Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Studies
Source-composition sensitivity in historical marine wind observations: a CLIWOC case study, 1750--1855
Published: 2026-08-15
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Library and Information Science, Meteorology, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Applied Mathematics, Other Computer Sciences
Recovering Climate’s History with Artificial Intelligence used the CLIWOC ship-logbook database to argue that sailors’ wind observations reveal a previously undetected shift in global atmospheric circulation between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. We reproduce the article's principal annual aggregate from CLIWOC release 2.1 and find that this unstandardized, record-weighted [...]
Nature dependency analysis and the contributions to assessing nature-related risks
Published: 2026-08-13
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Human dependency on natural capital and ecosystem services (ES) present significant risks to wellbeing and economic prosperity, which are poorly understood. While tools, such as the Exploring Natural Capital Opportunities, Risks and Exposure (ENCORE) database, provide valuable global dependency information, translating these insights into country-specific contexts remains challenging. Here, we [...]
Annual high-resolution global ambient population estimates from 1975 to 2024
Published: 2026-08-13
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Other Geography, Physical and Environmental Geography, Remote Sensing, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Spatial Science
Gridded population data support assessments of human exposure, settlement change, infrastructure demand, and access to services, yet global datasets combining annual coverage over multiple decades with fine spatial resolution remain limited. LandScan Mosaic Time Series provides 50 annual estimates of global ambient population distribution at 3 arc-second resolution from 1975 through 2024. The [...]
Socio-economic characterization and Natural Resource appraisal for watershed development around Pumped Storage Hydroelectric Project sites in Andhra Pradesh, India
Published: 2026-08-06
Subjects: Environmental Studies
A comprehensive baseline study was conducted to develop the watershed treatment plan around four Pumped Storage Hydro-electric Project sites in Andhra Pradesh, India. As a part of study, household survey was conducted with 450 samples around 10 km radius of project reservoir sites. The data was collected on socio-economic conditions of communities and natural resource status around the [...]
Spatiotemporal Variation and Driving Forces of Ecological Quality in the Ili Grassland Based on the Remote Sensing Ecological Index: Implications for Sustainable Ecotourism
Published: 2026-08-04
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Abstract: The Ili Grassland is an important ecological security barrier in northwestern China and a region with abundant ecotourism resources. Scientifically evaluating the spatiotemporal variations in ecological environmental quality and identifying its key driving factors are essential for regional ecological conservation and sustainable ecotourism development. In this study, MODIS remote [...]
A novel integrated assessment framework to inform Australia's net zero transition
Published: 2026-08-03
Subjects: Agriculture, Environmental Studies, Physical and Environmental Geography, Spatial Science
Australia has set an ambitious goal of achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Attaining this target will require important transformations across multiple sectors of the economy. Integrated assessment models can provide valuable insights into the interactions across sectors of the economy, including land, agriculture and energy, to guide these complex transformations. However, many [...]
The Possible Global Role of Nature-Based Solutions in Reducing People’s Vulnerability to Climate Change
Published: 2026-08-03
Subjects: Environmental Studies
While climate mitigation is essential for maintaining global mean temperature within 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels, climate adaptation is necessary both now and in the coming decades. Ecosystems provide a wide array of services, including those that can reduce the negative impacts of climate change. Actions that solve problems using ecosystem services, called Nature-based Solutions (NbS), [...]
Valuation boundaries in monetary ecosystem service assessment: A logic-chain-based reporting framework with a vineyard application
Published: 2026-07-08
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Monetary ecosystem service (ES) valuations often diverge across studies and locations even when similar valuation approaches are applied. A key reason is that applied valuations frequently rely on opportunistic datasets and proxies, which implicitly determine which biophysical, management, and demand-side drivers are represented in the valuation workflow. Because this “valuation boundary” is [...]
Climate-Induced Risk to Food Security in Two Indian Indigenous Communities: Evaluating Impact and Associations Through Community Perception
Published: 2026-07-03
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Food systems across low- and middle-income countries remain inadequately equipped to anticipate climate-sensitive risks, particularly among indigenous and ecologically dependent populations. While climate change impacts are frequently linked to food security, attention needs to be paid to how communities experience climate stressors in their food systems. Our study examines perceived climate [...]
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 [...]
Climate-mode-conditioned exposure of a sporting mega-event: an event-based assessment of Rugby World Cup 2027 in Australia
Published: 2026-06-30
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The environmental risk of sporting mega-events is usually assessed from host-city climatologies or, more recently, from tournament design (venue, date, kick-off time). Both overlook a distinct axis: the interannual state of the large-scale climate modes into which a given edition falls. We ask to what extent the phase of the El Ni\~no--Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) [...]
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 [...]
Probabilistic Regional Conditioning of Natural Hazard Loss Models
Published: 2026-06-25
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Hydrology, Risk Analysis
Natural hazard risk models underpin decisions from insurance pricing to infrastructure investment, yet their accuracy depends on vulnerability functions rarely calibrated to local conditions. The most accurate vulnerability functions capture regional building characteristics through multi-variable models or large engineering-based loss-function databases, but need detailed asset-level data that [...]
Analysis of the potential of NLP techniques to identify climate change themes in Canadian social media textual content
Published: 2026-06-17
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Social media discussions about climate change offer valuable insights into how the public views climate issues and their willingness to engage in personal climate actions. Understanding individual climate actions is crucial because households are responsible for more than 70% of global carbon emissions, and lifestyle changes alone can reduce carbon emissions by approximately 15%. This research [...]
WITHDRAWN: Can Green Infrastructure Curb Urban Sprawl? Evidence from China's Sponge City Program and Spatial Implications for Emerging Asia
Published: 2026-06-16
Subjects: Environmental Studies