Climate

Cold and heat stress present welfare challenges for dairy calves. The consequences of thermal stress on biological functioning have been well documented, and many housing and management strategies have been evaluated to mitigate those detrimental impacts. In cold weather, mitigation strategies have largely focused on nutritional interventions or limiting heat loss with resources such as bedding or jackets. In hot weather, heat abatement strategies such as supplemental shade, increased environmental air exchange through passive ventilation, and forced air movement through mechanical ventilation have been evaluated...

We propose a new methodology to systematically transform presurveyed argument preferences into fictional narratives, that can help people to imagine the consequences of future events, and measure how they impact willingness to pay for a public policy. We apply narrative theory to construct two short narratives that depict an imaginary future, bleak due to climate change or energy dependence, and show experimentally that exposure to these narratives increases contributions in a Public Goods game, framed as payments toward the construction of new nuclear plant in The Netherlands...

Process-based forest models combine biological, physical, and chemical process understanding to simulate forest dynamics as an emergent property of the system. As such, they are valuable tools to investigate the effects of climate change on forest ecosystems. Specifically, they allow testing of hypotheses regarding long-term ecosystem dynamics and provide means to assess the impacts of climate scenarios on future forest development. As a consequence, numerous local-scale simulation studies have been conducted over the past decades to assess the impacts of climate change on forests...

Climate change has emerged as a tough challenge affecting the world's society and economy in the twenty-first century. Furthermore, it has been determined that global warming and climate change have detrimental effects on human health both physical and psychological. In this framework, eco-anxiety has emerged as a new construct to assess the distress in relation to climate change and its effects. In the current article, after a study of the literature regarding both eco-anxiety and generativity related to environmental issues, in the search for a healthy response to eco-anxiety, we propose the construct of eco-generativity as a sustainable development-related concept for the health of planet earth and people in the present and in the future...

INTRODUCTION: Food insecurity has remained a serious public health problem in developing countries, such as Ethiopia, over the past two decades. Vulnerable populations, such as pensioners, have been affected by this problem because of emerging socio-demographic changes, a global financial crisis, and climate change, all of which have contributed to the high food prices. Hence, this study aimed to assess household food security status and associated factors among pensioners in Arba Minch town, South Ethiopia...

Despite the existence of many interventions to mitigate or adapt to the health effects of climate change, their effectiveness remains unclear. Here, we introduce the Comprehensive Evaluation Framework for Intervention on Health Effects of Ambient Temperature to evaluate study designs and effects of intervention studies. The framework comprises three types of interventions: proactive, indirect, and direct, and four categories of indicators: classification, methods, scope, and effects. We trialed the framework by an evaluation of existing intervention studies...

Care provision is a key component of women's time use with implications for the health and wellbeing of children. Shifting labor demands resulting from weather shocks may imply that women in developing countries have less time for care provision, potentially affecting their children's nutrition. Nonetheless, a broad literature focusing on the indirect impacts of climate change on child nutrition has yet to explore the mechanisms whereby this occurs, and whether mothers' time use is one of these mechanisms. Using the Uganda National Panel Survey, a unique data set that gathers data on farming activities, time use, and anthropometric measures, I analyze how rainfall variability affects mother's time use and whether time use is a mechanism whereby rainfall variability affects child nutrition in the short run (measured as weight-for-age and weight-for-height Z-scores)...

INTRODUCTION: Climate change is the single biggest health threat facing humanity, with direct and indirect impacts on mental health, yet health impacts of climate change remain notably absent from most medical school curricula. We describe a timely interactive educational session on climate change and mental health that was implemented and studied on a medical student clinical psychiatry rotation. METHODS: We developed a 1-hour introductory session on the mental health impacts of climate change and potential solutions...

BACKGROUND: Understanding stand dynamics is essential for predicting future wood supply and associated ecosystem services for sustainable forest management. The dynamics of natural stands can be characterized by age-dependent growth and yield models. However, dynamics in managed stands appear somewhat different from that of natural stands, especially with difficulties in explaining the phenomenon of post-thinning overcompensation, based upon some long-term observations. Though overcompensation is an ideal outcome for the forest sector, it had been largely treated as an outlier and thus ignored or dismissed as "out-of-the-ordinary"...

Understanding belowground plant-microbial interactions is important for biodiversity maintenance, community assembly and ecosystem functioning of forest ecosystems. Consequently, a large number of studies were conducted on root and microbial interactions, especially in the context of precipitation and temperature gradients under global climate change scenarios. Forests ecosystems have high biodiversity of plants and associated microbes, and contribute to major primary productivity of terrestrial ecosystems...

The growing demand for sustainable and environmentally friendly viticulture is leading to a multiplication of breeding programs aimed at obtaining vines that are resistant to powdery mildew (PM) and downy mildew (DM), the two most damaging vine diseases. In Puglia, the most important Italian region for the production of table grapes, an extensive crossing program was launched in 2015 with 113 crosses, including elite table varieties, seedless varieties, and resistant varieties. The main seedling production parameters were measured for each cross...

Information about the resistance and adaptive potential of tree species and provenances is needed to select suitable planting material in times of rapidly changing climate conditions. In this study, we evaluate growth responses to climatic fluctuations and extreme events for 12 provenances of northern red oak ( Quercus rubra L.) that were tested across three trial sites with distinct environmental conditions in Germany. Six provenances each were sourced from the natural distribution in North America and from introduced stands in Germany...

Livestock presence impacts plant biodiversity (species richness) in grassland ecosystems, yet extent and direction of grazing impacts on biodiversity vary greatly across inter-annual periods. In this study, an 8-year (2014-2021) grazing gradient experiment with sheep was conducted in a semi-arid grassland to investigate the impact of grazing under different precipitation variability on biodiversity. The results suggest no direct impact of grazing on species richness in semi-arid Stipa grassland. However, increased grazing indirectly enhanced species richness by elevating community dominance (increasing the sheltering effect of Stipa grass)...

Non-photochemical quenching (NPQ) is a protective mechanism used by plants to safely dissipate excess absorbed light energy as heat, minimizing photo-oxidative damage. Although the importance of NPQ as a safety valve for photosynthesis is well-known, the physiological and environmental effects of the heat produced remain unclear because the amount of heat produced by NPQ is considered negligible, and its physiological effects have not been directly observed. Here, we calculated the heat produced by NPQ and evaluated its impact on the leaf and global warming based on simplified models...

Geological bodies are important sources of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Organic-rich oil shale in sedimentary basins is a good gas source rock, the GHG in which will be released into the atmosphere during crushing to affect climate change. Quantitative calculations of GHG emissions during oil shale crushing were carried out on oil shales from the Yaojie (YJ) and Fushun (FS) mining areas in China. Organic geochemistry, X-ray diffraction, and pore structure analysis experiments, as well as the relationship between storage time and GHG emissions, were analyzed to investigate the main controlling factors of GHG release in different types of oil shales...

Landfills play a key role as greenhouse gas (GHGs) emitters, and urgently need assessment and management plans development to swiftly reduce their climate impact. In this context, accurate emission measurements from landfills under different climate and management would reduce the uncertainty in emission accounting. In this study, more than one year of long-term high-frequency data of CO2 and CH4 fluxes were collected in two Italian landfills (Giugliano and Case Passerini) with contrasting management (gas recovery VS no management) using eddy covariance (EC), with the aim to i) investigate the relation between climate drivers and CO2 and CH4 fluxes at different time intervals and ii) to assess the overall GHG balances including the biogas extraction and energy recovery components...

In response to high population density, the desert locust, Schistocerca gregaria , becomes gregarious and forms swarms that can cause significant damage to crops and pastures, threatening food security of human populations from western Africa to India. This switch from solitary to gregarious populations is highly dependent on favorable weather conditions. Climate change, which has been hypothesized to shift conditions towards increasing risks of gregarization, is therefore likely to have significant impacts on the spatial distribution and likelihood of outbreak events...

The urgent need to mitigate the severe environmental impacts of climate change necessitates a transition to a low-carbon energy infrastructure, crucial for decarbonization and achieving global sustainability goals. This study investigates the decarbonization trajectories of five major economies and significant carbon emitters: the United States of America (USA), China, Japan, Germany, and India. We focus on evaluating two decarbonization scenarios for power generation. Scenario 1 explores the use of a generic storage system for reducing critical excess electricity production (CEEP), maintaining the same thermal power plant capacity as in the reference year 2021...

Ecological similarity plays an important role in biotic interactions. Increased body size similarity of competing species, for example, increases the strength of their biotic interactions. Body sizes of many exothermic species are forecast to be altered under global warming, mediating shifts in existing trophic interactions among species, in particular for species with different thermal niches. Temperate rocky reefs along the southeast coast of Australia are located in a climate warming hotspot and now house a mixture of temperate native fish species and poleward range-extending tropical fishes (vagrants), creating novel species assemblages...

The massive reductions in anthropogenic emissions resulting from the COVID-19 lockdown provided a unique opportunity to evaluate the effect of mitigation measures aiming to abate air pollution. In Mexico, the total lockdown period took place during the dry-hot season when biomass burning activity is enhanced. Here, we investigate the role of biomass burning emissions on regional ozone levels in the Megalopolis of Central Mexico. The studied period covers the lockdown phases 2 and 3, and the first month of the New Normal...