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Carbon neutrality cannot be achieved without different economic sectors, individuals and households, and the government making serious efforts. Green finance in different forms including environmental, social and governance investment and carbon emissions trading are used to measure the reduction in carbon emissions and place a monetary value on them. However, because of inconsistencies or even manipulation in the monitoring/measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) of air quality and carbon emissions data, the effectiveness of green finance has been largely compromised. Environmental MRV is a technology-based engineering task, which is also heavily impacted by institutional design and professionalism. This commentary will draw upon principal–agent theory and the practical arrangements of environmental MRV to discuss why professionalism is badly needed and how to bridge the missing link for achieving carbon neutrality and sustainability transitions.

China's Sponge City Program (SCP) envisions a city's surface water management system to function like a sponge to absorb, store, infiltrate, and purify rainwater, and release it for reuse when needed. It emphasizes the use of natural and natural-engineering hybrid measures to mimic natural water cycle, thus offers Nature-Based-Solutions (NBS) to urban surface water management. The SCP has become a flagship sustainability program, applied across 30 pilot cities in mainland China since 2014. Significant progress has been made with three years of start-up financial support from the central government. At present, securing adequate financial resources to support further construction, operation, and maintenance of relevant green/blue infrastructures becomes the key challenge to extending the SCP within pilot cities and to other cities. Green finance, referring to local, national, or transnational financial investments from public, private, and alternative sources flowing into environmental and sustainability initiatives, has been experimented in the EU member countries and identified as one of the key business models to NBS, could be a viable solution to further the uptake of China's SCP concept and its implementation. In this context, the emergence of Hong Kong as an Asia-Pacific green finance hub offers a gateway for the SCP to secure financial resources. This paper describes the financial challenge of the SCP and the emerging development of green finance in China and compares it with the EU's experience in NBS green finance. It then explores how Hong Kong could take advantage of its well-established international standards and favourable geopolitical position as a key financial hub to channel green capital into China's SCP from interested investors. To do so requires overcoming current barriers in financial regulations and jurisdictional regimes between mainland China and Hong Kong. A stable and transparent cross-border green finance platform should be established to actively engage investors interested in the SCP and other green projects, so as to accelerate China's transition towards its goal of ecological civilisation and sustainable development.

A critical feature of cancer is the ability to induce immunosuppression and evade immune responses. Tumor-induced immunosuppression diminishes the effectiveness of endogenous immune responses and decreases the efficacy of cancer immunotherapy. In this study, we describe a new immunosuppressive pathway in which adenosine promotes Casitas B-lineage lymphoma b (Cbl-b)-mediated Notch1 degradation, causing suppression of CD8+ T-cells effector functions. Genetic knockout and pharmacological inhibition of Cbl-b prevents Notch1 degradation in response to adenosine and reactivates its signaling. Reactivation of Notch1 results in enhanced CD8+ T-cell effector functions, anti-cancer response and resistance to immunosuppression. Our work provides evidence that targeting the Cbl-b-Notch1 axis is a novel promising strategy for cancer immunotherapy.

IntroductionUp to 30% of individuals with hemophilia A develop inhibitors to replacement factor VIII (FVIII), rendering the treatment ineffective. The underlying mechanism of inhibitor development remains poorly understood. The My Life, Our Future Research Repository (MLOF RR) has gathered F8 and F9 mutational information, phenotypic data, and biological material from over 11,000 participants with hemophilia A (HA) and B as well as carriers enrolled across US hemophilia treatment centers, including over 5,000 whole-genome sequences. Identifying genes associated with inhibitors may contribute to our understanding of why certain patients develop those neutralizing antibodies.Aim and MethodsHere, we performed a genome-wide association study and gene-based analyses to identify genes associated with inhibitors in participants with HA from the MLOF RR.ResultsWe identify a genome-wide significant association within the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) locus in participants with HA with F8 intronic inversions. HLA typing revealed independent associations with the HLA alleles major histocompatibility complex, class II, DR beta 1 (HLA DRB1*15:01) and major histocompatibility complex, class II, DQ beta 1 (DQB1*03:03). Variant aggregation tests further identified low-frequency variants within GRID2IP (glutamate receptor, ionotropic, delta 2 [GRID2] interacting protein 1) significantly associated with inhibitors.ConclusionOverall, our study confirms the association of DRB1*15:01 with FVIII inhibitors and identifies a novel association of DQB1*03:03 in individuals with HA carrying intronic inversions of F8. In addition, our results implicate GRID2IP, encoding GRID2-interacting protein, with the development of inhibitors, and suggest an unrecognized role of this gene in autoimmunity.

The special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macao enjoy a high degree of autonomy from the national policy system in devising their local policies, including measures related to climate change. Hong Kong and Macao each have their own climate change policies, some aspects of which are more advanced than policies in mainland China. While their high degree of policy autonomy has advantages, this has also isolated them from China's larger environmental management and practices that continue to advance at scale. This paper reviews the climate change policies of the two special administrative regions and analyzes their strengths and innovations, particularly in adaptation. It also identifies areas where there could be closer engagement, collaboration, and capacity-building with the mainland China, which has the potential for greater positive impacts, especially on a regional basis.