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Background: Climate change and extreme temperatures pose increasing challenges to individuals and their health with older adults being one of the most vulnerable groups. The aim of this paper is to better understand the roles that tangible assets (e.g., physical or financial) and intangible assets (e.g., human or social) play in the way older adults adapt to extreme temperatures, the types of adaptive responses they implement, limits and constraints, as well opportunities for better adaptation. Rather than focusing exclusively on extremes of heat, or considering each type of asset in isolation, the important and novel contribution of this paper is to take an integrated and multi-seasonal qualitative and quantitative approach, that conjointly investigates all categories of assets in relation to the adaptations that independently-living older adults make to both extreme heat and extreme cold. Methods and findings: The paper examines the contribution of assets to adaptation to extreme temperatures among older adults living independently in their homes. An innovative mixed methods study with an inter-seasonal approach was implemented in Lisbon, Portugal with interviews and surveys during summer for extreme heat and winter for extreme cold. The ability of participants to adapt to extreme temperatures was found to be dependent on asset context and diversity, and the dynamics through which extreme temperatures enhanced or reduced the stock of assets available. As a result, participants engaged in activities of assets replacement, exchange or substitutions. Despite this, many participants recognised many constraints and limits to their ability to adapt and protect their health and well-being ranging from reduced income, high energy costs and lack of social networks. Opportunities for improving older adults’ adaptation were found to exist and strategies, action and investment have been identified by older adults which included life-long education, incentives to improve insulation and local activities. Conclusions: The paper suggests that the implementation of the proposed asset-based approach linking assets and adaptation to extreme temperatures, illustrates the key pathway that individuals, their families and carers, governments, policymakers, researchers and practitioners can follow to ensure effective adaptation and promote health and well-being. Supporting older adults’ adaptation to extreme temperatures is possible and can be complemented with efforts to reduce older adults’ vulnerability and building resilience to extreme temperatures. These findings pose concrete implications for policy and practice, including for example the need for implementation of measures and actions to reduce poverty, reduce energy costs, improve the quality of the housing stock and improve older adults’ social networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In traditional public good experiments participants receive an endowment from the experimenter that can be invested in a public good or kept in a private account. In this paper we present an experimental environment where participants can invest time during five days to contribute to a public good. Participants can make contributions to a linear public good by logging into a web application and performing virtual actions. We compared four treatments, with different group sizes and information of (relative) performance of other groups. We find that information feedback about performance of other groups has a small positive effect if we control for various attributes of the groups. Moreover, we find a significant effect of the contributions of others in the group in the previous day on the number of points earned in the current day. Our results confirm that people participate more when participants in their group participate more, and are influenced by information about the relative performance of other groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we introduce a scalable machine learning approach accompanied by open-source software for identifying violent and peaceful forms of political protest participation using social media data. While violent political protests are statistically rare events, they often shape public perceptions of political and social movements. This is, in part, due to the extensive and disproportionate media coverage which violent protest participation receives relative to peaceful protest participation. In the past, when a small number of media conglomerates served as the primary information source for learning about political and social movements, viewership and advertiser demands encouraged news organizations to focus on violent forms of political protest participation. Consequently, much of our knowledge about political protest participation is derived from data collected about violent protests, while less is known about peaceful forms of protest. Since the early 2000s, the digital revolution shifted attention away from traditional news sources toward social media as a primary source of information about current events. This, along with developments in machine learning which allow us to collect and analyze data relevant to political participation, present us with unique opportunities to expand our knowledge of peaceful and violent forms of political protest participation through social media data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examined the carbon market literature from 1992 to 2011 using bibliometric techniques based on the database of Science Citation Index (SCI) and Social Science Citation Index (SSCI). Of 5809 publications, 82% were journal articles. Our analysis documents that carbon market publications are expanding rapidly. Based on the contribution of countries and their h-index, the US has published most and been most influential in this area, followed by the UK, Canada, Germany and China. The Chinese Academy of Sciences (120), US Forestry Service (70) and University of Maryland (68) were the most productive research institutes. The most common subject category, Environment Sciences (1551), experienced an exponential increase with an average growth rate of about 50%, and the most productive journal was Energy Policy (469). According to the analysis of keywords, the hotspots related to carbon markets were “global warming” and “carbon tax” in the 1990's, but “climate change” and the “clean development mechanism” superceded them in the most recent decade. The most cited article published in Science in carbon market research is presented. This analysis is not only helpful for policymakers and others to understand trends in the field, but may also influence researchers' selection of future studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dans les villes, un nombre croissant de citoyens met en place de maniere independante des initiatives pour faire face aux changements climatiques, tels que des projets de verdissement, d'agriculture urbaine ou d'energies alternatives. Cet article cherche a comprendre comment les acteurs citoyens locaux contribuent a la gouvernance climatique urbaine par le biais d'experimentations sociales et environnementales de petite echelle. A partir de l'etude de cas du quartier Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie a Montreal (Canada) portant sur huit initiatives, cette recherche se base sur un cadre theorique combinant les experimentations de gouvernance climatique et la theorie de transition sociotechnique. L'accumulation et l'influence de telles initiatives peuvent contribuer a redefinir les enjeux urbains et demontrer la faisabilite et l'acceptabilite de solutions simples afin de mieux effectuer une transition urbaine face aux changements climatiques. En s'appuyant sur leur reseau social mais aussi sur leurs objectifs et leur savoir-faire, les militants urbains etablissent leur legitimite en tant qu'acteurs capables de proposer des alternatives a l'administration municipale. Les resultats de la recherche montrent egalement que ces initiatives locales refletent le pouvoir grandissant des modes d'action collectifs informels. En effet, par le biais des actions locales <>, les citoyens produisent des retombees directes, concretes, simples et axees sur leur benefice personnel. Ce faisant, ils construisent de nouveaux ecosystemes bases sur divers partenariats. Il s'agit d'un modele alternatif innovant face aux modes actuels de consommation des ressources et a la maniere dont est socialement geree la crise climatique a partir d'un paradigme faconne par le capitalisme et le neoliberalisme. Mots cles: Initiatives citoyennes; gouvernance urbaine; transition sociotechnique, changements climatiques; Montreal Within urban areas, a growing number of citizens independently set up initiatives to face climate change, such as greening, urban agriculture or alternative energy projects. This paper seeks to understand how local citizens'actors contribute to urban climate governance through small-scale social and environmental experiments. Based on a Montreal (Canada) neighbourhood Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie case study of eight initiatives, the research is based on a theoretical framework combining climate governance experiments and sociotechnical transition theory. The accumulation and influence of such initiatives can contribute to redefine urban issues and demonstrate the feasibility and acceptability of simple solutions in order to implement an urban transition in face of climate change. Using their social network but also their objectives and know-how, urban activists establish their legitimacy as stakeholders who can propose alternatives to the municipal government. Results of the study also show that such local experiments reflect the growing power of informal collective modes of action. Indeed, through local 'green' actions, citizens produce impacts that are immediate, concrete, simple and 'personal-benefit-oriented.' By doing so, they build new ecosystems made of various partnerships. This offers an innovative alternative model in the face of the current ways of consuming resources and about how we socially deal with the climate crisis under a paradigm shaped by capitalism and neoliberalism. Keywords: Citizens'initiatives; urban climate governance; sociotechnical transition; climate change; Montreal, Introduction Les villes comme entites geographiques et politiques sont reconnues comme ayant un role primordial a jouer dans la question relative aux changements climatiques. En raison de la concentration des [...]

Past research indicates that in political debates the same arguments are judged very differently depending on the perceiver’s own position on the issue, because positions on controversial issues are often tied to collective identities. In this article, we test the assumption that equality-based respect from an opposing opinion-based group can reduce such biases. Results confirmed that identification as an opponent or proponent of a contested issue was negatively related to evaluations of outgroup arguments (Study 1) and that this negative link was no longer significant when intergroup respect was experimentally induced (Study 2). Results support the notion that disagreements over political issues are intergroup conflicts, in which different socio-political groups struggle for recognition, and that approaches that protect collective identities and improve intergroup relations should be employed to de-escalate them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social institutions that facilitate sharing and redistribution may help mitigate the impact of resource shocks. In the North American Arctic, traditional food sharing may direct food to those who need it and provide a form of natural insurance against temporal variability in hunting returns within households. Here, network properties that facilitate resource flow (network size, quality, and density) are examined in a country food sharing network comprising 109 Inuit households from a village in Nunavik (Canada), using regressions to investigate the relationships between these network measures and household socioeconomic attributes. The results show that although single women and elders have larger networks, the sharing network is not structured to prioritize sharing towards households with low food availability. Rather, much food sharing appears to be driven by reciprocity between high-harvest households, meaning that poor, low-harvest households tend to have less sharing-based social capital than more affluent, high-harvest households. This suggests that poor, low-harvest households may be more vulnerable to disruptions in the availability of country food. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The strategies that experts have used to share information about social causes have historically been top-down, meaning the most influential messages are believed to come from planned events and campaigns. However, more people are independently engaging with social causes today than ever before, in part because online platforms allow them to instantaneously seek, create, and share information. In some cases this “organic advocacy” may rival or even eclipse top-down strategies. Big data analytics make it possible to rapidly detect public engagement with social causes by analyzing the same platforms from which organic advocacy spreads. To demonstrate this claim we evaluated how Leonardo DiCaprio’s 2016 Oscar acceptance speech citing climate change motivated global English language news (Bloomberg Terminal news archives), social media (Twitter postings) and information seeking (Google searches) about climate change. Despite an insignificant increase in traditional news coverage (54%; 95%CI: -144 to 247), tweets including the terms “climate change” or “global warming” reached record highs, increasing 636% (95%CI: 573–699) with more than 250,000 tweets the day DiCaprio spoke. In practical terms the “DiCaprio effect” surpassed the daily average effect of the 2015 Conference of the Parties (COP) and the Earth Day effect by a factor of 3.2 and 5.3, respectively. At the same time, Google searches for “climate change” or “global warming” increased 261% (95%CI, 186–335) and 210% (95%CI 149–272) the day DiCaprio spoke and remained higher for 4 more days, representing 104,190 and 216,490 searches. This increase was 3.8 and 4.3 times larger than the increases observed during COP’s daily average or on Earth Day. Searches were closely linked to content from Dicaprio’s speech (e.g., “hottest year”), as unmentioned content did not have search increases (e.g., “electric car”). Because these data are freely available in real time our analytical strategy provides substantial lead time for experts to detect and participate in organic advocacy while an issue is salient. Our study demonstrates new opportunities to detect and aid agents of change and advances our understanding of communication in the 21st century media landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We inductively tested if a coherent field of inquiry in human conflict research emerged in an analysis of published research involving “conflict” in the Web of Science (WoS) over a 66-year period (1945–2011). We created a citation network that linked the 62,504 WoS records and their cited literature. We performed a critical path analysis (CPA), a specialized social network analysis on this citation network (~1.5 million works), to highlight the main contributions in conflict research and to test if research on conflict has in fact evolved to represent a coherent field of inquiry. Out of this vast dataset, 49 academic works were highlighted by the CPA suggesting a coherent field of inquiry; which means that researchers in the field acknowledge seminal contributions and share a common knowledge base. Other conflict concepts that were also analyzed—such as interpersonal conflict or conflict among pharmaceuticals, for example, did not form their own CP. A single path formed, meaning that there was a cohesive set of ideas that built upon previous research. This is in contrast to a main path analysis of conflict from 1957–1971 where ideas didn’t persist in that multiple paths existed and died or emerged reflecting lack of scientific coherence (Carley, Hummon, and Harty, 1993). The critical path consisted of a number of key features: 1) Concepts that built throughout include the notion that resource availability drives conflict, which emerged in the 1960s-1990s and continued on until 2011. More recent intrastate studies that focused on inequalities emerged from interstate studies on the democracy of peace earlier on the path. 2) Recent research on the path focused on forecasting conflict, which depends on well-developed metrics and theories to model. 3) We used keyword analysis to independently show how the CP was topically linked (i.e., through democracy, modeling, resources, and geography). Publically available conflict datasets developed early on helped shape the operationalization of conflict. In fact, 94% of the works on the CP that analyzed data either relied on publically available datasets, or they generated a dataset and made it public. These datasets appear to be important in the development of conflict research, allowing for cross-case comparisons, and comparisons to previous works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]