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The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) fights transnational crimes: the illegal trade in waste is one major topic, as it generates multibillion-dollar profits for organized crime networks. We spoke to Ioana Cotutiu, programme officer for illegal trade in waste in the Asia–Pacific region, about the illegal waste trade and how behavioural science can help.
Waste pickers are often invisible in climate discourse. Waste specialist Sonia Dias discusses their essential part in climate resilience and what we can learn from their experience.
Corporate waste strategies are limited, and recycling is not enough to solve the global waste crisis. This Comment highlights the urgent need for businesses to adopt zero-waste principles by redesigning products and systems and discarding greenwashing. To drive this change, corporate governance must be inclusive and incentivize reduction.
Economist George Baffour Awuah discusses how a quiet revolution is helping to turn a waste crisis to economic opportunity in the Global South. But for scale, a supportive ecosystem is required.
Maria Raquel Lima is based in Brazil, where communities suffer owing to waste colonialism. She explains why polluters must pay and affected communities must lead the solutions.
Households waste huge amounts of food, which leads to considerable financial costs for individuals and substantial contributions to CO2 emissions. But this is a complex problem to address. In this Comment, Tapper and colleagues discuss how behavioural and systems science can help to provide solutions.
The bioecological model of human development is among the most influential frameworks in the social sciences. We argue that it is time to integrate natural ecosystems into this model. This approach will shape research, practice and policy to promote both healthy human development and an environmentally sustainable future.
At the World Health Summit, diversity in representation is increasing — but influence remains uneven. Drawing on 11 years of speaker data from one of the most prominent global health forums, we uncover patterns in gender, geography and sector. We propose three areas for future reform to ensure global health platforms move beyond tokenism towards meaningful inclusion and accountability.
Survey methods are used to collect informative data in a wide range of scientific contexts. This Comment outlines how to ensure that a survey is fit for its intended purpose and to avoid the many potential pitfalls associated with survey research.
Formal education systems rarely include the knowledge and skills of hunter-gatherer societies. This can lead to cultural erosion and knowledge decline. For education to be both high quality and sustainable, Indigenous knowledge should be recognized and valued.
Milad Malekzadeh was once told that to be successful in academia, developing unique expertise was necessary. Over the years, he learned that diversification is more valuable.
An academic website serves as both a public-facing window on the world wide web and an important internal laboratory resource. In this ‘How to’ piece, I outline how to build your academic website, including what content to include, and ways to build and launch your site.
Designing good research questions goes well beyond the standard definitions of clarity, focus and tractability, and even beyond ‘novelty’ in the strictest sense. This Comment describes the iterative creative process for designing good research questions, and includes practical suggestions and ways to avoid common traps.
