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"This was actually tried and tested on Queensland's roads during Tropical Cyclone Debbie in 2017," says Caroline Evans, chair of the climate change and road network resilience committee for the World Road Association (PIARC).

"When the waters receded the pavements were still intact, so they didn't need to be fully rehabilitated afterwards."

Foam bitumen stabilisation has also been applied to other roads as part of Queensland's move to makes its roads more flood-resistant, and is proving more cost-effective than traditional asphalt.

Queensland faces considerable challenges as it has the longest state-controlled road network of any Australian state or territory with over 33,300km of roads. So far it has built 1,000km of foamed bitumen road surfaces and is "continuing to develop foamed bitumen techniques", according to its transport department.

Australia's floods of 2010-11 spread devastation and damage across Queensland, with 33 people losing their lives and causing billions in losses across the state. The floods also damaged 19,000km of roads, including those needed for emergency and delivery vehicles.

It was a stark lesson in the importance of weather-proofing Queensland's most vulnerable roads, to ensure that future flooding would lead to fewer people being cut off.

Since then, Queensland has been using a process called foamed bitumen stabilisation. This injects small amounts of air and cold water into hot bitumen, the sticky dark substance typically used for road surfaces.

The bitumen then expands and forms a water-resistant layer. The result is a stronger yet flexible road surface or pavement that is better able to withstand flooding.

Fusion works on the principle that energy can be released by forcing together atomic nuclei rather than by splitting them, as in the case of the fission reactions that drive existing nuclear power stations.

In the core of the Sun, huge gravitational pressures allow this to happen at temperatures of around 10 million Celsius. At the much lower pressures that are possible on Earth, temperatures to produce fusion need to be much higher - above 100 million Celsius.

No materials exist that can withstand direct contact with such heat. So, to achieve fusion in a lab, scientists have devised a solution in which a super-heated gas, or plasma, is held inside a doughnut-shaped magnetic field.

The Joint European Torus (JET), sited at Culham in Oxfordshire, has been pioneering this fusion approach for nearly 40 years. And for the past 10 years, it has been configured to replicate the anticipated ITER set-up.

The ITER facility in southern France is supported by a consortium of world governments, including from EU member states, the US, China and Russia. It is expected to be the last step in proving nuclear fusion can become a reliable energy provider in the second half of this century.

Operating the power plants of the future based on fusion would produce no greenhouse gases and only very small amounts of short-lived radioactive waste.

"These experiments we've just completed had to work," said JET CEO Prof Ian Chapman. "If they hadn't then we'd have real concerns about whether ITER could meet its goals.

"This was high stakes and the fact that we achieved what we did was down to the brilliance of people and their trust in the scientific endeavour," he told BBC News.

The paper, published in the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, sets out why land matters in a host of problems facing humanity and calls on decision makers and stakeholders to do more to address misconceptions over land use and sustainability.

With much of the planet already "used-up", the world has hard choices to make over how to use land in the most sustainable and effective way.

That's the take-home message from 50 leading experts on why land matters in tackling a host of existential challenges.

Vast areas of land are being earmarked for grand plans to fight climate change and nature loss.

Yet land is also needed for food production and alleviating poverty.

The scientists say there simply isn't enough land on the planet to address all of these things at once.

"We live on this used planet where all the land that's even considered unused or untouched is providing really important benefits to people," said Dr Ariane de Bremond of the University of Bern.

"There isn't enough land to do everything simultaneously - we have to recognise that and find better ways - and that requires a lot of negotiation between different sectors of society and between nations."

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