In recent years, there have been significant changes in weather patterns, mainly caused by sharp increases in temperature, increases in carbon dioxide, and fluctuations in precipitation levels, negatively impacting agricultural production. Agricultural systems are characterized by being vulnerable to the variation of biophysical and socioeconomic factors involved in the development of agricultural activities. Agent-based models (ABMs) enable the study, analysis, and management of ecosystems through their ability to represent networks and their spatial nature. In this research, an ABM is developed to evaluate the behavior and determine the vulnerability in the sugarcane agricultural system; allowing the capitalization of knowledge through characteristics such as social ability and autonomy of the modeled agents through fuzzy logic and system dynamics. The methodol-ogy used includes information networks for a dynamic assessment of agricultural risk modeled by time series, system dynamics, uncertain parameters, and experience; which are developed in three stages: vulnerability indicators, crop vulnerability, and total system vulnerability. The development of ABM, a greater impact on the environmental contingency is noted due to the increase in greenhouse gas emissions and the exponential increase in extreme meteorological phenomena threatening the cultivation of sugarcane, making the agricultural sector more vulnerable and reducing the yield of the harvest.
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Adopted on the fifteenth anniversary of resolution 1325, Security Council resolution 2242 has recognized for the first time the substantial link between climate change and the “Women, Peace and Security” (WPS) framework. Despite this landmark resolution, the intersections of environmental factors, conflict and violence against women remain largely absent from the Security Council's WPS agenda. Competition over natural resources is generally understood as a driver of conflict. The risk of insecurity and conflict are further increased by environmental degradation and climate change. It is therefore clear that the environment and natural resources must be integrated into the WPS agenda. This should necessarily include a discussion of indigenous rights to land and the gender-related dimensions of environmental factors. Indigenous women are disproportionately affected by environmental degradation, caused by resource extraction and increasingly compounded by climatic changes. This in turn exacerbates other vulnerabilities, including sexual and gender-based violence and other forms of marginalization. This article argues, by reference to the situation in West Papua, that unfettered resource extraction not only amplifies vulnerabilities and exacerbates preexisting inequalities stemming from colonial times, it also gives rise to gendered consequences flowing from the damage wreaked on the natural environment and thus poses a danger to international peace and security. As such, the Security Council's failure to recognize the continuous struggle of women in indigenous and rural communities against extractive economies and climate change impact as a security risk forms a serious lacuna within its WPS agenda. Originally published by Oxford University Press in Global Studies Quarterly, Volume 1, Issue 3, September 2021, ksab018, https://doi.org/10.1093/isagsq/ksab018
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While the optimal mean annual temperature for people and nations is said to be between 13 °C and 18 °C, many people live productive lives in regions or countries that commonly exceed this temperature range. One such country is Australia. We carried out an Australia-wide online survey using a structured questionnaire to investigate what temperature people in Australia prefer, both in terms of the local climate and within their homes. More than half of the 1665 respondents (58%) lived in their preferred climatic zone with 60% of respondents preferring a warm climate. Those living in Australia's cool climate zones least preferred that climate. A large majority (83%) were able to reach a comfortable temperature at home with 85% using air-conditioning for cooling. The preferred temperature setting for the air-conditioning devices was 21.7 °C (SD: 2.6 °C). Higher temperature set-points were associated with age, heat tolerance and location. The frequency of air-conditioning use did not depend on the location but rather on a range of other socio-economic factors including having children in the household, the building type, heat stress and heat tolerance. We discuss the role of heat acclimatisation and impacts of increasing air-conditioning use on energy consumption.
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As people age, physiological changes affect their thermal perception, sensitivity and regulation. The ability to respond effectively to temperature fluctuations is compromised with physiological ageing, upsetting the homeostatic balance of health in some. As a result, older people can become vulnerable at extremes of thermal conditions in their environment. With population ageing worldwide, it is an imperative that there is a better understanding of older people’s thermal needs and preferences so that their comfort and wellbeing in their living environment can be optimised and healthy ageing achieved. However, the complex changes affecting the physiological layers of the individual during the ageing process, although largely inevitable, cannot be considered linear. They can happen in different stages, speeds and intensities throughout the ageing process, resulting in an older population with a great level of heterogeneity and risk. Therefore, predicting older people’s thermal requirements in an accurate way requires an in-depth investigation of their individual intrinsic differences. This paper discusses an exploratory study that collected data from 71 participants, aged 65 or above, from 57 households in South Australia, over a period of 9 months in 2019. The paper includes a preliminary evaluation of the effects of individual intrinsic characteristics such as sex, body composition, frailty and other factors, on thermal comfort. It is expected that understanding older people’s thermal comfort from the lens of these diversity-causing parameters could lead to the development of individualised thermal comfort models that fully capture the heterogeneity observed and respond directly to older people’s needs in an effective way. (article starts at page 13)
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Urban flooding has become a key issue for many cities around the world. With the continuing effects of climate change, this will become more acute and will add to the serious problems already experienced in dense urban areas. Therefore several international stakeholders are in the need of toolsthat can assess the vulnerability to floods and visualization tools that will contribute to international knowledge exchange. Years ago scientists started to use DEMs (digital elevation maps) as quick scans to indicate locations that are vulnerable to urban flooding and the effect of climate change. Now thedatasets are getting bigger and stakeholders are becoming more demanding and require faster and more visual results. The technology using DEMs is becoming more common and improved, both with a higher accuracy and a higher resolution. As an example the flood modeling using DEMs is comparedfor the case Bergen in Norway (figure 1a and 1b) from 2009 and 2016.
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Tropical forests and woodlands are key components of the global carbon and water cycles. Yet, how climate change affects these biogeochemical cycles is poorly understood because of scarce long-term observations of tropical tree growth. The recent rise in tropical tree-ring studies may help to fill this gap, but a large-scalequantitative analysis of their potential in global change research is missing. We compiled a list of all tropical tree species known to form annual tree rings and built a network encompassing 492 tropical ring-width chronologies to evaluate the potential to generate insights on climate sensitivity of woody productivity and to build centuries-long reconstructions of climate variability. We assess chronology quality, length, and climatic representativeness and explore how these change along climatic gradients. Finally, we applied species-distribution modeling to identify regions with potential for tree-ring studies in ecological and climatic studies. The number of tropical chronologies has rapidly increased, with ~400 added over the past two decades. Yet, tree-ring studies are biased towards high-elevation locations, with gaps in warmer and wetter climates, on the African continent, and for angiosperm species. The longest chronologies with strongest climate signals (i.e., synchronous growth variations among trees) are from cool regions. In wet regions, climate signals and precipitation sensitivity decrease. Most tropical regions harbor 5–15 (and up to 80) species with proven potential to generate chronologies. The potential for long climate reconstructions is particularly high in drier high elevation sites. Our findings support strategies to effectively expand tree-ring research in the tropics, by targeting specific species and regions. Tropical dendrochronology can importantly contribute to global change research by generating historical context of climate extremes, quantifying climate sensitivity of woody productivity and benchmarking vegetation models.
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Both climate change and human activity are the important drivers that can change hydrological cycle routs and affect the features of hydrological drought in river basins. The current study selects the Zayandeh Rud river Basin as a case study region in which to evaluate the influences of climate alteration and human activity on meteorological and hydrological drought based on the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) and Standardized Runoff Index (SRI) on different time scales. The generated local climatic data of future years (2006–2040), (2041–2075) and (2076–2100) under the severest scenario (RCP 8.5) from the CMIP5 climate model are selected and used for the hydrology model and water allocation model of WEAP to construct hydrological drought which also consider human activities. The results indicate that significant meteorological drought is expected to occur in the winter and spring months of January to June. However, the driest month for hydrological drought is in the summer and autumn (July to December) (e.g. no changes in seasonality of droughts compared to historic period). It is concluded that, in the results of this work, the human influences on projected hydrological drought have been outlined; they had been missed in many projections for future hydrological drought. However, this study confirms the previous study (Bierkens et al. 2012) which mentioned that human influences can account for future hydrological drought in areas of Asia, the Middle East and the Mediterranean. The results attained in this study are beneficial for examining how hydrological drought characterizations respond to climate alteration and human activity on several time scales, thereby providing scientific information for drought predicting and water resources management over various time scales under non-stationary circumstances.
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Expectations are high for digital technologies to address sustainability related challenges. While research into such applications and the twin transformation is growing rapidly, insights in the actual daily practices of digital sustainability within organizations is lacking. This is problematic as the contributions of digital tools to sustainability goals gain shape in organizational practices. To bridge this gap, we develop a theoretical perspective on digital sustainability practices based on practice theory, with an emphasis on the concept of sociomateriality. We argue that connecting meanings related to sustainability with digital technologies is essential to establish beneficial practices. Next, we contend that the meaning of sustainability is contextspecific, which calls for a local meaning making process. Based on our theoretical exploration we develop an empirical research agenda.
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In the last month, the Visual Methodologies Collective participated in Regenerative Futures, a month-long design challenge to envision what a more desirable future could look like. Launched by SPACE10, a research and design lab based in Copenhagen, the call invited to use different AI generative models to develop a vision of the future home, community, or city.The call invited to reflect on different speculative briefs: resilient futures (How will future communities co-exist with non-human species? And how might the design of our homes and communities nurture surrounding ecosystems?), symbiotic futures (As we look to the future, how can we design homes as spaces of refuge and resilience? How will they flex to sudden climatic changes, while being conscious of the land and ecology around them?) collective futures (What would a self-sustaining city look like? How can we adapt and evolve existing structures and streets to better support collective living?)
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