Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Studies
Conservation is Coherence: Introducing the Negawatt Philosophy of Lawful Design
Published: 2025-07-10
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Natural Resources and Conservation, Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering, Other Environmental Sciences, Other Physics, Other Planetary Sciences, Sustainability, Systems Biology
This paper articulates the Negawatt Philosophy, reframing conservation not as omission or moral restraint, but as the structural intelligence that sustains life and preserves biospheric coherence. Modern economies valorise extraction and combustion while treating conservation as invisible absence. Yet thermodynamics reveals life as negentropy—an ordering that defies the drift into entropy’s [...]
Embedding Symbolic Power in the Relational Turn
Published: 2025-07-05
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Understanding how nature’s values become institutionalised, while others are marginalised, is central to advancing sustainability transformations. The relational turn in sustainability science is centred around the coconstitutive dynamics of human–nature relationships. Yet, it has so far paid limited attention to the power relations that shape which values gain legitimacy or are marginalised. We [...]
River Network HyperGraphs and Transportation Network HyperGraphs: A Graph-Theoretic Approach for Geoscientific and Civil Applications
Published: 2025-07-03
Subjects: Applied Mathematics, Civil Engineering, Environmental Studies, Life Sciences, Mathematics, Other Life Sciences, Other Mathematics, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
River Network Graphs and Transportation Network Graphs are classical models that represent river systems and transportation infrastructures as vertices and edges, respectively, and underpin applications in hydrological simulation, watershed management, shortest-path computation, and urban traffic analysis. In this paper, we extend these graph-based models into the hypergraph and superhypergraph [...]
‘You can’t blame people for risky choices if there are no better options’: Household water safety in the Dominican Republic
Published: 2025-07-02
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Household water insecurity, fractured systems of water delivery, and intermittent water supply hamper efforts to ensure that the water households consume is safe. Household water treatment and safe storage are often advocated as effective, rapidly deployed, and cost-effective solutions to these problems. However, the effectiveness of these measures and household compliance with them often degrade [...]
The air pollution benefits of low severity fire
Published: 2025-07-02
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Forest Sciences, Remote Sensing
Larger and more frequent wildfire events in Western North America in recent years have resulted in extensive human and environmental damage, and are reversing decades of air quality improvements. Fuels treatments, including the use of prescribed fire, can reduce the extent and severity of future wildfires, but air quality trade-offs resulting from application of these treatments -- more initial [...]
The association between experiencing environmental injustice and climate attitudes: a nationally representative survey of United States residents
Published: 2025-06-26
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Despite growing public awareness, action to mitigate and adapt to climate impacts remains urgent. Environmental hazards and climate change effects are disproportionately placed on marginalized communities, exacerbating existing inequalities and creating a triple threat for those facing environmental pollution, social vulnerability, and limited adaptive capacity. Using the regulatory scope [...]
Food security beyond borders: how crop imports affect drought risk of conflict-affected countries
Published: 2025-06-25
Subjects: Agricultural Science, Agriculture, Climate, Environmental Studies, Hydrology, Meteorology, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Sustainability
Drought events can disrupt food security and increase the risk of violent conflicts. In an interconnected global food system, countries rely on both local food production and imports to meet domestic demand. When assessing the impact of drought risk on national food security, however, imported crops are often overlooked. This study incorporates international crop trade information to understand [...]
Gamified Learning for Sustainable Eating: Exploring the Role of Prior Knowledge and Readiness to Change
Published: 2025-06-14
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Background: Dietary habits play a central role in the transition toward a more sustainable food system. However, many consumers lack an understanding of the principles of sustainable eating. Objective: This study examined whether a gamified quiz could enhance knowledge about the environmental impact of food. Additionally, it explored the role of prior knowledge and readiness for change, based on [...]
Bridging the Macro-Micro Divide through a New Paradigm for Climate Resilience Assessment in Data-Scarce Regions
Published: 2025-06-05
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Efforts to assess climate resilience in low-income countries (LICs) are often hampered by fragmented data systems and analytical silos between national and local scales. This study proposes and operationalizes an integrated empirical framework that bridges macroeconomic econometric modeling and micro-level spatial analysis to measure and visualize climate resilience in data-scarce settings. Using [...]
Coral Reefs Span Borders, So Must Solutions: A Blueprint for International Cooperation for Coral Reef Conservation in Complex Political Environments
Published: 2025-05-23
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Studies, Marine Biology
Coral reefs face escalating threats from climate change, yet reducing greenhouse gas emissions alone will not ensure their survival. Local and regional conservation efforts are urgently needed to address immediate, human-induced stressors and build resilience. Although conservation often begins locally, the interconnected nature of reef systems that span borders demands transboundary management, [...]
Climate change and Vulnerability: A Comparison of Perspectives from Indian Sundarbans Delta
Published: 2025-05-02
Subjects: Environmental Studies
An understanding of how climate events influence potential harm to livelihoods may depend on perspective. When perspectives on climate-change vulnerability diverge, policies aimed at reducing vulnerability may be perceived as unjust or unproductive by intended beneficiaries. Using household-level data from an island in the Indian Sundarbans, vulnerability is assessed from three perspectives, [...]
Institutional barriers to food safety in the urban irrigated vegetable value chain in Accra, Ghana
Published: 2025-04-26
Subjects: Environmental Studies
The faecal contamination of irrigation water threatens public health. Although safe practices can mitigate hygiene and food safety risks along the urban irrigated vegetable value chain, their adoption remains limited. A behaviour framework was combined with a participatory approach to explore how institutions influence farmers’ capability, opportunity and motivation to adopt safe practices in [...]
Uncertain seafood sustainability in a manufactured crisis
Published: 2025-04-26
Subjects: Aquaculture and Fisheries Life Sciences, Environmental Studies
In 2025, the United States (U.S.) administration issued a new Executive Order (EO), Restoring American Seafood Competitiveness, intensifying efforts to deregulate the seafood sector under the guise of promoting domestic industry. Building on the 2020 EO (Promoting American Seafood Competitiveness and Economic Growth), this policy marks a significant escalation in dismantling federal regulatory [...]
Predicting Urban Heat-Related Illness Across U.S. Climate Regions and Demographics
Published: 2025-04-23
Subjects: Environmental Studies
We still know relatively little about how climate, demographics, built environment, and behaviors interact to drive hospitalizations during extreme heat events (EHEs).This study employed a discrete event system dynamics modeling approach to address two research questions about the relationship between EHEs and heat-related illnesses (HRIs): (1) How will changes in EHE frequencies, intensities, [...]
Adaptation to the climate and ecological emergency: motivational factors predict policy support and behavioural engagement
Published: 2025-04-20
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Understanding the determinants of human adaptation to the climate and ecological emergency (CEE) will be essential to any future policy design and implementation. The present study (N = 1951) investigates some of the most relevant psychosocial variables associated with environmental policy support and adaptation to the CEE: descriptive norms, negative affect, perceived self-efficacy and outcome [...]