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Better, swifter and more responsive international coordination is needed within our global financial system for the containment of the pandemic and its effects. This requires better international tax coordination with a higher global minimum corporate tax, comprehensive coverage of sectors and firms, inclusion of all current tax havens and more generous redistribution of excess profits to developing nations based on user location. There also needs to be a more substantial and easier-to-access mechanism for debt relief and restructuring, one that generously suspends debt payments in periods of crises and provides financial support without strict and painful conditionalities.

PR, IFPRI3, Markets, Trade, and Institutions (MTI); Food and Nutrition Policy

Ongoing debates in conservation studies stress the dire consequences of ‘fortress’ and ‘militarized’ conservation at violent frontiers. Presenting evidence from Kahuzi-Biega National Park in war-torn eastern Democratic Re-public of Congo (DRC), this article shows how the park has become a focal point for armed insurgent groups in the region. Although fortress conservation has contributed to one major incident of violent resistance in recent years, it plays only a marginal role in defining the structures shaping the actions of armed groups. These structures — some of which are reproduced and (occasionally) reshaped by armed groups — include the legacies of poverty and insecurity, the geographical features of the park and the presence of illicit trading networks. This perspective emerges only when we zoom out from the park to place it within the context of the history and broader political economy of the DRC. On the one hand, these dynamics severely constrain the agency of conservation organizations, leaving militarized conservation as the only feasible form of enforcement. This approach at times generates violent outcomes for certain groups of people and produces a resource-rich, isolated terrain which provides a staging ground for broader conflicts to play out. On the other hand, militarized conservation could provide basic law and order at the forest’s edge. Ultimately, therefore, militarized conservation plays an ambivalent role vis-à-vis security and stability.

Background: The Glanville fritillary (Melitaea cinxia) butterfly is a model system for metapopulation dynamics research in fragmented landscapes. Here, we provide a chromosome-level assembly of the butterfly's genome produced from Pacific Biosciences sequencing of a pool of males, combined with a linkage map from population crosses. Results: The final assembly size of 484 Mb is an increase of 94 Mb on the previously published genome. Estimation of the completeness of the genome with BUSCO indicates that the genome contains 92–94% of the BUSCO genes in complete and single copies. We predicted 14,810 genes using the MAKER pipeline and manually curated 1,232 of these gene models. Conclusions: The genome and its annotated gene models are a valuable resource for future comparative genomics, molecular biology, transcriptome, and genetics studies on this species.

As the urgency of responding to climate change and the insufficiency of current demand-side policies to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions become clearer, supply-side initiatives are beginning to gain prominence and acceptance globally. Policies such as moratoria and compensation for leaving fossil fuels unextracted in exchange for financial compensation of rights owners are likely to be effective and complementary to existing policies. A number of unknowns remain regarding the operationalization of supply-side policies, such as how to establish a binding international agreement and how to raise and allocate financial compensation for nonextraction. Nevertheless, the need for supply-side policies only emphasizes the importance of imaginative and bold initiatives within the current conjuncture of global environmental politics.

To limit the increase in global mean temperature to 1.5°C, CO2 emissions should be capped at 440 gigatons. To achieve this, about 89 percent, 59 percent, and 58 percent of existing coal and conventional gas and oil reserves, respectively, need to remain unburned. This implies an economic cost for fossil fuel rights owners, and any successful climate policy will rely on resolving the distributional challenge of how to allocate the right to use the remaining burnable reserves. We discuss the possibility of compensating rights holders of unburnable oil and gas reserves, producing the first estimates of the financial resources needed to secure full compensation. We estimate that approximately US$ 5,400 billion (109) would be needed. Despite the vast amounts required, compensation is nevertheless economically feasible. We suggest a Keynesian “whatever it takes” approach for climate action, combining partial compensation for unburnable fuels and investment in low-carbon technologies to drastically reduce emissions in the rapidly closing window of opportunity before 2030.

One of the most visionary goals of Artificial Intelligence is to create a system able to mimic and eventually surpass the intelligence observed in biological systems including, ambitiously, the one observed in humans. The main distinctive strength of humans is their ability to build a deep understanding of the world by learning continuously and drawing from their experiences. This ability, which is found in various degrees in all intelligent biological beings, allows them to adapt and properly react to changes by incrementally expanding and refining their knowledge. Arguably, achieving this ability is one of the main goals of Artificial Intelligence and a cornerstone towards the creation of intelligent artificial agents. Modern Deep Learning approaches allowed researchers and industries to achieve great advancements towards the resolution of many long-standing problems in areas like Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing. However, while this current age of renewed interest in AI allowed for the creation of extremely useful applications, a concerningly limited effort is being directed towards the design of systems able to learn continuously. The biggest problem that hinders an AI system from learning incrementally is the catastrophic forgetting phenomenon. This phenomenon, which was discovered in the 90s, naturally occurs in Deep Learning architectures where classic learning paradigms are applied when learning incrementally from a stream of experiences. This dissertation revolves around the Continual Learning field, a sub-field of Machine Learning research that has recently made a comeback following the renewed interest in Deep Learning approaches. This work will focus on a comprehensive view of continual learning by considering algorithmic, benchmarking, and applicative aspects of this field. This dissertation will also touch on community aspects such as the design and creation of research tools aimed at supporting Continual Learning research, and the theor

We estimate the impact of the 2016 Brexit referendum on the UK (un-)employment rate up to January 2020 by comparing the observed performance of the indicators in the UK with those of a synthetic control. The decline in the UK unemployment rate recorded after the referendum mimics the trend of the synthetic indicator and, similarly, the increase in UK employment follows the trend of the synthetic control. Overall, we find that the Brexit referendum has had little effect on the UK (un-)employment rate.

Conservation efforts must develop strategies to perform at violent frontiers where environmental values, mineral extraction and conflict intersect. Using war-torn eastern Democratic Republic of Congo's Itombwe Nature Reserve as an illustrative example, this article explores how community conservation is implemented and received at a violent frontier. Taking inspiration from an emerging body of literature which portrays conservation as a form of ‘social contract’ in regions where the nation state is weak or absent, it explores some of the expectations and obligations that surround community conservation initiatives. It draws the conclusion that conservation social contracts are likely to produce unintended consequences when left unfulfilled or broken. Conservation actors perceived to be breaking the terms of (implicit) social contracts can inadvertently encourage local communities to embrace alternative contracts with other actors seeking to extract value from the resources located in frontiers, such as industrial mining companies.

In this study, we estimate the impact of the Fairmined certification scheme on the well-being of participating artisanal and small-scale gold miners in Colombia and Peru. First, we collected information through phone surveys of certified and non-certified miners. Second, we constructed a well-being index that covers multiple dimensions of well-being, including material and subjective measures. Third, through linear regression techniques and propensity score matching, we compared certified miners (treatment group) to non-certified ones (control group). The results indicate that, on average, Fairmined certified miners enjoy higher well-being scores than those who do not belong to a certified mining organization.

The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), launched in 2002, has been promoted as an international anti-corruption tool. Several empirical evaluations on the effectiveness of the EITI scheme provide average estimates based on cross-country analysis. However, little empirical work has been conducted on individual case studies, especially in the context of Latin America. Our study uses a Synthetic Control Methodology (SCM) to measure the EITI's impact on several measures of corruption in the first five Latin American countries to join the initiative: Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, Peru, and Trinidad and Tobago. The method allows us to assess the magnitude and statistical significance of the EITI's effect on perceived corruption at each stage of implementation. Our results cast doubt on how decisive the scheme has been in combatting corruption. In the vast majority of cases, participation in the scheme either had no statistically significant effect or even coincided with marginally increased corruption levels (only in very few cases it was associated with temporary minor improvements). Taken together, the results indicate that joining EITI did not lead to a substantial decrease of corruption in any of the countries under scrutiny.