News Updates

In emergency action responding to a forest fire blazing toward Lake Tahoe, residents of long stretches of the lake’s shoreline are being ordered to evacuate. The fire is just one of dozens raging across western states. Beyond immediate firefighting challenges, the United States needs to forge a science-based national forest fire policy, Jerry F. Franklin and James K. Agee argue in Issues. A comprehensive policy, they write, should consider all aspects of wildfire management—including fuel reduction, fire suppression, and landscape restoration—and be part of an overall vision for stewardship and management of the nation’s forests.

The Indian capital of Delhi, infamous for polluted air, has opened its first “smog tower” to take in dirty air, filter it, and release the purified result. But even if it works—skepticism abounds—a larger challenge will be solving the problem at its source. As Jon Hellin and Sudhanshu Singh explain in Issues, much of the city’s smog derives from smoke generated when area farmers burn rice straw in their fields—ironically, a practice spurred by the Green Revolution. The remedy, the authors write, will require technological, social, and policy changes, including giving farmers incentives to reduce burning.

A Swedish steelmaker has delivered the world’s first batch of “green steel,” produced without emitting any carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Although only a trial run, with industrial-scale production estimated to start by 2026, such an advance would be welcome. In Issues, Colin Cunliff maintains that cutting carbon emissions from steelmaking and other hard-to-decarbonize industrial sectors is essential to reducing their impact on global climate. He calls for developing a “comprehensive innovation strategy that is appropriately scaled to the urgency of the climate challenge … and makes use of the full suite of policy tools at the government’s disposal to accelerate innovation.”

Expansion of broadband service in rural and other underserved areas—an effort slated to receive $65 billion in the infrastructure bill approved by the US Senate—will bring “significant” social returns, according to researchers at the Brookings Institution. Gains include improved health, educational, and life outcomes. In Issues, Camille Crittenden predicts that teenagers will especially benefit. She cites research showing that gathering information and communicating online “can help teens feel more connected, find information on topics they may be too embarrassed to ask about in person, and join communities less exclusive than high school cliques and varsity teams.”

The US Bureau of Reclamation is expected to announce the first-ever mandatory cuts to water allocations from the Colorado River. The move comes as drought in the American West has intensified and reservoirs have dipped to historic lows. Solving this will be a challenge. Indeed, Lewis Branscomb in Issues calls improving management of water resources one of the nation’s “grand challenges”—technically complex societal problems that have stubbornly defied solution. He argues for adopting new “research and innovation policies” spanning government, business, and the science community to shorten the time and cost of innovations needed to meet these challenges.

With the latest rapid surge of COVID-19, many US hospitals are facing a critical shortage of nurses. In addition to threatening immediate patient care, the lack of nurses available and their increasingly stressful workloads could blunt longer-term advances in care. As Lisa De Bode details in Issues, nurses have proven to be key innovators during the pandemic. They have developed new modes of care and solved a variety of logistical logjams, often on the fly to meet unforeseen needs. And critical to successful innovation, they have been instrumental in convincing institutions that the changes are worthwhile.

The Gulf of Mexico’s “dead zone”—where nutrient runoff depletes oxygen levels so sharply that marine life cannot survive—is larger than usual this year, covering some 6,334 square miles. This finding reinforces the argument in Issues by Carl Safina and Sarah Chasis that Congress should make “fundamental changes in ocean governance and management.” As guidance, they write, the private Pew Oceans Commission and the public US Commission on Ocean Policy have “crafted a comprehensive set of recommendations for improving the health, viability, and ethical stewardship of the oceans.”

As part of its plan for tackling climate change and competing with China, the Biden administration just issued an executive order calling for up to half of new vehicles sold in the country to be electric by 2030. In a White House ceremony, many US automobile companies also committed to the effort. In Issues, John D. Graham, Keith B. Belton, and Suri Xia offer a road map that might help the nation and automakers reach that destination. Key routes include adopting new industrial policies to make EV companies more competitive and EVs more attractive for consumers.

Even as they advanced to the 200-meter finals at the Olympics, two female runners are banned from competing in their favored event, the 400-meter race, because of their naturally high testosterone levels. The same rules kept two-time Olympic champion Caster Semenya from competing in the 800-meter race, her specialty. In Issues, Roger Pielke Jr. and Madeleine Pape, a former Olympian, maintain that the testosterone regulations derive from improperly structured and poorly analyzed research. They offer an alternative regulatory approach that would maintain female-male competition categories while respecting the actual biological and genetic complexity of female athletes.