Memory-guided mask reconstruction with central contrastive learning for robust multivariate time series anomaly detection.

This article examines the growing economic threats associated with areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ), including Antarctica, outer space, the high seas, and the deep seabed. Drawing on comparative analysis of legal instruments, scientific studies, and international reports, it identifies two overarching categories of risks: mature threats already visible in practice, such as monopolization, uncertain returns on frontier industries, IUU fishing, and piracy; and speculative threats arising from regulatory gaps, geopolitical competition, and technological inequalities. The study further distinguishes threats linked to resource exploitation from those resulting from ecosystem degradation, including climate impacts, tourism pressures, pollution, and orbital debris. It argues that fragmented governance and weak enforcement exacerbate these threats, creating systemic vulnerabilities that impact global economic stability. By offering the first comprehensive cross-domain typology of economic threats in the ABNJ, the article highlights the convergence of economic, environmental, and geopolitical pressures, underscoring the need for strengthened multilateral governance.

A global data commons is needed to protect and govern Earth's soil

Abstract Marine genetic resources (MGRs) sit at the centre of emerging biotechnological innovation, yet the international legal regimes governing their access, use, and benefit-sharing remain fragmented and often contradictory. This article operationalizes Hohfeld’s relational framework to map the legal relations embedded in six core instruments that regulate MGRs: the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the Nagoya Protocol, the WIPO Treaty on Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge (GRATK), and the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) Agreement. The resulting Hohfeldian mapping shows how claim-rights, obligations, powers, and other legal positions are distributed across these regimes, revealing overlapping and sometimes competing legal logics within MGR governance. This approach clarifies the relational structure of these legal positions and highlights how legal form shapes, and occasionally obscures, the exercise of authority, the creation of regulatory gaps, and the persistence of asymmetries, particularly in relation to benefit-sharing and the treatment of digital sequence information. The analysis draws on a manually curated, machine-readable dataset that serves as a resource for further research. The article places the legal governance of MGRs within wider debates on the international law of global commons and sets out a methodological scaffold for comparative and critical legal analysis. It ultimately invites a reconsideration of who owns and who owes what within the evolving governance of MGRs.

Governing the invisible: Deep-sea debris, lessons from space, and AI innovation for global commons governance.

This study provides a comprehensive, longitudinal analysis of ocean goods trade dynamics for BRICS, the European Union (EU), G-20, G-77, and the OECD from 2012 to 2023. Utilizing data from UNCTAD, the research employs a tripartite analytical framework, examining Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA), Trade Openness, and Trade Intensity indices across five key sectors: Marine Fisheries, Seafood Processing, Sea Minerals, Ships & Port Equipment, and High-Technology Manufactures. A critical methodological innovation involves adjusting nominal values for inflation to derive real-term trade metrics, revealing more accurate growth trajectories. The results unveil a complex, multi-polar ocean economy with distinct bloc specializations. BRICS demonstrates a robust and rising comparative advantage in shipbuilding, positioning it as a specialized industrializer, though its overall trade openness has declined in real terms. The synthesis of these findings leads to a novel typology of regional blocs within the global ocean economy. The discussion underscores the strategic implications of these divergent pathways, emphasizing the need for policies that align economic competitiveness with the principles of the sustainable Blue Economy. This study concludes that understanding these comparative dynamics is essential for crafting effective trade, industrial, and environmental policies aimed at fostering equitable and sustainable growth within the global ocean commons. Keywords: Blue Economy, Development; Economic Blocs; Sustainability; Supply Chain

Multi-omics in combination with advanced computational methodologies synthesizes diverse omics data to provide deeper insights into molecular interactions and offers transformative potential for unravelling phenomenon behind disease complexities, improving diagnostics, disease prevention, and personalized treatments. This integrative strategy enables our understanding of gene-environment relationships, chronic disease progression, and the intricate molecular pathways involved in health. Effective multi-omics analyses require robust data sharing, accessibility, interoperability, and governance, which are critical for linking genomic elements to phenotypic traits. The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health advocates for responsible data-sharing practices, by promoting key principles such as transparency and equity. By emphasizing a collaborative approach to data utilization, our proposed framework seeks to advance improved disease prevention and treatment strategies. Multi-disciplinary collaboration, encompassing researchers, clinicians, policy makers, and patient representatives, is pivotal for driving innovation and addressing rare disease diagnostics. The success of multi-omics applications hinges on the establishment of comprehensive datasets, understanding the functional implications of multi-omic variation, adherence to findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable (FAIR) and Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics (CARE) principles, and the strengthening of global genomic commons, benefiting scientific research, drug development, and broader health initiatives. Our review highlights essential components of multi-omics integration, underscoring its potential to transform the landscape of precision medicine and improved patient outcomes worldwide.

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty was drafted in the Cold War era, when States were the primary actors in outer space activities. Consequently, Article I’s concept of “use” referred mainly to peaceful and scientific exploration by States. In the New Space Era, however, private actors such as SpaceX and Blue Origin have shifted space activities toward profit-driven commercialization. This development creates normative tension with the Treaty’s principle that outer space shall be used “for the benefit of all countries,” as commercial practices risk deepening inequality, enabling technological monopolies, and increasing environmental threats, particularly space debris. This research employs a normative juridical method through library-based analysis of international legal instruments, national regulations, and academic doctrines, complemented by comparison with other global commons regimes, notably the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. The findings show that the current interpretation of “use” is inadequate for regulating multi-actor commercial activities. Therefore, an ius constituendum is required to redefine and limit “use” through fair benefit-sharing, proportional responsibility, and sustainable protection of the outer space environment, drawing inspiration from institutional models such as the International Seabed Authority.

At the dawn of 2026, this Preface Article to the EPL Special Issue 56 (1–2) provides a brief stocktaking since the “global wellbeing is in jeopardy” as the humankind's consumption is “at the rate of 1.7 planets a year”. The UN Charter originally did not contain any reference to the word ‘environment’ or ‘sustainability.’ Yet it's spirit can be traced to some Charter provisions and words embedded therein. Over the years, the UN has played the vanguard role for the global environment protection, global commons and sustainable development. Over the last 65 years [after the 1960 UNGA resolution 1514 (1960)], the UN has tried best to navigate between global developmental requirements and environmental imperatives. Upon the UN attaining historic milestone of 80-years in 2025, the new global headwinds brought intense pressures, humanitarian crises, persistent violent conflicts (affecting two billion people) geopolitical divisions and non-payment of UN's ‘assessed contributions’ reducing it to the “brink of bankruptcy”. The year of 2026 has arrived in the backdrop of 50-years (1975–2025) of UN processes for “revitalization” to make it fit for remaining part of the twenty-first Century. The future trajectory of the UN in the protection of the global environment need to be seen in this context. This preface-cum-article seeks to briefly provide a stocktaking and a look ahead for the UN's future role amid funding crunch, withdrawals from environmental entities and sidelining of the UN from its core function of maintenance of peace and security. 2026 has brought a renewed hope in the election process of the 10 th UNSG to lead the UN in 2027 to vindicate the solemn dedication to “We, the Peoples”. The article modestly urges for an audacity of hope and invites balanced ideational scholarly contributions to lead the way for securing our common planetary future in the UN-led world order.

This article traces the history of microbial culture collections to explore the evolution of microbial biodiversity conservation and biotechnological valorization between 1972 and 2022. It shows how a progressive assetization of microbial value led to an enclosure of the global microbial commons. Culture collections were enablers and victims of this change. Analyzing collections across Europe, the Americas, and Asia as well as the World Federation of Culture Collections (WFCC), the article reconstructs how culture collections functioned as a key infrastructure for the globalized take-off of the biotechnology industry. Biotechnological investment in microbial exploitation created important revenue streams amidst public funding cuts and collections' declining role as research hubs. However, pressure to control and generate income from microbial assets also shifted moral economies governing microbial exchange and led to commercial rivalry between collections. While biodiversity concerns prompted a reconceptualization of collections as microbial arks, the 1993 Convention on Biological Diversity's recognition of national sovereignty over bioresources further complicated microbial conservation. Actors such as the WFCC and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) tried to reconcile access and benefit sharing (ABS) obligations and intellectual property (IP) via guidelines, networking, and accreditation. However, entrenched asymmetries in the global distribution of ex situ conservation infrastructures and microbial value generation remained unaddressed despite passage of the 2010 Nagoya protocol on ABS. Meanwhile, advances in sequencing and synthetic biology not only highlighted biases in existing collections, but also pointed to an era in which in silico approaches to biodiversity might supersede existing in vitro museums.

The current UN system lacks a principal organ or a specialized agency with the authority to exercise governance over the global response to climate change. This article reviews proposals for two possible solutions to this problem. The academic community proposes strengthening and expanding the powers of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The UN is discussing the prospect of a possible reform of the Trusteeship Council with the aim of transforming it into a body that manages global commons (most vulnerable ecosystems). Furthermore, it is necessary to expand the scope of the activities of the "UN Climate Change" structural unit to involve non-state actors in common efforts. The author considers the voluntary adoption of environmental commitments by international non-governmental organizations of the Olympic and Paralympic movement to be a successful example of such interaction.

Establishing global governance of artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming an increasingly pressing challenge to ensure the provision of global public goods and to mitigate harmful effects on societies and the planet. Current debates around AI take various forms, follow diverse narratives, and centre variously on economic, social, environmental, or safety aspects. Here, we make three contributions. First, we classify risks and challenges of AI across the social, planetary, and safety domains. Second, we show that AI should be governed as a global commons, requiring coordinated interventions across all three domains, reflecting relevant inter-domain feedback loops, and root drivers, such as the pursuit of monopolistic AI power and the AI-infused media environment. Third, we identify data, energy, and compute as relevant regulatory dimensions across social, planetary, and safety domains. We conclude by emphasising the importance of limiting agentic AI, incentivising depolarising algorithms on social media, and setting AI dynamics within the context of global equity.

ABSTRACT The right to starlight (RtS) is finding a place in the discourse on human rights. As an emanating right against inaccessibility to starlight due to anthropogenic causes, such as light and atmospheric pollution, the global demand for institutional recognition of this right is on the rise. Given this, the article seeks to locate RtS in Vašák’s third-generation rights. The article also conceptualizes starlight as a global commons. It further builds a theoretical defense for RtS as an astro-environmental and astro-ecological right by evaluating the existing political and legal dimensions. The idea of starlight is problematized through the potential prism of starlight justice and equity to demonstrate the astropolitical patterns and directions in the growth of this right. The article also navigates through the astropolitical challenges, with a special focus on the” astrosubalterns”, defined as groups in need of starlight, in accommodating RtS in the discourse on human rights.

The notion of space as some sort of global common has been around since before the dawn of the Space Age and this notion has continued to be asserted by various commentators from time to time, most recently often in the context of space resource utilization. But, is space really a “global common” that “belongs” to all of humanity? This article discusses the concept of global commons as traditionally defined, understood, and applied on Earth. Then we review the evolution of commons-type language in multilateral documents and transpose the concept of the commons to the space domain, arguing that, while the freedom to engage in the activity of access and use outer space is a right held by all states under international space law, the domains of space themselves are not global commons or other such social constructs. Indeed, such constructs are mutable and not always correlated with peaceful, sustainable or prosperous uses of shared resources across history.

This introduction outlines recent developments in the theory and practice of what has emerged as African ecocriticism. These include, among others, the shift toward a less anthropocentric ecological discourse empathetic to the agency of natural beings, the decoupling of ecocriticism from a rather narrow focus on traditional genres of literature (poetry, drama, especially fiction), the intentional bridging of the Anglophone-Francophone divide in environmental scholarship, and the growing practice of ecocritically engaging trendy categories in contemporary African scholarship, including decoloniality, Afrofuturism, and indigenous studies. Foregrounding the articles assembled here, this introduction argues that the map of African ecocriticism is expanding as it touches previously unreached national, ethnic, and indigenous locations, and as it inevitably embraces other signifying practices (besides written literature), which include oralities, visual art, media practices, and everyday stories of Africa’s ecological futures. African ecocriticism, designed to respond to the peculiarities of Africa’s precolonial and postcolonial life—at the same time mindful of global commonalities of planetary precarity—is growing as a viable subfield of environmental humanities. This special issue signposts that growth and the possibilities ahead.

"Algorithm of Sustainability"  A Guide to a Fair and Stable Economy for the 21st Century

Space resource exploitation is increasingly becoming feasible, yet current international space law does not provide sufficient legal certainty for such activities. While the outer space treaty (OST) establishes foundational principles, such as the “common interest of mankind,” its provisions remain ambiguous when it comes to resource exploitation. Both the United Nations (UN) and individual States are actively seeking ways to address the legality of space resource utilization. This article argues that the principle of the common interest must guide the evolution of space resource governance. It is not only the basis for other OST principles but also reflects an intrinsic “inner law” governing resource exploitation in global commons. Inner law represents an inherent, objective, and irresistible force that leads the course of historical development, regardless of individual awareness or intention. Under this law, the rule of the jungle does not dictate international relations; zero-sum competition will not persist indefinitely, and mutually beneficial cooperation will ultimately prevail. The regulation of resource exploitation in global commons follows this trajectory, as evidenced by economic theories of managing the commons. China’s “global community with a shared future” concept exemplifies this inner law in policy form, embodying its spirit and principles. Accordingly, it is timely to reaffirm that outer space activities belong to all humankind, and the interests of all nations should be safeguarded, ensuring that every country can participate in, contribute to, and benefit from space activities. To achieve this objective, the committee on the peaceful uses of outer space (COPUOS) should be maintained and strengthened to facilitate international cooperation in the peaceful exploration and use of outer space. Furthermore, countries currently lacking space capabilities should be encouraged to establish or enhance their own space organizations, ensuring equitable access and participation in space activities.

While many companies have made claims regarding regenerative efforts in recent years, analytical frameworks are sparse that clearly demonstrate how claims of regeneration can be differentiated from claims of sustainability. This study proposes the use of Regenerative Value Networks (RVNs) as a theoretical framework to analyze these claims and refine the descriptive approaches to claims of regenerative efforts, particularly for marine plastics in the global commons. In this exploratory study, five cases of new materials generated from marine plastics were analyzed to understand how value networks were constructed and what types of regenerative value were created. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews and thematic analysis was used in a comparative analysis across cases. Preliminary data analysis led to the question “But who is paying whom for what?” and a series of value configuration maps were developed to better understand these relationships. Types of value exchanged in the RVNs were categorized as material, social, ecological, and economic, contributing to a more robust theoretical framework for claims of regeneration in business. Further research should include quantitative measures of the regenerative impact of these value networks in the context of the global commons’ pollution, the role of certifications in regenerative business claims, and additional types of less tangible value created by RVN activities.

This paper examines how the twin transition of digitalization and decarbonization is reshaping green trade cooperation in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative. Drawing on literature on the digital economy, climate governance and international trade, it analyzes how mechanisms such as the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), Ecodesign rules and Digital Product Passports (DPP) shift climate obligations into cross-border trade rules and make granular carbon data a precondition for market access. The article compares three governance pathways—EU rule-based regulation, China’s infrastructure-led model and protocol-based plurilateral agreements such as the Singapore–Australia Green Economy Agreement—using a qualitative comparative approach. It argues that digital public infrastructure, including the United Nations Transparency Protocol (UNTP), blockchain and W3C Verifiable Credentials, can provide interoperable, trustworthy verification of embedded emissions while mitigating green protectionism and the green digital divide. The paper proposes a multi-layered governance architecture to build a Global Green Digital Commons.

Abstract To address the limitations of insufficient model learning capacity and task identifier dependency in industrial process fault diagnosis, this paper proposes an improved progressive neural network approach based on a dynamic routing mechanism. Its theoretical foundation lies in feature decoupling and representation learning theory: by constructing a local-global dual-path architecture, the local task column employs lightweight CNNs to extract fault-specific spatio-temporal features, while the global routing network utilizes multilayer perceptrons to model cross-task commonality representations and probabilistic task allocation. It leverages the stability of the shared representation space to constrain parameter update directions. The implementation comprises three core steps: hierarchical convolutional feature extraction, dynamic routing allocation based on Softmax probability mapping, and end-to-end joint training optimization. This method innovatively replaces explicit task identifier dependencies with a global column-based commonality representation learning mechanism. It achieves 98.12% accuracy on fault data during the Transfer Learning (TE) process while significantly suppressing catastrophic forgetting. t-SNE visualization reveals that historical task feature clusters maintain high cohesion (intra-cluster distance standard deviation < 0.1), validating its effectiveness in preserving incremental learning performance without requiring prior task information.