Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Studies
Beyond Techno-Centered Decarbonization Roadmaps: Designing Demand-Side Pathways for Sustainable Mobility
Published: 2026-06-06
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Decarbonization roadmaps for the automobile sector predominantly rely on supply-side improvements and electrification, yet their ability to deliver the required environmental reductions remains uncertain. This study introduces the Demand-Side Decomposition Analysis framework, which consistently integrates demand-side mitigation into a parametrized life cycle assessment of the automobile value [...]
Ecosystem accounting for social-ecological policy: an applied ecological economics research agenda from Guatemala
Published: 2026-06-06
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Economy and ecology are inseparable since economic decisions affect the natural systems that sustain them. Conventional economics still treats this dependence as an externality to be corrected through prices, even as ecosystems lose resilience and the economy presses against planetary boundaries. Ecological economics offers a more adequate framework, one that situates the economy within a finite [...]
Colonial Hydrologies and Local Ecologies: An Ethnographic Study of the Beas River Region in Punjab, Pakistan
Published: 2026-06-05
Subjects: Environmental Studies
The disappearance of the Beas River in Pakistan's Punjab, completed by a natural migration of the river's channels between 1750 and 1800, predates colonial hydraulic intervention, the partition of 1947, and the Indus Water Treaty of 1960. Each successive political and infrastructure development has not caused the river to disappear, but has gradually formalized and deepened it, removing any [...]
Ecosystem accounting for social-ecological policy: an applied ecological economics research agenda from Guatemala
Published: 2026-06-05
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Economy and ecology are inseparable since economic decisions affect the natural systems that sustain them. Conventional economics still treats this dependence as an externality to be corrected through prices, even as ecosystems lose resilience and the economy presses against planetary boundaries. Ecological economics offers a more adequate framework, one that situates the economy within a finite [...]
Climate overshoot and the insurability frontier: peak stress, domestic capacity, and market retreat risk
Published: 2026-06-05
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Planetary Sciences
Climate overshoot can create mid-century peaks in climate stress before end-century temperatures stabilize, but its implications for insurance availability remain poorly understood. We assess subnational insurance market exit risk under overshoot across 1,590 first-order administrative regions in 88 countries, covering 4.54 billion people. Combining ADM1-level multi-hazard climate stress, an [...]
Awareness and Action: An Exploration Between Public Perception and Space Industry Priorities Regarding Sustainability
Published: 2026-05-30
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Nature and Society Relations, Sustainability
As issues regarding sustainability continue to grow more urgent and prevalent to everyday life, it is important to recognize whether society fully understands what is occurring. The low earth orbit is at threat of overcongestion, and the environment is experiencing higher rates of pollution due to rocket launches, calling for the need for the government and public to engage in this issue. [...]
Unequal weather exposure across teams and groups at the 2026 FIFA World Cup: an event-based analysis using hourly reanalysis
Published: 2026-05-30
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Studies, Human Geography
The connection between climate change and sports is evident, as sports contribute to environmental challenges, while climate change impacts the conditions for playing, organizing, and enjoying sports. In professional football, heat, humidity, rain, wind, and insufficient recovery time at night can influence player health, physical stress, and game performance. Evaluations of the 2026 FIFA World [...]
An adaptive hybrid model for wildfire front forecasting based on cellular automata, multi-agent UAV observations, and binary data assimilation: A case study of the 2021 Dixie Fire
Published: 2026-05-30
Subjects: Environmental Studies
This study presents a retrospective case-study evaluation of a hybrid framework for daily wildfire-front forecasting during the 2021 Dixie Fire in California, USA. The framework couples a stochastic cellular automaton (CA) with a multi-agent system (MAS) of simulated UAV observations and a lightweight binary data-assimilation scheme. The model uses topography, vegetation, fuel proxies, and [...]
Productive Rather Than Aesthetic Urban Landscapes Drive Actualized Sustainable Consumption
Published: 2026-05-25
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations
Global sustainability initiatives prioritize urban greenery to foster resilient cities, yet their efficacy remains under-researched in the Global South. Conventional reliance on self-reported data risks a pervasive “green illusion”— a discrepancy between reported behavior and actual sustainable consumption behavior. To diagnose this anomaly, we synthesize spatial morphology and psychometric [...]
When Fiction Reflects Fiction: Contrarian Views of Climate Change in Popular Entertainment TV & Films
Published: 2026-05-23
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Climate contrarian discourse permeates a wide range of media outlets, including popular entertainment television shows and films. This study identifies and quantifies the frequency of these views within a large global corpus of entertainment scripts derived from film and television subtitles (N = 223,782). Additionally, drawing on a discourse studies perspective, we evaluate the performance of a [...]
Multidimensional Inconsistency in Forest Ecosystem Representation: An NLP-Assisted Thematic Review
Published: 2026-05-13
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geography
Forest ecosystem monitoring increasingly relies on multisensor remote sensing approaches integrating optical imagery, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), and LiDAR observations to assess biomass, degradation, and ecosystem condition. However, these systems frequently generate inconsistent representations of the same ecosystem due to differences in sensor sensitivity, ecological complexity, scale [...]
Bridging science, policy, practice and purpose: global insights from sustainability leaders driving transformative change
Published: 2026-05-09
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Seventeen percent of the Sustainable Development Goals are currently on track to be achieved by 2030. That number points to a problem that better frameworks and more ambitious targets have not resolved: the gap between sustainability policy and operational delivery is not primarily a design problem. It is, at least in part, a leadership problem. This study examines how that problem is experienced [...]
Understanding Microplastics Discourse Through Social Sensing: Insights from Geotagged Social Media
Published: 2026-05-07
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Microplastics have emerged as a growing global environmental and public health concern due to their widespread presence and increasing potential for human exposure through food, water, and air. Recent scientific evidence and expanding media coverage have heightened public awareness and debate surrounding their ecological and health impacts. However, a systematic understanding of how public [...]
A Multi-Dimensional Framework for Diagnosing Inconsistencies in Remote Sensing-Based Ecosystem Assessment
Published: 2026-05-04
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geography
Remote sensing-based ecosystem assessment increasingly relies on the integration of spectral, structural, and model-derived datasets; however, inconsistencies among these data sources can produce divergent representations of vegetation dynamics and carbon processes. This study proposes a multi-dimensional framework to diagnose such inconsistencies by integrating scale, dimensional, and variable [...]
Assessing the impact of Colombian public land acquisitions on forest cover in the Andes
Published: 2026-05-01
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Remote Sensing
Public land acquisitions (PLAs) are a promising conservation instrument, combining the permanence of protected areas with the voluntary, compensatory structure of payments for ecosystem services, yet causal evidence on their effectiveness remains limited. Colombia’s Article 111 mandate, which requires departments to allocate 1% of revenue to land acquisition for watershed protection, has produced [...]