revealing story is the one playing out inside India - the argument over who gets any additional water New Delhi now seeks to retain or divert within India.

The treaty, signed in 1960 after nine years of World Bank mediation, split six rivers between the two countries. India was allocated the eastern three, the Ravi, Beas and Sutlej. Pakistan was allocated unrestricted use of the waters of the western three, the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab, with India keeping specified rights, including for irrigation and run-of-river hydropower. Its rigidity was the point. It answered the question of entitlement once, so that neither side had to keep asking it.

Pakistan says the treaty can only be altered by mutual consent, and a Court of Arbitration has ruled that India’s suspension does not stop proceedings against it. India rejects the court’s jurisdiction and prefers the treaty’s neutral expert route. Both positions rely on the machinery of a treaty India says it has placed in abeyance.

The moment India stops sharing with Pakistan, it has to start sharing with itself

Within weeks of the suspension, India’s water ministry launched a feasibility study for a 113-kilometre canal linking the Chenab, in Jammu and Kashmir, to the Ravi-Beas-Sutlej system that waters Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan. Jammu and Kashmir objected at once. Its chief minister asked why a territory with its own shortages should export flows downstream, and he has long described the treaty as deeply unfair to his own people. Punjab and Rajasthan, meanwhile, have already staked claims to any additional water.

Saklani’s point is that the word doing all the work here is surplus. Surplus relative to what? To an allocation that India says no longer applies? To the needs of Jammu and Kashmir, which its government says have never been met? Nobody has agreed how much water there is, let alone who is entitled to it, and the claims are arriving anyway. India has a precedent for how that ends. The Sutlej-Yamuna Link canal has Supreme Court orders and decades of negotiation behind it, and it remains unfinished.

The treaty fixed the question. Sixty-five years of arguing about dams, diversions and hydropower took place inside a settled frame of who was entitled to use what, which is why those arguments stayed arguments rather than becoming wars. Suspend that frame and entitlement is reopened all the way down, between countries, between states, between the upstream and the downstream. The government in Delhi may have imagined it was creating greater freedom to retain and use water that would otherwise flow to Pakistan. What it has actually done is reopen the question of how any additional water is allocated at home, among claimants it cannot easily refuse and cannot all satisfy.

India has challenged Pakistan’s entitlement to the water. The harder question, who within India gets to claim it, has only just been asked.

Saklani, U. (2026). The Indus Treaty's suspension: whose water is it anyway? Democracy Asia Magazine, September 2026. https://democracyasia.com/articles/the-indus-treatys-suspension-whose-water-is-it-anyway

Dr Udisha Saklani is a Lecturer in Human Geography and Climate in the Department of Geography at King’s College London. Her research looks at how infrastructure, finance and state institutions shape water and energy across South Asia, and at who gains and who loses when rivers are dammed and divided.

A strange argument is unfolding across the Scottish Highlands. It is not just about wildlife, farming or rewilding. It is about identity.

The animal at the centre of the debate is officially classified by the Scottish Government as a feral pig. Yet many local people call it a wild boar. That distinction might sound technical, but new research suggests it is shaping how communities respond to one of Scotland’s most controversial wildlife stories.

Researchers from King’s College London explored perceptions of free-ranging boar populations in the Highlands, where animals descended from escapes and illegal releases have become established. Their study found that disagreements over what these animals are, have become inseparable from broader questions about nature recovery, rewilding and rural life.

At the heart of the research is an intriguing idea: many people in Scotland have no living memory of coexisting with wild boar.

The species disappeared from Britain centuries ago. Unlike deer, which remain embedded in local culture, management systems and everyday experience, boar have been absent for so long that few shared traditions or institutions exist for dealing with them. The researchers describe this as an “extinction of experience”.

That absence matters because people often make sense of wildlife through experience. When experience is missing, stories can fill the gap.

The study found three broad ways of thinking about these animals.

The dominant perspective viewed them as feral pigs: invasive, damaging and out of place. Farmers, crofters and some residents described concerns about torn-up pasture, damaged fences and threats to livelihoods. For many, coexistence meant controlling populations and reducing impacts.

A second perspective saw them as wild boar: a native species returning to landscapes it once inhabited. People holding this view emphasised ecological benefits and argued that communities should adapt to their presence rather than rely on lethal control.

Between these positions sat a third group, largely associated with rewilding organisations. They recognised both the potential ecological value of boar and the genuine challenges they can create. Their preferred approach combined tolerance, scientific evidence and targeted management where necessary.

Yet perhaps the most fascinating finding concerns the power of storytelling.

Many fears surrounding the animals were based not on direct encounters but on second-hand accounts circulating through local networks, social media and national news coverage. Reports of aggressive behaviour or livestock predation often travelled far beyond the people who claimed to have witnessed them. In environments where scientific data and personal experience are limited, these stories can exert enormous influence.

The researchers argue that this storytelling is not simply background noise. It actively shapes how people understand wildlife and whether they believe it belongs.

As a result, debates about boar have become deeply emotional. The animals are not merely ecological actors. They have become symbols in wider struggles over land use, rural identity and Scotland’s rewilding future.

The study concludes that Scotland’s current approach leaves much of the responsibility for coexistence with individual land managers, while providing limited institutional support and scientific certainty. As wild boar populations continue to expand, similar arguments are likely to emerge in new communities.

The bigger lesson extends beyond wild boar.

When species return after generations of absence, the challenge is not only ecological. It is cultural. Communities must build new knowledge, habits, customs, and relationships that structure everyday life with their new neighbours.

It is also inherently political. In Scotland today, the question is not only whether these animals are feral pigs or wild boar.

It is whether, and how, wild boar can become a part of the fabric of the land and people once more.

Whitehead, T., Schreckenberg, K. & Dawson, T.P. (2026). Feral pigs or wild boar? Emerging interpretations of belonging and coexistence in the Scottish Highlands. Journal of Rural Studies, 127, 104339. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2026.104339

Toryn Whitehead is a doctoral researcher in the Department of Geography at King’s College London. His research focuses on human-wildlife coexistence, rewilding, species reintroductions and the social dimensions of environmental change, particularly in Scotland.

Professor Kate Schreckenberg is a Professor in the Department of Geography at King’s College London whose research examines environment and development, natural resource governance, conservation and the relationships between people and nature.

Professor Terry P. Dawson is Professor of Global Environmental Change in the Department of Geography at King’s College London. His work focuses on biodiversity, ecosystem services, climate change and sustainability, and how environmental change affects society and ecosystems.

In July 2022, the UK recorded 40.3 degrees for the first time in its history. That summer’s heatwaves killed nearly 3,000 more people than expected, cost over 11 million working hours, and saw ten large fires burn across London in a single day, forcing the fire brigade to declare a major incident.

The capital’s flagship answer is the Cool Spaces scheme: libraries, churches, museums and community centres signposted on a map as free refuges from the heat. In a summer when Britain has already broken its wildfire record, thousands of Londoners have used them.

New research asks a harder question. What do they actually fix?

The team interviewed the policy officials who designed the scheme and the people who run its spaces, visiting venues in person during hot weather.

On paper, the model is light-touch. Around 154 venues signed up in 2024, only half of them with air conditioning, open through the heat-health alert season that runs from June to September. Each offers somewhere cooler than outside, drinking water and a seat, and the design assumes someone out and about will stop off briefly and move on. It borrows an idea with pedigree: shared social spaces, from libraries to faith centres, are where communities hold together in a crisis.

The reality the researchers found was warmer and messier.

People did not drop in for ten minutes; many stayed from ten in the morning until five, wanting company, activities and something to do, so providers improvised. One museum turned itself into a free co-working space with Wi-Fi and charging points because everyone nearby lives in small, hot ex-industrial flats. Community centres laid on social lunches.

None of this adaptation came with extra money from the Greater London Authority or the boroughs. Meanwhile the map that anchors the whole scheme exists only online and only in English, in a city where some providers reckon a third of their visitors do not have English as a first language, and where hand-delivered newsletters still beat social media for reaching isolated older residents.

The sharpest finding sits underneath the practical ones. Cool spaces treat the symptom, which is people overheating, while leaving the cause untouched, which is that their homes overheat. Roughly 90 per cent of UK homes are at risk of overheating by 2050 under two degrees of warming, and post-2000s flats already trap residents in bedrooms at 27 degrees with windows that will not open.

Yet retrofitting sits behind energy efficiency in the funding queue, and adaptation loses out to mitigation at every budget round. The researchers name what is happening: depoliticisation. Responsibility for surviving heat drifts from the state to the individual, who must find the map and get themselves to a library, and to the volunteers and librarians who hold the line - some photographing staff-room thermometers for managers in a country with no legal maximum working temperature.

The authors are not calling for the scheme to be scrapped. It builds awareness, uses trusted local places well, and clearly helps people, including some the state struggles to reach.

Their argument is simpler.

A refuge is not a policy. Without funding for the spaces, guidance shaped by how people actually use them, and above all a serious national effort on overheating homes, cool spaces become a way of managing a crisis rather than ending one.

London will get hotter. The question the research leaves hanging is whether the city keeps improving its escape routes, or starts fixing the buildings people are escaping from.

Connor, F., Goodden, A. E., & Porter, J. J. (2026). Escaping the heat: urban heat resilience and public cool spaces. Regional Environmental Change, 26, 168. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-026-02652-5

Anna Goodden is a PhD researcher in the Departments of Political Economy and Geography at King’s College London. Her research explores the challenges of measuring progress towards improving climate resilience of people and infrastructure, with a focus on flood resilience policies in England.

Dr James Porter is a Senior Lecturer in Environment, Science and Policy in the Department of Geography at King’s College London, researching local climate action from flood risk to extreme heat.

In parts of India, carrying a lit flame through a forest can still make you a criminal. The rule dates from 1878, written by a colonial forestry service that saw burning by indigenous communities as a threat to a forest regime organised around timber extraction.

Nearly a century and a half later, the science has moved on. Ecologists now argue that decades of fire suppression have allowed fuel to accumulate in India’s protected areas, contributing to the large fires of recent decades, including those at Bandipur and Sariska. The bans, however, remain.

A new study asks why a policy keeps winning after its scientific case has weakened.

The stakes are hardly marginal. Around 275 million people in India depend on forests, and many rely on fire to manage grazing land and collect products such as mahua flowers and tendu leaves that put food on the table. For many indigenous communities, burning is part of how forests are cared for and managed, shaped by generations of knowledge and practice. The law calls the same act arson.

Drawing on colonial archives, forestry journals dating back to 1875, and interviews with officials and ecologists, the researchers reconstruct how fire suppression became embedded in Indian forest governance. Their answer is uncomfortable.

Suppression persists not simply because the state believes it protects forests, but because it helps make forests governable. By turning fire into a crime, the state acquired a powerful way to draw boundaries around forests, regulate who could enter and what they could do there, and decide which forms of knowledge and land use were legitimate. Fire suppression was therefore never only about extinguishing flames. It was also a way of extending state authority into everyday life in the forest. Over time, this system of control expanded to cover large forest areas under fire suppression.

The striking thing is how this logic persisted beyond colonial rule, even as the reasons for suppressing fire changed. The colonial Forest Department justified restrictions on burning in part through the need to secure timber for railways and ships. After independence, many of these provisions remained in place, now justified in the language of development. From the 1970s and 1980s, fire suppression was increasingly folded into wildlife conservation, as forests were recast as spaces to be protected from human disturbance.

Today, that logic is being renewed once more. India’s forests are increasingly recast as carbon sinks, while community burning is framed as a threat to climate targets. Satellite fire maps lend these interventions a new scientific sheen, turning local fires into data points that can be detected, counted and policed at scale. The justification for controlling fire has changed—from timber extraction, to development, to conservation, and now to climate protection. But the underlying power remains remarkably consistent: the power to decide where fire is permitted, whose practices are legitimate, and how forests should be managed.

Knowledge is part of this machinery. Colonial foresters eventually adopted controlled burning themselves when complete suppression began to damage timber regeneration, while community fire use remained illegal, with the state becoming the only legitimate user of fire. And the recurring figure of the reckless native burning down the nation’s forests, the researchers argue, is a fiction that survives because it is useful: blaming communities keeps the counterevidence of careful, situated fire use safely out of view.

None of this means romanticising every blaze. Fire behaves differently across India’s ecosystems, and the authors acknowledge that governing it will always involve judgment. Their point is that the current law forecloses the judgment of the people who know these landscapes best. Even the Forest Rights Act of 2006, meant to restore land rights to forest dwellers, ties those rights to state-defined standards of sustainable use, which in practice still means no burning.

Repealing the fire provisions of the 1927 Forest Act, which remains in force today, is where the authors argue any honest reform must start.

As wildfire seasons lengthen from California to the Mediterranean, governments everywhere are deciding whether fire is an enemy or an instrument. India’s history offers a warning about what the wrong answer protects.

Sometimes a fire ban is not about the fire at all.

Yadav, K., Tebbs, E., & Schreckenberg, K. (2026). Why fire suppression persists: Territorial politics and the criminalisation of fire in India’s political forests. Antipode, 58, e70192. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.70192

Dr Kapil Yadav completed his PhD in the Department of Geography at King’s College London on contested fire management in India’s forests, and is now a researcher at Royal Holloway, University of London and the Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires, Environment and Society.

Dr Emma Tebbs is a Senior Lecturer in Physical Geography and Earth Observation in the Department of Geography at King’s College London, using satellite data to monitor ecosystems and support conservation.

Kate Schreckenberg is Professor in Environment and Development in the Department of Geography at King’s College London, working on forest governance, livelihoods and equity in conservation.

Illness rarely arrives alone, and it does not arrive evenly. In the UK, South Asian and Black people develop multiple long-term conditions years earlier than their white counterparts, and in the United States the disease burden of Black people in their thirties resembles that of white Americans five to ten years older.

Living with two or more conditions at once means more medication, more appointments, poorer quality of life and earlier death. You would expect medicine to have built a thick file of tested solutions for the people hit hardest and earliest.

A team of researchers went looking for that file. It is nearly empty.

The researchers screened 6,566 studies from nine databases, hunting for healthcare interventions designed to improve health outcomes for minoritised people with multiple long-term conditions, aimed at the health system rather than at patient behaviour.

Fifteen qualified.

Thirteen of those came from the United States, one from Canada, one from Australia. From Europe, home to some of the starkest ethnic health inequalities on record, the count was zero.

The fifteen studies that do exist are encouraging. Five produced improvements in every outcome they measured; nine more improved at least some, from blood pressure and diabetes control to depression, medication adherence and hospital stays. And they succeeded in strikingly similar ways.

Almost all treated mental and physical health together, usually with depression alongside conditions like hypertension, diabetes or cancer, delivered by teams rather than lone clinicians.

They adapted to the lives in front of them: interpreters at every stage, materials rewritten for language and idiom, family members involved where patients wanted them, transport and medication costs covered. Several were built around community health workers who shared patients’ backgrounds and sometimes their conditions, turning trust from an obstacle into an asset.

The authors read the gaps as carefully as the findings. Across all fifteen studies, only one measured any outcome for the providers themselves. It showed no improvement. Decades of research have asked how patients should change - their adherence, their behaviour, their engagement - while barely examining the systems that serve them. This review deliberately reverses the lens, and the near-total silence it finds on provider outcomes suggests medicine still prefers to study the people with the least power in the room.

There are honest limits here. Fifteen mostly small studies, concentrated in US cities and dominated by a handful of conditions, cannot simply be imported into the NHS or any European system; the authors are explicit that the findings may not travel without adaptation.

But that is precisely the point. The feasibility is proven. Minoritised patients with complex conditions can be recruited into high-quality trials, and their outcomes can be improved. Eight of the studies kept over 95 per cent of their participants to the end, which sits uneasily beside the old excuse that such communities are hard to reach. What is missing is not possibility but effort.

For a health service under pressure to manage multiple long-term conditions, the message is awkward and useful in equal measure. The studies that worked relied on multidisciplinary teams, built on community resources and adapted their interventions closely enough that patients signed up and stayed the course. What no European country has yet done is test it on the patients who need it soonest. Six thousand studies produced fifteen answers. The next fifteen should not take so long.

Hayanga, B., Joshi, M., Hartley, K., Oyibo, P., Sarwar, R., Tariq, S., Kashyap, M., & Bécares, L. (2026). Healthcare interventions to improve health outcomes for racially/ethnic minoritised people with multiple long-term conditions: a systematic review and narrative synthesis. BMC Public Health, 26, 2295. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-026-28056-y

Dr Brenda Hayanga is a Research Fellow in the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine at King’s College London, studying how social and structural processes shape the health of minoritised ethnic people across the life course.

Laia Bécares is Professor of Social Science and Health in the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine at King’s College London, researching how racism and discrimination produce inequities in health.

England has a depression problem it can see but struggles to explain.

Around one in five people over 65 lives with depressive symptoms, and the burden falls unevenly: older people in income-deprived areas face roughly two and a half times the risk of their better-off peers.

Map antidepressant prescribing across the country and the pattern concentrates in the post-industrial towns of the North and Midlands and in ageing coastal communities. Now a team of researchers has traced part of that pattern to an unexpected place: the broadband map.

For a decade, the digital divide has been treated as a switch: you are online or you are not. That framing is out of date. Ofcom reports that 12 per cent of rural households still lack basic broadband, against 2 per cent in cities, but the sharper inequality lies in what kind of connection people have once the switch is on.

The stakes are personal as well as technical: national survey data show that 41 per cent of older adults who stay offline report feeling lonely, close to double the rate among internet users. The researchers combined quarterly antidepressant prescribing data for every neighbourhood in England with detailed measures of broadband coverage and speed, alongside the conventional furniture of the built environment - buildings, shops, clinics, green space, transport.

They call what emerged a digital quality gradient. Connectivity runs on a slope, from crawling sub-30 Mbps lines up to gigabit fibre, and where a neighbourhood sits on that slope carries real information about the depression burden of its older residents, even after the physical environment is accounted for.

Part of the achievement is in how the knowledge was built: the team used models that let the relationship bend and vary from place to place, rather than forcing one straight line through the whole country. The flexible models predicted prescribing patterns far better than the standard approach.

The straight line was hiding the story.

The gradient does not mean the same thing everywhere. In areas with high concentrations of low-paid and long-term unemployed residents, clustered around Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham and parts of Yorkshire, top-tier infrastructure mattered most: gigabit availability and fast download speeds went hand in hand with a lighter depression-related burden.

In areas where older people face income deprivation, often remote or coastal communities in the North East, Somerset and the South West, the priorities flipped. Speed stopped being the point. There, dependable medium-speed coverage and decent upload capacity, the raw ingredients of a video call to a GP or a grandchild, mattered more than headline speed, while reliance on sub-30 Mbps lines sat alongside heavier prescribing.

The authors are honest about the limits. This is an area-level snapshot, so it shows association rather than cause, and it cannot see whether any individual pensioner actually uses the connection outside their door. What it can show is where poor connectivity and later-life distress pile up in the same postcodes, and that map is itself a policy instrument.

Britain tends to file broadband under economic policy, a matter of growth, productivity and streaming quality. This research files it under health too. A single national speed target assumes every place needs the same thing, when a post-industrial estate may need fibre and a retirement coastline may need reliability and support to use what is already there.

The question for policymakers is no longer whether older England is connected, but how well, and where.

Rui, J., Li, Y., Menendez, H. D., & Pinto da Costa, M. (2026). Digital quality gradient and the burden of elderly depression: A spatial multi kernel SVR analysis of socio economically vulnerable groups in England. DIGITAL HEALTH, 12, 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1177/20552076261465140

Dr Jin Rui is a postdoctoral research associate in spatial analytics and machine learning in the Department of Geography at King’s College London, where he works on geospatial AI and the ways cities shape wellbeing.

Every survey opens with the same ritual. Age, sex, sexual orientation: tick the box that applies. Most people barely notice. The categories feel as settled as the alphabet, less a choice than a fact of paperwork. But for many queer people that first page is where a study loses them, because the options on offer describe someone else, and everything they say afterwards gets filed under an identity that is not quite theirs.

Rosie Cammack ran into this problem in her Master’s research at King’s College London, and decided the form itself was the thing to fix. She was studying how queer people think about normalising testing for sexually transmitted infections - a field with a blind spot of its own. Sexual health research has concentrated overwhelmingly on cisgender men who have sex with men, leaving lesbian, bisexual and queer women, along with non-binary, transgender and intersex people, nearly invisible in the evidence base, despite the real barriers they face in testing and care. Studying an overlooked population with tools that could not describe them made no sense. So she changed the tools.

Her questionnaire asked ten open-ended questions and made every one of them optional, including the demographics. Instead of preset categories, participants were given a blank text box and an invitation to describe their sex, gender and sexual orientation in their own words. Fifty-two people took part. Their answers ranged across terms no drop-down menu would have offered, including reclaimed language that carries history and defiance in equal measure. And where someone felt that words could not capture how they identify, Cammack treated the gap as a finding in itself. A refusal can be evidence. Silence can be data.

That reversal sounds small. It is anything but.

Behind it sits an argument about what counting actually does. Demographic categories are not neutral containers; they are decisions, made by researchers, about which lives become legible. Every form is a theory. When it offers two sexes and four orientations, everyone outside those lines is either squeezed in or dropped out, and what never enters the data cannot shape the services and policy later built on it. Cammack argues that representation in data is a political question for marginalised communities, and that justice should outrank tradition when the two collide over what counts as rigorous method.

The stakes run well beyond one dissertation. Health systems run on data: screening invitations, risk models, decisions about where money goes. If the categories underneath are wrong, the errors compound at scale. Britain’s census has fought running battles over its sex and gender questions, and NHS records still struggle to describe trans patients accurately enough to care for them. A tick box drawn too tightly in a London seminar room has cousins everywhere.

Cammack is honest about the trade-offs. Free-text answers take longer to give and far longer to analyse, and they resist the tidy comparisons that categorical data makes easy. A national survey could not simply copy her design. The deeper lesson travels anyway: before asking people who they are, researchers should check whether their categories can hear the answer. Her participants responded warmly, which suggests communities notice when a study makes room for them - and remember the many times it did not.

The first page of a survey looks like administration. It is really a decision about who exists.

Rosie Cammack is a research assistant in the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine at King’s College London, where she works on the SHARE project on environmentally sustainable health research. She completed her MSc in Global Health, Social Justice and Public Policy at King’s in 2023.

Few sustainability ideas have gained momentum as quickly as the circular economy. The promise is hard to resist: reduce waste, protect the environment and create economic growth at the same time. For governments, businesses and investors, it presents an optimistic vision of the future where prosperity and sustainability can go hand in hand.

But beneath that appealing narrative lies a question that is rarely asked.

What if the people these policies are designed to help have different ideas about what a better life actually means?

A new study explores this challenge through the lens of electronic waste, or e-waste, in Bangalore, India. As the world’s appetite for technology grows, so does the mountain of discarded phones, computers and other electronic devices. Recovering valuable materials from these products has become an important part of the circular economy, creating jobs while reducing demand for new resources.

Traditionally, much of this work has been carried out by informal waste workers who collect, sort and dismantle discarded electronics. In recent years, policymakers and organisations have increasingly sought to formalise this sector. The goal is understandable. Formal systems can improve safety, strengthen environmental protections and create more stable economic opportunities.

Advocates often describe this as a win for everyone. The environment benefits from better recycling. Businesses gain access to valuable materials. Workers gain access to formal jobs and new opportunities.

Yet the researchers argue that this vision of progress rests on a particular assumption: that moving people into formal employment and entrepreneurship is automatically a social good.

The paper challenges that assumption by drawing on the capabilities approach developed by economist and philosopher Amartya Sen. Instead of measuring success primarily through income or economic participation, the capabilities approach asks whether people have the freedom to pursue lives they themselves value.

That shift in perspective changes the conversation.

From a capabilities viewpoint, social justice is not simply about creating jobs. It is about expanding people’s real opportunities and respecting their ability to make choices about how they live. Economic growth can contribute to this goal, but it should not become the goal itself.

Research cited in the paper suggests that some informal e-waste workers value aspects of their current livelihoods that are often overlooked by policymakers. Flexibility, independence, local relationships and control over working patterns can matter deeply. Some workers report that formal employment introduces new pressures and anxieties, even when it brings other advantages.

This does not mean informal work should be celebrated uncritically. Many waste workers face dangerous conditions, insecure incomes, discrimination and significant health risks. These problems are real and demand attention. However, the authors argue that social justice requires more than assuming everyone shares the same aspirations.

The challenge for policymakers is that the things people value most are often difficult to measure. Recycling targets, economic output and employment figures can be easily counted. Dignity, freedom, agency and wellbeing are harder to place into spreadsheets and performance dashboards.

As a result, important aspects of people’s lives can disappear from policy discussions.

The authors suggest that circular economy policies should be complemented by a stronger focus on capabilities. Doing so would encourage decision-makers to think beyond economic outcomes and pay greater attention to how individuals define a good life for themselves.

As countries invest heavily in green transitions and circular economy strategies, this research offers a timely reminder that sustainability is ultimately about more than materials and markets. It is about people.

Creating a greener economy matters. But creating a fairer society requires recognising that progress cannot be defined from the top down. If social justice is truly the goal, people must have the freedom to shape their own futures and pursue the lives they have reason to value.

Samuel, G., Kovacic, Z., Lucivero, F., Pitt, M., & Vaz, M. (2026). A Critical Exploration of Social Justice and the Notions of ‘The Good’ in Circular Economy Discourses: The Need for a Capabilities Approach. Ethics, Policy & Environment, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/21550085.2026.2712904

Dr Gabrielle Samuel is Senior Lecturer in Environmental Justice and Health in the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine at King’s College London and co-Director of SHADE, a research group focused on sustainability, health, AI, digital technologies and the environment.

For decades, fire in Northern Ghana has been treated as a problem. Government policies, development projects and conservation initiatives have largely framed burning as a threat to forests, biodiversity, agricultural productivity and climate goals. Yet fire remains deeply embedded in daily life across the savanna, used to prepare farmland, manage grazing, hunt, protect homesteads and support cultural practices.

Two recent studies offer a rare opportunity to examine this tension from different angles. One analyses more than two decades of satellite evidence on fire activity across Northern Ghana. The other investigates how policymakers and institutions construct traditional burning as an environmental problem. Together, they tell a powerful story about changing fire regimes, governance, knowledge and the consequences of whose understanding of fire becomes dominant in environmental decision-making.

The first study combines MODIS and Landsat satellite data with institutional interviews to understand changing fire regimes between 2000 and 2022. At first glance, the results appear encouraging for advocates of fire suppression. Large fires detected through coarse-resolution MODIS data have declined significantly in several regions, particularly Savannah, Upper East and Upper West. Stakeholders attributed these changes to fire management campaigns, restoration projects and government interventions designed to reduce uncontrolled burning.

Yet the picture becomes more complex when different datasets and spatial scales are considered. Unlike MODIS, the Landsat-derived Global Annual Burned Area Mapping dataset showed no significant overall trend in burned area, while active fire data revealed an increase in the Northern Region. These contrasting patterns demonstrate that there is no single story of fire change in Northern Ghana. Rather, what we observe depends partly on the scale, resolution and characteristics of the satellite data used. Aggregating the landscape into one overall trend can also mask important sub-national differences in how fire regimes are changing.

The research also identifies a shift in seasonality. Fires are occurring less often in November and more often in January and February across Northern Ghana. This matters because many projects and policies continue to promote “early burning” without clearly defining what that means in practice. The observed trends suggest that fire management strategies may not be fully aligned with how people actually use fire on the ground.

The second study asks a different question: how did fire become a policy problem in the first place?

Using Carol Bacchi’s “What’s the Problem Represented to Be?” framework, the researchers examine contemporary fire-related policies in Ghana. They find that traditional burning practices are routinely described using terms such as “bushfires”, “wildfires” and “uncontrolled burning”. By grouping diverse burning practices under these labels, policies often obscure important distinctions between destructive fires and controlled, intentional burns used for livelihood and land management purposes.

This framing has deep historical roots. Colonial administrators viewed West African savannas through a forestry lens and associated fire with deforestation and degradation. Although later research demonstrated the ecological benefits of some burning practices, anti-fire narratives became embedded within institutions and persisted through post-independence development agendas. Today they are being reinforced through climate mitigation, carbon accounting and restoration programmes.

The result is what the authors describe as a technocratic approach to fire governance. Environmental challenges are presented as problems of knowledge, behaviour and management that can be solved through awareness campaigns, regulation, tree planting and behavioural change. Traditional fire knowledge, meanwhile, often receives less attention than scientific and institutional expertise.

Perhaps the most fascinating insight emerges when both papers are read together.

The satellite evidence shows that understanding fire depends on how it is measured. Different datasets reveal different aspects of changing fire regimes, while sub-national analysis exposes patterns that are hidden when Northern Ghana is viewed as a whole. The policy analysis shows that understanding fire also depends on how it is represented. By framing diverse burning practices as a single environmental problem, fire governance has often focused on changing fire behaviour rather than understanding the social, economic and ecological realities that make burning necessary. In this sense, both studies reveal the importance of representation in shaping how fire is understood, measured and governed.

Both studies ultimately argue for a more nuanced approach. Rather than treating all fire as harmful, policymakers may need to distinguish between different types of burning, recognise the ecological role of fire in savanna landscapes, and engage more seriously with local knowledge and livelihood needs. Effective fire governance, the authors suggest, requires understanding not only where and when fires occur, but also why people continue to use them, how different forms of knowledge shape management decisions and how policies affect different social groups whose livelihoods depend on fire use.

As debates about climate adaptation, carbon sequestration and landscape restoration intensify across Africa, Northern Ghana offers an important lesson. Environmental governance is rarely just about ecology. It is also about power, knowledge and whose understanding of the landscape counts, whose practices are recognised and who bears the cost of environmental interventions.

The challenge is therefore not simply to stop fires, but to govern them in ways that reflect the complexity of changing fire regimes and the realities of the people who live with them every day. The future of fire management depends not only on better monitoring and stronger policies, but also on building more equitable relationships between scientific evidence, institutional authority and communities whose lives and livelihoods are shaped by fires.

Alare, R.S., Schreckenberg, K. & Tebbs, E. (2026) Navigating Discourses: Unpacking the Problematisation of Traditional Burning Practices in Northern Ghana. Journal of Pyrogeography, 3, 100017. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pyro.2026.100017

Alare, R.S., Tebbs, E. & Schreckenberg, K. Diverging fire trends in Northern Ghana’s savanna landscape: insights from remote sensing and institutional perspectives. fire ecol 22, 102 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1186/s42408-026-00553-w

Rahinatu Sidiki Alare is a PhD researcher in the Department of Geography at King’s College London. Her research explores natural resource governance, fire management, equity and conflict in Northern Ghana, combining remote sensing with local ecological knowledge to understand the impacts of environmental policy on communities.

Professor Kate Schreckenberg is Professor of Environment and Development at King’s College London. An interdisciplinary researcher with extensive experience across Africa, Asia and Latin America, she specialises in natural resource governance, environmental justice, livelihoods, conservation policy and landscape management.

Dr Emma Tebbs is Senior Lecturer in Physical Geography and Earth Observation at King’s College London. Her research focuses on remote sensing and Earth observation technologies for conservation, sustainable development and environmental monitoring, particularly in Africa.

How much of our future health is shaped before we are even born? Research in the field of developmental origins of health and disease has spent the past four decades exploring how early-life experiences influence later health. While studies have consistently linked early-life conditions with future outcomes, far fewer have tested whether interventions can alter those trajectories in practice. That is the challenge at the heart of the Healthy Life Trajectories Initiative, or HeLTI.

Established in 2017 under the stewardship of the World Health Organization (WHO), HeLTI brings together researchers in Canada, China, India and South Africa to evaluate a complex intervention that begins before conception and continues through pregnancy, infancy and early childhood. Its primary aim is to determine whether this sustained support can improve children’s developmental and metabolic health, particularly by reducing childhood adiposity at the age of five.

The study is significant not only because of the question it asks, but because of how it has been designed.

The first innovation lies in the way the consortium itself was created. Rather than being funded by a single national agency, HeLTI is supported through a partnership between major research funders in four countries, with WHO acting as convenor. This unusual funding model reflects a shared commitment to addressing a global health challenge that no individual country could tackle alone.

A second innovation is conceptual. Although earlier studies have explored interventions before and during pregnancy, HeLTI is the first harmonised preconception trial to operate across four very different national settings. Over three and a half years, researchers aligned almost 2,000 variables, including intervention components, biological samples, analytical methods and outcome measures. This painstaking process enables meaningful comparisons across countries while also revealing where local differences matter and standardisation has its limits.

Perhaps the initiative’s most distinctive feature is methodological. Large clinical trials often focus on a single primary outcome measured years after recruitment has begun. HeLTI instead allows cohorts to be analysed after each phase of the intervention. This approach enables researchers to investigate how the intervention works, examine secondary outcomes and generate new knowledge throughout the life of the study, rather than waiting until its conclusion. The consortium has therefore become not simply a trial, but a learning platform.

That flexibility has proved valuable. Since HeLTI was conceived, the consortium has worked through the COVID-19 pandemic, geopolitical tensions and rapid advances in data science. Maintaining an international collaboration across such disruption has required sustained trust between researchers, funders and participating countries. As of March 2026, all four trials had completed their preconception phase, allowing comparative analyses to begin.

Even before the main trial outcomes are available, broader lessons are emerging. The consortium has shown how large international studies can function as long-term scientific resources, supporting research into cardiometabolic health, mental health and gender equity alongside their original objectives. It has also highlighted the importance of designing interventions that respond to local contexts rather than seeking one-size-fits-all solutions.

At a time when international cooperation faces increasing political and financial pressures, HeLTI also offers a wider lesson about the value of multilateral collaboration. The initiative demonstrates the role that organisations such as WHO can play in bringing together countries, funders and researchers to address questions that extend beyond national borders. While the model is resource intensive and complex to coordinate, it illustrates what is possible when partners commit to a shared long-term goal. Its legacy may extend beyond the evidence it generates on early-life interventions to the way it reshapes how global health research is organised and conducted.

Dr Michelle Pentecost is a Lecturer in Global Health and Social Medicine in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College London. Her research examines reproduction, maternal and child health, global health governance and the social and biological factors that shape health across the life course.

Pentecost M. Early insights from the Healthy Life Trajectories Initiative. Bulletin of the World Health Organization. blt.26.295804.pdf

There are few less forgiving venues for a historian than r/AskHistorians, the Reddit forum whose famously ruthless moderators delete most answers for failing to meet their standards of rigour. Last week it turned its attention to Mao Zedong, and answering the questions was Professor Kerry Brown, Director of the Lau China Institute here at King’s College London, whose recent book Mao: Power and Contradiction distils three decades of thinking about the most contested figure of China’s twentieth century.

Brown opened with what he calls the Mao challenge: weighing the terrible human costs of 1949–1976 against the fact that today’s China - however different it looks economically - remains in a real sense Mao’s creation. What followed, across more than 160 comments, was a masterclass in public engagement: direct, unguarded, and at moments unexpectedly personal.

Seven parts correct, three parts wrong?

The question everyone expects came early: the famous formula that Mao was seventy per cent right and thirty per cent wrong. Brown’s answer complicated the folklore. The phrase appears nowhere in the 1981 Resolution on Party History, the closest thing to an official verdict; what it actually says is that Mao made enormous mistakes, the Cultural Revolution above all, but that his achievements came first. Its architect, Deng Xiaoping, was no Mao loyalist - he had suffered badly in Mao’s final decade - but he was determined to avoid a Chinese de-Stalinisation. The result was a curious settlement: Mao honoured symbolically, his body lying in state on Tiananmen Square, while in policy terms his successors did close to the opposite of everything he had championed.

The hardest questions came from family memory

The most affecting exchange came from a reader whose grandparents lost everything after 1949 and whose parents barely survived the famine as children. Did thirty or forty million people really starve? Brown did not soften the answer. Drawing on Yang Jisheng’s Tombstone, he set out why estimates for 1960–63 range from thirty to sixty million deaths, why precision is impossible - starvation kills obliquely, through diseases the weakened body cannot resist - and why serious scholarship agrees on one thing: the catastrophe was avoidable, the product of human decisions rather than drought or failed harvests.

Pressed on how any legacy containing such a catastrophe could be called mixed, Brown argued that binary verdicts miss the deeper question: how a system with near-imperial concentrations of power magnifies elite error - a failure of self-correction common to autocracies, not unique to China - and what it means that the shattered, deindustrialised country of 1949 nonetheless built an industrial base.

The view from the edges

Asked by one of the forum’s own moderators how Mao is remembered on the “imperial fringes,” Brown reached for his own biography. He spent two years in 1990s Inner Mongolia researching the Cultural Revolution, persistently struck that even ethnic Mongolian officials whose families had suffered in the 1960s spoke of Mao as a great leader - an ambivalence shaped partly by knowledge of the far bloodier Soviet-aligned purges across the border. And when a sceptic asked whether anyone would speak honestly to a foreigner, his answer was disarming: he lived in Hohhot, married into a local family there in 1995, and heard more unguarded testimony than today’s surveillance-saturated China would ever allow.

Daoist, poet, contradiction

The richest material was the least expected. Temperamentally, Brown suggested, Mao was less a Confucian than a Daoist, drawn to the collision of opposites - and likely more influenced by the Song-dynasty historian Sima Guang than by the Communist Manifesto. Best of all was the poetry: Brown recalled the late J. H. Prynne, one of Britain’s most exacting modernist poets, admiring a Mao poem in his Cambridge study and remarking that he wished he had written it himself. The man responsible for some of the century’s greatest catastrophes was also, inconveniently, an accomplished poet - and the author of a legacy, the framing of Taiwan as an existential question, that still constrains his successors half a century on.

The format forced something rare: a leading scholar answering, in real time, people for whom this history is not academic at all. As Brown framed it, the task is “finding a balanced assessment of a figure that arouses such deep emotions.” On this evidence, the internet - at its best - is a good place to attempt it.

The full AMA is on r/AskHistorians.

Kerry Brown is Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College London, School of Global Affairs. His latest book, Mao: Power and Contradiction (Reaktion Books), is out now.

What happens when the people most excluded from healthcare become the ones keeping each other alive?

That question sits at the heart of a striking new study examining the experiences of trans women and travestis in Brazil. Drawing on two integrated ethnographic research studies, the authors reveal how gender-based violence, substance use and community care are deeply intertwined. Yet amid stories of trauma and exclusion, they also uncover something powerful: communities building their own systems of survival when formal institutions fall short.

The research follows the lives of trans women, travestis, sex workers, activists and harm reduction practitioners between 2019 and 2023. Participants described violence that appeared at almost every stage of life. Some were forced from their homes as teenagers when their gender identity became visible. Others experienced discrimination in schools, healthcare settings and workplaces.

The consequences of this exclusion can be profound. Participants spoke about loneliness, grief and social isolation. In this context, substance use often emerged not simply as a health issue but as a way of coping with pain, fear and rejection. The study challenges simplistic narratives that treat drug use as an individual failing. Instead, it argues that people’s experiences are shaped by larger and structural systems of inequality including transphobia, racism, poverty and gender-based violence.

But the most compelling aspect of the research is not its account of suffering. It is its account of care.

Across the study, participants described sophisticated forms of community support that operate largely outside traditional healthcare structures. Harm reduction workers with lived experience of life on the streets were often showed as more trusted and credible than professionals without that background. Their knowledge came not only from training but from having survived many of the same challenges faced by the people they supported.

Informal networks also played a critical role. Participants used WhatsApp groups to exchange information about hormones, sexual health, substance use and safer working practices. Sex workers warned one another about dangerous clients. Friends intervened during crises. Colleagues watched over each other during encounters on the street.

These practices are often overlooked in mainstream public health discussions. Yet the researchers argue that they represent important forms of expertise. Rather than seeing trans women and travestis solely as recipients of care, the study positions them as producers of knowledge and architects of innovative support systems.

This perspective has wider significance. Much of the global conversation around harm reduction focuses on reducing the risks associated with drugs. The authors suggest a broader understanding. In their view, harm reduction should also address the harms created by social exclusion, discrimination and structural violence.

The study therefore offers a challenge to policymakers and health professionals. Effective care is not simply about clinical interventions. It is also about recognising lived experience, supporting community-led initiatives and understanding how social inequalities shape health outcomes.

Perhaps most importantly, the research reminds us that marginalised communities are not defined solely by vulnerability. They are also sites of resilience, creativity and resistance, reminding us, as bell hooks states, that marginality is not only a site of exclusion but also a potential space of resistance and radical possibility.

In the stories collected here, survival is rarely an individual achievement. It is something built collectively through friendship, solidarity and shared knowledge. When institutions fail, people find ways to care for one another.

And sometimes, those lessons from the margins can teach the rest of us what care really means.

Tune in to Drop-In: Harm Reduction Chats on mossradio.com from Thursday July 30th (6:45pm EST) where a panel will be discussing this paper further. Recording: https://freight.cargo.site/m/W3060282678159247418857970115030/rec073026_1.mp3

Da Mosto, D., Solaterrar, U. Peer‑led harm reduction in Brazil: gender‑based violence, intersectionality, and decolonial perspectives of community-based care. Harm Reduct J (2026). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12954-026-01499-7

Delia da Mosto is a PhD researcher in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, School of Global Affairs, King’s College London, working on the ethics and politics of psychiatric deinstitutionalisation in South America, funded by the Wellcome Trust.

A global vibe shift is under way.

According to King’s College London Professor Astrid Nordin, one of the most important changes in international politics is not simply a redistribution of military, economic or technological power. It is a shift in the emotional foundations of world order itself. As China grows in influence, long-established assumptions about authority, legitimacy and belonging are beginning to change.

Writing for East Asia Forum, Nordin argues that global politics is experiencing a redistribution of what she calls emotional authority. This refers to the power to determine whose fears are considered reasonable, whose grievances deserve recognition and whose aspirations are viewed as politically legitimate.

For decades, Western countries occupied a privileged position in shaping these judgements. Their institutions, values and narratives often set the terms of international debate. Yet many societies never fully accepted Western claims to moral leadership. Experiences of colonialism, military intervention, unequal economic relationships and selective humanitarian responses have long fuelled scepticism towards the idea that the West speaks for the world.

What is changing today is not the existence of that scepticism but its visibility and influence.

China has become central to this emerging global vibe shift. Nordin is careful not to present Beijing as the sole driver of change or as an uncomplicated alternative to Western leadership. Instead, China’s rise has helped create conditions in which criticisms of existing power structures are harder to dismiss and easier to share. Its growing economic, technological and diplomatic reach has made alternative political futures feel more plausible than they once did.

The result is a world in which the authority of Washington and its allies no longer appears as self-evident as it did in previous decades.

Nordin illustrates this through reactions to US President Donald Trump’s visit to Beijing in May 2026. While many observers focused on whether the summit delivered concrete agreements, she argues that its deeper significance lay in what it symbolised. The image of an American president travelling to Beijing to engage with Xi Jinping reflected a changing international landscape in which power is increasingly dispersed and no longer centred exclusively on the West.

At the heart of Nordin’s analysis is another striking concept: postcolonial glee.

The phrase describes a feeling that extends beyond traditional geopolitical calculations. It captures the sense of relief, satisfaction and possibility that can emerge when long-dominant centres of power begin to lose their unquestioned status. This is not necessarily enthusiasm for China, nor is it straightforward anti-Western sentiment. Rather, it reflects an emotional response to the loosening grip of a political order that many people have experienced as dismissive, paternalistic or hypocritical.

In this sense, postcolonial glee is less about celebrating a new hegemon and more about welcoming the possibility of a world with multiple centres of influence.

That sentiment can be seen in growing interest in organisations such as BRICS and in wider discussions about multipolarity. For many governments and societies, the attraction lies not in replacing US leadership with Chinese leadership but in challenging the assumption that any single power should define the rules, language and emotional boundaries of international politics.

Importantly, Nordin does not ignore the tensions within this transformation. She acknowledges widespread concerns about Chinese power, including anxieties over regional coercion, debt dependence and Beijing’s behaviour towards neighbouring states. She also highlights contradictions between China’s opposition to hegemony and some of its own actions.

These concerns matter because they reinforce a central point of the essay. The emerging world order is not a simple contest between a declining United States and an ascending China. Nor is it a story of one dominant power replacing another.

Instead, it is a story about the weakening of a system in which a single set of actors could claim authority over whose perspectives mattered and whose futures seemed imaginable.

China’s significance, Nordin argues, lies in helping to widen those horizons of possibility. Its rise has made it easier for governments, institutions and publics to challenge inherited assumptions about legitimacy and power. In doing so, it has become intertwined with a broader global vibe shift that is reshaping how international politics is experienced and understood.

Whether this transformation ultimately produces a more stable world remains uncertain. What is clear is that debates about global order are no longer only about who possesses power. They are increasingly about who gets to define its meaning.

Astrid Nordin, China’s rise shifts the global political vibe, East Asia Forum, 21 July 2026 https://eastasiaforum.org/2026/07/21/chinas-rise-shifts-the-global-political-vibe/

Professor Astrid Nordin is Professor at King’s College London and Associate Research Fellow at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs. She holds the Lau Chair of Chinese International Relations in the Lau China Institute.

How should a country respond when its wealthiest residents pay lower effective tax rates than many ordinary workers?

A new report from King’s College London economist Ben Tippet and renowned inequality scholar Gabriel Zucman argues that Britain has reached precisely that point. Their proposal is strikingly simple: households with more than £100 million in wealth should face a minimum annual tax equivalent to 2% of their total wealth.

The idea arrives at a moment when questions about wealth, inequality and public finances are becoming harder to ignore. According to the research, the wealth of the richest 300 UK households has risen from around 5% of GDP in 1989 to more than 16% today. If recent trends continue, that figure could reach 22% within a decade.

The authors argue that Britain’s existing tax system struggles to capture the growth of extreme wealth. While income from work is taxed when earned, large fortunes can continue to grow through increases in asset values, corporate ownership and investment gains that may never trigger a significant tax bill.

Their solution is a minimum tax designed specifically for the ultra-rich.

Under the proposal, households worth more than £100 million would pay a minimum effective tax rate of 2% of their wealth each year. Existing personal taxes already paid would count towards that total. If a household was already paying the equivalent of 2% of its wealth through income and other personal taxes, it would owe nothing extra. If not, it would pay the difference.

The report estimates that around 946 households would be affected.

Despite that small number, the projected revenues are substantial.

The researchers estimate the tax would raise around £10.4 billion in 2026 after allowing for avoidance, administrative costs and behavioural responses. That is equivalent to approximately 0.3% of GDP and nearly a third of the UK’s projected current budget deficit.

By 2036, annual revenues could rise to around £17.6 billion if recent trends in wealth growth continue.

One reason the proposal is likely to attract attention is that it deliberately avoids many of the problems traditionally associated with wealth taxes.

Historically, wealth taxes in Europe often failed because they covered large sections of the population, contained numerous exemptions and created opportunities for avoidance. Tippet and Zucman argue that a tax aimed solely at households with more than £100 million in wealth is fundamentally different.

Fewer than 1,000 households would fall within scope, allowing HMRC to concentrate valuation, auditing and enforcement resources on a small and identifiable group.

The report also proposes a ten-year post-emigration rule. Individuals who accumulated wealth while resident in Britain would remain liable for the tax for up to a decade after leaving the country. The authors point out that a similar principle already exists within recent inheritance tax reforms.

The most politically powerful finding may be the challenge the report poses to common assumptions about who benefits from Britain’s tax system.

Nearly half of the projected revenues would come from fortunes built primarily in finance, real estate and land. The report therefore frames the proposal not as a broad assault on entrepreneurs or business owners, but as an attempt to ensure those with extraordinary wealth contribute at rates more comparable to the rest of society.

Critics will undoubtedly raise concerns about capital flight, investment, valuation and competitiveness. The authors devote a significant section of the report to addressing those issues, arguing that many objections are rooted in experiences of earlier wealth taxes that operated very differently from what is being proposed here.

Whether politicians embrace the idea is another matter.

Britain has a long history of debating wealth taxation without implementing a comprehensive annual wealth tax. Yet growing pressure on public finances, combined with persistent concerns about inequality, means the conversation is unlikely to disappear.

The significance of this report is not simply the £10 billion headline figure. It is that the authors attempt to reframe the debate. Rather than asking whether wealth should be taxed, they ask whether a tax system can remain credible when some of the country’s richest households appear to face lower effective tax rates than many people who earn a salary.

That is a question likely to resonate far beyond economics departments.

Tippet, B. and Zucman, G. (2026). Taxing Extreme Wealth in the United Kingdom: Revenue Estimates for a 2% Minimum Tax on Ultra-High-Net-Worth Households. https://taxobservatory.world/publication/taxing-extreme-wealth-in-the-united-kingdom-revenue-estimates-for-a-2-minimum-tax-on-ultra-high-net-worth-households/

Dr Ben Tippet is Lecturer in Economics and Wealth Inequality at King’s College London. His research examines wealth concentration, taxation, inequality and climate change. He leads a British Academy/Leverhulme-funded project analysing Britain’s wealthiest families using data from The Sunday Times Rich List.

A transmission line is rarely seen as a symbol of regional cooperation. It is steel, concrete and cable, stretching across mountains and borders with little fanfare. Yet some of the most important connections being built in South Asia today are not roads, railways or trade routes. They are the power lines linking countries through the electricity they generate and consume.

Across the Himalayas, a transformation is underway. Nepal and Bhutan possess some of the world’s most significant untapped hydropower resources. India is rapidly expanding its solar and wind capacity. Bangladesh faces growing energy demand while searching for reliable and affordable sources of electricity. On paper, the opportunity is compelling: countries with abundant renewable resources can sell power to neighbours that need it.

The story is particularly striking in Nepal. Not long ago, power shortages and daily load shedding were part of everyday life. Today, the country is exporting surplus hydropower during the monsoon season, turning rivers into a source of national income rather than national frustration. Bhutan has followed a similar path for years, using hydropower exports to generate substantial revenue and support economic development.

For smaller countries, the appeal is obvious. Exporting electricity offers more than income. It can create jobs, attract investment and strengthen public finances. For importing countries, access to renewable electricity can reduce dependence on expensive fossil fuel imports while supporting climate goals.

There is also a deeper logic behind regional electricity trade. Renewable energy does not always arrive when demand is highest. Solar generation falls on cloudy days and disappears after sunset. Hydropower output changes with rainfall and seasonal river flows. Connecting different countries through shared grids creates the possibility of balancing these fluctuations more effectively.

In theory, the region’s energy systems complement one another. Hydropower generation in Himalayan river basins often peaks during the monsoon, when solar output can decline in parts of India. A connected network allows countries to share resources rather than manage energy challenges in isolation.

Yet the promise of integration remains only partially realised.

South Asia has become more interconnected, but it has not become fully integrated. Electricity is crossing borders, but governance structures are still largely organised around bilateral agreements. Deals are negotiated country by country rather than through a common regional framework. Rules, regulations and political priorities can change, introducing uncertainty into long-term planning.

This is where geography meets geopolitics.

India occupies a central position within the emerging electricity system. Much of the region’s cross-border trade depends on Indian infrastructure, markets and regulatory approvals. For Nepal and Bhutan, India is a critical customer. For Bangladesh, India is often the transit route through which regional electricity flows. This arrangement creates opportunities for cooperation but also highlights uneven relationships and dependencies.

The challenge for policymakers is therefore not simply building more transmission lines. It is building trust, institutions and predictable rules that can support a truly regional energy market.

What happens next will matter beyond the energy sector. Reliable access to renewable electricity affects economic growth, industrial development and climate resilience. It shapes how countries respond to rising temperatures, growing populations and increasing energy demand.

The power lines stretching across the Himalayas are carrying more than electrons. They carry an idea: that shared resources can create shared prosperity. Whether South Asia can turn physical connections into lasting regional cooperation remains an open question. But the foundations are now being built, one transmission corridor at a time.

Saklani, U. (2026) ‘Power lines across the Himalayas’, Democracy Asia, July. https://democracyasia.com/articles/power-lines-across-the-himalayas

Dr Udisha Saklani is Lecturer in Human Geography and Climate in the Department of Geography at King’s College London. Her research focuses on environmental governance, infrastructure and development, with particular attention to how finance, state institutions and local agency shape climate and energy transitions across the Global South.

We often imagine work and home as separate worlds. Work happens in the factory, office, farm or shop. Home is where workers rest, eat, care for others and recover for the next day. But for many workers, that separation has never really existed.

A new special issue of Work in the Global Economy focuses on exactly this problem: “Living at Work”. The editors’ introduction argues that the relationship between work and housing deserves much more attention than it usually receives. Across many different sectors and countries, employers, states and labour intermediaries have long organised workers’ accommodation in ways that shape not only where people live, but how they work, how much control they have over their time, and how easily they can leave.

This is not just about “working from home”, as many of us have done at least partially since Covid-19. It includes much more visible and coercive arrangements: factory dormitories, labour camps, live-in domestic work, tied housing and off-site accommodation arranged through contractors or brokers. In all these cases, housing is not simply a background condition of employment, but part of the organisation of labour itself. It can help recruit workers, keep them close to the job, extend oversight of their time and behaviour, and make leaving more difficult. If losing your job may also mean losing your bed, room, legal right to stay, or the social infrastructure that makes your daily life possible, then free labour looks a lot less free.

Accommodation can therefore be a powerful mechanism of labour control, and it isn’t just about the ability to leave. When housing is tied to employment, the boundary between paid work and the rest of life becomes much less clear. Time outside work is no longer fully outside work, and workers may be “on call” for far longer than their formal contracted hours. Employers or their intermediaries may gain influence over when workers rest, who they live or associate with, how mobile they are, and how easily they can refuse demands.

This is especially important for migrant workers. In many contexts, both domestically and across borders, workers move long distances for employment and depend on employers, contractors or landlords linked to their workplace for somewhere to stay. That dependence makes them more vulnerable. When losing a job also means losing your accommodation, the costs of refusing poor conditions are much higher. In some cases, even the right to remain in a place or country is bound up with employment and housing. It also becomes harder to organise collectively when an employer-cum-landlord is monitoring who you meet and when.

The special issue shows that these arrangements take many different forms. Some involve workers living in dormitories close to factories: the “dormitory labour regime”. Others involve domestic workers living in their employer’s home, farmworkers housed in camps, or workers in off-site private rental accommodation that is nonetheless controlled by labour brokers who report to employers. These cases might seem very different, but they share a common feature, that living space is drawn directly into the labour process.

Of course, accommodation is not only about control. It can also be a site of negotiation and sometimes resistance. Workers exchange information where they live and build social ties there. They compare wages, conditions and opportunities. In some cases, accommodation may become a space from which workers begin to organise and contest the terms of their employment. Housing is not only where labour power is reproduced, then; it can also be a place where workers make claims and push back.

Looking at work through accommodation in this way, the editorial argues, helps us see something important about contemporary capitalism. It is not simply that work is “spilling over” into private life in the vague sense many of us may recognise. Nor is it just a continuation of older forms of paternalism, in which employers provided longer-term housing in “company towns” to ensure a settled workforce and, sometimes, whole family or intergenerational labour systems. Instead, many labour accommodation regimes are geared towards securing temporary labour supply, extending workers’ flexibility, deepening dependence on employers, and shifting longer-term costs away from firms.

This is why worker accommodation should not be treated as a side issue. It is often central to how labour is recruited, controlled, reproduced and contested. If we want to understand the changing world of work, we need to pay much closer attention not only to what happens in the workplace itself, but also to where workers sleep, eat, care and base their lives.

Smith, C., Goodburn, C., Sacchetto, D. and Ngai, P. (2026) Living at work: accommodation, labour and social reproduction, Work in the Global Economy. https://doi.org/10.1332/27324176Y2026D000000069

Dr Charlotte Goodburn is a Reader in Chinese Political Economy at King’s College London, specialising in labour, migration and development. Her research explores how global production systems intersect with migration regimes and the lived realities of workers.

At 1am, senior lab technician Naing Oo was staring at data from a newly deployed water quality sensor in Kenya’s Lake Victoria.

The readings made no sense.

Dissolved oxygen levels had plunged towards zero - an extreme result that suggested either something dramatic was happening in the lake or the equipment had malfunctioned.

His first thought was that the sensors must be broken.

By the following morning, reports began arriving from local fish farmers.

Fish were dying.

The pilot sensor network, installed only days earlier, had captured the warning signs of a real environmental crisis. What initially looked like an equipment error turned out to be evidence of a hypoxia event - a sudden depletion of oxygen in the water severe enough to trigger widespread fish deaths.

Fish deaths are not new to the African Great Lakes. But predicting them remains remarkably difficult.

Around the world, forecasting systems can tell us before storms arrive, rivers will flood or droughts are likely to intensify. Yet forecasting water quality hazards remains a major scientific challenge. By the time warning signs become obvious, the damage is often already underway.

For fish farmers operating floating cage systems, that delay can be devastating.

A sudden drop in oxygen can wipe out large numbers of fish, causing significant financial losses and threatening food security. Communities that rely on fisheries have developed their own ways of recognising deteriorating conditions, drawing on generations of local knowledge and environmental observation.

That challenge sits at the heart of the FRESH-WQ project.

The initiative brings together researchers from King’s College London with partners from the Kenya Marine and Fisheries Research Institute (KMFRI) and the African Centre for Aquatic Research and Education (ACARE). Their aim is to create a system that combines low-cost environmental sensors, satellite observations and artificial intelligence to identify emerging water quality hazards and provide communities with time to act.

During workshops in Kisumu, stakeholders described watching for changes in water colour, fish behaviour and other natural indicators. What many said they really needed, however, was the ability to see what was coming next.

The vision is simple to describe but difficult to achieve.

Instead of relying solely on observations of current conditions, future systems could provide advance notice of emerging risks. Fish farmers could move cages, reduce feeding or harvest stock early. Water managers could prepare for deteriorating conditions. Communities would gain precious time to respond.

The recent field deployment offered an unexpected glimpse of why that capability matters.

When the dissolved oxygen readings suddenly fell to almost zero, researchers initially assumed there must be a problem with the sensors. The following morning, reports of fish deaths arrived from the same area of the lake.

The experience highlighted both the devastating impact such events can have on local communities and the potential value of continuous, real-time monitoring. It also reinforced the need for affordable systems that, combined with forecasting tools, could one day provide advance warning before these events become disasters.

The experience also highlighted an important lesson. Technology alone is not enough.

Successful environmental monitoring systems must work for the people who need them most. That is why the project has been built around collaboration with local researchers, practitioners and communities. Rather than simply introducing new technology, the team is combining environmental sensing with local expertise and on-the-ground knowledge of the lake.

Climate change, pollution and growing pressure on freshwater ecosystems are expected to increase the risks facing lakes around the world. Harmful algal blooms and low-oxygen events are becoming a growing concern for ecosystems, fisheries and water supplies. Yet compared with weather, floods or droughts, our ability to anticipate these threats remain limited.

The fish farmers at Dunga Beach did not need another explanation after the event happened.

They needed warning before it happened.

That is the problem researchers are now trying to solve.

FRESH-WQ is funded by King’s Climate & Sustainability Seed Fund. The project focuses on real-time forecasting of water quality hazards in lakes - an area of critical importance for climate resilience and sustainability since lakes hold 85% of the world’s surface freshwater. The project is developing a novel framework integrating satellite Earth observations (EO), in situ sensor networks, artificial intelligence (AI), and participatory approaches, to improve water quality hazard prediction and management in Lake Victoria.

The aim is to create operational early warning systems that support decision-making for fisheries, aquaculture, and drinking water safety. This is especially urgent in the African Great Lakes, where Harmful Agal Blooms and low oxygen events are intensifying and rapid cage aquaculture expansion and climate change are threatening the livelihoods and food security of over 90 million people.

For more information, contact Dr Emma Tebbs

When the United States imposed tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of Chinese goods during the 2018-2019 trade war, many observers expected manufacturers to leave China and build new supply chains elsewhere.

Vietnam quickly emerged as one of the biggest apparent winners, with exports to the US surging. But what was really happening beneath those headline figures?

A new working paper provides one of the most detailed answers yet. Drawing on more than 52 million transaction-level records covering imports, exports and domestic business-to-business trade in Vietnam, the study opens up the black box of supply chain adjustment and reveals how firms responded when tariffs disrupted established trading relationships.

The headline finding is that Vietnam benefited from the trade war, but Chinese influence over production networks remained remarkably resilient. More tariff-exposed firms in Vietnam increased exports to the US by 126 per cent relative to less-exposed firms, while increasing imports of intermediate goods from China by 85 per cent.

Rather than replacing China, many firms relied on China even more heavily.

The study distinguishes between two very different responses. The first was transshipment, where Chinese goods effectively passed through Vietnam before reaching the US market. The second was genuine processing, where Vietnamese firms imported components from China, added value through assembly or manufacturing, and then exported finished products to America.

The timing proved crucial. Transshipment appeared almost immediately after tariffs were introduced in 2018. Processing activity, however, did not accelerate until mid-2019 when rising tariffs signalled that the new trade barriers were likely to be long-lasting.

That delay highlights an important reality of global production. Moving goods is relatively easy. Reorganising factories, supplier relationships and production systems takes far longer.

One of the paper’s most striking findings concerns how supply chains adjusted over time.

Firms operating in Vietnam did not simply begin exporting more overnight. Instead, they first expanded their networks of Chinese suppliers. Only later did they increase purchases from domestic Vietnamese suppliers. US buyers adjusted last of all. The researchers describe a clear sequence: Chinese supplier diversification first, local sourcing second and downstream US buyer commitment third.

This pattern suggests firms responded cautiously to uncertainty. Before expanding production at scale, they strengthened sourcing networks and secured access to inputs. Only once the new trading environment appeared durable did they deepen relationships with customers and increase export volumes.

The research also challenges the assumption that greater local sourcing automatically translates into stronger domestic industrial development.

Firms in Vietnam did increase purchases from local suppliers, but much of that growth flowed through firms already deeply connected to Chinese supply chains. More than half of the expansion in local sourcing reflected Chinese intermediate content embedded within Vietnam’s domestic supplier network. Suppliers already linked to Chinese production networks experienced sourcing growth more than three times greater than independent local suppliers.

In other words, production shifted geographically, but many of the underlying supply relationships remained connected to China.

The findings offer a more nuanced picture of economic decoupling. Trade diversion created genuine opportunities for Vietnam, generating new production activity and export growth. Yet supply chains did not simply relocate from one country to another. Instead, they evolved into more complex regional networks that continued to depend heavily on Chinese inputs, expertise and supplier relationships.

For policymakers seeking to reduce strategic dependence on China, the study carries an important message. Looking only at export statistics may tell an incomplete story. Supply chains can move across borders while still carrying the influence of the production systems they appear to have left behind.

Zou, T., & Gong, Y. (2026). Just passing through? The US-China Trade War and Reconfiguration of Global Value Chains through Vietnam. KCG Working Paper No. 38. https://www.kcg-kiel.org/kcg-working-paper-no-38-just-passing-through-the-us-china-trade-war-and-reconfiguration-of-global-value-chains-through-vietnam/

Tao Zou is a PhD candidate in International Economics at King’s College London, researching global value chains, trade policy and multinational business strategy.

Dr Yundan Gong is a Reader in Development Economics at King’s College London whose research focuses on foreign direct investment, globalisation and economic development in emerging economies.