Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Studies
Sustainable irrigation reduces arsenic bioavailability in fluvio-alluvial soils promoting microbial responses, high rice productivity and economic profit
Published: 2023-07-26
Subjects: Agricultural Science, Agriculture, Agronomy and Crop Sciences Life Sciences, Biodiversity, Environmental Studies, Microbiology
Minimizing arsenic (74.92As33) loading into rice plants, we suggest adopting alternating wetting and drying (AWD) irrigation as a sustainable water management strategy allowing greater silicon (28.08Si14) availability. This two-year field-based project is the first report on AWD's impact on As-Si distribution in fluvio-alluvial soils of the entire Ganga valley (24 study sites divided into six [...]
Adaptation to climate damages is not inevitable
Published: 2023-07-21
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Understanding how climate change will affect human welfare must account for how humans will adapt to the changing environment. Adaptations are often local, unobserved, or will only emerge in the future, posing a challenge for attempts to empirically derive climate damage functions and leading to claims that such empirically based functions overestimate the future economic costs of warming. By [...]
A preliminary assessment of urban water security in Ulaanbaatar, a semi-arid region in Mongolia.
Published: 2023-07-19
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Water security is one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century. Understanding context-specific challenges and opportunities around this issue is key to improving water systems globally. This paper explores the current state of urban water security in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia’s capital city. Ulaanbaatar is home to more than 40% of the country’s population and 60% of its national GDP. The city is [...]
Impacts of Climate Change on Various Sectors in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province of Pakistan; A Review
Published: 2023-06-23
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Studies
Introduction: Day to day atmospheric conditions of an area is referred to as weather, whereas, the statistical expression of weather events in an area over a period of minimum 30 years is called climate. Due to the global warming, weather across the globe has started changing from time to time. As a result, the climate change in different areas have taken rise. Pakistan is amongst the top ten [...]
From Awareness to Action: Unleashing the Transformative Potential of Climate Change Education in St. Michael’s College
Published: 2023-06-23
Subjects: Environmental Studies
The aim of this study is to explore how climate change education is delivered and received in higher education at SMC. As a qualitative study, the study was conducted in the first semester of 2022-2023 and involved 30 students and teachers who participated in semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions. The data analysis revealed the themes that emerged from the students’ complex [...]
Towards Understanding the Geospatial Skills of ChatGPT: Taking a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Exam
Published: 2023-06-20
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Education, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Higher Education, Other Geography, Science and Mathematics Education, Spatial Science
This paper examines the performance of ChatGPT, a large language model (LLM), in a geographic information systems (GIS) exam. As LLMs like ChatGPT become increasingly prevalent in various domains, including education, it is important to understand their capabilities and limitations in specialized subject areas such as GIS. Human learning of spatial concepts significantly differs from LLM training [...]
Local social-ecological context explains seasonal rural-rural migration of the poorest in a rural community in southwestern Bangladesh.
Published: 2023-06-02
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Bangladesh is one of the countries most affected by climate change. Internal migration is often presented as a response to environmental degradation in rural areas. Here, we hypothesise that climate-induced changes and adaptations impact local production and the local labour market, seasonally pushing out unskilled landless workers. We focus on different categories of livelihoods and their [...]
Listening to Manchester: Using citizen science Raspberry Shake seismometers to quantify road traffic
Published: 2023-05-31
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Earth Sciences, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Human Geography
Road traffic is a major contributor to greenhouse gases in our cities. This study has been designed to test whether low-cost citizen science seismometers (Raspberry Shakes) can be used to quantify temporal and spatial variations in road traffic. I used a network of seismometers installed around Greater Manchester to record signals in the frequency range 1-50 Hz. Data were processed using the open [...]
The Future in Anthropocene Science
Published: 2023-05-23
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Studies, Nature and Society Relations, Sustainability
The Anthropocene is the present time of human-caused accelerating global change, and new forms of Anthropocene risk are emerging that society has hitherto never experienced. Science and policy are grappling with the temporal and spatial magnitude of these changes, as well as the diminishing margin between science and policy itself. However, there is a gap in the transparency — and perhaps even in [...]
Ecological Flows in Southern Europe: status and trends in non-perennial rivers
Published: 2023-05-15
Subjects: Biodiversity, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Studies, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
The concept of environmental flows (E-Flows) describes the streamflow that is necessary to maintain river ecosystems. Although a large number of methods have been developed, a delay was recorded in implementing E–Flows in non-perennial rivers. The general aim of the paper was to analyse the criticalities and the current state of implementation of the E-Flows in non-perennial rivers of southern [...]
Lived Experience of Climate Change and The Impact on Health and Health Inequalities: A systematic review of qualitative studies from the UK
Published: 2023-05-12
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Climate change is one of the biggest threats to public health in the 21st century. To date little action has been undertaken globally to mitigate the risks of climate change. The aim of this systematic review is to synthesise the qualitative literature on people’s and the health care systems’ lived experiences of climate change with a focus on health and health inequalities. We employed a [...]
The complex role of local governance in facilitating property buyouts and managed retreat in response to climate hazards
Published: 2023-05-04
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Managed retreat is an increasingly important management option for responding to the localized impacts of climate change and poses a complex governance challenge. Floodplain property buyouts represent the largest form of managed retreat currently underway in the U.S. and have been broadly studied as disaster response policy using large national datasets. Research on the local governance [...]
VIVIR BIEN: INTERCULTURAL AND SPIRITUAL APPROACH TO WATER AND POWER IN TIME OF CLIMATE CHANGE AND POLITICAL TRANSFORMATION
Published: 2023-04-27
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Climate change and lack of freshwater are a concern for people living in the Andean highlands, altiplano of Bolivia. The objectives of this study were to establish a culturally appropriate research approach to study water governance and to identify key political actors and engagement processes related to water governance in Bolivia. A qualitative field study was conducted in the Department of La [...]
Revisiting the Climate Narrative
Published: 2023-04-06
Subjects: Agriculture, Climate, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Studies, Food Science, Forest Management, Hydrology, Natural Resources and Conservation, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Oil, Gas, and Energy, Other Environmental Sciences, Soil Science, Sustainability, Water Resource Management
The rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide is chiefly tied to land stewardship. Farmers and loggers have removed the plants that, until the industrial era, kept the soil fungi alive, kept soil emissions nearby by breaking the wind, and soaked those up. The result is plumes of carbon dioxide. Putting plants back in would curb these emissions. Farmers and loggers could address biodiversity loss [...]
A two-decade analysis of the spatial and temporal variations in burnt areas across ecosystems of Zimbabwe
Published: 2023-03-31
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Understanding wildfire dynamics in space and over time is critical for wildfire control and management. In this study, fire data from MODIS (ESA/CCI/FireCCI/5_1) with ≥ 70% confidence level was used to characterise spatial and temporal variation in fire frequency in Zimbabwe between 2001 and 2020. Results showed that burnt area increased by 16% from 3,689 km2 in 2001 to 61,330km2 2011 and [...]