【推荐1】Keeping habitat free from development seems to be gaining a fresh understanding from the Australian public. It may have something to do with the bad situation of our beloved koala. If a canary（金丝雀）in the coal mine means something giving people an early warning of danger, the canary in Australia’s habitat coal mine is probably the koala.

Koalas live where humans want to live. Up to now, the koalas have rarely won against the special economic interests of housing, industrial development and roadways.

The net result is that mature gumtree（桉树）habitat for local koala populations is cruelled, and the “soils library” of the area is lost forever under concrete and blue grassland. Worse still, once those trees are gone replanting will take at least 10 years before they are suitable for eating. The Australian Koala Foundation maps future solutions. But time is running out.

Thankfully, the Australian public at large seems more aware of habitat protection issues. The results of the 2021 National Parks Australia Council survey tell that story. It found 91 percent of Australians agree that national parks and conservation areas are desirable to protect nature from resource extraction（开采）. More importantly, protecting koalas for current and future generations, topped the list of the most important benefits of national parks and conservation areas for Australians.

Besides, Australians are now modelling the way of “untouched wilderness” areas being managed by First Nations people, who developed vast scientific knowledge and experience over 60,000 years of habitation and “natural” development. Australians come to understand a universal truth that conservation ultimately depends on repairing the broken relationship between people and wildlife. Saving natural ecosystems and biodiversity is directly saving humanity.

【推荐2】Human societies depend on healthy ecosystems (生态系统). People use their products in the shape of fish, meat, crops and fibers such as cotton and silk. Medicines may be directly harvested from the natural world or inspired by molecules (分子) and elements found within it. Through light reaction, trees and other plants take in carbon and pump out oxygen.

The services that ecosystems provide to humans depend, in turn, on there being a diversity of living things. More than 75% of global food-crop types, including coffee, cocoa and almonds, are pollinated (授粉) by animals. The complex web supporting every food chain and ecosystem means that the narrow range of species that humans eat and exploit cannot be sustained (维持) without the existence of a much greater diversity of animals, plants and bacteria.

When IPBES published its assessment of the state of global biodiversity in 2019, it offered a sobering picture. Roughly 1 million animal and plant species were considered to be at risk of extinction. These included many that are used in farming. At least 9% of the 6,200 sorts of house-trained mammals that humans eat, or use to produce food, had become extinct by 2016, and at least 1,000 more are threatened. And one-third of ocean fish stocks were being unsustainably exploited in 2015.

Surveys also show that the loss of biodiversity is the result of a combination of factors: climate change, pollution, human exploitation of land, sea, plants and animals, and the movement of some species into new territories where they destroy existing ecosystems.

Understanding a problem, however, is a necessary step towards solving it. And that is where technology can help. Ironically (讽刺地), it is humans’ use of technology, whether in simple forms such as chainsaws (链锯) or dragnets, or more complex ones such as modern agriculture and transportation, that is chiefly responsible for biodiversity loss. The challenge now is to arrange it so that it is not just part of the problem, but part of the solution.

【推荐1】As seabird biologist Bonnie Slaton slides off a small boat and walks through high water, the brown pelicans (鹈鹕) spread their wings overhead until she reaches Raccoon Island. The narrow island is a small piece of land separating the American state of Louisiana from the Gulf of Mexico. During the seabird breeding (繁殖) season, the placer, one of the few remaining places of safety for the pelicans, is full of noise.

Twelve years ago, there were 15 low-lying islands with breeding areas for Louisiana’s state bird. However, today, only about six islands in southeastern Louisiana have brown pelican nests and the rest have disappeared underwater.

Slaton and other scientists set u cameras to observe pelican nests on the island. The cameras show that in recent years the pelicans have faced some natural disasters. The main killer of them is flooding, which can wash away all the nests, as happened in April 2021. The disappearing islands are the location of a story of successful conservation. For many years, scientists have worked to bring the pelicans beck from tally dying off.

Mike Carloss is a state wildlife biologist in Louisiana. He said he never saw brown pelicans as a child in the 1960s. Their populations had been killed by the use of DDT, a kind of farm chemical. It thinned eggshells and prevented pelicans from giving birth to young birds. The beloved birds were completely gone from Louisiana, only appearing on the state flag. But a long-running effort to save them led to the birds’ return. After DDT was stopped in the U.S. in 1972, biologists brought young pelicans from nearby Florida to let them inhabit empty islands across the Gull of Mexico again. More than 1,200 pelicans have been set free in southeastern Louisiana over 13 years.

The brown pelicans can live more than 20 years. So, the final effect of disappearing breeding areas is uncertain and it will sill take time to become clear. And the future for pelicans is uncertain on the islands.

【推荐1】P. H. Hanes, founder of HanesBrands, came up with retail price in the 1920s. That allowed him to use ads in publications across America to discourage distributors from unfairly raising the price of his knitted underwear. Even today many American shopkeepers stick to manufacturers’ recommended prices, as much as they would love to raise them to offset the inflationary (通货膨胀) pressures on their other costs. A growing number, though, resort to more complicated pricing techniques.

Getting retail price right can be tricky. Set prices too high and you risk losing customers; set them too low and you leave money on the table. Retailers have historically used rules of thumb, such as adding a fixed margin (差额) on top of costs or matching what competitors charge. As energy, labour and other inputs go through the roof, they can no longer afford to treat pricing as an afterthought. To gain an edge, shopkeepers have been turning to price-optimisation systems.

At their core are mathematical models that use deal data to estimate price flexibility—how much demand increases as the price falls and vice versa—for thousands of products. Price-sensitive items can then be discounted and price-insensitive ones marked up. Merchants can fine-tune the algorithms (算法) to prevent undesirable outcomes.

These systems are becoming cleverer thanks to advances in artificial intelligence(AI). The latest crop of AI-powered ones can spot patterns and relationships between multiple items. Makers of pricing software are incorporating new data sources into their models, from customers’ tweets to online product reviews, says Doug Fuehne of Pricefx, one such firm. In February Starbucks, a chain of coffee shops, boasted about its use of analytics and AI to model pricing “on an ongoing basis”. US Foods, a food distributor, praised its pricing system’s ability to use “over a dozen different inputs” to boost sales and profits.

What pricing systems do not do is lead unavoidably to higher prices. Matt Pavich of Revionics, another pricing-software firm, calls this misconception “one of the biggest misunderstanding” about products like his. Sysco, a big food distributor which rolled out new pricing software last year, is a case in point. The firm says the system allows it to lower prices on “key value items”—as price-sensitive bestsellers are known in the trade—and raise them on other products. It can thus increase profits by expanding sales while maintaining margins.

【推荐3】After midnight, when the crowds of revellers (饮酒狂欢者) have gone, Choi Young-soo crouches (蹲) in a shabby alley in Seoul’s wealthy Gangnam district. This is the only time that the 35-year-old, a part-time food delivery rider, dare leave his tiny room at a cheap hotel he shares with about 30 other people. The rooms, he says, are “only slightly bigger than coffins(棺材)”.

Choi’s desperate situation is real. He is one of a large and growing number of ordinary South Koreans who find themselves choked by debt. “I feel like other people sense that I’m a failure, so I only come out at night to smoke and watch the lost cats,” says Choi.

Choi’s serious debt came with alarming speed. Just two years ago, he was working as an IT engineer for a firm. Years of punishing overtime and late nights seriously damaged his health. After lengthy discussions and a year spent planning and saving, he and his wife decided to open a pub in Incheon.

After an encouraging start, their business fell victim to the COVID-19 pandemic. After bars and restaurants were ordered to close as early as 9 pm to prevent the virus from spreading, the number of customers reduced to a trickle (细流), and then dried up altogether. After failing to pay their rent for four months, the couple sought help.

Securing a bank loan was surprisingly easy, but the interest rate was a steep 4%. Within months they had taken out loans from all five of South Korea’s high-street banks. Unavoidably, they had to borrow more to pay off existing loans, joining long queues of troubled business owners eager to secure cash from commercial lenders with interest at more than 17%.

Household debt in South Korea has risen in recent years and is now equal to more than 100% of GDP, a level not seen elsewhere in Asia. The rising household debt has gone hand in hand with a dramatically widening income gap worsened by rising youth unemployment and property prices in big cities beyond the means of most ordinary workers.

According to Lee In-cheol, the chief executive of the think tank Real Good Economic Research Institute, the total amount of debt run up by ordinary South Koreans exceeds GDP by 5%. In individual terms, it means that even if you saved every single penny you earned for an entire year, you would still be unable to repay your debt. In response, the country’s financial services commission and financial supervisory service recently decided to prevent more South Koreans from falling into debt. “That is why major banks have acted to limit borrowing,” says Lee.