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  • Grass-roots grant-writing approaches can help researchers at small institutions to succeed

    Grass-roots grant-writing approaches can help researchers at small institutions to succeed

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    A close-up shot of a young woman's hand writing the word "money" on a yellow sticky note

    Community support groups help researchers to write successful grant proposals.Credit: Virojt Changyencham/Getty

    Chemist David Sanabria-Ríos was no stranger to receiving the cold shoulder from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH).

    Several times, he had applied for funding for his research on synthesizing small, new molecules at the Inter American University of Puerto Rico Metropolitan Campus in San Juan. But Sanabria-Ríos says that his proposals often fared worse than being rejected — they were not even discussed or scored by reviewers at the NIH, the largest biomedical research funder in the world. Although this outcome stings, it’s fairly common.

    The NIH receives tens of thousands of grant proposals every year and it can give dedicated feedback to only a fraction of those. An even smaller fraction is ultimately funded.

    A funding adviser’s guide to writing a great grant application

    Sanabria-Ríos says that although his science was sound, his problem was a lack of effective grant writing. Part of this issue stemmed from a language barrier he faced when writing grant proposals in English instead of his native Spanish. However, a lack of grant-related resources at his university, such as a grants office to assist in editing proposals, added to this disconnect.

    “My university is mainly an undergraduate institution,” Sanabria-Ríos says. “We don’t have specific programmes” to help with grant-writing, such as are found at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and other institutions.

    Sanabria-Ríos is not alone. Writing grant proposals is necessary to advance in the scientific world, but the challenges that have to be overcome to get research funded can feel more intense at small and less research-intensive universities.

    For example, in the United States, research-intensive universities that regularly receive top-tier grants from institutions such as the NIH are known as R1 or ‘very high research activity’ institutions. They typically have administrative offices dedicated to moving grant paperwork along and infrastructure to support researchers who take time off from teaching to write proposals. However, for researchers at smaller institutions in the United States that mainly serve undergraduates and have a large proportion of students from minority backgrounds, such resources for grant writing are scarce.

    To bridge that gap, researchers on these campuses are using their shared experiences to help each other stay on track and overcome what might be unfamiliar logistical obstacles in their grant proposals, such as crafting a realistic research budget or carving out time in their busy schedules to write. For some researchers, this might mean holding informal writing sessions together and sharing goals over coffee; for others, it means finding mentorship outside their university.

    Katia Del Rio-Tsonis missed out on this kind of community support when she began her research career at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Cuernavaca in the 1990s. Informal support and mentorship between colleagues when writing grants might be even more valuable than resources that are offered by institutions, says Del Rio-Tsonis, who is now a biologist at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Miami University is an R2 institution — defined as having ‘high research activity’ — that has a large proportion of undergraduate students compared with postgraduate students.

    “There has been an incredible change in the support,” she says. “A lot of us try to find colleagues who can be helpful.”

    Pulling together from grass roots

    When biologist Kelly Tseng arrived at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), in 2012, writing grants was just one of many new challenges she faced. UNLV is a minority-serving institution — that is, it has a significant number of students from one or more minority groups including Indigenous people and those from Black, Hispanic, Asian and Pacific Islander backgrounds — and it achieved R1 status in 2018.

    For new investigators, Tseng says, there can be a lot of obstacles that eat away at the time researchers can dedicate to grant writing, such as setting up their independent laboratory or taking on a full teaching load. The grant-writing process itself can also be confusing for those with limited experience, she says.

    I’ve built a career without a big golden grant. Here’s how

    “It’s not just writing the proposal but there are many other documents that a researcher needs to prepare, such as a budget, that need to be submitted at the same time,” Tseng says. “And sometimes you focus so much on the proposal that you forget about the other parts.”

    Biologist Melissa Harrington is the associate vice-president of the research-development team at Delaware State University in Dover, an R2 institution and a historically Black college and university. Harrington says that a lot of new investigators who arrive at Delaware State are starting their grant experience from scratch.

    Many, she says, “have never seen a grant proposal; they don’t even know what it looks like. I see that as the biggest obstacle.”

    Having earned a PhD from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, before arriving at UNLV, Tseng was familiar with what a good grant proposal looked like. However, she still faced a steep learning curve when it came to submitting her own proposals. One resource that helped her to work through those growing pains was attending informal grant clubs hosted by faculty members in her department.

    “This was started by a couple of senior faculty members who came from research-intensive institutions, who had success with grant writing for the NIH,” Tseng says.

    The idea behind the club, she explains, is that anyone working on a proposal in the cellular biology department could sign up for a weekly slot to bring in a section of their draft proposal and receive feedback from two senior faculty members. These draft sections were also shared with any other faculty members who were interested in attending the meetings and they could listen in on the feedback given.

    “Many people who participated found it really helpful to clarify their proposal,” Tseng says. “Sometimes, when you spend a lot of time writing a proposal, it becomes hard to see the weaknesses in it.”

    For Wendy Beane, a biologist at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, the accountability she needed to keep her proposals on track was missing. She says that although her university, an R2 institution with a high percentage of undergraduate students compared with postgraduate students, offers some support for grant writing, colleagues also turn to each other for help with staying on top of grant deadlines.

    Most scientists don’t enjoy writing grants. Here’s how to change that

    “The biggest issue with grant writing is that it’s probably the most important thing you need to do, but it always gets put to the bottom of the list” when you have an assay experiment to run or a deadline for submitting a talk, Beane says. “Holding each other accountable is something we did at the grass-roots level.”

    When she was a junior faculty member, Beane says, she and a group of her peers would come together and set goals with each other, either through in-person conversations or by e-mail, to help them achieve milestones during their grant writing, such as submitting a proposal by the end of a grant application cycle. Beane says that the cohort also held small group-writing sessions in a colleague’s office once a week for about an hour.

    “We’d say ‘we’re going to get together in so-and-so’s office, bring your coffee’ and then we would just sit in the same room and type,” Beane says. A strict no-talking rule was implemented during dedicated writing time.

    The importance of mentorship

    Although group support can be important for success, it doesn’t necessarily replace one-on-one guidance through mentorship, Beane says. As she sees it, there are three levels of mentorship that are important to draw on when writing a grant: feedback from someone outside your field, feedback from someone in your field but outside your institution and your ‘work best friend’ who will be candid with you.

    The mentor from an external institution can be particularly beneficial, says Del Rio-Tsonis, who has been a mentor to Tseng. “Cross-institutional mentoring is important because then you don’t have a bias and you don’t have to deal with departmental politics or jealousy,” she says. “You’re just helping with the science.”

    But it’s not always easy for new investigators to make these mentorship connections. At Delaware State, Harrington says, such connections are supported by an NIH programme called Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) that puts in place a more formal mentorship programme, which is both internal and external to an institution.

    A standing Barbara Duncan is seen leading a grants training workshop to sitting participants

    A grant-writing training session at a 2022 Interactive Mentoring to Enhance Research Skills (iMERS) workshop at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.Credit: University of Kentucky Photography

    For Sanabria-Ríos, mentorship came from a programme at the University of Kentucky in Lexington called Interactive Mentoring to Enhance Research Skills (iMERS), which offers free mentorship to faculty members at minority-serving institutions who are looking to land a NIH grant.

    Melissa Nickell is the centre administrator for iMERS’ sister programme, the SuRE Resource Center, which is also based at University of Kentucky. Nickell says that these programmes work mainly with resource-limited institutions that have researchers who have great scientific ideas, but might lack some of the nuts and bolts for successful grant writing. For example, some scientists might not fully appreciate the details that are needed to make a grant proposal both compliant and competitive, she says.

    Sanabria-Ríos first began working with his iMERS mentor virtually during the COVID-19 pandemic, in May 2020. His mentor, Sarah D’Orazio, a microbiologist at the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine, advised him on how to write persuasively and for a non-specialist audience, because NIH reviewers are not always in a researcher’s field or subfield. Taking that advice to heart, Sanabria-Ríos submitted his grant proposal to the NIH in February 2021 and received a score and constructive feedback for the first time — but the proposal was ultimately rejected.

    “When I received my score, I was happy,” he says. “It was a good score, but not a fundable score. But I recognized it as an invitation for resubmission.”

    Nature collection: Mentoring

    In June 2022, Sanabria-Ríos met D’Orazio in person in Lexington, and they worked together to provide targeted revisions in response to the harshest bits of feedback on his proposal. He resubmitted the proposal in February last year for NIH R15 funding, which supports small-scale research projects at mainly undergraduate institutions and funds researchers who have not previously received significant NIH grants. He proposed to develop synthetic fatty acids, which can form holes in bacterial membranes and ultimately lead to cell death, as a new type of antibiotic that might be difficult for bacteria to develop resistance against. His resubmission won approval.

    “This is the first R15 grant that my institution has received in its history,” he says. “We are working hard to enhance the level of research at our institution. This is a specific example of moving in that direction.”

    Even for researchers at small, low-resourced institutions, support for grant writing will look different at different universities. What could be helpful for some scientists, Beane says, might come across as micromanaging for others. What remains crucial is the sense of community and support that researchers find with each other.

    “Most of us face more noes than yeses” when it comes to grant proposals being funded, Tseng says. “It’s always helpful to have others to talk with about it and to learn from each other’s experiences. It’s really just a support to keep writing and keep submitting.”

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  • Trump’s shadow looms at climate summit: what COP29 could deliver

    Trump’s shadow looms at climate summit: what COP29 could deliver

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    Attendees watch a speech onstage at the opening of the 2024 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP29) in Baku, Azerbaijan.

    The COP29 climate summit, where negotiators from more than 200 nations will meet, opened on 11 November.Credit: Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty

    Extreme storms fuelled by climate change have wreaked havoc across the world in 2024, including in Brazil and the Philippines. The average annual temperature for the globe could reach 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels for the first time this year. But another worrying development for many attending this week’s United Nations climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, will probably be the re-election of Donald Trump as US president.

    What Trump’s election win could mean for AI, climate and health

    The last time Trump was in the White House, beginning in 2017, he pulled the United States out of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, a pact that governments made to prevent Earth from warming more than 1.5–2 °C by curbing their emissions. The US president-elect is expected to do the same after entering office next year. This is already casting a shadow over the 29th UN climate conference of the parties (COP29) as representatives from nearly 200 countries gather to discuss financial aid for low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) vulnerable to global warming. The summit runs from 11-22 November.

    Negotiating a strong agreement without the United States — the world’s largest economy and its second-largest greenhouse-gas emitter — will be “very difficult”, says Niklas Höhne, a climate policy expert and co-founder of the NewClimate Institute in Cologne, Germany.

    Here, Nature takes a look at what is on the agenda at COP29.

    Another US exit

    When the Paris agreement was inked, world leaders included a provision that any party seeking to leave the pact would have to wait until three years after it entered into force. This meant that Trump could not pull the United States out of the agreement officially until 4 November 2020. When US President Joe Biden succeeded Trump a little over two months later, he signed the paperwork to rejoin the agreement.

    How to recover when a climate disaster destroys your city

    This time around, the exit process will take only one year, but observers say the damage is in many ways already done. Trump’s election signifies that the United States is unlikely to keep its pledge, made under Biden, to cut greenhouse-gas emissions to 50% below 2005 levels by 2030. This could give other countries political cover to scale back their efforts under the agreement, says Joanna Lewis, who heads the science, technology and international affairs programme at Georgetown University in Washington DC.

    A US exit could also spell more trouble for climate finance, the main theme of the summit in Baku. The United States has already failed to meet its commitment under Biden to boost international aid for developing nations to US$11.4 billion annually, to help them adapt to climate change and forgo industrialization that involves heavy pollution. The US Congress appropriated just $1 billion this year. And few see any prospects of the new administration under Trump, who has questioned the existence of climate change, stepping up.

    The price of change

    Industrialized countries, which are responsible for the bulk of historical greenhouse-gas emissions, have committed to helping ‘developing countries’ with climate funding under the terms of the UN climate framework. They put a dollar figure on that commitment in 2009: $100 billion annually.

    COP28 climate summit signals the end of fossil fuels — but is it enough?

    By some measures they hit that goal, albeit two years late, but researchers say much more is now needed. Negotiations at the summit starting this week will determine a ‘new collective quantified climate finance goal,’ to help developing nations, which are the least responsible for climate change and oftentimes the most vulnerable. Which countries will pay, how much and where the funds will go are up for discussion in Baku.

    Estimates vary for how much money developing nations need to adapt, but the negotiations are likely to begin around $1 trillion annually, says Melanie Robinson, the global climate director at the World Resources Institute, a non-profit research organization based in Washington DC. Others say the need is much larger: one economic panel has estimated the need around $2.4 trillion annually by 2030.

    Whatever the new finance goal is, methods for tracking how much funding wealthy countries are contributing towards LMICs will be discussed at the summit. Transparency is already a challenge because there is no broad agreement about what constitutes ‘climate finance’, says Romain Weikmans, a researcher who studies the issue at the Free University of Brussels in Belgium. “Every country has its own accounting methodology.”

    Believe it or not, this lush landscape is Antarctica

    For instance, Weikmans says, an LMIC might use funds from a wealthy nation to build a new school equipped with solar panels, but it’s unclear whether that wealthy country would report the whole cost of the school, or just the solar panels, as part of a climate investment. “My hope is that the new goal will be formulated in a way that makes it possible for observers to assess the extent to which it has been met or not,” Weikmans says.

    Countries will also discuss whether financial aid covering the costs of disasters driven by climate change will be counted in the new finance goal. Wealthy countries pledged roughly $700 million last year to a new ‘loss and damage’ fund created to support nations suffering such disasters, but this “pales in comparison to the $580 billion in climate-related damages that developing countries could face by 2030”, Robinson says. This figure was estimated by researchers at the Basque Center for Climate Change in Leioa, Spain, and represents the maximum cost of damages that developing nations might encounter this decade.

    The globe has already warmed 1.3 °C, and some are projecting that Earth will officially hit 1.5 °C this year. One message scientists are delivering to policymakers at COP29 is that the climate is changing, and the risks are increasing, faster than even a few years ago.

    “This year we have seen severe weather events, droughts, extreme heat, flooding, hurricanes of a magnitude we’ve never seen before, and those impacts will not go away — even in the very best scenario,” Höhne says. As the world barrels towards an unlivable future, he adds, leaders at COP29 need to switch to “emergency mode”.

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  • scientists globally react to Trump election win

    scientists globally react to Trump election win

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    Donald Trump and J. D. Vance standing on a stage in front of American flags

    Soon-to-be US president Donald Trump (left) and his vice-president, J.D. Vance, at an election night watch party.Credit: Evan Vucci/AP Photo/Alamy

    Scientists around the world expressed disappointment and alarm as Republican Donald Trump won the final votes needed to secure the US presidency in the early hours of 6 November. Owing to Trump’s anti-science rhetoric and actions during his last term in office, many are now bracing for four years of attacks on scientists inside and outside the government.

    The US election is monumental for science, say Nature readers — here’s why

    “In my long life of 82 years … there has hardly been a day when I felt more sad,” says Fraser Stoddart, a Nobel laureate who left the United States last year and is now chair of chemistry at the University of Hong Kong. “I’ve witnessed something that I feel is extremely bad, not just for the United States, but for all of us in the world.”

    “I am shocked, but not surprised”, given how polarized US politics are right now, says Michael Lubell, a physicist at the City College of New York in New York City, who tracks federal science-policy issues. The implications of the win for both government policy and science are profound, especially because of Trump’s deep scepticism of scientists and other specialists who manage public health and environmental policy within the federal government, Lubell says.

    Votes are still being counted in many places, but Trump has already won enough US states to sail to a resounding victory over his opponent, vice-president and Democrat Kamala Harris. Trump addressed his supporters as the victor early today, declaring his coalition “the greatest political movement of all time”.

    Republicans also look primed to win the upper chamber of the US Congress — the Senate — flipping at least three Democratic seats, although there are four more competitive races that have yet to be called for either party. It could be days or weeks before the final results are in for the lower chamber, the US House of Representatives, but it seems likely that Republicans will retain control. This would give Trump and his party full control of government in Washington DC.

    “We need to be ready for a new world,” says Grazyna Jasienska, a longevity researcher at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. “I am trying to be optimistic, but it is hard to find any positive aspects for global science and public health if Republicans take over.”

    Worries pour in

    Trump has in the past called climate change a hoax and pulled the country out of the Paris climate agreement; he has said he would give Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a political figure who has denied the effectiveness of vaccines, a “big role” in his administration, and he has promised to make it easier to fire specialists such as scientists from the US government who oppose his political agenda.

    The US is the world’s science superpower — but for how long?

    Worries pouring in this morning align with those expressed by the majority of readers who responded last month to a survey conducted by Nature. Eighty-six per-cent of the more than 2,000 people who answered the poll said that they favoured Harris, owing to concerns including climate change, public health and the state of US democracy. Some even said they would consider changing where they live or study if Trump won.

    Responses geared towards that sentiment have come swiftly. Tulio de Oliveira, a prominent virologist at the Centre for Epidemic Response and Innovation at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, posted on X (the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter): “With the changes around the world, you may want to relocate to one of the best Universities in [South Africa] in one of the world’s most beautiful region!”, he said and linked to job ads for postgraduate and postdoctoral fellowships.

    Not all researchers are against a Trump presidency, however. Of those who responded to Nature’s reader survey, 6% expressed a preference for Trump — usually citing concerns about security issues and the economy. One reader who agreed to be contacted but did not want their name to be used, worried about Trump’s hostility towards science and evidence. Nonetheless, the respondent, a longtime nurse from Wilmington, North Carolina, said they would vote for Trump because, “at the end of the day, I want to be safe, and I want to be able to take care of my family.”

    Lessons learnt

    Others, though, are focused on what a second Trump presidency will mean for science. “Perhaps one of my biggest worries … is that Trump will be another nail in the coffin for trust in science”, given his anti-science rhetoric, says Lisa Schipper, a geographer specializing in climate change vulnerability at the University of Bonn in Germany. According to a survey of thousands of US adults by the Pew Research Center in Washington DC, the percentage of people who say that science has had a positive effect on society has been declining steadily since 2019.

    US election debate: what Harris and Trump said about science

    “I’m speechless, but I think it’s a learning moment,” says Sheila Jasanoff, a social scientist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Trump’s victory illustrates a fundamental disconnect between academic researchers and many Republican voters. Finding common ground will require social engagement and likely humility on the part of scientists, who have yet to fully grapple with this social and political divide. For many Republicans, “the problem is us” — the academic ‘elites’, Jasanoff says.

    Some have already begun to think about January 2025, when Trump is slated to take office. “I hope we can convince the Trump administration to adopt a bold evidence-based science agenda and to hire people who are skilled and competent to implement it,” says Georges Benjamin, the executive director of the American Public Health Association in Washington DC. But the last time he was in office, Benjamin adds, “he had some absolutely amazing scientists who worked for him, and then he undermined them — he didn’t follow their advice” — in particular by publicly rebuking them and not pushing a strong response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

    “Starting now, we are going to need brave people, people willing to push back, protect the vulnerable, and do what’s right over what’s easy,” says one senior official with the US Environmental Protection Agency, who declined to be named because they were afraid of retribution under a new Trump administration. “We do have to remember what’s right. And what’s right is protecting public health and the environment.”

    This is a breaking news story and will be updated throughout the day.

    With additional reporting from Davide Castelvecchi, Elizabeth Gibney and Max Kozlov.

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  • researchers must stay strong and united

    researchers must stay strong and united

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    A person carrying a bag and wearing a face mask walks past a sign reading 'Vote Here'

    Moving on: Donald Trump’s re-election poses challenges for science.Credit: Loren Elliott/Getty

    When Donald Trump was first elected to the US presidency in 2016, Nature advised scientists to constructively engage with Trump. We said that the incoming president’s contrary approach to evidence, among other things, had no place in modern society. We added that the science community had a responsibility to step up and work with the president and his new administration so that they govern on the basis of research and evidence.

    ‘We need to be ready for a new world’: scientists globally react to Trump election

    And yet, during Trump’s first term, the world saw a government that ignored and undermined efforts to address some of the world’s greatest problems, such as climate change and a global pandemic. Many researchers left US federal science agencies, their place sometimes taken by lobbyists and political appointees.

    The United States has now re-elected Donald Trump as president. Many researchers have told Nature that they are in despair, seeing the election result as a step backwards for facts, reason, knowledge and civility.

    Last week, Nature said that the United States needs a leader who respects evidence. The incoming administration must embody this principle. On behalf of the research community, we will hold it to account if it falls short.

    We hope that the incoming administration will govern in the best interests of the United States. That means holding on to the best of what the previous administration did, and not returning to some of the policies of the first Trump presidency.

    The world needs a US president who respects evidence

    This includes respecting the scientific consensus when making regulatory decisions in public health, environmental issues, artificial intelligence and elsewhere. This is one of the cornerstones of modern government. Policymakers and politicians retain control over decision-making, but they cannot control the facts.

    Climate change must also remain a crucial priority. During the past four years, the United States took important steps in recognizing that it is in its own interests to not stand still as global temperatures continue to increase. It enacted policies to support industries and communities through the coming sustainability transition. If those policies are repealed, people on the lowest incomes and those from marginalized communities will be among those most affected.

    Both the United States and the world are at their best when the country engages internationally. That means not repeating the previous Trump administration’s decision to exit the 2015 Paris climate agreement — an accord aimed at protecting the world from the impacts of climate change, which US scientists helped to craft. And it means continuing to support other important international organizations, such as the World Health Organization and the United Nations science and cultural organization UNESCO.

    The US is the world’s science superpower — but for how long?

    Trump’s threat to defund the WHO in 2020 was especially dangerous for those low-income countries where the agency’s work is crucial for tackling diseases and maintaining standards of public-health infrastructure. Currently, the WHO’s epidemiologists, clinicians and logistics personnel are helping to treat and control diseases in countries including Afghanistan, Ukraine, Sudan and Yemen. Diseases do not respect borders: to cooperate and engage with international institutions to fight their spread is in the best interests of the United States.

    The United States is a nation that welcomes the world’s talent, in science and in other fields. That must continue if the country wants to maintain its strength in research and innovation, the bedrock of prosperity.

    The research community must engage with the new administration with courage, tenacity, strength and unity. At the same time, scientists in the United States must know that they are not alone. The research community is a global one. We need to stand together and stand strong for the challenges that are to come. And that will mean continuing to speak facts to power.

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  • scientists say the secret’s in the dirt

    scientists say the secret’s in the dirt

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    An agronomist and a farmer stand in a corn field where radishes have been planted as a cover crop.

    Agronomists examine a field where the cash crop, maize, has been harvested and a cover crop, radishes, has been planted to protect soil health.Credit: Paul Chiasson/The Canadian Press/Alamy

    As climate change threatens farmers’ ability to produce the world’s food, researchers and environmental advocates think they have a solution: playing in the dirt.

    How farming could become the ultimate climate-change tool

    Experimental evidence is accumulating, they say, that by improving soil health, crops can be made more resilient to drought and extreme weather — and they want governments to offer financial incentives to farmers who use ‘regenerative’ practices to climate-proof farmland. These agricultural practices include boosting the soil microbiome — that is, its microbial community — by rotating crops between fields, rather than repeatedly planting the same crop in the same field, and by adding ‘cover crops’ to fields. These comprise plants that won’t necessarily be harvested, but that prevent soil erosion and boost soil nutrients.

    “There are lots of ripple effects from the changing climate that are creating challenges for our food system,” says Rob Myers, the director of the Center for Regenerative Agriculture at the University of Missouri in Columbia. “The ways we combat that are with biological diversity, more organic matter in the soil — and more integrated approaches.”

    But switching to such practices requires upfront investment. Researchers and farmers who spoke to Nature say that regenerative agriculture does work, but it can take a few years of implementing it before farms start to see a profit. In the United States, advocates are calling on the US Congress to include more subsidies for regenerative agriculture in the Farm Bill, a massive piece of legislation that is updated every five years or so and includes funding for disaster aid and farmer training. The most recent version expired on 30 September. Meanwhile, the latest version of the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy entered into force last year, and included funding for farmers using these types of sustainable practice.

    Nurturing the soil

    Industrial agriculture usually relies on fertilizers, pesticides and mechanical equipment to produce high-yielding monocultures — single crops such as maize (corn) or wheat. Excessive use of chemicals on these crops disrupts ecological processes in the soil and is one of the leading causes of water pollution in the United States. Unhealthy soil struggles to soak up water or retain nutrients.

    CRISPR-edited crops break new ground in Africa

    An estimated 8,505 million tonnes of topsoil on US farmland was lost to erosion between 2013 and 2017. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization warns that more than 90% of Earth’s soils are at risk of becoming degraded by 2050; this could lead to a rise in famine.

    Regenerative agriculture lacks a formal definition, but scientists who spoke to Nature say that its general goal is to rebuild healthy soil. That starts with increasing the proportion of organic matter — including living roots and manure — to feed the soil microbiome and recycle nutrients for plants.

    Although the term is modern, regenerative principles are ancient. Implementing them means “returning to some of the practices that we’ve relied upon as a human species for thousands of years”, says Rich Smith, an agricultural ecologist at the University of New Hampshire in Durham.

    Keeping cover

    One practice that is considered regenerative is cover cropping: planting species that typically won’t be harvested, such as crimson clover, when the cash crop is out of season instead of leaving the soil bare. Roots from the cover crop prevent erosion and take up excess nitrate from fertilizers that would otherwise leach into streams and groundwater. When a farmer cuts down the cover crop to prepare for the next round of cash-crop planting, they work it into the soil where it feeds the bacteria and invertebrates underground, improving soil fertility. Only about 5% of cultivated land in the United States was cover cropped in 2022, but that figure has been increasing: by 2022 it was 17% higher than in 2017.

    Grass fed cattle for beef grazing on kernza, a cover crop, in the spring.

    Farmer Brandon Kaufman plants the grain kernza on his fields in Moundridge, Kansas, as a cover crop and grazes cattle on it to fertilize the soil.Credit: Brandon Kaufman

    During a major drought that destroyed maize and soya bean crops across the US Midwest in 2012, Myers heard farmers say that cover-cropped fields hadn’t been hit as hard as fields without the extra plants. So he worked with the Conservation Technology Information Center, a non-profit organization in West Lafayette, Indiana, that promotes conservation in agriculture, and a sustainable farming programme funded by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to launch the National Cover Crop Survey. Researchers polled roughly 700 farmers, and found an average 9.6% greater maize yield and 11.6% greater soya bean yield during the drought on fields in which cover crops had been grown.

    This was surprising, because “at the time, many people thought that cover crops would take moisture away” and not leave any for the cash crops, Myers says.

    The USDA has offered subsidies to farmers who use cover crops. Of the farmers who responded to the 2022–23 National Cover Crop Survey and had received payments to plant cover crops, 90% said that they would probably continue the practice after the funding stopped.

    Valuing variety

    There is also evidence that crop rotation can improve soil health and resilience. Swapping out crops, rather than growing the same monoculture on the same field for years on end, can improve soil health without sacrificing productivity, Smith says.

    Eat less meat: will the first global climate deal on food work?

    This can be done by rotating different crops, including cover crops, on the same field over time, or by planting several crops on the same field at the same time, including the ‘three sisters’ trio of maize, beans and squash that has been grown by some Native American tribes for centuries.

    A review of 20 studies that analysed the effects of crop rotation on soil life found that rotating various species increased the amount of microorganisms in soil by about 15% compared with monoculture fields, and boosted microbial diversity by more than 3%1. Rotating two or more different crops also generates more of the nutrients carbon and nitrogen in soil than does monoculture2. A review of 33 papers that assessed fields in which legumes and grains were grown together revealed an increase in the stability of yields year-to-year compared with those of monoculture fields3, suggesting that biodiverse farms could improve food security.

    “Those types of systems can often be more resilient to weather variation and have some enhanced disease resistance,” Smith says. “The evidence is relatively strong that they maintain, if not increase, yields.”

    Seeding incentives

    But the switch to regenerative agriculture can take about three years to pay off, say farmers and researchers who spoke to Nature.

    Genetic modification can improve crop yields — but stop overselling it

    Brandon Kaufman, a fourth-generation farmer in Moundridge, Kansas, rotates crops and also grazes cattle on fields in the autumn and winter to fertilize the soil. When he got started with regenerative agriculture at the industrial operation he inherited, he “didn’t have a safety net to fall back on”, he says. Government subsidies “incentivized me to try some things, and I’ve gained a tremendous amount of knowledge because of that”.

    Federal, state and business programmes that incentivize cover cropping usually stop after farmers make the transition. To support producers supplying the nation’s food who institute these practices over the long term, the US Farm Bill should include a measure to reduce farmers’ federal crop insurance premiums, Kaufman and others say. The USDA trialled this idea during the COVID-19 pandemic by offering farmers who planted cover crops an insurance discount of US$5.00 per acre. The federal programme has now ended, but states including Iowa, Wisconsin and Illinois have implemented their own versions.

    Farms can move away from industrial agricultural practices and move towards healthier soil, Kaufman says. “It just takes time” and financial incentives to get producers to change, he says. But it’s important, he adds, because “if you think about your kids and your grandkids … where’s their food going to come from in 100 years?”

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  • plan to pay for wildlife conservation emerges at biodiversity summit

    plan to pay for wildlife conservation emerges at biodiversity summit

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    Attendees onstage and in the audience at the last plenary session of the COP16 Summit in Cali, Colombia, 2024.

    The last plenary session of the COP16 biodiversity summit in Cali, Colombia, wrapped up on 2 November.Credit: Joaquin Sarmiento/AFP via Getty

    Two years ago, after more than 190 countries at a United Nations summit made a historic pledge to protect the world’s species, questions arose about whether they could afford to keep that promise. At the latest meeting — held in Cali, Colombia, over the past two weeks — fights about conservation funding took centre stage, with little resolution.

    Can the world save a million species from extinction?

    But there were some bright spots. One was that negotiators approved an agreement that paves the way for large companies to pay for the use of digital genetic information extracted from nature, if it generates profit. For instance, a highly profitable agribusiness in the United Kingdom might use a digital DNA sequence from a plant found in Brazil to improve a crop. Under the agreement, that business will be encouraged to pay 1% of its profits or 0.1% of its revenue into a fund that could help countries such as Brazil to pay for conservation.

    The agreement seemed far off before this year’s summit. Civil-society groups and researchers are calling it a crucial victory in the face of rapid decline in global biodiversity.

    “It is a voluntary mechanism, so there’s everything to be seen about how we get that to work and make sure companies are doing it,” says Yadvinder Malhi, an ecosystems researcher at the University of Oxford, UK. But “it is a big, big win, and we have to go further with it”.

    Species threatened

    Research released during the Cali summit, called the 16th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP16), highlighted the urgent need for action on biodiversity.

    For instance, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, based in Gland, Switzerland, reported that more than one in three tree species is now at risk of extinction, and the conservation organization WWF, also based in Gland, reported that the average size of the globe’s wildlife populations has declined by 73% in 50 years.

    10 startling images of nature in crisis — and the struggle to save it

    “We are already at a tipping point, and the change to these ecosystems will be irreversible” if action isn’t taken, says Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, the global leader of climate and energy at the WWF.

    Yet many researchers were frustrated by what they saw as a lack of progress at COP16. By the close of the summit, only 44 of the 190-plus countries that signed the biodiversity deal two years ago had submitted action plans. And although around US$163 million was pledged in Cali to protect and restore nature, that amount is well short of the $200 billion per year that nations agreed will be needed to attain the goal of protecting 30% of the world’s land and seas by 2030.

    With nations not yet spending the sums required, there is growing pressure to seek funding from the private sector.

    Paying for knowledge

    For example, in the agreement to pay for genetic information from nature, otherwise known as digital sequence information (DSI), highly profitable companies are asked to contribute to the conservation ‘Cali Fund’. To be tapped for money, these firms have to hit two of three criteria: they must have $20 million in assets per year, make $50 million in sales per year or make $5 million in profit annually, averaged over the preceding three years.

    “Conservation is mostly funded by governments and philanthropy,” says Amber Hartman Scholz, head of the science-policy department at Leibniz Institute DSMZ in Braunschweig, Germany. “Now businesses that profit from biodiversity will pay.”

    Members of indigenous communities from different countries react after receiving representation at the COP16 Summit in Cali, Colombia, 2024.

    Members of Indigenous communities erupted in cheers at COP16 after a formal body representing their interests in biodiversity negotiations was created.Credit: Joaquin Sarmiento/AFP via Getty

    If countries create strong legal frameworks to ensure that businesses comply, economic models show that the DSI agreement could bring in between $1 billion and $9 billion annually, Scholz adds.

    “It’s a step in the right direction,” says Nathalie Seddon, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Oxford. She is concerned that the agreement doesn’t obligate businesses to pay into the fund and instead leaves it to governments to ensure compliance. But she points out a bright spot: half of the Cali Fund has been earmarked for Indigenous people and local communities, who are often the stewards of land rich in biodiversity. (Negotiators at COP16 also agreed to establish a subsidiary body for Indigenous communities to represent their interests in future biodiversity conservation decisions.)

    Putting a price on biodiversity

    There was much more controversy over discussions of another way to coax businesses to financially support biodiversity conservation: the sale of biodiversity credits.

    The idea is that companies could purchase biodiversity credits to improve their reputation, to ensure their own survival if they rely on nature-based products and to offset any harm that they are doing to Earth’s species with their operations. The credits would, in turn, pay for conservation projects globally.

    How biodiversity credits could help to conserve and restore nature

    During COP16, the International Advisory Panel on Biodiversity Credits (IAPB) — a group of 25 specialists in business, conservation and finance from around the world — published its guidelines on how to establish and scale up the scheme. But the release was met with criticism.

    The plan has been compared with carbon credits, which companies can purchase to offset their release of greenhouse-gas emissions. Carbon credits have been derided for potential links to human-rights violations and for generating profits for intermediary businesses that sell the credits while failing to actually reduce emissions.

    “Government donations are the only thing that’s put significant amounts of money towards nature, and those efforts are getting diminished by talk of selling biodiversity credits, which are convoluted, unproven and have no demand,” says Brian O’Donnell, director of the environmental-advocacy organization Campaign for Nature, who is based in Durango, Colorado.

    According to a December 2023 report from the World Economic Forum, if biodiversity credits gain traction quickly like carbon credits, global demand for them could reach $2 billion per year by 2030 and $69 billion by 2050.

    IAPB member Simon Zadek, chief executive of NatureFinance — a non-profit organization in Geneva, Switzerland, that is working to increase the role of finance in conservation — argues that the “disgrace” of voluntary carbon markets provides lessons that will make it possible to design a biodiversity-credit market that works.

    For instance, says Zadek, the panel has recommended that there should be no secondary trading of biodiversity credits, as is done by intermediary companies in the carbon market. Instead, the panel proposes a national model in which businesses that damage nature are taxed by their government. The proceeds would buy national biodiversity credits to fund 20–25-year nature-restoration programmes.

    If the IAPB does not push the creation of a market for biodiversity credits, “there is a real risk” that private firms, including those already involved in the carbon market, will go it alone with no oversight, Zadek says. This would “generate a mess”.

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  • Chinese scientists say funding shake-up has made it harder to win grants

    Chinese scientists say funding shake-up has made it harder to win grants

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    Researchers from the School of Life Sciences of Tianjin University conduct an experiment in a laboratory.

    Early-careers researchers in China need highly sought-after grants to progress in their career.Credit: Xinhua/Shutterstock

    Scientists in many countries face intense competition for research funding, but the situation in China is particularly fierce, say researchers, especially for those in their early-career. To address this, one of the country’s largest funders of basic research, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), has introduced reforms over the past year aimed at better supporting young scientists. But some worry that the changes are making matters worse.

    The NSFC, based in Beijing, oversees several programmes that provide funding through competitive grants. This year, there was a massive jump in applications, more than 380,000 overall, up 26% compared with last year. Only 13% of those were successful, compared with 16% in 2023.

    The success rate for the NSFC’s Youth Scientists Fund, which supports male researchers who are under 35 and female researchers under 40, also declined, from 17% in 2023 to 15.5% this year, according to an analysis posted on WeChat. The number of applications to the fund grew by 11.3% over the same period, according to a report compiled by the NSFC.

    “The competition is very, very intense,” says Cong Cao, a science-policy researcher at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. For comparison, the US National Science Foundation’s funding rate was 29% in 2023.

    New policies

    Researchers say the jump in NSFC applications this year stems from the foundation’s decision to eliminate its requirement that applicants who were unsuccessful for two consecutive years wait a year before reapplying.

    Another recent policy change is an extension to the Distinguished Young Scholars (DYS) programme, which gives outstanding young scientists an opportunity to pursue research of their choosing, funded for five years. From this year, up to 20% of these scholars will be eligible for a further five years of funding.

    “It’s a positive development,” says Albert Hu, an economist who focuses on science and technology at the China Europe International Business School in Shanghai. It suggests that China’s policymakers are becoming more aware that basic research projects need long-term support, Hu says.

    But others are concerned that providing extra funds to a small number of already well-supported DYS researchers will make it more difficult for other early-career researchers to obtain limited grants. Typically, DYS researchers already have access to a wide range of funding sources from universities, local governments and the corporate sector, says Yanbo Wang, a science-policy researcher at Hong Kong University. He’s also not convinced that the funding boost will result in better research. “There is little evidence to suggest that these few individuals can utilize the additional funding more effectively than those who have been overlooked for funding,” says Wang.

    The NSFC declined Nature’s request for comment about the impact of the policy changes. In August, the head of the agency, Dou Xiankang, told Nature that the reforms were designed to provide further support for young scientists. As part of them, the NSFC also introduced funding for undergraduate and PhD students to help them start their research careers.

    Old problem, getting worse

    The struggle to secure funding isn’t unique to researchers in China, says Li Tang, a science-policy researcher at Fudan University in Shanghai. “Many countries face similar challenges in balancing the demand for excellence in research with equitable funding distribution,” says Tang.

    But China’s broader research-evaluation system — which places emphasis on researchers securing NSFC grants, in particular — is making the competition for limited funding particularly intense, says Tang.

    NSFC grants are a measure of achievement when researchers are assessed for contracts, promotions and tenure, says a researcher who requested to remain anonymous because they are worried their view might harm their chances of obtaining NSFC grants in future. Many early-career researchers view NSFC funding as opening the door to career opportunities rather than just as a vehicle to fund their projects, the researcher says. “We regard the NSFC as a bridge.”

    Bigger research pool

    The growing number of early-career researchers is set to add to funding pressures. In 2023, around 1.3 million graduate students were enrolled in universities across China, an increase of 4.8% on the previous year, according to the Ministry of Education.

    Another factor adding to the pressure to obtain grant funding is that many universities don’t offer start-up packages to young scientists, which forces them to obtain grants from elsewhere to get up and running, adds Cao. “If you don’t have money from external sources, it’s very difficult to start your career,” he says.

    One way to ease the competition and pressure on young Chinese scientists is to create a more diverse range of funding sources, says Hu. Universities and research institutions should also base their research evaluations on the outcomes of funded projects instead of the number of grants researchers win, he adds. “There has to be a change in the way these young scientists are evaluated,” says Hu.

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  • The US is the world’s science superpower — but for how long?

    The US is the world’s science superpower — but for how long?

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    Cartoon showing the Statue of Liberty holding a scientific flask teetering on the edge of a first place podium.

    Illustration: Sébastien Thibault

    Science in the United States has never been stronger by most measures.

    Over the past five years, the nation has won more scientific Nobel prizes than the rest of the world combined — in line with its domination of the prizes since the middle of the twentieth century. In 2020, two US drug companies spearheaded the development of vaccines that helped to contain a pandemic. Two years later, a California start-up firm released the revolutionary artificial-intelligence (AI) tool ChatGPT and a national laboratory broke a fundamental barrier in nuclear fusion.

    This year, the United States is on track to spend US$1 trillion on research and development (R&D), much more than any other country. And its labs are a magnet for researchers from around the globe, with workers born in other nations accounting for 43% of doctorate-holders in the US workforce in science, technology, engineering and medicine (STEM).

    US election debate: what Harris and Trump said about science

    But as voters go to the polls in November to elect a new president and Congress, some scientific leaders worry that the nation is ceding ground to other research powerhouses, notably China, which is already outpacing the United States on many of the leading science metrics. “US science is perceived to be — and is — losing the race for global STEM leadership,” said Marcia McNutt, president of the US National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC, in a speech in June.

    Concerns range from funding limitations for R&D and the growing politicization of science to heated debates about immigration. This has created “a perception that the United States is increasingly hostile to foreigners”, the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) reported in August1, warning that the United States “can no longer take for granted that it will remain the destination of choice for the world’s best and brightest”. The academies called for a government-wide effort to attract and retain international talent and improve STEM education at home.

    The future of US science hinges, in no small way, on the November election. Together, the next president and Congress will play a pivotal part in setting the course for the US scientific enterprise for years to come by establishing funding plans, immigration policies and national-security measures that affect international collaboration.

    Given the concerns over US leadership in science, how does the country measure up and what comes next after the election? Nature examines the numbers and a few key issues that could determine the United States’ scientific future.

    Losing ground to China

    The driving force behind research is money, and the United States has long enjoyed a leading position in science and technology in large part because it outspends all other nations. Combining government and private funding, the United States spent $923 billion in 2022 (the last year for which full numbers are available), or around 30% of global R&D spending.

    But as China’s economy has soared, so has its R&D spending, to the equivalent of $812 billion (adjusted for purchasing power parity). On that trajectory it will draw level with the United States before 2030 (see ‘Research funding race’).

    Research funding race: Line chart comparing research funding in the United States with China and other territories.

    Source: OECD/MSTI

    On sheer numbers of personnel, scientific output and patents, the United States has already lost its lead. In 2016, China leaped ahead as the top producer of science and engineering articles. In 2019, it passed the United States in the number of science and engineering PhDs awarded; and in 2021, it became top dog in international patent applications, according to a report by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) published in March2.

    For years, some researchers who study science metrics have argued that China still lagged behind in terms of the quality of its scientific output, but that is also changing. In 2020, for instance, China overtook the United States in terms of its share of the world’s top 1% cited papers, a proxy measure of high-impact work, according to numbers from the Web of Science database (see ‘Top-cited research’).

    Top cited research: Line chart comparing the share of top 1% cited papers published by Untied States with China and the European Union.

    Source: Clarivate/Web of Science

    China showed particular strengths in engineering, chemistry and materials science, whereas the United States retained its lead in areas such as biology and medicine (see ‘Who leads in various fields of science?’).

    Who leads in various fields of science: Infographic comparing the share of top 1% of cited papers published by the United States, the European Union and China in various fields.

    Source: Clarivate/Web of Science

    Citation statistics are imperfect measures of influence: a study this year found that researchers in China show the greatest ‘home bias’, that is, disproportionately citing work from their own country3. Adjusting for this bias dents China’s progress — perhaps nudging it down to fourth in the world, the study suggested — but it doesn’t hugely change its direction of travel.

    There are other signs of rising quality in China relative to other nations. Last year, it surpassed the United States in terms of papers that appeared in influential journals (see ‘Share of work in influential journals’).

    Does it matter whether China or the United States is on top? Some political rhetoric frames these trends as essentially a zero-sum game. But in research, one country’s gain is not necessarily another’s loss, says Caroline Wagner, a research-policy specialist at the Ohio State University in Columbus.

    The highest-cited papers of all come from US, Chinese and European researchers working together, she says. If China, or any other country, is pouring more money into research, this should benefit the United States — as long as it retains world-leading scientists who can tap into global innovation, and keeps its own research funding and quality high, says Kieron Flanagan, a research-policy analyst at the University of Manchester, UK.

    Missing in action: federal funds

    The current alarms about US science echo similar warnings that have rippled through policy circles about once a generation. In 2005, for example, the National Academies published a dire report called Rising Above the Gathering Storm that cautioned about threats to US competitiveness from globalization4.

    How Trump damaged science — and why it could take decades to recover

    One recommendation from the report was to double the amount of basic research funding for mathematics, engineering and physical sciences, in line with the doubling of the budget for the National Institutes of Health that was accomplished between 1998 and 2003. The US Congress, which sets funding levels, passed a law in 2007 promising to do just that — but lawmakers didn’t follow through.

    History is now repeating itself. In 2022, this time with an eye on China, Congress united to pass the CHIPS and Science Act, which authorized $280 billion to promote the domestic semiconductor industry and boost the budgets of several major research agencies. A key beneficiary of the legislation, the NSF, saw its budget increase by 11% to $9.9 billion in 2023 — only to fall back to $9.1 billion when Congress finalized this year’s budget.

    As a share of gross domestic product (GDP), public investments in the NSF, the US Department of Energy’s Office of Science and the US National Institutes of Standards and Technology — all major funders of basic research in the physical sciences — are now lower than they have been at any time since 1997, according to Matt Hourihan, associate vice-president for government relations and public policy at the Association of American Universities in Washington DC (see ‘Falling federal research intensity’). US research investment as a share of GDP is still rising — but that is because R&D investment from private businesses is picking up the slack.

    Falling federal research intensity: Line chart comparing Government R&D as a share of GDP over time for the United States with South Korea, Germany, China and the OECD.

    Source: OECD/MSTI

    “We absolutely have to get federally funded R&D back on a healthier track,” says Arati Prabhakar, science adviser to US President Joe Biden and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). The sharp uptick in private R&D is good for jobs and the economy, but it is no substitute for the kind of basic science that federal investments support, she told Nature.

    Indeed, these trends explain the shifting balance of power between the United States and China, says Jonathan Adams, chief scientist at the Institute of Scientific Information, a unit of the analytics firm Clarivate, who is based in London. Adams points out that the United States retains its lead in areas that it has invested in the most, such as biomedical research. By contrast, China is overtaking the United States in materials science, physical sciences and computer science, which are areas where US investments have fallen short.

    The question, come January, is whether the next president and Congress will work together to advance scientific funding commitments that both political parties have endorsed in the past. This depends in large part on who controls the two chambers of Congress, which is currently divided, with Democrats holding the Senate and Republicans having a majority in the House of Representatives.

    Biden seeks to boost science funding — but his budget faces an ominous future

    When it comes to setting spending priorities, Congress often goes its own way no matter what presidents propose in their budgets. For example, although previous president Donald Trump repeatedly sought to cut science budgets, it was during his tenure that Congress broke its own self-imposed budget caps and gave science agencies a significant boost in funding alongside the increases in defence spending sought by the Trump administration, says Jennifer Zeitzer, who leads the public-affairs office at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology in Rockville, Maryland.

    Today, lawmakers are once again operating under a budget agreement that seeks to cap overall spending until 2025, which could make it difficult to increase STEM spending, but it’s unclear how that discussion will play out with a new president and Congress next year.

    “I call it the whiplash effect,” says Zeitzer. Funding agencies are constantly buffeted by shifting political winds that produce big promises — and occasionally big investments — before an inevitable swing back towards austerity. Half of the time, funding agencies are operating under provisional budgets and the looming threat of a government shutdown. “I don’t know how we’re supposed to be competitive if we’re facing another 20 years of this,” Zeitzer says.

    The importance of foreign talent

    Because the United States relies heavily on international talent to fuel its scientific engine, a key question is whether it will remain the preferred place for researchers globally to study and work. There are different ways to interpret the data.

    The United States relies ever more heavily on overseas researchers: more than one-third of science and engineering PhDs granted last year went to international students (those on temporary visas), with the share at 59% in computer science (see ‘US reliance on overseas talent’). “We are at an all-time high in terms of dependency on foreign talent,” says Darío Gil, director of research at the technology giant IBM in Yorktown Heights, New York, and current chair of the US National Science Board, which oversees the NSF.

    US reliance on overseas talent: Line chart showing the share of US PhDs awarded to students with temporary visas for for various fields since 1980.

    Source: NCSES

    Most of these students come from China and India, which is a distant second. And when asked, 77% of Chinese students who earned doctoral degrees in the United States said that they intended to stay in the country, according to 2022 data, a proportion that has dipped only slightly over the previous five years.

    More generally, the United States remains the world’s top venue for international students, according to data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development5, hosting 15% of all students worldwide in 2020, the latest comparative figures available.

    But there are signs that the United States might be losing its edge. Its share of international students is declining, down from 23% in 20005. And although enrolment numbers have recovered to an all-time high after a brief pandemic dip (see ‘International students on the rebound’), there remains a question about whether top talent from China continues to view the United States as an attractive destination.

    International students on the rebound: Bar chart showing the number of science and engineering students on temporary visas enrolled in US higher-education institutions since 2012 by degree level.

    Source: ref. 2

    China is still the United States’ biggest research collaborator, but the number of articles co-authored by Chinese and US researchers is falling — even as Chinese collaborations with competitors rise (see ‘US–China collaboration is dropping’).

    US china collaboration is dropping: Line chart showing the number of publications published as a collaboration between the US and China, the US and the UK and China and the UK.

    Source: Scopus

    Some lawmakers in Congress might welcome this trend. Citing the dangers of letting science that is funded by US taxpayers fall into the hands of the Chinese military, congressional Republicans are pushing legislation that would limit the kind of research collaborations that university researchers can pursue.

    Questions about immigration and research security came to a head when Trump occupied the White House. First came the temporary travel ban that mainly impacted citizens from several Muslim-majority countries. Then a federal crackdown on academic espionage, dubbed the China Initiative, drew accusations of racism after ensnaring scholars with links to China, including many US citizens of Chinese descent.

    Biden ultimately ended both policies, but many scholars say they could make a comeback if Trump prevails in November. Last month, Trump vowed to reinstate his travel ban, and Republicans who control the US House of Representatives have approved legislation that would, if enacted, essentially reinstate the China Initiative.

    These tensions might be taking a toll: surveys in the United States have found that many Chinese researchers worry about prejudice after the China Initiative. A study6 published this year examined the propensity of Chinese students to enrol in US PhD programmes, compared with a control group of non-Chinese students. The two were in step until 2016, but the Chinese students became 15% less likely to enrol by 2019 — and more likely to enrol in non-US English-speaking countries. (The rapid drop of enrolments during the pandemic means that the study, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, can’t reliably be extended to later years.)

    Although Chinese-student enrolment at US universities has rebounded since the pandemic, China’s best and brightest might be shying away, says Yingyi Ma, a sociologist who heads the Asian/Asian American studies programme at Syracuse University in New York. Soaring anti-China rhetoric probably plays a part, Ma says, but so do expanding opportunities for Chinese graduate students at home, and the growing challenges to obtain work visas.

    How to win a Nobel prize: what kind of scientist scoops medals?

    A further challenge, and one that would be easy for Congress to fix, is the limitation on the availability of ‘green cards’ that grant permanent residency in the United States, says Amy Nice, an immigration scholar at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who recently served at the White House OSTP under Biden. The Biden administration has been working to do just that under existing laws and regulations, she says, but it’s ultimately up to Congress to increase the numbers of green cards that are available. “That’s the one thing that Congress could do to solve this problem,” Nice says.

    Not everybody is convinced that US academic institutions are facing an imminent crisis when it comes to international talent. Allan Goodman, chief executive at the Institute of International Education in New York City, points out that the United States isn’t the only country that is cracking down on immigration: Canada, the United Kingdom and others are doing much the same. This means fewer non-US options as international students consider where to forge their careers.

    Gil also says that he doesn’t see evidence showing Chinese students have been put off coming to the United States. “There is an extraordinary appetite to continue to come to the US,” he says. Gil says a bigger problem is how to encourage US students to engage in science and technology, citing declining mathematics attainment scores.

    The campus culture wars

    Across university campuses in the United States, there are growing tensions over issues such as the Gaza–Israel war; efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion; and the rights of transgender individuals. Part of a broader trend towards increasing political polarization, these culture wars have engulfed campuses and led some lawmakers to impose limits on what university researchers can study and teach, and to curtail policies that promote diversity, equity and inclusion. The August NASEM report1 tapped into some of these sentiments, raising the fear that the United States’ reputation is beginning to suffer abroad. “Some of the nation’s most important advantages in attracting and retaining talent are the intangibles: values, freedom, and opportunity,” the report stated.

    Like Biden, vice-president and presidential candidate Kamala Harris would be expected to advance science-friendly budgets while continuing to emphasize the role of science in tackling climate change and promoting public health. By contrast, Trump and his appointees repeatedly undermined government scientists and agencies during his time in office, especially on issues such as climate change and public health.

    Many political scientists fear a second Trump term could be even more fraught for government researchers. Besides Trump’s refusal to acknowledge the results of any election he doesn’t win and his promises to use the powers of the federal government for political retribution, researchers fear that he just might succeed in reshaping the US government by replacing thousands of federal scientists with obedient political appointees. This would further undermine the part that science plays in developing the rules and regulations that govern everything from greenhouse-gas emissions to drug development.

    No matter which party controls the presidency and Congress, the fate of US science is linked to broader trends in an increasingly polarized society, in which trust in many institutions has been eroding for several decades.

    So far, the institution of ‘science’ remains an outlier, with support from broad swathes of the public, but that could change if polarization increases on issues ranging from vaccines to global warming, says Henry Brady, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. “If science and academia become ideological endeavours,” he says, “it’s going to be hard for them to survive.”

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  • Funders launch online resource to help researchers navigate narrative CVs

    Funders launch online resource to help researchers navigate narrative CVs

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    A female scientist in a lab coat using a phone on a tripod to record herself carrying out an experiment with test tubes

    Narrative CVs are gaining in popularity — but many researchers don’t yet know exactly how to craft one.Credit: Getty

    A group of funding agencies and research organizations has created a free online platform to help academics to create narrative CVs.

    In the past few years, funders have increasingly favoured the narrative style over typical formats, which usually emphasize quantitative indicators. These include the titles of journals that papers are published in, and the amount of grant money received. Narrative CVs describe a person’s contributions and achievements, and reflect a broader range of skills and experiences than do conventional formats.

    The Peer Exchange Platform for Narrative-style CVs (PEP-CV) is backed by a coalition of national funders that are already using narrative CVs in funding applications. These include UK Research and Innovation, the Swiss National Science Foundation, Science Foundation Ireland, the Dutch Research Council and the Luxembourg National Research Fund.

    Other PEP-CV supporters include London-based research funder Wellcome; the Young Academy of Europe (YAE), a Europe-wide association of junior researchers; and the Marie Curie Alumni Association, an international non-profit organization.

    It’s difficult to understand a person’s expertise by looking only at quantitative metrics, says YAE chair Katalin Solymosi, a plant biologist at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest.

    “If you want to change the research culture, and also build a more inclusive scientific landscape with equity, diversity and inclusion of all talents, there should be greater awareness among funders of more qualitative indicators,” Solymosi says.

    Narrative CVs can help funders to see the human being behind a funding application. They can capture periods of parental leave, for example, which are harder to account for in conventional CV formats, she adds.

    “But many researchers have no experience with how to write narrative CVs, what to include, and how to avoid it becoming a very lengthy text that nobody will really read,” Solymosi concludes. This is why mentoring support is needed, she says.

    A sea change for CVs

    Individual researchers can register on PEP-CV as mentors or people seeking advice. Those seeking a mentor can then search for one who best fits their needs. If that person accepts the request, the two are connected through e-mail. Since its launch in March, the platform has garnered around 500 users, 153 mentors and 348 seeking guidance.

    Tanita Casci, who directs the research strategy and policy unit at the University of Oxford, UK, says that a mentoring platform such as PEP-CV can help researchers who do not have much local support to find guidance on how to craft their CV.

    Because knowledge of this CV format is not yet widespread, she adds, it means that “rather than the narrative CV achieving its intended aims of allowing for greater diversity in applicant pools and awardee pools, it’s actually favouring those who are in institutions that have the appropriate support”.

    Future plans include incentivizing mentors to offer their time for free by allowing them to claim recognition using ORCID, a tool that assigns unique identifiers to authors to capture bibliometric outputs. This will enable them to earn credit for their work.

    Kelly Cobey, who leads the metascience and open-science programme at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute, says a change in behaviour is needed to shift in how research is assessed, and narrative CVs are part of that process.

    Currently, grant applicants don’t always know what funders are looking for in narrative CVs, which is why more mentoring support is a positive step, Cobey adds.

    In addition to guidance on crafting CVs, Casci thinks institutions should support researchers by making sure they are participating in relevant activities to gain knowledge and experiences that they can eventually write about.

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  • Support the Pact for the Future

    Support the Pact for the Future

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    A general view of participants attending the meeting of the 79th UN General Assembly

    The United Nations Summit of the Future took place shortly before the start of the General Assembly (pictured).Credit: Thomas Trutschel/Photothek/Getty

    Last week’s United Nations General Assembly debate saw a lot of anger. Some was directed at the UN, some at powerful nations, for their seeming inability or unwillingness to do more to tackle the world’s crises. UN secretary-general António Guterres did not mince his words in his criticism of world leaders. “Conflicts are raging and multiplying, from the Middle East to Ukraine and Sudan, with no end in sight. The climate crisis is destroying lives, devastating communities and ravaging economies. New technologies, including artificial intelligence, are being developed in a moral and legal vacuum, without governance or guardrails,” he said.

    The world is in what social scientist Pedro Conceição, the editor-in-chief of the UN’s annual Human Development Report, describes as a “new uncertainty complex” of inequality, planetary pressures and polarization. In 2019, the Human Development Index, a composite measure of well-being, dropped for the first time in its more than three-decade history, although it is now recovering. It is also extremely unlikely that any of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will be achieved by the UN’s self-declared 2030 deadline.

    Yet, amid the anger and frustration, a different meeting, the UN Summit of the Future, brought a sliver of hope that a better future is possible: one in which science and cooperation are front and centre. Through a document called the Pact for the Future, Guterres says that he wants to “turbocharge” climate action and efforts to meet the SDGs. The 61-page text was signed off by world leaders on 22 September. It might be one of the few remaining opportunities that the world has to correct course.

    Unearthing ‘hidden’ science would help tackle the world’s biggest problems

    The pact is a list of 56 pledges across 5 themes, in which world leaders promise, among other things, to provide more finance for low-income countries; work harder towards peace and security; mobilize science; and listen more to young people. The document also advocates reform of the UN’s top level of governance, as well as changes to global financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. These organizations have not changed much since the end of the Second World War, when they were established in part to support countries devastated by the conflict.

    The document already has its critics. Some are disappointed that there is no mechanism for monitoring whether the pledges are kept. Others see it as another example of governments getting unnecessarily involved in peoples’ lives. Some of these points are valid, although there are a number of concrete mechanisms for following up on the pledges, including ones on improving Internet governance while protecting its autonomy, and improving the world’s financial architecture. These are also reasons why it would be wrong to dismiss the pact. The benefits of such documents are as much about the process of writing them as they are their actual content, and need to be judged by what has changed from what came before.

    Several things are worthy of note. First is the fact that there is a whole section of the report devoted to science. This is not always the case with system-wide reports from the UN’s highest office. For example, advancing science is not one of the SDGs. Some argue that it doesn’t need to be, because science implicitly underpins the process of achieving all 17 goals. This is true, but science’s invisibility at the highest level also means that it risks getting ignored. Guterres recognizes this. He has re-established a board of science advisers reporting to his office, which was originally established by his predecessor Ban Ki-moon, but wasn’t continued in Guterres’s first term. Also, as Nature reported last week, researchers, including those working at the UN, are pushing national governments to establish a much greater role for evidence in policymaking (see Nature 633, 493; 2024).

    How to stop a looming ‘splinternet’

    Second, the pact was produced through a radical process — for governments at least — that needs to be studied for its replication potential. Starting with its founding charter in 1945, the UN has grown to oversee hundreds of treaties and conventions, which set the rules for everything from managing road traffic to conserving endangered species. These agreements often have their own legally binding text, governing structure and complicated schedule of conferences. The existence of so many individual agreements makes it challenging to tackle cross-cutting issues. Most countries have no formal mechanism for different government departments to work together to achieve the SDGs.

    What was novel about the creation of the Pact for the Future is that representatives from different countries and across individual SDGs had to cooperate to produce it. SDGs, such as zero poverty or education for all, need to be achieved individually, but they also intersect — reducing poverty has an effect on education, and improving education boosts poverty reduction. In creating the pact, Guterres’s team broke through these silos, something that researchers have long been advocating and that is in fact the 17th goal: working in partnership. Researchers should help UN member states to learn from this process.

    Third, and appropriate for the document’s name, the pact is a call for nations to invest more in their young people and involve them in decisions now. It is the coming generations that will “live with the consequences of our actions and inaction”, as the document says.

    Ultimately, the pact will live or die on the actions of its signatory countries. If they choose to collaborate, they can achieve goals much quicker. If they build walls between them, there is a limit to what can be achieved. Guterres and his team have shown what can be achieved by prioritizing evidence and using a partnership approach. It is now up to all of us who care about sustainability, peace and security to run with the baton that has been passed to us.

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