It may be both the most prestigious and the most frustrating job in international diplomacy: members of the United Nations are weighing who should succeed António Guterres as Secretary-General when he completes his final term in December. The timing couldn’t be more critical, with U.N.’s fortunes at a historically low ebb, for reasons both political and financial.

Indeed, U.N. insiders question why anyone would even want the job at such a testing—and turbulent—moment. Some predict that, with major powers repeatedly blocking the U.N. from intervening in crises from Ukraine to Myanmar, and with the U.S. rolling back funding, whoever succeeds Guterres will simply have to continue to do “less with less” and manage a process of institutional decline as gracefully as possible. Others still hold out hope that a new U.N. leader could reverse the slide, and persuade powers large and small to invest in the organization.

Yet, at a time when global challenges—wars, epidemics, and climate change—continue to proliferate, there is a compelling case for preserving the U.N. as a space for global deal making. Doing so will require a Secretary-General of formidable political skills, capable of persuading world leaders to listen.

It is a question of balancing two competing imperatives. The U.N. is an organization that rests on international cooperation, but the current global moment is one of international competition. The challenge facing the next Secretary-General is to explain how the U.N. can stay relevant. This is no time to preach the virtues of solidarity among nations. It is necessary to meet governments “where they’re at,” as psychologists say, and accept their rifts are real. A shrewd leader of the U.N. could find ways to help states de-escalate conflicts and cooperate on global challenges out of necessity, not idealism.

Ultimately, if political leaders do not believe that the U.N., which was founded in 1945 to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” can live up to that founding goal, they are less likely to take it seriously as an authority on other international issues such as Artificial Intelligence or economic cooperation. Making sure that doesn’t happen will be the central challenge for the organization’s next leader. Perhaps each nomination should thus come with a warning: Caveat emptor, or buyer beware. 

Our tumultuous present

Maybe the biggest challenge for the next Secretary General lies inside the cavernous chamber that houses the Security Council, the organization’s most powerful body. The five permanent, veto power-wielding members—the United States, China, Russia, Britain, and France—that dominate the council have repeatedly blocked intervention in crises from Ukraine to Myanmar. The Biden Administration’s repeated refusal to support calls for a ceasefire in Gaza at the U.N. in 2023 and 2024 stirred deep resentment across the organization.

Most member states still pay homage to the U.N. Charter and its prohibition against aggression. But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the U.S. decision to attack Iran in February suggest that some of the security council’s most powerful members no longer feel bound by its guiding principles. If the U.N.'s political situation is its main headache, its financial positions is a close second.

After the Trump Administration cut off the bulk of U.S. funding for its operations in 2025, U.N. officials have been spending a lot of their time wondering about how to pay the bills. The U.S. is supposed to cover about a fifth of the organization’s core costs and a quarter of the budget for its blue helmet peace operations, which add up to roughly $8.5 billion this year. Washington was already behind on its dues when Trump returned to office, and currently owes the U.N. about $4 billion. The U.S also previously covered roughly a third of the separate budgets for the organization’s big relief agencies—such as the World Food Programme—which need tens of billions of dollars to feed, vaccinate and shelter vulnerable people each year.

Other traditional donors, including European governments, are scaling back spending on development and humanitarian aid. Potential alternatives have not stepped in to close the financial gap. China is now on the hook for almost as much of the U.N.’s core and peacekeeping budgets as the U.S., but is often slow to stump up its annual contributions. Beijing also contributes very little to the humanitarian sector. While the Trump Administration has released some funds for the U.N.’s life-saving efforts this year, big relief agencies have been forced to cut back life-saving assistance to civilians in places like South Sudan and Afghanistan.

This is a markedly different landscape from the one António Guterres encountered in 2017, when the former Portuguese prime minister became Secretary-General. At that time, the U.N. members had just agreed to the Paris climate accord and a new set of Sustainable Development Goals, including a pledge to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030. Geopolitical storm clouds were gathering—the Security Council was fiercely divided over the war in Syria—and Donald Trump’s surprise victory in the 2016 elections, coming soon after Guterres’s selection, signaled trouble ahead. Still, for believers in multilateral processes, a broad agenda for international cooperation appeared to be in place, and the Secretary-General’s task was to turn it into reality.

That brief moment of optimism proved ephemeral. Guterres spent a large part of his first term trying, with some success, to keeping Trump at bay. Nonetheless rising tensions among major powers, and disputes over how to finance development projects and support poorer states’ climate change adaptation efforts, have eroded governments’ trust in one another, and their faith in the U.N.’s complex, negotiation-based approach to addressing their national interests. Guterres has spoken eloquently about the risks of international fragmentation, and has pushed U.N. members to work together on emerging challenges, such as the regulation of Artificial Intelligence. But he has struggled to get leaders to focus consistently on that agenda. Increasingly, many governments are turning instead to smaller, looser decision-making clubs—such as the Group of 7, a Western club, or the BRICS, the bloc of emerging market nations—rather than the U.N. itself.

Diplomats and U.N. officials also fault Guterres for taking a low-key role in crisis management, despite major conflicts exploding on his watch. The Secretary-General has been blunt about his lack of leverage to mediate in most of today’s conflicts, and has encouraged a culture of caution among his senior staff dealing with political affairs and peace operations. Although he was involved in one notable mediation success—the 2022 Black Sea Grain initiative—many U.N. members feel that his reluctance to engage in broader peace efforts has undermined the body’s credibility.

Runners and riders

Such critiques of the incumbent, and the manifold challenges facing the office of the Secretary General, haven’t deterred a clutch of candidates from around the world—who may yet be joined by new competitors as the race to succeed Guterres enters its final stretch. 

Eight candidates are currently jostling to replace him and assume the reins of what U.N. watchers sometimes call “the parliament of man.” Among the most widely discussed are Rafael Grossi, the Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and Rebeca Grynspan, a senior U.N. trade official and former vice president of Costa Rica. Carolyn Rodrigues Birkett, Guyana’s ambassador to the U.N., is also a popular candidate among her colleagues in New York. But because there is no official cut-off point for new candidates to enter the race, and many diplomats expect more challengers to emerge, especially if none of the existing crop looks like a clear winner.

While the current candidates have been speaking at public events from Europe to Korea, they have struck a cautious tone regarding their plans for the U.N. This reflects the way the selection process works. The Security Council—where the U.S., Russia, China, France and the U.K. hold vetoes—is central to the process, vetting candidates and recommending one to the General Assembly, where all U.N. members have seats, for approval. To date, the Assembly has always ratified the recommendation. Anyone who wants to be Secretary-General must avoid offending the five veto powers.

Talking about what is wrong with the world today without irritating at least one of the major powers is quite hard. Guterres angered Russia by criticizing its war in Ukraine, and Moscow is likely looking for a pliable U.N. chief. The biggest headache for Guterres’s successor will be maintaining working relations with Washington in the remaining years of the Trump presidency. Senior U.N. officials worry that, having imposed severe economic strain on the organization, the U.S. will insist that the next Secretary-General make deep cuts to U.N. agencies and follow the Trump Administration’s agenda on questions such as diversity, and soft-pedal criticism of Israeli actions against the Palestinians.

Tiptoeing around these sensitivities, the eight candidates for the Secretary-General position agree that the U.N. is in poor shape. All have promised to concentrate on preventive diplomacy, and have committed to managing the organization efficiently. None has so far set out a groundbreaking strategy for putting the U.N. back on its feet. If this is partly a matter of political tact, it also reflects the fact that the U.N. Secretary-General, despite being the public face of the organization, has only limited power to shape the organization. While the veto powers dominate the Security Council, a sprawling array of intergovernmental committees and boards—including dozens of entities dealing with issues from telecommunications to the environment—oversee the wider work of the U.N. system.

The Secretary-General and his or her advisers must barter with U.N. members over remarkably minor budgetary matters, down to the number of mid-level and junior staff employed in U.N. offices. It is easy to call on the U.N.’s top official to focus on problems of world order, but bureaucracy gets in the way. 

Once in office, the next U.N. chief will have to manage these institutional issues while also laying a broader agenda. She or he could address this challenge by appointing a powerful chief of staff to handle administrative matters, freeing up more time to prioritize diplomacy.

On the diplomatic front, the incoming leader’s priority will be to demonstrate the ability to insert himself or herself into one or more conflicts, signaling a shift from the Guterres era. This is easier said than done. Conflict prevention and peacemaking have become crowded fields, with a growing number of middle powers, and at times the Trump Administration, leading peace processes that the U.N. might once have overseen. 

The next Secretary-General will not simply be able to fly into trouble spots and cajole warring parties into making deals. But he or she can use the first months in office to shuttle between key capitals in regions such as the Middle East, looking for opportunities to engage, and encouraging U.N. staff—who still have considerable expertise on issues like mediation and peacekeeping operations—to table new options for dealing with ongoing or looming conflicts. This is not likely to produce quick or major wins, and there is always a risk that the U.N. will launch peace initiatives that fail. But as a European diplomat familiar with the U.N. once put it, everyone expects the U.N. to fail, and as a result it can do so without sustaining reputational damage. 

The greater danger for the institution right now is that it fails to engage in meaningful crisis diplomacy at all, cementing the impression that it is no longer a significant peacemaking force. If the Secretary-General can use this kind of early outreach to gain a place on the diplomatic map, she or he will still face the challenge of articulating what the U.N. stands for in a divided world.

Collective action in a world divided

There is no shortage of good arguments for why collective action helps address problems that transcend borders. These often get lost at a time when the predominant political narratives center on national divisions and differences.

U.N. officials do not help themselves by couching their arguments in technocratic terms, weighed down with talk of goals and policy frameworks. But the underlying political challenge is to make a case for multilateralism that resonates with decision-makers who view international affairs in zero-sum, or at least very low-trust, terms.

The best approach may be to frame the U.N. as a sort of global risk reduction organization. Over the last decade, governments, the private sector and the public have seen the knock-on effects of both the pandemic and regional conflicts causing global economic disruption. New technologies are creating further economic shocks and could make future conflicts more dangerous.

The U.N. is not a global authority with the powers to halt these trends. But it is a space in which governments can discuss the risks involved and—where they see common ground—explore steps to mitigate them. Even though it may be easier for states to meet in smaller clubs such as the BRICS and G7, the U.N.’s advantage is that it remains a neutral space where different blocs of governments can engage in dialogue.

The next Secretary-General can only encourage rivalrous states to take part in these dialogues, and will need to do so with a light touch. In the past, the U.N. has sometimes responded to new challenges by announcing new agencies and funds to address them. The resulting multilateral bloat has become hard to sustain financially and defend politically. The incoming U.N. leadership will need to show that it can facilitate discussions of difficult global problems without adding new layers of bureaucracy.

The role of the Secretary-General is perhaps to be both the world’s most prominent event organizer—bringing governments and other actors into the room to talk about their problems—and a sort of political therapist for world leaders. If the Secretary-General can win the trust of these leaders, and persuade them to work on common problems despite their divisions, he or she may be able to bring a degree of stability to a dangerous international environment. In doing so, she or he can also keep some political space open for the U.N. to do its most basic work, getting help to the suffering, mitigating the effects of suffering and – at its best – giving small states and civil society groups a rare platform to speak out on issues like human rights and climate change.

The new leader of the U.N. cannot heal all the world’s divisions, but with courage and political acumen, the Secretary-General can make international disputes a little less toxic. That may be a limited vision of what the U.N., sometimes dubbed the “parliament of man” is for.  But in an era of multiplying dangers and distrust, it is a noble and perhaps essential one.

The warnings from meteorologists have been growing slowly but steadily in recent months: the most severe El Niño on record may be coming soon. Record-breaking temperatures and a slew of extreme weather events are likely to follow.

For companies and investors, alarm bells are already sounding. Hundreds of publicly traded companies—particularly in the food and chemicals sectors—have used earnings calls in recent months to outline their contingency planning. And banks have warned about the possibility of a supply shock that drives up prices as extreme weather disrupts production chains. 

In other words, the potential effects of El Niño over the coming year are both local and specific to companies and their operations, and cumulative across the economy.  

Unlike many phenomena in our climate-changed world, El Niño isn’t new or unfamiliar to most decision makers. Past cycles in the 1970s and 1990s have wrought enough damage that supply chain planners know to watch out. But this El Niño will inevitably be different. 

For one, it’s happening against the backdrop of a world that has already warmed roughly 1.5°C since the Industrial Revolution. And, second, modelers have observed an especially significant difference between recent sea-surface temperatures and the historical averages, an indicator of an especially strong El Niño. 

A typical El Niño cycle lasts less than a year, but the economic effects may extend far longer. An initial shock of crops destroyed by heavy rain, for example, would harm farm economies immediately while disrupting global supplies for several seasons. A report from the European Central Bank found that a strong El Niño could raise global food commodity prices by as much as 9% within 16 months of onset and last for years longer. Factory flooding wouldn’t just create immediate disaster relief challenges but take years to rebuild.  

“When we think about pricing and when we think about other actions to protect our margins, we don’t look at it specific to weather patterns,” says Richard Shin, CFO at the Philippines-based fast food chain company Jollibee Group, on an earnings call. “We look at it right across the board, what we call inflation and what we call supply chain disruptions or limitations.”

All told, the economic hit could be enormous. A 2023 paper published in the journal Science found that the 1982-1983 El Niño drove more than $4 trillion in global income losses. In the 1997-98 cycle, that total hit $5.7 trillion.  

With El Niño, as with climate change, the relationship between a stronger phenomenon and economic damages isn’t linear. A worse El Niño may lead to much, much worse economic outcomes. 

The International Congress of Mathematicians met in Philadelphia last month, its first U.S. meeting since 1986. Minutes after accepting the Fields Medal, mathematics’s highest honor, Jacob Tsimerman told reporters he was leaving academia to work on AI safety. “I think the world is changing,” he said, adding that he did not expect the mathematical career to survive in its present form. 

Two months earlier, he had been one of nine mathematicians asked to review whether an AI model had truly refuted an 80-year-old central pillar of modern geometry, known as the Erdős unit distance conjecture. Tsimerman and his peers determined that it had, and their commentary alongside the 18-page proof helped translate the machine's argument into mathematics a human could understand.

The breakthrough, and subsequent report, reflected how the bottleneck that holds us back from forging new discoveries in mathematics, and, increasingly, in every other field, is changing. For most of history, the scarce resource was discovery. With AI, discovery is nonstop, and human confirmation is now what is scarce. 

To be clear, we are AI optimists. We believe AI tools will complement human ingenuity and expand what we can know and build, but our infrastructure for vetting and certifying discoveries was built for human throughput, and that is now the binding constraint. That is what holds innovation back. The answer to this problem is formalization: translating AI’s outputs into precise forms whose correctness can be checked automatically. Building the infrastructure to make verification routine is now a national-scale engineering problem.

Machines are outrunning us in more than math. The same is happening to the code that runs hospitals, banks, and power grids. In April, for example, Anthropic disclosed that its Mythos model could find unknown vulnerabilities in major operating systems and browsers, and restricted access to fifty organizations racing to patch them. Soon after, Microsoft engineers found 90 critical flaws in a widely used product; and in June, Sen. Mark Warner told a Senate hearing, citing the NSA director, that the tool "broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks but in hours."

All of this arrives in a world that already runs on code we assume is correct. In July 2024, a single faulty software update, not a cybersecurity attack, grounded flights and disrupted hospitals worldwide. Nowadays, developers can “vibe code,” or use generative AI to write code with natural language prompts. This lets teams build quickly, but at the same time can produce vast quantities of code nobody fully understands.

The same AI systems accelerating discovery can also solve the resulting information overload — if we pair their generative power with the rigor of mathematics.

For decades, researchers in defense, intelligence, academia, and industry have built an alternative to blind trust: formal methods, systems for proving that software mathematically will do exactly what it was designed to do. Like the way a software compiler translates a program into instructions a computer can execute, formal verification takes code, a specification of what it should do, and a proof connecting the two, and accepts the program only if every logical step checks out. This makes it possible to automatically validate AI output, and more broadly rigorize software and other security guarantees. And generative AI tools have made this sort of formalization broadly accessible in a way it never was before. 

Once proof checking is cheap, the next bottleneck becomes writing the right specification. Deciding precisely what a system should do and capturing the world around it remains a matter of human judgment. A flawless proof of the wrong specification is still an answer to the wrong question. Formal verification cannot stop phishing, prevent every failure in a complex human system, or certify an AI model's overall safety—but it can eliminate whole classes of errors in critical software. For systems where failure can mean harm to millions, this should be a crucial step in the adoption of AI-generated code. 

The Leiden Declaration, endorsed in June by the International Mathematical Union, warns that AI threatens the verifiability of proof. We would put it the other way around: mathematics offers the infrastructure to make generative AI more trustworthy. For this reason, the United States should treat that mathematical rigor as a national mission. We need public infrastructure for verified software: open libraries of verified components and specifications, standards and benchmarks, better tools for checking updates, and training programs that connect mathematics, computer science, engineering, and national security—coordinated across agencies rather than confined to one program. And because formal methods rest on deep mathematical foundations, this requires sustained investment in mathematics research and education, not only in the applications built on top.

Companies operating critical infrastructure should not rely solely on reactive patching and bug bounties where failure could hurt the public. Instead, they should aim to build in auditing and formal guarantees from the start. The goal is not to formally verify every line of every program, but to identify the logic of critical systems, specify what that logic must and must not do, and achieve mathematical assurance in that logic.

Mathematics has weathered crises of trust before. Geometry, infinity, logic, and the nature of proof each threw the field into foundational doubt, and each time the response was more precise languages, stricter standards, and better verification. That rigor is what made mathematics scalable, and software now needs the same transformation. As AI writes more of the code the world runs on, blind trust is no longer good enough. The question is whether the United States will lead the shift to mathematical trust, or wait for the failures that force it.

Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, are expected to move back to the United Kingdom later this year, after six years of living in the U.S. during a period of estrangement from the rest of the Royal family. 

The couple are set to move with their children, Prince Archie, 7, and Princess Lilibet, 5, to a non-royal residence that is said to be outside of London, with both children enrolled to start at a British school in September. The news was first reported by the Daily Telegraph on Wednesday, with multiple outlets since reporting similar details. 

The move follows years of Prince Harry arguing that the security arrangements provided for his family in the U.K. were insufficient. In May 2025, Prince Harry lost an appeal after the British government downgraded his security arrangements following his decision, along with Meghan, to step back from Royal duties in 2020. 

Asked on Thursday about the move and if the British government would pay for the family’s security, Prime Minister Andy Burnham said the issue was “a private matter” and that he “wishes them well in the move that they are making.”

King Charles III was reportedly informed of the couple’s move on Sunday, and in line with their wishes, the Duke and Duchess will not return to their duties previously held as members of the Royal family.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex last visited the U.K. in July and were hosted by Charles and Queen Camilla at their private residence, Highgrove House, in Gloucestershire, west England. 

Prince Harry also spent time attending events across the country linked to the Invictus Games, a sporting event established by the Duke involving injured or sick international servicemen and women.

Neither the Royal family nor Harry and Meghan have responded publicly to the reports. When asked about the speculation during a roundtable event in Washington on Wednesday, Harry said he had “nothing to say,” per the Associated Press. 

TIME has reached out to Buckingham Palace, as well as representatives of the Duke and Duchess for comment. 

Harry and Meghan’s break from the Royal family 

Harry and Meghan initially lived and worked in the U.K. following their wedding in May 2018. But amid intense media scrutiny and other issues, they soon expressed desires to pull back from public-facing Royal duties. 

In October 2019, the couple said they would be taking “family time” away from their duties towards the end of the year, CNN reported.  

Then in January 2020, the Duke and Duchess announced their decision “to step back as ‘senior’ members of the Royal Family and work to become financially independent.” The couple said they would split time between the U.K. and North America, to “enable us to raise our son with an appreciation for the royal tradition into which he was born, while also providing our family with the space to focus on the next chapter.”

The late Queen Elizabeth II issued a statement in support of the decision after “constructive discussions” with the family, and following a 12-month review, Buckingham Palace confirmed in February 2021 that Harry and Meghan would not be returning as working members of the Royal family. 

“While all are saddened by their decision, The Duke and Duchess remain much loved members of the family,” a statement read. 

The next month, Harry and Meghan sat down with Oprah Winfrey for a now-infamous interview during which they detailed their decisions to move away from the Royal family and the apparatus around it, which Meghan referred to as “The Firm”.

In the interview, Harry said the decision to withdraw from public duties and move to California was both due to the amount of tabloid press scrutiny and harassment, as well as a lack of support from “The Firm.”

Tabloid headlines focused on Meghan have included descriptions of the Duchess as “gangster royalty” and coming from a “crime-ridden neighborhood.”

In 2023, Harry published his memoir, Spare, outlining details of Royal life. In his book, the Duke revealed how he learned of his grandmother’s death, Queen Elizabeth II, via the BBC, and how his father, Charles, did not hug him following the death of his mother, Princess Diana, in 1997.

While in the U.S., the couple have launched a number of business ventures, including several with Netflix. In December 2022, the couple released a six-episode docuseries on Netflix detailing more details about the early days of their relationship, as well as discussions around racism and stereotypes experienced by the Duchess since the start of their relationship. 

Harry’s battle with the British press

Speaking in 2021 the Duke also detailed his relationship with the British media which has been dominated in recent years by a number of legal battles. Most recently Harry lost a lawsuit against Associated Newspapers Ltd., the publisher of The Daily Mail, with a judge ruling a lack of proof for privacy invasion claims against the paper.  

Before the legal defeat, expected to be the Duke’s last challenge against tabloids, the publisher of the Sun newspaper was forced in January 2025 to pay Prince Harry “substantial damages after using “unlawful techniques” to acquire information on his private life. 

The Duke also won 15 claims in December 2023, accusing Mirror Group Newspapers of unlawfully gathering information for stories published about him through phone hacking and other methods. 

Meghan’s struggles

During the March 2021 interview, the Duchess also opened up about her suicidal thoughts while pregnant with their first child, Archie, in 2019. 

“I just didn’t want to be alive anymore,” she said. “And that was a very clear and real and frightening constant thought.” Meghan added that when she approached Royal staff about seeking outside support, her request was refused. 

The Duchess also relayed conversations between Harry and family members, during which they raised concerns with the Duke about how dark Archie’s skin might be. 

Harry said such conversations took place at the start of his relationship with Meghan. “There were some real obvious signs before we even got married that this was going to be really hard,” he said. 

In 2016, when the couple began dating, a statement from Harry’s communications secretary denounced the wave of racist and sexist comments targeting Meghan, as well as the tone of some of the media coverage about her. “Some of this has been very public—the smear on the front page of a national newspaper; the racial undertones of comment pieces; and the outright sexism and racism of social media trolls and web article comment,” the statement from the Duke’s communications secretary read. 

Click here to see TIME's full list of Longevity Leaders

Shinya Yamanaka goes for a run almost every morning. So do a lot of people—but the habit carries extra weight when done by a Nobel-winning scientist whose discovery forms the foundation for one of the most exciting areas of longevity research today: reprogramming human cells to make them act younger. When someone like that makes a daily habit of anything, you take notice. 

Yamanaka had just come back from a run in late July, during one of Kyoto's worst heatwaves, when he sat down with senior health correspondent Alice Park to talk about his career and the influence he’s had on the rapidly expanding longevity field 20 years after his landmark discovery. He is one of TIME’s 2026 Longevity Leaders highlighted in this week’s issue: 12 trailblazers marking the way to a longer, healthier life.

We set out to find some of the most innovative leaders who are starting to show concrete results in helping us to live longer, better. A few pioneering scientists—like Harvard geneticist David Sinclair and Altos Labs’ Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte—have put their own spin on Yamanaka’s discovery. They’re on a mission to reverse cellular aging in different parts of the human body. Others have stepped up to separate snake oil from legitimate science. Jamie Justice, for instance, runs XPrize Healthspan, a $101 million longevity science fair that is funding the most promising research around the world. And some are addressing the equally important question of how our society should change to accommodate an older population. AARP CEO Myechia Minter-Jordan, for example, is leading the group into a new era of aging advocacy. 

We are squarely in a longevity boom, and the field is now well established as serious science. But we are still near the beginning. Right now, there is no proven longevity drug you can take to make yourself live longer. (That we know of: Nir Barzilai, who thinks some existing drugs could be repurposed as longevity-boosting treatments, is eager to change that.) Some things are within your control, however. You can exercise, like Yamanaka; build muscle, which Dr. Gabrielle Lyon calls the “organ of longevity”; and strengthen your social ties, which Dr. Robert Waldinger has learned are crucial from directing the world’s longest study of human happiness. TIME’s 12 Longevity Leaders know that all of these approaches—medical, physical, social—are key in the quest to live as well as possible for as long as possible.

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Outer Banks Season 5.

After years of treasure hunts, betrayals, shipwrecks, family feuds and increasingly improbable escapes, the Pogues finally make it home. The fifth and final season of Netflix’s Outer Banks sends John B (Chase Stokes), Sarah (Madelyn Cline), Kiara (Madison Bailey), Pope (Jonathan Daviss), Cleo (Carlacia Grant), and Rafe (Drew Starkey) through one last race for treasure—this time involving the Royal Merchant gold, the Blue Crown, a deadly hurricane, and the ghosts of everything they have lost along the way.

The finale takes the Pogues far beyond the Outer Banks before bringing them back. First, they learn that the arms dealer Anton Finch is planning to use the Blue Crown during a meteor shower. The group travels to Azerbaijan to stop him, while Cleo is arrested as they are leaving for the private plane. She tries to board as the plane is taking off, but a police officer shoots at the plane's stairs, causing her to fall. Pope is already in Azerbaijan with the others when he discovers that Cleo has been deported to Nassau, Bahamas.

Kiara eventually gets the Blue Crown from Finch and takes it to the lake during the meteor shower, hoping it can bring JJ (Rudy Pankow) back. The crown doesn't resurrect him, but it gives Kiara a powerful final connection to her memories of JJ and everything they shared. Finch later takes the crown back, meaning the Pogues return to the Outer Banks without it. They arrive just hours before Hurricane Cassandra hits.

Meanwhile, back in Kildare, Rose has the Royal Merchant gold after stealing it from the Pogues. Chandler Groff (J. Anthony Crane) attacks and tries to kill Rose, but Wheezie shoots him in the arm and saves her stepmother. Groff escapes in Rose's car with the gold. During the hurricane, Kiara finds him aboard the stolen boat and confronts him about killing JJ. Their fight ends with Groff going overboard and presumed dead, while Kiara discovers that the boat is sinking.

Trying to keep the boat afloat, Kiara begins throwing heavy cargo into the ocean. Among the crates is the Royal Merchant gold Groff stole from Rose. She reluctantly pushes the gold overboard and soon falls into the water herself, but the Pogues find and rescue her.

The gold, however, isn't lost for good. After the hurricane passes, Pope calculates where the treasure should have drifted by triangulating the fort, the lighthouse and the location where they rescued Kiara, while accounting for the currents and wind. John B dives into the ocean and discovers the gold beneath the debris and sand. The Pogues are able to recover part of it in the moment and retrieve the rest over the following days.

With the Royal Merchant fortune finally in their hands, the Pogues use the money to rebuild Kildare, buy back properties and restore their homes. They help create the community they always wanted, where Kooks and Pogues can live together.

So, where does everyone end up as the Outer Banks adventure finally comes to a close? Here's what happens to the Pogues, their families and the people who shaped their story.

John B and Sarah Cameron

After everything John B has been through, the finale gives him the future he has been fighting for: a family and a home. He and Sarah welcome their first child, a son named JJ in honor of their late best friend.

One year later, John B and Sarah get married in a ceremony surrounded by their friends and family. Their son is also part of the celebration, with Kiara carrying him into the ceremony before Sarah walks down the aisle with Pope.

John B and Sarah begin their married life raising their son in the community they helped rebuild. In the final moments, John B rings the bell near their home and calls for JJ.

“I think he's traveled the world searching for happiness and peace, and his identity has been around this treasure that is significant to him and his father, and it's this weird relationship to it,” Stokes says. “You can travel the world, you can see beautiful places and meet incredible people, but home is always going to be home.”

Meanwhile, Sarah finally gets the freedom and stability she has spent years searching for. After breaking away from the unstable[?] world she grew up in, she builds a family of her own with John B and their son.

With Kildare rebuilt and the Pogues no longer living from one treasure hunt to the next, Sarah can settle into a life she chose for herself. Her journey from the daughter of a powerful Kook family to a member of the Pogues ultimately brings her to the family and sense of belonging she had been looking for all along.

“And I think a very, very full heart,” Cline says. “She finally got out of the bubble wrap, and that's what she always wanted. She made her dreams come true, and I hope she feels that.” 

Kiara Carrera

Kiara’s final chapter is defined by what comes after JJ’s death. The Blue Crown gives her an unexpected sense of closure, allowing her to revisit the memories she shared with him rather than simply focusing on what she lost.

Back in Kildare, Kiara confronts Groff and eventually turns her attention toward the future. She buys back the Maybank property with her share of the fortune and begins rebuilding it, while also pursuing her passion for marine life as an intern with North Carolina Marine Fisheries.

“I feel at peace with where she ends up,” Bailey says. “It’s a sweet ending for her, and I hope the fans love it too.”

Pope Heyward and Cleo Anderson

After being arrested while trying to board the plane with the Pogues, Cleo is deported to Nassau, Bahamas and separated from Pope. But their story doesn’t end there. Pope eventually makes his way to Nassau and proposes to Cleo. She accepts and once the Pogues recover their fortune, Pope and his family are able to help Cleo resolve her immigration situation so they can live in Kildare together.

Cleo settles into a life with Pope and becomes part of the community the Pogues helped rebuild.

“It’s just a full 360 of how we met her,” Grant says. “We met her sort of on her own, or with a group of robbers, and now we see her in family, in a relationship, really blossoming into a young woman—still badass, but showing other sides of herself.”

Back home, Pope helps his father rebuild Heyward’s Seafood and uses his share of the fortune to buy a house for himself and Cleo. He also repairs his relationship with his father, bringing his personal and family lives into a more stable place.

“I think he's proud of his growth as a person, and he's proud of his relationship with the people he loves,” Daviss says. “His relationship with Cleo, his relationship with the Pogues, his family, him mending that relationship with his father, his own relationship with himself, growing up from a kid to being grown and being more confident.”

Rafe Cameron and Sofia

Rafe leaves Kildare with Sofia after helping her escape from jail during the evacuation. Sofia was arrested after helping Rafe evade the police, following the discovery of new evidence linking him to the murder of Sheriff Peterkin. Rafe believes the authorities will come down hard on Sofia if he doesn't turn himself in, so he cuts the power to the station, frees her from her cell, and flees with her.

They are later confronted by Sheriff Shoupe, who reminds Rafe that he killed Peterkin, one of Shoupe’s friends. Rafe admits that he was responsible for her death, saying he never wanted it to happen. He tells Shoupe that he plans to disappear after the hurricane and asks him not to come looking for him.

Rafe and Sofia eventually take shelter from the storm before the Pogues help them leave Kildare by boat. Pope gives them enough fuel to reach New Bern, from where they plan to make their way to South America. Before leaving, Rafe says goodbye to the Pogues, thanking Sarah and telling John B that he is happy for him.

“I think Rafe in the end feels finally important, wanted and loved,” Starkey says. “There’s a lot of things that he’s leaving behind. It kind of feels like he’s leaving behind the worst parts of himself, and I think he needs to leave that location in order to do so. It’s a bit of a rebirth for him at the end.”

Rose and Wheezie Cameron

Rose and Wheezie evacuate Kildare along with the other residents as Hurricane Cassandra approaches, leaving the island behind as the storm tears through the community. With the Cameron family’s old life permanently changed, the two eventually return to Kildare as the island begins to recover.

Rose and Wheezie are among the guests at Sarah and John B’s wedding, marking their continued place in Sarah’s life and in the community the Pogues helped rebuild.

Dale Zeasy and Sheriff Shoupe

Dale’s plans to reshape Kildare fall apart after an insurance investigation discovers that his financing was illegitimate. He had been trying to acquire land to build apartments and pressured Pope’s father to sell his property, threatening to use a video of Pope and the Pogues trespassing on private property against him.

After Hurricane Cassandra damages the island, the Pogues use their fortune to buy back the properties and rebuild Kildare on their own terms, leaving Dale without the foothold he had been trying to establish. In the final moments, Shoupe arrests Dale, bringing his attempt to take over the island to an end.

A year later, Shoupe is among the guests at Sarah and John B’s wedding, showing how his relationship with the Pogues has also evolved over the years.

This year, governments and businesses across Europe,North America and parts of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean have been contending with the impacts of severe drought and wildfires. Every year, drought-induced losses alone cost the global economy an estimated $307 billion. Yet one of the assets that could make economies more resilient remains dangerously underfunded: healthy land.

This week, leaders gathering in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia for COP17 of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) will have an opportunity to change that. What happens on Mongolia’s vast rangelands—and in degraded landscapes around the world—matters far beyond the environment. It is increasingly central to food and water security, supply chains and economic stability. In other words, the soil beneath our feet is essential to protecting livelihoods and economies from growing shocks.

The economic opportunity is significant. The UNCCD estimates that financing land conservation and restoration could generate up to $1.8 trillion annually, driven by strengthened agricultural and supply chain resilience, new revenue opportunities, and mitigated physical risks like drought-related losses. It could also generate employment for an additional 65 million people by 2030, resulting in a net gain of 37 million jobs. Business investment is already responding to this opportunity: the COP Action Agenda on Regenerative Landscapes reported more than a fourfold increase in business investment between 2023 and 2025. But fragmented and misaligned policies continue to hold investment back.

The COVID pandemic exposed how vulnerable global supply chains can be. Recent wildfires and droughts have exposed another weakness: the deteriorating natural systems on which those supply chains depend. Healthy land is not simply an environmental asset. It is economic infrastructure. 

For farmers already contending with increased costs of necessities like seeds and fertilizer, land degradation, and increasingly severe drought add another layer of risk. For businesses, these physical risks directly affect the availability, cost, and quality of natural resources on which they depend within and beyond their value chains. And for governments, the consequences arrive as costly crises to manage. The imperative is clear: we need to invest in restoring land and supporting the people who manage it, before the economic and social costs of inaction become even greater. 

The UNCCD estimates the combined cost of land degradation, drought, and desertification to the global economy at $878 billion annually. Governments routinely spend billions responding to and rebuilding after floods, wildfires, droughts, and other disasters—with US Government spending on wildfire suppression only set to grow—yet they invest only a fraction in preventing the degradation that makes economies and communities more vulnerable to these shocks. From an economic perspective, this is a poor allocation of capital. 

When we think about economic infrastructure, ports and power grids loom large. However, what stewards of the land—including farmers, herders, and pastoralists—have understood for generations is that healthy land is infrastructure too. It underpins livelihoods, food production, water security, the production of raw materials, and, by extension, the economy. 

In fact, roughly $44 trillion of global GDP, around half of global output, is moderately to highly dependent on natural capital, including healthy land. Restoring degraded land should therefore be viewed as an investment in economic resilience. An added benefit is that responsible management and restoration of degraded agricultural land can help reduce emissions, including agricultural methane through improved livestock health and feed quality.  

By 2050, three in four people worldwide are projected to be affected by drought, with significant knock-on effects for businesses and supply chains through disrupted production, higher input costs, and increased commodity-price volatility. For developing countries, the challenge is particularly acute. The countries most exposed to drought and land degradation are often those with less financial capacity to invest in resilience. A drought that reduces agricultural output can quickly become a wider economic shock by raising food-import bills, reducing rural incomes, and increasing pressure on public budgets and foreign-exchange reserves. 

This is the context in which COP17 opens in Ulaanbaatar, and rangelands are top of the agenda. They make up more than half of the earth’s land surface, and 70% of host country Mongolia’s territory. They provide 16% of global food supply, 70% of livestock feed, and support the livelihoods of up to 500 million pastoralists—land stewards who sustain the adaptive knowledge and land management practices on which food systems depend. 

Rangelands are part of a much bigger economic story. Land restoration is a long-term investment, and many of its benefits are public goods that cannot easily be captured as private returns. In developing countries, high borrowing costs and constrained public finances make even economically attractive projects difficult to fund. Public and concessional finance therefore has a critical role to play in reducing risk and crowding in private capital where commercial opportunities exist.

A global consultation led by the WBCSD and mandated by the UNCCD Secretariat has called for governments to create a coherent and stable policy environment, develop a long-term investment vision, and strengthen trusted accountability frameworks. These would give businesses greater confidence to invest in shared socioeconomic objectives. 

There are already mechanisms through which this can happen. In 2024, COP16 in Riyadh launched the Riyadh Action Agenda (RAA), bringing public, business, and community actors together around land and drought resilience. Together, it has mobilized more than $2.9 billion for land conservation, restoration, drought and water resilience. For 2026 to 2030, participating initiatives have set mobilization goals of more than $130 billion.

The next step is to make this investment progress more coordinated and measurable. At COP17, the RAA will launch the Land & Soil Breakthroughs: time-bound, measurable milestones designed to aggregate non-state actor commitments, reduce overlap, and make collective progress visible and investable. The RAA will also launch a Community Platform to visualise progress towards conserving and restoring 1.5 billion hectares of degraded land by 2030. 

The investment return could be significant. Globally, every $1 invested in landscape restoration can create between $7 and $30 in economic benefits for local people. 

For too long, healthy land has been treated as an environmental concern rather than the economic asset it is. At a time when governments are under pressure to strengthen economic resilience while managing constrained public finances, and businesses are facing increasing climate shocks, these are the investments we need. 

COP17 is an opportunity to change the narrative on land. The question is no longer whether we can afford to invest in its restoration, but whether we can afford not to.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) announced Tuesday that “all trade, commercial exchanges, and financial transactions with Iran have been halted until further notice,” alleging that Iran had fired two ballistic missiles toward it. 

The country’s foreign ministry said the decision comes “in light of regional escalations that undermine regional and international peace and security.”

Earlier Tuesday, the UAE’s Ministry of Defense reported that two missiles launched from Iran toward the country, both of which fell into the sea. The statement said it “affirms its readiness to respond to any threats and to resolutely counter any attempts to undermine the security of the country or the safety of maritime navigation in the region.”

Read More: Trump Again Threatens to Bomb Oman

Esmaeil Baghaei, a spokesperson for Iran’s foreign ministry, rejected the Emirati claim on Tuesday, saying that it “undermines ongoing efforts to strengthen trust between countries in the region and prevent the escalation of insecurity,” according to the semi-official Fars news agency. 

“The impact on the Iranian economy could be significant,” Simon Henderson, director of the Bernstein Program on Gulf and Energy Policy at the Washington Institute, tells TIME. “The UAE is one of the top non-oil trading partners with Iran.”

As of April, the UAE accounts for 12.5% of Iran’s exports and 30.43% of its imports, according to Iranian news agency WANA. 

Iran’s dollar currently ranks as the least valuable currency in the world, and its government told a Russian news agency in April that the war has already cost it some $270 billion in direct and indirect damages.

Regional instability amid the war in Iran

Stability in the region is fragile, as a number of incidents have been recently reported in the Strait of Hormuz. On Tuesday, a vessel reported that it had been struck by an unknown projectile, causing damage to the engine room and a crew casualty, according to the U.K. Trade Maritime Operations Centre (UKMTO). Last Thursday, a separate vessel was struck by a drone. 

The UAE has previously reported the detection of missiles coming toward it, most recently on July 12, when it confirmed that a missile fell outside of its borders.  

In May, the defense ministry reported that it had intercepted six unmanned aerial vehicles within 48 hours that “attempted to target civilian and vital areas in the country.”

One drone, launched from the direction of the UAE’s western border, struck an electricity generator near the Barakah Nuclear Energy Plant on May 17. Its origin has not been confirmed and is under investigation.

During the first few weeks of the conflict, Iran launched a series of more aggressive strikes on targets in the UAE, hitting military, energy, and civilian infrastructure. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) vowed at the time to “punish aggressors throughout the region,” pointing toward U.S. military assets stationed in the country, as well as other Gulf states. 

Tehran resumed targeting U.S. allies in the Middle East, including Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain during the return to hostilities in early July, when negotiations based upon a Memorandum of Understanding collapsed. 

Where do peace plans between the U.S. and Iran stand?

Peace talks between the United States and Iran have made little progress in recent weeks.

President Donald Trump said Tuesday that “there are no talks or conversations going on, or scheduled,” between the U.S. and Iran. He also reaffirmed that the naval blockade on Iranian ports and vessels remains in place, amid ongoing claims that the Strait of Hormuz is “open and operating.”

Marine traffic data suggested Wednesday that some ships were indeed passing through the Strait, but still at significantly lower levels than before the conflict began. 

Earlier this week, the President also threatened to “bomb the s---” of Oman, a U.S. ally and mediator between Washington and Tehran, should it “get in the way” of U.S. attempts to gain  effective international control of the Strait of Hormuz. 

Oman and Iran have reportedly been working toward an agreement to manage traffic through the Strait, which carries roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and gas supply. 

As students go back to school in the midst of record-breaking summer heat, many are returning to overheating classrooms whose aging air conditioning systems can't keep up with extreme heat waves—if they even have air conditioning at all. 

Extreme heat has already caused school closures and disruptions across the country. In July, Milwaukee Public Schools shut down its Summer Academy and other indoor school programs for two days because of extreme heat. One day in May, 57 Philadelphia schools went remote and canceled all in-person activities due to soaring temperatures. That same month, a Washington, D.C. high school carried out a "heat evacuation" as classroom temperatures reached the mid-90s. Eight elementary schools in Doylestown, PA also closed for a day because old buildings couldn’t protect students from the heat. And in recent years, schools in Memphis dismissed students early as temperatures climbed to 110 degrees. 

During the 2024-25 school year alone, more than 9 million students at 10,000 schools nationwide experienced extreme heat- and weather-driven school closures or disruptions. These are not isolated inconveniences. They are warning signs that our school buildings and grounds were not designed for today’s new weather patterns.

It’s important to understand that students struggle to learn in hot, stuffy classrooms. Air quality, temperature, and ventilation can affect how students think, focus, and perform. Poor ventilation can impair cognitive function, while excessive heat diverts the body’s energy from learning, slows reaction time, and weakens attention.

In fact, research has shown that in schools without cooling, each 1° Fahrenheit increase in school year temperature reduces the amount learned that year by approximately 1%.

Extreme temperatures (80 to 90 degrees Fahrenheit and above) are known to exacerbate student absenteeism and disciplinary referrals, while poor indoor environments can also contribute to the spread of illness and exacerbate respiratory conditions like asthma, one of the leading causes of missed school days. Younger children, whose bodies and brains are still developing, are especially susceptible.

In medicine and education alike, we have seen how the environments where people spend their time can directly affect their health, well-being, and ability to thrive. We would never accept these conditions in a hospital. We should not accept them in a classroom.

At the same time, outdated heating and cooling systems are placing a growing financial strain on school districts. Across the country, energy costs are rising and becoming more unstable. For school leaders, that often means tradeoffs: dollars spent on inefficient energy systems are dollars not spent directly on teaching and learning. But there is a better path forward.

Modern HVAC systems, often paired with on-site solar energy, offer schools a way to deliver reliable heating and cooling while reducing exposure to volatile fossil fuel costs. These solutions can stabilize energy budgets over time and are increasingly supported by domestic manufacturing, including the production of heat pumps here in the United States.

Just as important, new federal tools make these upgrades far more accessible than they once were. Through energy tax credits and a mechanism known as Elective Pay, public school districts can receive direct financial support to invest in these improvements. That means lower upfront costs and faster payback, turning what was once out of reach into a practical, near-term option.

We are already seeing what this looks like in practice.

In Indiana, Center Grove Community Schools are demonstrating how modern HVAC upgrades can improve classroom comfort while helping manage energy costs, in part by replacing aging boilers, chillers, and fan coils with a geothermal heat pump system. In Virginia’s Prince William County, at the heart of the nation’s data center corridor, district leaders are acting to shield their budgets from steep projected utility increases. And in Wisconsin, a school in Menasha modernized its facility with a ground-source heat pump system, solar panels, and energy storage to deliver better air quality, lower costs, and create local jobs.

The benefits extend well beyond temperature control. Students are better able to focus and learn. Districts gain predictability in their operating costs. And communities benefit from more resilient, efficient infrastructure that reduces strain on the grid during periods of peak demand.

For school and district leaders, this moment calls for action. Now is the time to explore how these solutions can work in your community.

The environments we live in shape the health within us. Nowhere is that more immediate, or more consequential, than in the classroom.

We can improve student health and learning, strengthen our schools, and protect public resources at the same time. And we have real-world proof from communities across the country that this is not only possible, but doable.

The real risk is not the price of modernization, but the cost of continuing to send students and teachers into unhealthy, inefficient buildings unprepared for the realities ahead.