News by Subject Policy & Ethics

Industrial ecologist Roland Geyer measures the production, use and fate of all the plastics ever made, including synthetic fibers.

Why did America's biggest banks become heavily exposed to high-risk derivatives in the lead-up to the recent credit crisis? Researchers found the trend wasn't just driven by banks' enthusiasm for profits. Instead, government efforts to dampen bank risk-taking backfired by putting champions of risk into power. Chief Risk Officers put in place to oversee risk management encouraged banks to increase their exposure to the riskiest kinds of derivatives in the years ahead of the crisis.

Solutions to climate change, and particularly its effects on the ocean, are needed now more than ever. Coral bleaching caused by climate change is a huge threat to coral reefs. Recent extreme bleaching events have already killed corals worldwide and permanent destruction of reefs is projected within the century if immediate action is not taken. However, genetically engineering a group of microalgae found in corals may enhance their stress tolerance to ocean warming and save coral reefs.

A new Northwestern University study suggests that paying people to conserve their trees could be a highly cost-effective way to reduce deforestation and carbon emissions and should be a key part of the global strategy to fight climate change. The study, led by Seema Jayachandran, associate professor of economics in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern, sought to evaluate how effective 'Payments for Ecosystems' (PES) is at reducing deforestation.

Although it has not been widely successful to date in the former Soviet zone, Russia's use of the 'energy weapon' against Western European countries in various forms still constitutes a strategic threat that warrants close attention from policymakers in Washington and throughout Europe, according to an issue brief by an expert in the Center for Energy Studies at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy.

Nearly 42 percent of the prosecutors who participated in a national online survey reported that the US Supreme Court's 2004 decision in Crawford v. Washington increased the need for abuse victims to testify in court and decreased their prosecutions of child abuse cases either 'greatly' or 'somewhat.' University of Illinois social work senior research specialist Theodore P. Cross and independent child abuse research Debra Whitcomb co-wrote the paper.