Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Studies
Brazil’s climate targets impaired by the potential cessation of the Amazon carbon sink
Published: 2026-10-30
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Other Earth Sciences, Sustainability
In accordance with the recommendations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), countries utilize the "managed land" proxy for their national greenhouse gas (GHG) emission inventories. This implies deducting “passive” carbon removals from countrywide gross GHG emissions. Long-term forest plots indicate that the carbon sink in structurally intact Amazon forest has weakened by [...]
Historical distribution of managed honeybee colonies (Apis mellifera) in 18th-century Spain: A standardized dataset (v1: Cáceres)
Published: 2026-10-27
Subjects: Agriculture, Climate, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Nature and Society Relations
This data descriptor presents a standardized, geographically harmonized dataset of managed honeybee (Apis mellifera) colonies in the current province of Cáceres (Spain) during the mid-18th century (1750–1754). Data was extracted from the Ensenada Cadastre primary manuscript sources. The dataset encompasses 207 Local Administrative Units (LAU) and records a minimum threshold of 165,387 managed [...]
Does electricity scaling improve annual water-withdrawal estimates? Evidence from US Meta data centers
Published: 2026-10-24
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Studies, Water Resource Management
Planners often need to estimate data-center water use before detailed operating data exist, and a common shortcut multiplies electricity use by a historical water intensity. The logic is appealing: computing produces heat, and removing heat often takes water. Yet whether this shortcut beats the simplest alternative, persistence (assuming that each facility withdraws what it withdrew the year [...]
Positive Nature Futures for Transformative Change: Visions from Youth in Europe and Central Asia
Published: 2026-10-20
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Education, Environmental Studies
Amid an escalating global crisis for safeguarding nature and its contributions to people, advancing methods to envision and realise transformative change is increasingly urgent. The Nature Futures Framework (NFF) provides a heuristic to co-create visions of positive futures centred on human-nature relationship and diverse values of nature. Despite its potential, the application of the NFF among [...]
Near-term climate impacts are roughly linear in cumulative CO2 emissions
Published: 2026-10-15
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies
Understanding the relationship between CO2 emissions and human well-being is central to informing climate policy. While global temperature change is proportional to cumulative CO2 emissions, many human outcomes respond nonlinearly to climate variation. As a result, the magnitude of the effect of a quantum of CO2 on these outcomes is ambiguous. Here we demonstrate that the impact of climate change [...]
Who Breathes Worse? Socio-economic Deprivation and PM2.5 in India
Published: 2026-10-13
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Geography, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Air pollution in India has intensified rapidly, alongside substantial population growth across regions with highly uneven socioeconomic and developmental conditions. Ambient fine particulate matter (PM2.5) is among the leading environmental contributors to premature mortality in India, where national average concentrations exceed the World Health Organization guideline by an order of magnitude. [...]
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: 2026-10-09
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 [...]