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.
This study aimed to investigate the occurrence and concentration patterns of three groups of trace contaminants-potentially toxic elements (PTEs), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), and per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs)-in river catchments with contrasting land use and landscape characteristics. A second objective was to relate the concentrations in suspended particulate matter (SPM) to those in soils and to catchment attributes in order to identify dominant transport processes and contaminant sources. A spatially explicit monitoring campaign was conducted in three river catchments of the central Danube River Basin: Zagyva and Koppány in Hungary and Wulka in Austria. Composite soil samples (∼10 per catchment, totaling ∼200 subsamples) were collected from forest, pasture, and cropland areas. SPM was collected using both passive and active samplers under base-flow and high-flow conditions. The results revealed strong spatial variability in concentrations for five of seven PTEs, all PAHs, and eight of 10 PFASs. Substances predominantly deposited atmospherically-such as PAHs and several PFASs-were more concentrated in forest soils compared to pasture and cropland. Base-flow SPM samples were often more contaminated than high-flow samples, especially for PAHs and some PTEs. Concentrations in SPM were generally correlated with soil concentrations, suggesting that erosion-related transport of these chemicals may be significant in rural catchments. However, enrichment patterns and correlation strength varied by substance group and land use type. These findings support the use of parallel SPM and soil sampling for improving empirical emission modeling and source identification in catchments with mixed land use.
