This article explores tensions between urbanisation and planetary boundaries by examining responses to water scarcity in the Frankfurt am Main region, Germany. Actors navigate resource scarcity and thereby influence regional politics of urban growth and climate adaptation by connecting urban homes and gardens, inner-city space, and rural hinterlands through new infrastructures of water storage. Those reach from centralised groundwater recharge systems to localised sponge city and rural biodiversity protection practices. These dynamics reveal the political role of technology in reconfiguring 'urban ecologies of limits' amid an emerging planetary shift in urban water management, influencing how environmental limits are scientifically represented, temporally framed and spatially scaled. The article captures these relationships through the notion of infrastructural technopolitics, advancing a resource-sensitive approach within urban infrastructure studies. It further grounds technopolitical analysis in geographical space by examining homes and gardens, inner-city spaces and rural hinterlands as interconnected technopolitical landscapes. This way of describing the shifting territories of the Critical Zone, the thin layer that harbours life on Earth, offers new avenues for developing political orientations toward urban water and space amid global environmental change, challenging persistent modernist distinctions and making space for more speculative futures.
Gute Innenraumluftqualität ist ein zentrales Ziel der Umwelt- und Gesundheitspolitik und gewinnt vor dem Hintergrund energieeffizienter Bauweisen sowie der Erfahrungen aus der COVID-19-Pandemie („coronavirus disease 2019“) weiter an Bedeutung. Ziel der Studie ist es, Wissen und Einstellungen in Bezug auf Innenraumluftqualität, Lüftungsverhalten sowie Veränderungen seit der Pandemie zu beschreiben und Ansatzpunkte für wirksame Interventionen abzuleiten. Im Februar 2025 wurden in einer deutschlandweiten Online-Befragung 1902 Personen mit einem standardisierten Fragebogen mittels eines Online-Panels befragt. Die Zusammensetzung der Stichprobe ist weitgehend mit den soziodemografischen Merkmalen der Bevölkerung Deutschlands vergleichbar. Innenraumluftqualität wird mit deutlicher Mehrheit von 93
Establishing global governance of artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming an increasingly pressing challenge to ensure the provision of global public goods and to mitigate harmful effects on societies and the planet. Current debates around AI take various forms, follow diverse narratives, and centre variously on economic, social, environmental, or safety aspects. Here, we make three contributions. First, we classify risks and challenges of AI across the social, planetary, and safety domains. Second, we show that AI should be governed as a global commons, requiring coordinated interventions across all three domains, reflecting relevant inter-domain feedback loops, and root drivers, such as the pursuit of monopolistic AI power and the AI-infused media environment. Third, we identify data, energy, and compute as relevant regulatory dimensions across social, planetary, and safety domains. We conclude by emphasising the importance of limiting agentic AI, incentivising depolarising algorithms on social media, and setting AI dynamics within the context of global equity.
Several scientific initiatives are underway to modernise and advance chemical environmental risk assessment (ERA), supporting the shift from conventional practices toward more mechanistic, integrated, and systems-based approaches. These developments aim to enhance ecological realism, improve predictive capacity, reduce reliance on animal testing, and foster greater alignment across sectors, ultimately contributing to better protection of biodiversity and the environment. Yet, translating these innovative approaches into regulatory practice remains challenging due to fragmented efforts and limited alignment between research and policy. To address this gap, the European Partnership for the Assessment of Risks from Chemicals (PARC) is fostering structured dialogue and stakeholder engagement to align research and innovation with regulatory needs. Within PARC, a proposed solution is the development of the MIND platform—Map, Integrate, Network, Drive—envisioned as a strategic and collaborative space that connects people, practices, and resources across disciplines and regulatory domains. MIND aims to encourage collaboration and knowledge sharing and integration, gradually connecting fragmented initiatives to build a more integrated and interoperable ERA knowledge ecosystem. By encouraging collaboration, improving data sharing, and enhancing policy relevance, MIND seeks to accelerate the uptake of advanced ERA approaches in regulatory practice, with a particular focus on safeguarding biodiversity. Over time, this may contribute to Europe’s sustainability objectives and the ambitions of the European Green Deal.
