Insights

Artificial intelligence (AI) offers transformative potential in healthcare through faster diagnoses, improved predictions, and increased efficiency. However, community health centers (CHCs) have experienced exploitative data extraction practices, where their data is used to develop products sold back to them at high costs. Current health policy and data governance frameworks are inadequate for AI integration in healthcare. Without proactive measures and equitable collaboration, these centers risk perpetuating past extractive dynamics under the guise of advanced technology.
Health
From Data Extraction To Collaboration: Building Equitable Artificial Intelligence Partnerships In Community Health
Iran faces severe environmental degradation, including excessive groundwater extraction causing land subsidence, drying of major lakes like Urmia, and extreme air pollution leading to thousands of premature deaths annually. These ecological crises undermine agriculture, infrastructure, public health, and economic productivity. Despite potential financial gains from a new US-Iran peace deal and lifted sanctions, Iran has historically prioritized military and geopolitical investments over environmental restoration. A strategic national investment focused on water management, ecosystem recovery, renewable energy, and pollution reduction could repair damaged natural systems, boost long-term economic growth, improve public health, enhance food security, create jobs, and promote sustainable development.
Iran’s environmental catastrophe has also wrecked its economy
On 6 July, the GCSP hosted the launch of the report "The Essential Convergence: Global Compact on Extreme AI Risks," developed by the Strategic Foresight Group. The event united leaders from humanitarian, diplomatic, parliamentary, scientific, and security sectors to explore lessons from historic international initiatives like the Red Cross, landmine bans, and arms control agreements. The goal is to establish a practical global framework for cooperation on extreme AI risks before a major crisis forces urgent action.
The essential convergence: Global Compact on Extreme AI Risks
Resistance to gender equality and the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda is a deliberate, well-funded effort undermining international commitments, especially amid escalating global conflicts and shrinking space for gender-responsive security. This brief examines how such resistance operates through language, funding, and procedures in multilateral forums, focusing on International Geneva. Based on research, expert input, and confidential diplomatic dialogues, it reveals that opposition damages public trust, deepens inequalities, and threatens sustainable peace. Providing diplomats and policymakers with strategic, actionable guidance, it emphasizes promoting gender-responsive norms, inclusive processes, institutional infrastructure, and meaningful participation to protect gains and build resilient alliances in a polarized environment.
Keeping gender on the agenda: Navigating resistance to WPS in multilateral fora
More than half of board directors (55%) report AI has yet to deliver significant business value, with most focusing on cost optimization and customer service rather than new opportunities. Board engagement in AI strategy and talent development remains low. Geopolitical instability leads 72% of companies to prioritize home-region operations, increasing investments in the EU and US, while supply chain diversification and operational flexibility are common resilience strategies. Sustainability remains a priority despite political setbacks, with 61% integrating sustainability metrics, emphasizing social impact, resource efficiency, and net-zero targets. Boards prioritize M&A, CEO succession, and cybersecurity in shareholder dialogues, valuing collaboration, strategic focus, and leadership roles for effectiveness.
More than half of boards of directors have yet to see significant business value from AI
"Artificial intelligence" is a misleading term since current AI systems simulate specific cognitive tasks without true human understanding or context, leading to misallocated authority when systems are mistaken for genuine intelligence. Similarly, "ethics" in AI is often reduced to compliance checklists, overlooking deeper questions about human responsibility and the long-term influence of AI on users' judgment and trust. Ethical governance must focus on the kind of intelligence AI cultivates in people and the kind of organization it shapes. Businesses benefit by recognizing AI as a tool simulating human capacities, ensuring humans remain central in decision-making to uphold both functional and moral accountability.
Education
Why ‘AI Ethics’ Is a Misnomer — and Why That Matters for Business
Young adults in low- and middle-income countries, surveyed across Africa and South Asia, show greater optimism about AI's potential to improve education, work prospects, and social lives compared to their Western peers. Nearly 80% expect AI to enhance learning, with many already using AI tools daily despite challenges like high data costs, weak internet, and limited digital skills. Half anticipate AI will boost employment opportunities in the next five years. Concerns center on AI tools being Western-centric, neglecting local languages and cultures, and issues around data ownership, corporate power, and environmental impact. Gender gaps exist in AI knowledge and usage, with young men reporting higher familiarity than women.
Africa | Education
What will AI do for us? Young adults in lower‑income countries feel more positive about its potential – new survey
Affordable housing is a complex, systemic issue linked to health, climate resilience, economic opportunity, and social equity, requiring coordinated efforts across land, infrastructure, finance, construction, and policy. The global housing crisis affects up to 3.4 billion people, with worsening deficits and significant public health and environmental impacts. Effective solutions must integrate supply- and demand-side approaches, including scalable affordable rental housing, inclusive housing finance, post-disaster reconstruction, and construction finance for homeownership. The Asian Development Bank’s 2026–2030 programmatic framework advocates this integrated systemic approach to enhance livability, resilience, and urban well-being.
Financial services, Health
Affordable Housing Needs a Systems Approach
Higher economic policy uncertainty increases carbon emissions in emerging markets, with the magnitude of this effect varying based on structural and institutional factors. Countries with stronger institutions, cleaner energy sources, and greater development levels experience weaker emissions responses. Conversely, lower-income and more climate-vulnerable economies face more pronounced increases in emissions. These findings emphasize the role of policy and structural conditions in shaping environmental outcomes under uncertainty and offer insights for designing strategies to mitigate carbon emissions risks.
Latin America
Economic Policy Uncertainty and Carbon Emissions in Emerging Markets
The UK’s new community refugee sponsorship route, inspired by Canada’s long-standing model, aims to create a safe, legal pathway for refugees while enhancing public confidence in the immigration system. Unlike earlier UK schemes, this initiative allows sponsors to name specific refugees and expands eligibility to a wider range of organizations, including businesses and universities, which could improve refugee employment outcomes. Refugee eligibility will remain linked to UN vulnerability criteria, but there may be a shift towards those closer to the labor market. Effective integration requires continued state involvement, as shown in the Homes for Ukraine program, where local authority support was key to success and safeguarding refugees.
Community refugee sponsorship: how the Home Office can get its new safe‑and‑legal route right
The DCAF Elsie Programme, part of the Elsie Initiative for Women in Peace Operations, emphasizes that achieving gender equity in the security sector requires transformation beyond mere representation. Action research, combined with technical assistance, access, and trust, drives deeper organizational change. The Women in Policing Project in South Africa, a partnership between the South African Police Service and the Institute for Security Studies, explored gender dynamics in operational policing, focusing on women. This research transformed discussions about gender by altering both the content and the voices empowered to speak, demonstrating that creating evidence for change simultaneously enacts that change.
Research as transformation: Creating space for conversations about gender in operational policing
Replacing combustion with electricity, known as "electrify everything," has been a key strategy to reduce carbon emissions, demonstrated by the rising use of electric vehicles and appliances. However, the advent of AI introduces new complexities, as it demands significant electricity consumption, potentially undermining decarbonization efforts. Still, AI may offer unexpected benefits for advancing a green economy, akin to historic innovations like the light bulb revolutionizing energy use. Despite political challenges and slower policy progress, experts suggest the critical factor is leadership in driving the transition to net zero, with AI playing a dual role as both challenge and opportunity in achieving sustainable energy goals.
Education
Podcast: Electricity Was Supposed to Save Us. Will It Doom Us Instead?
Europe is successfully producing world-class founders and frontier technologies across AI, fintech, deep tech, and climate tech, attracting global talent and capital. However, the critical challenge remains developing strong exit strategies—initial public offerings and acquisitions—that retain more value within Europe. While companies like Mistral have shown progress by raising significant funding domestically and from U.S. investors without relocating, many scale-ups still exit via U.S. markets, and European late-stage investment remains limited. Policymakers have increased capital allocation to venture but need to strengthen IPO markets and corporate acquisitions to create a virtuous cycle that encourages European exits and reinvestment.
Financial services, Education
Europe’s startup boom still needs an exit plan
Intelligence research is shifting from focusing solely on brains and code to emphasizing embodiment and goal-directed behavior across various scales and substrates. This edited volume brings together experts from philosophy, neuroscience, AI, robotics, biology, and related fields to explore embodied intelligence through transdisciplinary dialogue. By adopting a broad, inclusive definition, the collection challenges traditional distinctions between biological and artificial intelligence, revealing diverse and unexpected forms of intelligent behavior. This expanded perspective promises to reshape our understanding of intelligence, human nature, and technological development.
Education
Embodied Intelligence
The Bennett School of Public Policy’s essay anthology challenges the prevailing view of AI as a US-China arms race, questioning this zero-sum framing. Drawing on insights from diplomacy, philanthropy, civil rights, national security, and economics, contributors highlight the metaphor's limitations in capturing AI’s complex geopolitical realities. The collection presents diverse perspectives that reveal the shortcomings of the arms race narrative and propose alternative frameworks to better understand AI’s geopolitical influence and potential.
Reimagining the AI Arms Race
Smarter Together by Michael Clarke, Manuel Garcia-Garcia, and Michael Joffe explores the deeply human aspects of our relationship with artificial intelligence. The book examines real-world dilemmas—like chatbot misinformation and AI-created art—to reveal how AI systems are designed to reflect human thinking, emotions, and decision-making. Using insights from neuroscience and behavioral science, it unpacks how trust, cognitive biases, and cultural factors shape AI's impact. The authors provide practical guidance for creating AI tools that enhance human intelligence rather than replace it.
Smarter Together: How We Think, Feel and Decide with AI
Nathan Goldschlag emphasizes the urgent need for accurate and comprehensive data on AI usage among firms and workers to properly assess AI's economic impact. Policymakers require detailed insights to respond effectively to AI-driven changes in the workforce and business landscape. Although existing U.S. statistical infrastructure provides a foundation, it must be rapidly upgraded to meet these demands and enable informed policy decisions regarding AI’s influence on the economy.
Measuring the Economic Effects of AI
The Independent International Scientific Panel on AI released a Preliminary Report assessing AI's capabilities, opportunities, and risks globally. Comprising experts from all UN regions, the Panel warns that current safeguards lag behind AI’s rapid advancements. Policymakers face the challenge of obtaining timely scientific evidence to govern AI effectively before negative impacts arise. The report examines seven key areas: AI science and development, societal applications including health and education, economic effects, security and environmental concerns, human rights and democracy, cultural and individual well-being, and governance and reliability of AI systems.
Evidence-based assessment of opportunities, risks and impacts of AI
The United States leads global innovation by not only developing breakthrough technologies but also creating institutions that enable their scaling. Key factors include the evolution of the patent system, research institutions like Bell Labs, the rise of venture capital, and the current AI ecosystem. Commercialization, institutional design, and effective regulation have been as critical as the inventions themselves, providing valuable lessons for advancing artificial intelligence and entrepreneurship.
Education
Why America Leads the World in Innovation
Seventy years after London’s deadly 1952 smog, the legacy of the 1956 Clean Air Act shows that evidence-based regulation can dramatically improve air quality and public health. However, resistance from industry and political hesitation delayed action then and continue to hinder progress today. Modern air pollution remains a major health threat, causing tens of thousands of deaths annually in the UK and millions globally, largely driven by fossil fuel use. Fossil fuel interests persistently influence politics, funding parties and lobbying to delay policy, weaken regulations, and support extraction, despite clear scientific consensus linking emissions to health harms and climate change. The struggle to prioritize health over profit reflects enduring patterns of power shaping environmental policy.
Health
70 years on from the killer smog: what clean air laws teach us about power, pollution and profit

Forum Spaces

© 2026 All rights reserved
Privacy Policy & Terms of Service