The COVID-19 crisis has shown that effective public transport is vital to keeping cities running. By serving essential workers in health care, emergency services, food services, and other sectors, public transport has become a service for all urban residents. But pandemic lockdowns are also putting an incredible strain on public transit systems worldwide. Ben Welle and Sergio Avelleda write that public transport can be a powerful job engine and they list five ways that governments, development banks and agencies can include it in stimulus packages for post-COVID economic recovery. Read more.

Also: Register now to join us on April 29 for our next Build Back Better Webinar: Cities at the Frontlines of COVID-19 Impact and Recovery.

To manage the twin threats of the coronavirus pandemic and climate change, building resilience against both is imperative and urgent. How to do this in the face of a recession, falling government revenues and huge pressure on public budgets? Investments in COVID-19 response and in climate change resilience must work together and reinforce each other. Leonardo Martinez-Diaz and Lauren Sidner offer three solutions that can fix problems today and prepare for tomorrow. Read more.

Enzymes from a remarkable hydrothermal vent bacterium are crucial to virus test kits, including those that diagnose COVID-19. This surprising fact has focused fresh attention on threats to the ocean genome and the unbalanced relationship between low- and middle-income countries—home most marine biodiversity—and the higher-income countries that have the research capacity, technology, infrastructure and finances to develop marine biotech. Two new research papers commissioned by the High Level Panel for a Sustainable Ocean Economy point to solutions. Read more.