Science
13 May 2016 Vol 352, Issue 6287
http://www.sciencemag.org/current.dtl

.
Editorial
Pursuit of integral ecology
Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo1,*, Veerabhadran Ramanathan2,†
Summary
Later this month (23 and 24 May), the United Nations will convene the first World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul, where global and local leaders will commit to putting each and every person’s safety, dignity, freedom, and right to thrive at the heart of decision-making. More than 125 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance, a level of suffering not seen since World War II. The social problems are wide and deep, from war and human trafficking to the gross inequality between the wealthy 1% and the poorest 3 billion of the population. Included in the summit’s Agenda for Humanity are climate and natural disasters. Indeed, 1 year ago, Pope Francis emphasized, in the encyclical Laudato Si, that complex crises have both social and environmental dimensions. The bond between humans and the natural world means that we live in an “integral ecology,” and as such, an integrated approach to environmental and social justice is required.

.
Perspectives
Reconciliation in Sierra Leone
By Katherine Casey, Rachel Glennerster
Science13 May 2016 : 766-767
Short, low-cost interventions can help communities to recover from civil war
Summary
Since the end of World War II, there have been 259 armed conflicts in 159 locations (1). Sierra Leone’s civil war began 25 years ago, at a time when roughly 25% of all countries worldwide were experiencing civil war (2). How can individuals and groups recover from such violent conflicts? On page 787 of this issue, Cilliers et al. (3) provide rigorous evidence on the efficacy of one postwar reconciliation strategy that was implemented in 100 communities in Sierra Leone (4).

.
Refugee protection and resettlement problems
By Elizabeth Cullen Dunn
Science13 May 2016 : 772-773
Refugees face painful uncertainties that could be ameliorated by aid agency coordination
Summary
In 2015, more than a million refugees and other migrants entered the European Union. They are just a small part of the world’s rapidly burgeoning population of displaced people, which climbed by more than 37% between 2009 and 2015 to reach 59.5 million people. Humanitarian aid to these people has been dramatically insufficient, and many displaced people now lack adequate food, medical care, housing, or transportation. As a geographer, I spent 16 months between 2009 and 2013 conducting participant observation research in camps for displaced people in Georgia (see the photo), where I discovered serious shortfalls in the humanitarian aid system. Increasingly, humanitarian aid is a temporary solution to a permanent problem, a stopgap that not only does not help displaced people resettle but, instead, makes it more difficult for them to move on with their lives.

.
Reconciling after civil conflict increases social capital but decreases individual well-being
By Jacobus Cilliers, Oeindrila Dube, Bilal Siddiqi
Science13 May 2016 : 787-794
Exposure to the truth promotes social reconciliation, but at the cost of mental health.
Editor’s Summary
The psychological cost of reconciliation
During civil wars, individuals and communities who were previously good neighbors can end up fighting each other. One approach to reknit these sundered social ties is to bring perpetrators and victims together in truth and reconciliation forums. Cilliers et al. found that these forums have helped to reestablish social bonds in Sierra Leone, but that they have also imposed a cost on the victims’ mental health (see the Perspective by Casey and Glennerster).
Abstract
Civil wars divide nations along social, economic, and political cleavages, often pitting one neighbor against another. To restore social cohesion, many countries undertake truth and reconciliation efforts. We examined the consequences of one such effort in Sierra Leone, designed and implemented by a Sierra Leonean nongovernmental organization called Fambul Tok. As a part of this effort, community-level forums are set up in which victims detail war atrocities, and perpetrators confess to war crimes. We used random assignment to study its impact across 200 villages, drawing on data from 2383 individuals. We found that reconciliation had both positive and negative consequences. It led to greater forgiveness of perpetrators and strengthened social capital: Social networks were larger, and people contributed more to public goods in treated villages. However, these benefits came at a substantial cost: The reconciliation treatment also worsened psychological health, increasing depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress disorder in these same villages. For a subset of villages, we measured outcomes both 9 months and 31 months after the intervention. These results show that the effects, both positive and negative, persisted into the longer time horizon. Our findings suggest that policy-makers need to restructure reconciliation processes in ways that reduce their negative psychological costs while retaining their positive societal benefits.

.
Zika virus impairs growth in human neurospheres and brain organoids
By Patricia P. Garcez, Erick Correia Loiola, Rodrigo Madeiro da Costa, Luiza M. Higa, Pablo Trindade, Rodrigo Delvecchio, Juliana Minardi Nascimento, Rodrigo Brindeiro, Amilcar Tanuri, Stevens K. Rehen
Science13 May 2016 : 816-818
Zika virus infection in cell culture models damages human neural stem cells to limit growth and cause cell death.