Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Strengthening informal urban functions for climate-resilient cities
Published: 2026-08-05
Subjects: Medicine and Health Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Informal workers provide essential urban functions, yet climate hazards can disrupt the conditions that sustain them. We propose the informal urban function as an analytical unit linking worker conditions, functional performance, and sustainability outcomes. The framework identifies structural conditions shaping capacity, climate pathways leading to continuity, erosion, disruption, or [...]
Solar versus Diesel Powered Water Pumps in Meeting Sustainability Goals in Somalia, a qualitative study
Published: 2026-07-23
Subjects: Engineering, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Somalia endowed with high solar energy is still using diesel energy as the major source of energy to pump drinking water. This put the country under question from achieving SDG 6 which targets universal access to clean and sustainably managed water. Therefore, this study gathers qualitative data from relevant key stakeholders in Puntland, Somalia through individual in-depth interviews and analyze [...]
Local thermal externalities of hyperscale datacenters: causal satellite evidence and implied cooling costs
Published: 2026-07-21
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Hyperscale datacenter construction converts agricultural or greenfield land into continuous heat rejection campuses, yet no causal estimate of the resulting local thermal effect exists. This paper applies a Callaway and Sant'Anna (2021) staggered difference-in-differences estimator to spatially differenced Landsat satellite thermal imagery across 59 datacenter sites in the United States, with [...]
Does Free Allocation Slow Decarbonization ? Installation-Level Evidence from the EU ETS, Phases III and IV
Published: 2026-06-30
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Statistics and Probability
Installations at high risk of carbon leakage receive free allowances from the European Union Emissions Trading System. Free allowances are allocated to prevent energy-intensive factories from relocating outside the EU. However, whether free allocation slows decarbonization remains an open question. In this paper, I test this question directly. The panel was built at the installation-level. The [...]
Large-scale evidence of behavioral responses and adaptation to wildfire smoke
Published: 2026-06-27
Subjects: Environmental Public Health, Environmental Studies, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Using 371 million bikeshare trips across 12 US cities from 2010 to 2024, we find that wildfire smoke reduces urban cycling substantially and nonlinearly, and that populations with more prior smoke exposures avoid cycling more, not less - a pattern consistent with adaptation rather than habituation. Leveraging day-to-day variation in smoke in a distributed lag nonlinear model with high-dimensional [...]
AEF-Econ: Toward Plug-and-Play Socioeconomic Foundation Embeddings from AlphaEarth for Urban Remote Sensing
Published: 2026-06-19
Subjects: Computational Engineering, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Remote Sensing, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AlphaEarth Foundations (AEF) unify global remote sensing foundation embeddings through multimodal self-supervised learning, but their pretraining focuses on physical land-surface signals, limiting plug-and-play use in socioeconomic tasks. We integrate seven heterogeneous data streams across 36 Chinese cities over eight years—AEF embeddings, population, nighttime lights, remote sensing indices, [...]
Seeing Cities in Depth: Subsurface Urban Expansion and the Case for Volumetric Monitoring and Accountability
Published: 2026-06-10
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Cities are increasingly measured through surface land cover and aboveground form, even as urban activity expands below ground. This Perspective develops an integrated approach for making that expansion visible and governable. First, it defines subsurface urban expansion as durable growth or intensification of urban activity below the local ground surface through new or expanded occupation, use, [...]
Floods as a window of opportunity: When and why extreme events trigger adaptation
Published: 2026-06-08
Subjects: Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Disasters can open windows of opportunity for climate adaptation—moments when heightened public attention makes it possible to advance policies and measures that would otherwise struggle to gain traction. Yet whether and how floods shape public adaptation discourse remains unclear. Here, we quantify how flood severity influences media coverage on 12 adaptation measures across 274 German districts [...]
Public Understanding of the Atmospheric River Scale
Published: 2026-05-27
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Atmospheric rivers (ARs) are long, narrow bands of moisture in the atmosphere that transport large amounts of water vapor, producing hazards ranging from heavy rain to high winds once they reach land. In 2019, researchers at the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes, with partners including the National Weather Service and the California Department of Water Resources, developed the AR [...]
Bridging social–ecological systems and ecological economics to navigate polycrisis
Published: 2026-05-22
Subjects: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Human societies and ecological systems experience interacting and compounding crises, a condition often described as ‘polycrisis’. To better navigate it, we propose a synthesis agenda at the interface of ecological economics (EE) and social–ecological systems (SES) research. Through collaborative synthesis and building on a practical framework of crisis dynamics as shocks and creeping changes, we [...]
Modeling Heterogeneous Subnational Climate Action through a Sectoral Tiering Framework: Implications for U.S. Decarbonization Pathways
Published: 2026-05-15
Subjects: Engineering, Social and Behavioral Sciences
State governments play a critical role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions to meet the United States’ Paris Agreement targets. However, states vary widely in their capacities and inclinations for enacting climate mitigation policies. Here, we present a sectoral tiering framework to assess state-level mitigation performance across sectors. We implement the tiering system in an integrated [...]
Forty+ Years of Post-Earthquake Reconnaissance: Methodological Evolution Across Three Phases of EEFIT Activity
Published: 2026-05-12
Subjects: Engineering, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Over four decades, the Earthquake Engineering Field Investigation Team (EEFIT) has undertaken around 50 missions in around 35 countries, evolving from a structural-engineering field programme into a hybrid platform integrating fieldwork, remote sensing, community-based data collection, and longitudinal return studies. Founded in 1982 as a joint venture between UK academic institutions and the [...]
Assembly areas as urban infrastructure: disaster governance, spatial equity, and the protection of public open space in seismically exposed cities
Published: 2026-05-11
Subjects: Engineering, Physical and Environmental Geography, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Disaster assembly areas - designated open spaces where populations gather following a major earthquake - represent a critical but neglected component of urban resilience infrastructure. Using Istanbul as a primary case study, this Perspective examines how assembly area provision has been systematically eroded through routine planning decisions made outside the disaster management apparatus. Our [...]
Navigating the Complexity of Environmental Migration In the Context of Climate Change: Interdisciplinary Reflections on Concepts and Methods
Published: 2026-05-05
Subjects: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This article, from the perspective of a collective of researchers from the French National Research Institute for Development and collaborators, presents and discusses the conceptual and methodological frameworks they have developed to study environmental migration and (im)mobilities. It is based on a workshop organised within the IRD’s CoSav Migrations network, which brought together researchers [...]
Reduced geomagnetic shielding increased UV-B radiation at Earth’s surface during the Laschamps Event
Published: 2026-04-30
Subjects: Astrophysics and Astronomy, Atmospheric Sciences, Biochemistry, Biogeochemistry, Biology, Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Chemistry, Environmental Sciences, Geology, Geophysics and Seismology, Life Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Life Sciences, Paleobiology, Physical and Environmental Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Planetary Geochemistry, Planetary Geology, Planetary Geophysics and Seismology, Planetary Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Statistics and Probability
Exposure to excess UV-B radiation can harm organisms through DNA damage and oxidative stress, and has likely been a key ecological and evolutionary driver throughout Earth’s history. Here, we show UV-B at Earth’s surface was significantly increased during the Laschamps Event, the last major geomagnetic excursion ca. 41ka BP. During the Laschamps, we find significant and prolonged (lasting [...]