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Seafood is an important source of protein and micronutrients, but fishery stocks are increasingly under pressure from both legitimate and illegitimate fishing practices. Sustainable management of our oceans is a global responsibility, aligning with United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 14, Life Below Water. In a post-COVID-19 world, there is an opportunity to build back better, where locally sourced food via transparent supply chains are ever-more important. This article summarises emerging research of two innovative case studies in detecting and validating seafood provenance; and using alternative supply chains to minimise the opportunity for seafood fraud in a post-COVID-19 world.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused significant disruptions to the world since 2020, with over 647 million confirmed cases and 6.7 million reported deaths as of January 2023. Despite its far-reaching impact, the effects of COVID-19 on the progress of global climate change negotiations have yet to be thoroughly evaluated. This discussion paper conducts an examination of COVID-19's impact on climate change actions at global, national, and local levels through a comprehensive review of existing literature. This analysis reveals that the pandemic has resulted in delays in implementing climate policies and altered priorities from climate action to the pandemic response. Despite these setbacks, the pandemic has also presented opportunities for accelerating the transition to a low-carbon economy. The interplay between these outcomes and the different levels of governance will play a crucial role in determining the success or failure of future climate change negotiations.

The sudden Coronavirus Disease reported at the end of 2019 (COVID-19) has brought huge pressure to Chinese Plug-in Electric Vehicles (PEVs) industry which is bearing heavy burden under the decreasing fiscal subsidy. If the epidemic continues to rage as the worst case, analysis based on System Dynamics Model (SDM) indicates that the whole PEVs industry in China may shrink by half compared with its originally expected level in 2035. To emerge from the recession, feasible industrial policies include (1) accelerating the construction of charging infrastructures, (2) mitigating the downtrend of financial assistance and (3) providing more traffic privilege for drivers. Extending the deadline of fiscal subsidy by only 2 years, which has been adopted by the Chinese central government, is demonstrated to achieve remarkable effect for the revival of PEVs market. By contrast, the time when providing best charging service or most traffic privilege to get the PEVs industry back to normal needs to be advanced by 10 years or earlier. For industrial policy makers, actively implementing the other two promoting measures on the basis of existing monetary support may be a more efficient strategy for Chinese PEVs market to revive from the shadow in post-COVID-19 era.

Abstract This paper examines the frequency of spillovers between crude oil futures and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) stock markets. We use the methodologies proposed by Diebold and Yilmaz (2012) and Barunik and Křehlik (2018) and the wavelet coherency approach. The results show time-varying volatility spillovers in the considered markets. The short-term spillovers are higher than their intermediate-term counterparts. The highest jump in spillovers occurs during the COVID-19 outbreak, followed by the global financial crisis and the recent oil price crash. The spillovers are higher for oil-exporting countries than oil-importing countries. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are the main contributors to spillovers in the short and intermediate terms. Brent oil, Egypt, Morocco, and Turkey are the net receivers of spillovers in the short term, and they switch to become net contributors to spillovers in the intermediate term. Turkey and oil-exporting stock markets receive more spillovers than oil-importing stock markets irrespective of the time frequency. Wavelet analysis shows evidence of co-movements between oil futures and stock markets at intermediate and low frequencies. The lead–lag relationships between crude oil and stock markets are mixed and time-varying. Moreover, a mixed portfolio offers diversification benefits. Hedging is more expensive during the pandemic period and particularly in the intermediate term compared to the short term. Hedging effectiveness is highest during the COVID-19 pandemic in the short and intermediate terms for almost all markets.

This paper investigates the potential of transformative governance to address the wicked tourism problem of climate change. Drawing on a pragmatic constructivist approach that synthesises related concepts such as crisis, tourisystem, “dragons of inaction”, adaptive cycles and “panarchy”, we contend that progress toward lower-carbon tourism is currently impeded by mutually reinforcing poverty and rigidity traps which perpetuate gaps between pro-environmental attitudes and actual behaviour. Poverty traps occur when insufficient creativity is injected into the threatened system, while rigidity traps describe conservation of maladaptive system structures that reject creativity. Tourism responses to COVID-19 further demonstrate the intractability of these traps. “Soft” transformative governance, proposed as a realistic path for escaping the traps and improving system resilience, entails accelerated accrual of micro-transformations through paradigm nudge, or “transformation by stealth”. Facilitative strategies include constructive manipulation of stakeholder values, and adaptive mobilisation of citizenship rights and responsibilities.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, policymakers needed to assess the impact of large monetary and fiscal policy interventions in as close to real time as possible-yet existing survey-based indicators are usually released monthly or quarterly. The use of high-frequency data to track economic activity has become widespread. This paper constructs a near real-time economic activity indicator for the Brazilian economy during the COVID-19 pandemic. Brazil's integrated national electricity sector, which covers over 98% of the population, allows us to construct an economic activity indicator based solely on electricity consumption data that are available at near real time and accounts for activity in the large informal sector of the economy. We construct our indicator by isolating the variability in electricity consumption that is not related to economic activity, then measure how well monthly and quarterly versions of our indicator track against standard economic indicators. The results show strong correlation with standard indicators, notably during economic shocks.