Institutional autonomy is essential for safeguarding academic freedom. It is comparatively stable world-wide, with notable exceptions in autocratizing democracies. This year’s Academic Freedom Index (AFI) report, based on a collaborative project between scholars at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) and the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute at the University of Gothenburg, provides an overview of the global state of academic freedom. It presents data that demonstrate a correlation between universities’ institutional autonomy and individual scholars’ freedom to research and teach. It also analyses the dramatic decline of university autonomy in the United States of America from a comparative perspective.

Researchers identify a strategy that reconciles fairness in global climate policy with the urgent need to reduce air pollution deaths in low- and middle-income countries

Indiana is advancing public education with House Bill 1266, following December’s Indiana Call to Action Summit: Strengthening the Data Science Thread, co-hosted by the Indiana Department of Education and Data Science 4 Everyone.

A clean energy future hinges on minerals such as copper, cobalt, lithium and rare earth elements. But the race to secure them puts pressure on the places where they are mined, often affecting communities contributing the least to climate change. To secure CRM sources, the United States and European Union are moving supply chains to aligned regions. But simply shuffling where minerals are mined does not automatically make extraction more ethical or sustainable. In a commentary published in Nature Energy, researchers propose a new framework of “just-shoring” to shift focus from competition and security to the rights and interests of those whose lands are most at risk.

The American Meteorological Society and partner societies released a statement on “Public Availability of Scientific Information and Scientific Evidence on Climate Change” in response to the decision by the Federal Judiciary Center (FJC) to remove the climate science chapter from the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, Fourth Edition and a letter from state attorneys general urging the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) to omit similar guidance regarding climate change.

Research published in "early online" format in journals of the American Meteorological society discusses how gender affects flood mortality, U.S. ranchers and climate change, underestimations of Southern Ocean carbon uptake, terrain and tornadoes, increasing atmospheric rivers, and the future of Mississippi River water.