Laura Pereira

@laurap18.bsky.social

South African sustainability scientist. Prof in Sustainability Transformations and Futures at Global Change Institute, Wits University and researcher at Stockholm Resilience Centre. IPBES expert, Earth Commissioner and general academic traveller

I often hear people say that we need to include the Global South in CO₂ removal (CDR). I disagree. CDR is waste management and a bummer. Rich countries created this CO₂ mess and it’s our responsibility to clean it up. The Global South shouldn’t be burdened with this task.

On this third year anniversary of the war in Sudan we woke up to the devastating news that our friend and comrade Muzan Al Neel has passed away. She was a brilliant revolutionary thinker, writer and organizer and a wonderful human. Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji'un

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Thinking of those with Iranian links in the UK, worrying about family and friends. "There is every chance the regime will get tougher on Iranians to cover its vulnerability. I worry that ordinary people in Iran and beyond will be in harm’s way.” www.thetimes.com/world/middle...

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe: I fear for Iran and my family

She dreamt of a free Iran during her six-year incarceration. Then when Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe heard America had attacked she was worried for her relatives. She reveals why sitting for a portrait wa...

thetimes.com

Headlines moved on quickly from the schoolgirls in Minab. We don’t know their names; no media profiles about their lives and aspirations. No smiling photos attached to quotes from mourning families. How unfair that some dead are memorialised while others are relegated to ‘estimated casualties.’

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A new paper shows that less than 2 months of exposure to Twitter’s algorithmic feed significantly shifts people’s political views to the right. Moving from chronological feed to the algorithmic feed also increases engagement. This is one of the most concerning papers I’ve read in awhile.

The political effects of X's feed algorithm
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10098-2
Received: 16 December 2024
Accepted: 4 January 2026
Published online: 18 February 2026
Open access
• Check for updates
Germain Gauthier,5, Roland Hodler?5, Philine Widmer35 & Ekaterina Zhuravskaya3,4,5 m
Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects'. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk's platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects.
Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users' feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X's algorithm has persistent effects on users' current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.

🌊 The global community has made ambitious commitments to advancing ocean equity – what is missing is a transparent & replicable way to measure equity and track progress 🐠 📢 Our new @nature.com paper, the #OceanEquityIndex, offers a simple yet robust solution: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The Ocean Equity Index - Nature

The Ocean Equity Index provides a systematic, twelve-criteria framework to assess and improve equity in ocean initiatives, projects and policies, producing structured data that guide evidence-bas...

nature.com

As I often say, you cannot distinguish justice as a research or policy objective from epistemic injustice and knowledge politics - if our research is based on positivist models of Western science, we won't see the real problems - and maybe not even the solutions. I recommend reading both papers...

Solidarity with climate warriors @harjeet11.bsky.social & Jyoti Aswati, whose Delhi home was raided by Indian authorities amid outrageous claims their fossil fuels campaign is funded by foreign actors and threatens national security - part of a global crackdown www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

Indian police raid home of environmental activists over anti-fossil fuel campaign

Sarat Sampada founders Harjeet Singh and Jyoti Aswati say allegations are ‘baseless, biased and misleading’

theguardian.com