Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Studies
The Earth4All model of human wellbeing on a finite planet towards 2100
Published: 2023-03-03
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Geography
In the following pages, we give a short introduction to a new integrated global assessment model: The Earth4All model of human wellbeing on a finite planet towards the year 2100. The Earth4All (E4A) model has evolved over a fifteen-year period and represents a summary of insights we have gained during all these years (See Appendix 1 for a list of the main publications that form the foundation for [...]
Did hydroclimate conditions contribute to the political dynamics of Majapahit? A preliminary analysis
Published: 2023-02-21
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geography, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Physical and Environmental Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Majapahit was the largest Hindu-Buddhist empire that ruled the Indonesian archipelago from the late 13th to mid-16th centuries CE. Only now there is still a lot of history surrounding the Majapahit era that has yet to be revealed. One is about how environmental factors influenced the political dynamics at that time. This study tries to discuss the influence of hydroclimate regimes using the Paleo [...]
Towards robust interdisciplinary modeling of global human-environmental dynamics
Published: 2023-02-20
Subjects: Agriculture, Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Environmental Studies, Forest Sciences, Geography, Life Sciences, Nature and Society Relations
Real-world environmental problems are typically vast, urgent, and complex. Confronted with such problems, we are often tempted to act fast by pulling together little bits and pieces from different fields and simply adding these to pre-existing models and frameworks. Seldom, though, do we pause long enough to look whether and for how long those larger structures we build can support reliable [...]
Discounting the future: The effect of collective motivation on investment decisions and acceptance of policies for renewable energy
Published: 2023-02-10
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Previous research has mainly considered economic factors and personal psychological factors (e.g., personal pro-environmental attitudes) as determinants of investment behavior for renewable energies. However, less is known about how social identities, i.e. the human capacity to think and act as a member of a social group, can shape green investment behavior. Combining insights from economics and [...]
Climate and health benefits of a transition from gas to electric cooking
Published: 2023-01-26
Subjects: Environmental Public Health, Environmental Studies
Household electrification is thought to be an important part of a carbon neutral future, and could also have additional benefits to adopting households such as improved air quality. However, the effectiveness of specific electrification policies in reducing total emissions and boosting household livelihoods remains a crucial open question in both developed and developing countries. We [...]
Who are the hyper prolific authors in environmental sciences?
Published: 2023-01-01
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Library and Information Science, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Hyper prolific scientists are individuals who produce an exceptionally large number of scientific papers, often at a rate that is much higher than their peers. While productivity is generally a positive attribute in the scientific community, hyper prolific scientists may raise concerns about the quality and impact of their research. It is important to carefully evaluate the work of hyper prolific [...]
Wildfire influence on recent US pollution trends
Published: 2022-12-16
Subjects: Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Studies
Steady improvements in ambient air quality in the US over the past several decades have led to large public health benefits. However, recent trends in PM2.5 concentrations, a key pollutant, have stagnated or begun to reverse throughout much of the US. We quantify the contribution of wildfire smoke to these trends and find that since 2016, wildfire smoke has significantly slowed or reversed [...]
Knowledge co-production for decision-making in human-natural systems under uncertainty
Published: 2022-12-14
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Decision-making under uncertainty is important for managing human-natural systems in a changing world. A major source of uncertainty that challenges decisions is rooted in their multi-actor settings, i.e., the poorly understood societal actors with diverse values, complex relationships, and conflicting management approaches. Despite general agreement across disciplines on co-producing knowledge [...]
Systemic Vulnerabilities in Hispanic and Latinx Immigrant Communities Led to the Reliance on an Informal Warning System in the December 10–11, 2021 Tornado Outbreak
Published: 2022-12-10
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Social and Behavioral Sciences
On December 10–11, 2021, the deadliest December tornado outbreak on record produced a family of EF4 tornadoes that severely impacted communities in Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, and Tennessee. Although the National Weather Service anticipated the outbreak three days earlier, not all communities received life-saving information before, during, or after the disaster. To examine systemic [...]
The Importance of Internal Climate Variability in Climate Impact Projections
Published: 2022-10-28
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies
Uncertainty in climate projections is driven by three components: scenario uncertainty, inter-model uncertainty, and internal variability. Although socioeconomic climate impact studies increasingly take into account the first two components, little attention has been paid to the role of internal variability, though underestimating this uncertainty may lead to underestimating the socioeconomic [...]
Plastics Pollution and the Planetary Boundaries framework
Published: 2022-10-22
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies
Plastics are novel entities that have exceeded the planetary safe operating space due to extensive and resource-intensive production, uncontrolled environmental releases, and failure to control the chemicals within the materials. This paper examines evidence and discusses how plastics pollution affects Earth-system processes along the impact pathway from production, to release, to environmental [...]
Drivers of fire regimes in the Brazilian Amazon from 2011-2020
Published: 2022-10-18
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Forest Sciences, Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Over the last decade, carbon emissions due to forest degradation in the Brazilian Amazon, linked mainly to logging and wildfires, became larger than carbon emissions due to deforestation. Climatic and ecological processes affect the landscape’s flammability, while socio-economic processes influence the use of fire for deforestation and agricultural land management. However, a comprehensive [...]
The Openscapes Flywheel: A framework for managers to facilitate and scale inclusive Open science practices
Published: 2022-10-11
Subjects: Adult and Continuing Education, Environmental Studies, Remote Sensing
Solutions to large-scale environmental and social challenges require radical collaboration that blends technology and people — and the Open science movement is answering that call by transforming how we work together. While often the focus is on data, publications, code, software developers, and researchers, the transition to Open involves investment across agencies and organizations of all [...]
Rapid estimation of climate-air quality interactions in integrated assessment using a response surface model
Published: 2022-09-16
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Climate, Environmental Health and Protection, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Studies
Air quality and climate change are substantial and linked sustainability challenges, and there is a need for improved tools to assess the implications of addressing them in combination. High-fidelity chemistry-climate simulations can capture combined climate-air quality responses to policy change, but computational cost has prevented integration of accurate air quality impacts into integrated [...]
Pumped Storage Hydropower: A Grid Intermittency Solution
Published: 2022-08-30
Subjects: Environmental Studies
As public pressure and state emissions targets increasingly promote grid decarbonization, society must find solutions to the intermittency problem of renewable energy. While several emerging battery technologies provide a solution to this problem, pumped storage hydropower (PSH) is the most promising given its long lifecycle and widespread deployment. This paper will analyze and compare PSH with [...]