Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Environmental Studies
Creating a climate changed future with the sea level rise interactive- fiction game ‘Lagos2199’
Published: 2021-07-27
Subjects: Climate, Education, Environmental Education, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Geography, Instructional Media Design, International and Area Studies, Nature and Society Relations, Oceanography, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Other Earth Sciences, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical and Environmental Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Science and Mathematics Education, Sustainability
Story-based futures serve an important role in climate change scenario development. Stories are particularly useful in exploring sea level rise possibilities, since we know many coastal areas are specifically vulnerable to accelerating rises in sea level. This discrete change in coastline is different from most other climate change impacts, and offers a clear basis for scientifically-informed, [...]
Application of Probabilistic Machine Learning to the prediction of Remotely Sensed Vegetation Health
Published: 2021-05-28
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Every prediction of the future carries some level of uncertainty; making this explicit is challenging. This paper introduces a Probabilistic Machine Learning algorithm, namely the Natural Gradient Boosting algorithm, as a modelling tool for predicting the Vegetation Health Index, a proxy for monitoring vegetation stress in response to changing weather conditions. It then elaborates on the time [...]
Projecting long-term armed conflict risk: an underappreciated field of inquiry?
Published: 2021-05-27
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Little research has been done on projecting long-term conflict risks in response to climate change. Such projections are currently neither included in the development of socioeconomic scenarios or climate change impact assessments nor part of global agenda-setting policy processes. In contrast, in other fields of inquiry, long-term projections and scenario studies are established and relevant for [...]
Defining a Sustainable Development Target Space for 2030 and 2050
Published: 2021-05-24
Subjects: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Monitoring, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Natural Resource Economics, Other Environmental Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Sustainability
By adopting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), countries worldwide agreed to an agenda for achieving a prosperous, socially inclusive and environmentally sustainable future for all1. This ambition, however, also exposes a critical knowledge gap since science-based insights on how to achieve the 17 SDGs simultaneously are lacking. Quantitative goal-seeking scenario studies could enable [...]
Localised impacts and economic implications from high temperature disruption days under climate change
Published: 2021-04-23
Subjects: Climate, Environmental Studies
Most studies into the effects of climate change have headline results in the form of a global change in mean temperature. More useful for businesses and governments however are measures of localised impacts, and also of extremes rather than averages. We have addressed this by examining the change in frequency of exceeding a daily mean temperature threshold, defined as “disruption days”, as it is [...]
A Regional Semi-Distributed Streamflow Model Using Deep Learning
Published: 2021-03-08
Subjects: Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering, Environmental Studies, Hydrology
Recent studies have shown that deep learning models in hydrological applications significantly improved streamflow predictions at multiple stations compared to traditional machine learning approaches. However, most studies lack generalization; i.e. researchers are training separate models for each location. The spatial and temporal generalization ability of deep learning models in hydrology that [...]
Land-tenure regimes determine tropical deforestation rates across socio-environmental contexts
Published: 2021-03-06
Subjects: Environmental Studies
Many tropical forestlands are experiencing changes in land-tenure regimes, but how these changes may affect deforestation rates remains ambiguous. Using Brazil’s uniquely comprehensive land-tenure and deforestation data and quasi-experimental methods, we analyzed causal effects of six alternative tenure regimes on deforestation across 49 spatiotemporal scales corresponding to distinct [...]
Crisis at the Salton Sea: The Vital Role of Science
Published: 2021-03-04
Subjects: Atmospheric Sciences, Biogeochemistry, Chemistry, Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Chemistry, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geochemistry, Geology, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Medicine and Health Sciences, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Public Health, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Salton Sea—a hypersaline, terminal lake in southern California—is in crisis. A combination of mismanagement and competition among federal, state and local agencies has hindered efforts to address declining lake levels and unstable water chemistry. This delay has heightened the public health threat to regional communities as retreating shorelines expose dry lakebed— a source of potentially [...]
Back to the fields: COVID-19 impact on agricultural activity detected with satellite data
Published: 2021-02-04
Subjects: Environmental Studies
In response to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, policymakers worldwide adopted unprecedented measures to limit disease spread, with major repercussions on labour markets and economic growth. Here we provide empirical evidence of their impact on agricultural activity due to sectoral labour reallocation. Analysing daily satellite data in a non-parametric machine learning statistical framework over [...]
Climate change research and action must look beyond 2100
Published: 2020-12-17
Subjects: Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Geography, Human Geography, Nature and Society Relations, Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Physical and Environmental Geography, Physical Sciences and Mathematics, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Anthropogenic activity is changing Earth’s climate and ecosystems in ways that are potentially dangerous and disruptive to humans. Greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere continue to rise, ensuring these changes will be felt for centuries beyond 2100, the current benchmark for prediction. Estimating the effects of past, current, and potential future emissions to only 2100 is therefore [...]
Global lockdown potential impact on achieving Sustainable Development Goals
Published: 2020-11-17
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Life Sciences
Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has led to a lockdown worldwide. This restriction on human movements and activities significantly influences society and the environment. We examined the consequences of global lockdown for human movement and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) emissions using an air pollution index and dataset and satellite image analyses. We also evaluated the immediate (during [...]
ENSO Drives Child Undernutrition in the Global Tropics
Published: 2020-11-13
Subjects: Applied Statistics, Climate, Environmental Public Health, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Other Environmental Sciences, Public Health, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Sustainability
The El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a principal component of global climate variability known to influence a host of social and economic outcomes, but its systematic effects on human health remain poorly understood. We estimate ENSO’s association with child nutrition at global scale by combining variation in ENSO intensity from 1986-2018 with children’s height and weight from 186 surveys [...]
Using Machine-Learning Models for Field-Scale Crop Yield and Condition Modeling in Argentina
Published: 2020-11-10
Subjects: Environmental Studies, Geographic Information Sciences, Remote Sensing, Spatial Science
Accurately determining crop growth progress and crop yields at field-scale can help farmers estimate their net profit, enable insurance compa-nies to ascertain payouts, and help in ensuring food security. At field scales, the troika of management, soil and weather combine to impact crop growth pro-gress, and this progress can be monitored in-season using satellite data. Here, we use satellite [...]
Socio-technical multi-criteria evaluation of long-term spent nuclear fuel management strategies: Supplementary method
Published: 2020-11-07
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Environmental Sciences, Risk Analysis, Sustainability
The paper presents supplementary information about the framework and method for the socio-technical multi-criteria evaluation (STMCE) of spent fuel management strategies (Sci Total Environ, In press; Available on EarthArXiv at DOI:10.31223/X5459S). The STMCE approach consists of (i) a multi-criteria evaluation that provides an ordinal ranking of alternatives based on a list of criterion [...]
Socio-technical multi-criteria evaluation of long-term spent nuclear fuel management strategies: A framework and method
Published: 2020-11-06
Subjects: Environmental Engineering, Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Studies, Natural Resources Management and Policy, Other Environmental Sciences, Sustainability
In the absence of a federal geologic repository or consolidated, interim storage in the United States, commercial spent fuel will remain stranded at some 75 sites across the country. Currently, these include 18 “orphaned sites” where spent fuel has been left at decommissioned reactor sites. In this context, local communities living close to decommissioned nuclear power plants are increasingly [...]