Companies with strong environmental, social, and governance (ESG) track records performed better than their peers after being required to adopt more rigorous auditing standards. This is according to a new study from researchers at Nagoya University in Japan, which is the first to examine the connection between the implementation of “key audit matters” (KAMs) and firms’ sustainability practices.

Our times are dominated by crises as well as social polarization and fragmentation. When it comes to strengthening cohesion, leaders play a special role: this is the fundamental thinking behind the interdisciplinary Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences approved today by the DFG. The “Goethe Leadership Centre”, whose foundations lie in psychology and economics, will conduct research on this topic for an initial four years. In addition, the DFG announced that funding for the research unit QUAST, which focuses on predicting the properties of quantum materials, has been extended.

Lithium is a strategically very important mineral in the present decade. Latin American countries, with their abundant resources, have taken divergent paths in terms of governance strategies. In a recent study, a researcher from Jeonbuk National University has proposed a two-stage decision-making framework to explain this trend, providing a useful starting point for examining how states navigate the interplay between external pressures and domestic structural constraints in governing lithium industries.

International humanitarian aid organizations rely on analyses from the  Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) system, a global partnership that monitors and classifies the severity of food insecurity to help target assistance where and when it is most needed. Howwever, a new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and collaborators, published in Nature Foods, finds that global food insecurity analyses systematically underestimate hunger.

In Mozambique, more than one in three children under five suffer from stunting, or impaired physical growth. New research from Santosh Kumar Gautam, associate professor of development and global health economics at the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs, shows that improving access to safe drinking water can reduce the odds of stunting by about 20 percent, making it one of the most effective interventions for child growth.