Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences
ANALYSING THE PLANT VARIETY PROTECTION WITH RESPECT TO FOOD SECURITY IN INDIAN CONTEXT
Published: 2025-04-16
Subjects: Education, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Ending hunger, achieving food security and sustainable agriculture is the second Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) out of seventeen SDGs of United Nations and it aims to ensure food security and nutrition to each individual globally. Plant varieties protection (PVP)and plant breeders’ rights protection agreements and laws like International Union for the Protection of New varieties of Plant [...]
A realistic climate strategy
Published: 2025-04-12
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Sustainability
The international climate strategy is failing. Current policies will act too slowly to prevent rising temperatures from crossing critical climate tipping points. IPCC assessments underestimate the non-linear risks and catastrophic costs of overshooting Paris Agreement targets. Opponents of solar geoengineering cite concerns about moral hazard and other potential risks; however, at this juncture [...]
Inequities in Indoor Exposure to Wildfire-Related PM2.5 Across the Contiguous United States
Published: 2025-04-04
Subjects: Medicine and Health Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Exposure to wildfire smoke has been recognized as a major public health concern, but existing studies have focused on outdoor air, despite the fact that most people spend the majority of their time indoors, especially during wildfires. Here, we estimated indoor wildfire-related fine particulate matter (PM2.5) concentrations across 72,537 census tracts in the contiguous United States for the year [...]
Unprecedented Social-Ecological Impacts of the 2023 Extreme Drought in the Central Amazon
Published: 2025-03-21
Subjects: Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
While the 2023 record-breaking drought led to widespread social-ecological impacts across Amazonia, local impacts of such extreme events are rarely described in detail. Here we leverage a large interdisciplinary data collection related to social and ecological impacts in the Central Amazon. Compound hazards (reduced river water levels, lack of rainfall, high water/air temperatures, river erosion [...]
Multi-decadal analysis of major global risk assessments reveals consistent biases and low predictive capacity
Published: 2025-03-19
Subjects: Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The World Economic Forum (WEF) Global Risk Reports (GRRs) are published annually with the aim to uncover the most pressing challenges facing the world. However, the GRR have been criticized for presenting an overly simplistic and potentially biased portrayal of interconnected global risks and crises. Despite their influence, no in-depth, interannual analysis of the GRRs has been conducted to [...]
Floods, Facts, and Fictions: Numbers and Narratives Behind Bangladesh’s 2024 Regional Floods
Published: 2025-02-27
Subjects: Engineering, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The August 2024 regional floods in Bangladesh, occurring shortly after a major political upheaval, were among the most severe in recent history, displacing millions and causing extensive damage. This paper examines both the scientific and social dimensions of this disaster by exploring the natural drivers that led to the flooding and the sociopolitical context that caused rumors to spread that [...]
Aligning science and practice in evaluations of cookstove carbon projects
Published: 2025-02-25
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Carbon markets are thought to be central to global climate strategies,1 but their scalability depends on the credibility of emissions reduction claims,2 a point that has recently faced scientific and public doubt.3,4 Carbon projects typically generate their own estimates of averted emissions to produce credits, a practice that introduces potential conflicts of interest and underscores the need [...]
Thirty Years of the Open Geospatial Consortium - History, Present, and Future
Published: 2025-02-23
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
For 30 years, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has advanced geospatial interoperability through continuous innovation. The OGC provides strategies and Standards that promote adoption, increase efficiencies, create new opportunities, and transform our relationship with the dynamic planet we inhabit. It has fostered global collaborations among companies, governments, academic institutions, and [...]
Managing Smoke Risk from Wildland Fires: Northern California as a Case Study
Published: 2025-02-11
Subjects: Engineering, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Smoke fine particulate matter (PM2.5) from increasing wildfires in the western United States threatens public health. While land managers often prioritize reducing wildfire risk in the wildland-urban interface, the impact on regional air quality from mitigating wildfire spread is less explored. We develop a framework to quantify wildfire contributions to smoke exposure and assess targeted land [...]
Philanthropy’s Role in Supporting Community-Level Climate Action in Atlantic Canada: Opportunities and Challenges
Published: 2025-01-18
Subjects: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This review explores how philanthropy contributes to climate action in Atlantic Canada, a region facing threats from extreme weather events, rising sea levels, and scarcity of resources that impact local communities. While public and private sector funding is vital, philanthropy offers unique opportunities to support localized, innovative climate solutions. This review explores the current [...]
Exploring the Impact of Climate Change on Community Sustainability in Atlantic Canada: A Transdisciplinary Approach
Published: 2025-01-17
Subjects: Education, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This paper examines the significant impacts of climate change on community sustainability in Atlantic Canada, particularly for vulnerable populations. Rising temperatures and sea levels threaten livelihoods, infrastructure, and ecosystems, necessitating a transformative approach to avoid maladaptation. Current strategies primarily rooted in natural sciences and economic models lack the [...]
XAI and Sustainability: Unifying Regulatory Standards and Solutions for the Future of Environmental Management
Published: 2024-11-27
Subjects: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This study explores the integration of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) into environmental governance, addressing critical challenges in transparency, public trust and regulatory compliance. As AI technologies increasingly influence decision-making in environmental management, ensuring equitable and ethical practices has become paramount. By examining key regulatory frameworks, including [...]
ml4xcube: Machine Learning Toolkits for Earth System Data Cubes
Published: 2024-10-09
Subjects: Computer and Systems Architecture, Computer Engineering, Engineering, Geography, Remote Sensing, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Rapidly changing climate conditions and the increase in extreme events are posing severe challenges to human life and infrastructure, requiring sophisticated analytical capabilities for hazard prediction and disaster risk management. Earth System Data Cubes (ESDCs) have become an essential tool in Earth System Sciences (ESS) by organizing large-scale, multivariate environmental datasets into a [...]
Dynamics of the polycrisis: temporal trends, spatial distribution and co-occurrences of national shocks (1970-2019)
Published: 2024-09-20
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Polycrisis has emerged as a new property of the Anthropocene. Although sector-specific studies offer insights into the changing frequency and intensity of these disruptions, a comprehensive analysis remains absent, limiting a more integrated understanding of the polycrisis phenomenon. Addressing this gap, we develop and analyse a harmonized database capturing the occurrence of six categories of [...]
Private protected areas exhibit greater bias towards unproductive land compared to public protected areas
Published: 2024-09-13
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Geography, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Globally, private protected areas (PPAs) have become an important tool for biodiversity conservation. While they are expanding in size and number, there is limited evidence on their potential impact on avoiding biodiversity loss, and how this impact compares to the public protected areas (PAs). The impact of protection is measured as the actual biodiversity outcome within the area protected [...]