Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Studies
VITAL-PATHS-FOOD: New Transformative Change Pathways for Tackling Climate, Human Development, and Biodiversity Loss and Incorporating Plural Perspectives on Justice and the Value of Nature.
Published: 2026-10-12
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Nature and Society Relations
The IPBES Transformative Change Assessment (2025) gives a central role to equity, justice, and the value of nature in facilitating sustainable transformations, by acting as a powerful deep leverage point that aligns sustainability transformations with the values and worldviews different communities hold. Scenarios and modelling studies offer a tool for examining ways of acting on these leverage [...]
Land Use Change, Spillovers, and Transitions: Global Trends, Prospects, and Emerging Drivers
Published: 2026-10-10
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Environmental Studies, Forest Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Other Geography, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing
In this review, we first compile data on global trends and rates of major land use changes over the recent decades, and summarize the main insights revealed by these data. We then review recent research and quantitative estimates on key land use spillover processes, i.e., leakage, indirect land use change, rebound effect and land sparing, and agglomeration economies. We then turn to the [...]
The Spatial Journey: A Visual Narrative of the Keffi to Makurdi Field Trip
Published: 2026-10-08
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Education, Environmental Education, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Outdoor Education, Physical and Environmental Geography, Spatial Science
Background: Field-based education is a critical academic component in geographical studies, designed to bridge theoretical knowledge with empirical observation. This paper reports on the development of a visual and interactive geospatial narrative based on a five-day geography educational field trip from Keffi to Makurdi, Nigeria, from the 26th to the 30th of August 2024. Objective: The primary [...]
No Robust Evidence for a GDP–Methane Relationship in Africa, 1970–2024: A Multi-Specification Test Against the Environmental Kuznets Curve and STIRPAT Frameworks
Published: 2026-10-02
Subjects: Environmental Studies
The green growth hypothesis, that economic growth can be decoupled from environmental harm, is embedded in the Sustainable Development Goals and national climate strategies, yet remains contested, with recent evidence questioning whether decoupling occurs fast enough to meet climate targets. Methane policy for Africa, including the Global Methane Pledge's 22-plus African signatories, implicitly [...]
Trigger or driver? Tracing the role of climate variability since the Little Ice Age in the abandonment of mountain villages in the Eastern Pyrenees: evidence from historical documents
Published: 2026-10-01
Subjects: Environmental Studies
In recent decades, rural depopulation has emerged as a widespread phenomenon across much of Europe, driven by shared underlying processes but shaped by region-specific dynamics. Understanding how climate variability interacts with socioeconomic dynamics to drive long-term settlement abandonment is critical in the context of current global change. High-mountain regions are particularly sensitive [...]
Recent Changes in Lake Chad’s Surface Water Extent: A Remote Sensing Assessment Using Sentinel-2 Land Cover Data (2017-2025)
Published: 2026-09-24
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Lake Chad is an endorheic freshwater lake located at the junction of four countries; Nigeria, Niger, Chad, and Cameroon in West-Central Africa. Lake Chad, once one of Africa’s largest freshwater bodies, has experienced significant hydrological fluctuations over the past decades. While long-term historical analyses highlight a severe 90% surface area contraction since the 1960s, short-term [...]
The mortality burden of airborne fine mineral dust in the United States
Published: 2026-09-19
Subjects: Environmental Public Health, Environmental Studies, Public Health, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Regulation under the Clean Air Act has reduced combustion-derived fine particulate matter (PM2.5) in the United States, leaving windblown mineral dust—driven by drought, shrinking water bodies, and fallowed farmland—as a growing and largely unregulated share of what remains. Existing mortality burden estimates have had to borrow concentration–response functions from total PM2.5 and disagree [...]
Assessing Challenges for U.S.-Based Polar Early Career Scientists During Science Policy Changes
Published: 2026-09-13
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Environmental Studies, Geography, Glaciology, Hydraulic Engineering, Nature and Society Relations, Other Environmental Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Early-career researchers (ECRs) play a critical role in sustaining polar and cryosphere research in the United States. Since January 2025, changes in U.S. science policy and federal research funding have created substantial uncertainty for researchers, particularly those in the early stages of their careers. To assess the impacts of these changes, we conducted a community-driven survey of [...]
Where the green goes: green-network configuration and the super-additive loss of urban biodiversity under polyuncertainty
Published: 2026-09-12
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Climate assessment for cities proceeds one pressure at a time, its uncertainty treated as a sum of separable parts. Compound-event research shows this understates risk when drivers are dependent, and urban ecology that habitat arrangement, not quantity, governs which species persist. These have not been joined, so the contribution of green-infrastructure configuration, as against extent, to [...]
Climate Change and Crop Production in The Gambia: Farmers’ Perceptions, Agricultural Practices, and Adaptation Strategies
Published: 2026-09-10
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Background Climate change threatens crop production, food security, and rural livelihoods, particularly where smallholder farmers depend on rain-fed agriculture. The Gambia is exposed to rising temperatures, rainfall variability, droughts, floods, land degradation, and coastal hazards. This study assessed crop farmers' perceptions of climate change, their agricultural practices and adaptation [...]
A safe and just operating space for water at municipal scale: population, agriculture and mining in Chihuahua, Mexico, to 2050
Published: 2026-09-08
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Nature and Society Relations, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
Water allocation decisions in Mexico are taken municipality by municipality, yet water scarcity is assessed at national or basin scale. We operationalize a safe and just operating space for water for each of the 67 municipalities of Chihuahua, Mexico's largest and driest mining state, with both bounds drawn from national law rather than imposed by the analyst: an ecological ceiling equal to the [...]
Beyond climate-change risk: subjective attribution, multidimensional impact appraisal, and adaptation advocacy among Swedish forestry professionals
Published: 2026-09-07
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Adaptation may depend on whether decision-makers recognise climate change, but also on whether they attribute experienced changes to climate change and how they appraise consequences across valued domains. We analysed survey data from 140 Swedish forestry professionals to examine whether stronger subjective attribution of experienced forest changes to climate change is associated with more [...]
Cloud Cover and Structural Observation Gaps in African Agricultural Earth Observation: Evidence from Six Agroecological Zones
Published: 2026-09-07
Subjects: Agriculture, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Remote Sensing
Optical Earth observation underpins a growing number of agricultural-monitoring and agri-fintech services across Africa, all of which need a usable view of a field often enough to track its condition. Cloud gaps in that record are usually treated as random missing data; we test whether they are instead structurally biased. Using three growing seasons (2022–2024) of Sentinel-2 scene-classification [...]
BORDER OPTICS : Satellite Verification of India's Vibrant Villages Programme: A Compositing-Window Robustness Assessment of Border-Village Development
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Education, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, Natural Resource Economics, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Nature and Society Relations, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Sustainability
Ask the Government of India if things have worked out for them with their flagship scheme for the Border Villages, the honest answer (on parliamentary record) is No, it has never been verified anywhere. The Vibrant Villages Programme (VVP-I) has approved around ₹4,800 crore in support of 2,967 villages in five Himalayan border states/union territories including 662 villages marked 'priority' for [...]
Independent Verification of the European Climate Law's Effect on Nitrogen Dioxide Pollution: A Satellite-Derived, Difference-in-Differences Analysis
Published: 2026-09-05
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, International and Area Studies, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science, Statistics and Probability
Satellite observations make it easy to compare air pollution in countries that adopted a policy with countries that did not. This paper examines what such a comparison identifies. It uses Sentinel-5P TROPOMI tropospheric NO₂ for 2019–2024 and a country-level difference-in-differences (DiD) model of the European Climate Law that compares the EU-27 with nine neighbouring non-EU countries. NO₂ fell [...]