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In light of global climate change, the variance of rainfall is projected to increase substantially, affecting every country. In this paper, we examine how exposure to rainfall during the first 1,000 days of life influences women's long-term human capital accumulation in the context of 28 African countries. Exploiting the exogenous deviations of rainfall from the historical norms, we document a positive relationship between rainfall during the first 1,000 days and women's educational attainment. The effects mostly come from rainfall variability in agricultural season. There is also suggestive evidence that larger impacts are detected among women from low-income countries and women living in areas with poor market integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractOxygen bioavailability is declining in aquatic systems worldwide as a result of climate change and other anthropogenic stressors. For aquatic organisms, the consequences are poorly known but are likely to reflect both direct effects of declining oxygen bioavailability and interactions between oxygen and other stressors, including two-warming and acidification-that have received substantial attention in recent decades and that typically accompany oxygen changes. Drawing on the collected papers in this symposium volume ("An Oxygen Perspective on Climate Change"), we outline the causes and consequences of declining oxygen bioavailability. First, we discuss the scope of natural and predicted anthropogenic changes in aquatic oxygen levels. Although modern organisms are the result of long evolutionary histories during which they were exposed to natural oxygen regimes, anthropogenic change is now exposing them to more extreme conditions and novel combinations of low oxygen with other stressors. Second, we identify behavioral and physiological mechanisms that underlie the interactive effects of oxygen with other stressors, and we assess the range of potential organismal responses to oxygen limitation that occur across levels of biological organization and over multiple timescales. We argue that metabolism and energetics provide a powerful and unifying framework for understanding organism-oxygen interactions. Third, we conclude by outlining a set of approaches for maximizing the effectiveness of future work, including focusing on long-term experiments using biologically realistic variation in experimental factors and taking truly cross-disciplinary and integrative approaches to understanding and predicting future effects.

Today, populism is widely understood to entail an exclusionary conception of "the people" that threatens climate change action. While this threat is real, I argue that populism itself can be understood as a response to perceived exclusion and marginalization, making it possible to conceptualize a more heterogeneous conception of populism's "people." Examining two approaches to climate change action rooted in contrasting conceptions of the people and the elite, I argue that climate justice organizing offers a promising effort to construct a heterogeneous people and offers a powerful critique of the elite representation of climate change action in which "we are all in this together." Yet along with this promise, climate justice organizing must navigate tensions that are inescapable within any populist formation. One neglected thread of populist history and theory offers resources for doing so; in the final section of this paper, I explore its relevance to climate justice today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a comprehensive review and synthesis of studies that forecast economic impacts of ocean acidification. The changes in seawater chemistry resulting from increased carbon dioxide emissions, known as ocean acidification, will have detrimental impacts to marine ecosystem services. Those services include wild capture fisheries, aquaculture, recreation, shoreline protection, and others. The current literature valuing expected impacts to those services is rather thin and tends to focus on mollusk harvesting and aquaculture. Despite the paucity of studies, we divide all relevant estimates into five additively separable economic sectors to provide an aggregate estimate of economic damage from ocean acidification at the end of this century. We perform nonparametric bootstrap simulations to characterize the distribution of estimates within each sector and the aggregation across sectors. We also perform meta-regressions to explore whether estimates provided by these studies are generally consistent with expectations based on ocean chemistry and economic theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article tests a novel intervention for increasing consumer recycling by anthropomorphizing product characteristics. Across five studies, including lab and online studies and a field experiment, we find that consumers are more likely to recycle an anthropomorphized (vs. nonanthropomorphized) product. We argue that anthropomorphism elicits affective (empathy) and cognitive reactions (an abstract construal level), making consumers empathize with the humanlike product as well as focus on the desirable end (vs. undesirable, effortful means) of recycling and therefore increases their likelihood of recycling. We provide evidence for the mediating roles of both affective and cognitive psychological mechanisms and further pin down the role of construal level by manipulating focus on the means (vs. end) of recycling. We discuss the practical implications of these findings for sustainable consumption and addressing climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democracy is in crisis. According to a dominant view, the problem is populism. Populists, critics argue, undermine democracy through its own procedural and normative logic. This essay calls the critique of populism into question. I argue that critics misrepresent the significance of populism for democratic politics in three ways. First, by reducing populism to a single political logic, critics confound important differences between different instances of populism. Secondly, by blaming populists for the maladies of contemporary democracies, critics wrongly exonerate centrist political forces. Thirdly, critics underestimate the structural deficiencies of contemporary democracy. The main task for proponents of democracy today is not to fight populism, but to address the more fundamental sources of democratic decay: rising inequality, the decline of mass democracy, maltreatment of immigrants and ethnic minorities, and climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following deglaciation during the final stages of the Pleistocene, vast landscapes became increasingly accessible for human dispersal. With no historical analogs, it remains uncertain how people were adapting to these unknown and often unstable environments and whether dispersals were sustained or characterized by local retreat or extinction events. We here address these uncertainties by using climate niche modeling to investigate the relationship between climate and the archaeological record of such a dispersal event: the Late Upper Paleolithic Hamburgian settlement of northern Europe. Our models consider temperature and precipitation from paleoclimate models with high temporal and spatial resolution. They suggest that rising temperatures instead of precipitation changes drove dispersal events by allowing carriers of the Hamburgian tradition to occupy a specific northward-shifting climate space. Similarly, our models suggest a subsequent constriction and fragmentation of this climate space caused by declining temperatures. This climatic downturn and shifting climate space coincide with the disappearance of the Hamburgian tradition from the archaeological record. We argue that this sudden climatic change altered the social and demographic costs of northward dispersal to become unsustainable, leading to a depopulation of the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Headwater streams are critical to the integrity of the stream network, yet they are being rapidly degraded, channelized, or lost through land-cover and land-use change, particularly in urbanizing areas. We refined the definition of a headwater stream, reviewed the headwater stream ecosystem literature using examples from southeastern Australia and globally, and identified 4 critical knowledge gaps that are hampering the management of these unique systems: 1) inadequate high-resolution mapping and, thus, low-accuracy estimates of headwater stream locations and extents within catchments; 2) insufficient characterization of headwater stream typologies across varying geological, topographical, climatic, and anthropogenic conditions; 3) incomplete quantification of headwater stream structure, function, and ecosystem services across varying scales; and 4) limited understanding of the effects of urbanization on headwater streams against a backdrop of climate change. We propose a series of research questions to address these gaps and, finally, hypothesize and discuss the most effective ways to protect headwater streams in urbanizing environments given our current state of understanding. Of particular importance are the need to 1) shift perceptions of these systems as dry, insignificant depressions in the landscape; 2) manage both the headwater stream catchment and the channel; and 3) prioritize protection of the natural flow regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media can be an effective tool for encouraging prosocial behavior, such as energy conservation, making it a key avenue to address the challenges associated with climate change. We examine how social media can be best leveraged to encourage energy-saving behavior. We theorize that two characteristics of social media messages are of particular importance in the context of nudging prosocial behavior: the recipient's affiliation with the message sender and whether the content of the message contains a social proof appeal. We use a multimethod approach to test the importance of these characteristics, including a large-scale energy efficiency campaign and a controlled experiment. We find that social mediamessages sent by a groupwithwhich the recipient is affiliated are substantiallymore effective, particularly when providing evidence of social proof. We discuss the practical impact on the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract What are the links among climate change, epidemics, and socioeconomic inequality? Although the recent pandemic has focused attention on the effects of epidemics on economic outcomes, and a separate literature in climate science and environmental health has linked global environmental change to an increase in infectious disease epidemics, there is relatively little work connecting these two strands of literature. We explore the links among climate change, epidemics, and group-based inequality by first reviewing the scientific literature modeling the effects of global warming on infectious disease epidemics. We highlight the ways in which climate variables (such as temperature, precipitation, and wind speeds) and adaptive human behavior (such as migration) in response to climate events may facilitate the spread of infectious disease. We then examine the effects of climate-induced epidemics on gender inequality using evidence from the African meningitis belt. The results show that epidemics can worsen outcomes for groups in already economically precarious circumstances, thereby widening group-based socioeconomic inequality. Effective policies to combat the negative effects of epidemics must be mindful not to increase existing group-based inequalities and should aim to reduce these inequalities by minimizing damage for members of the most marginalized groups in societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The practice of archaeologists of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) urgently needs decarbonization in the context of a climate crisis disproportionately affecting this region's people and cultural heritage. Academic conferences are both an invaluable forum for research exchange and networking and a carbon-intensive practice presenting barriers to diversity, equity, and inclusion. This article summarizes a study by the authors and the ASOR Ad Hoc Climate Impact Committee on the carbon footprint of the American Society of Overseas Research Annual Meeting and potential strategies for making the meeting carbon neutral and accessible while retaining engagement. We find that the best strategies for significantly reducing the about 1266 t CO2e produced by the traditional meeting format are: (1) alternation of in-person and virtual meetings; (2) hybrid in-person and virtual meeting; (3) dual-component in-person/virtual meeting; or (4) distributed meeting with US and MENA hubs. Carefully vetted carbon offsets should be purchased for remaining emissions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop a novel analysis of climate change and policy regarding climate damages to growth under regional cooperation or noncooperation. We introduce a new stylized climate module and compute the regional social cost of carbon (SCC) when climate change impacts the growth rate of regional GDP under cooperation and noncooperation between regions. We find that in the presence of climate damage to economic growth, the regional SCC is high in either a cooperative or a noncooperative world, implying that it is optimal for each region to choose stringent climate policies. Moreover, relative to cooperation, noncooperation reduces the GDP of countries in both high northern latitudes and the tropics, while the loss for developing countries in the tropics is especially significant. The welfare losses to the tropics are larger still in the absence of compensatory transfers from wealthier regions most responsible for climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hurricane Michael made landfall in the Florida panhandle 27 days before the 2018 elections. In the aftermath the governor issued Executive Order 18-283, allowing election officials in eight affected counties to loosen a variety of voting laws and consolidate polling places but providing no emergency funding to maintain the planned number of polling places. We test the efficacy of the order, using a novel research design that separates the weather effects of the hurricane on turnout from the administrative effects of how the election was run. We find little evidence that the hurricane itself (as proxied by historically relative rainfall) reduced turnout but that the executive order likely had large, negative turnout effects thanks to widespread polling place consolidation. Natural disasters need not spell turnout disasters if state and local election officials can avoid reducing the number of polling places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Freshwater ecosystems are threatened by climate change and invasive species. Amphibians are important members of freshwater communities and are susceptible to negative effects of climate change and invasion. Furthermore, both climate change and invasion can influence density of amphibian larvae at the microhabitat scale because of larval clustering. To understand the effects of climate change and invasion on Pacific Chorus Frog Pseudacris regilla (Baird and Girard, 1852) larvae, a 2 × 2 × 2 factorial experiment was carried out with a climate treatment (future/historical; simulated as changes in both temperature and hydroperiod), indirect exposure to the invasive Brook Stickleback Culaea inconstans (Kirtland, 1840) fish (chemical cues present/absent), and conspecific density (conspecific present/absent). We measured tadpole survival and development rate along with variables related to body shape, including mass, growth, growth rate, body mass index, tail fin depth, tail muscle depth, tail muscle width, and rear limb length. We assessed the effects of 3 common and important stressors (climate, invasive species, and density) alone and in combination with the other stressors to explore their interactions. Climate change, as simulated by our study, had large effects on Pacific Chorus Frog tadpole development and body shape. Brook Stickleback chemical cues had smaller but important effects on body shape and development rate when combined with additional stressors. Competition because of presence of a conspecific tadpole also reduced survival and had large effects on body shape. Pairwise interactions were largely additive or antagonistic. Three-way stressor interactions were most often antagonistic, resulting in less-than-additive effects of the 3 stressors together. However, 3 synergistic 3-way emergent interactions were detected. When all 3 stressors were present, development rate was faster than expected but rear limb length and tail muscle width were smaller than expected. Our results illustrate that climate change and conspecific density have wide-ranging effects on amphibian growth, development, and morphology—effects which may carry over into the terrestrial stage and reduce fitness. Furthermore, our findings reveal complex stressor interactions that were not predictable from single stressor effects or pairwise stressor effects, illustrating the difficulty in predicting multiple stressor interactions in freshwater systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses two distinct notions of harm, wakllichishka and oil harm, and two distinct ways of shaping bodies. Following postcolonial and decolonial insights, I develop an approach that deploys two Indigenous concepts— wakllichishka , and not being able to see the diagnosis —as valid tools of analysis. Kichwa people in northern Peruvian Amazonia use both to analyze the condition of being harmed, illness, and the possibility of recovering. While wakllichishka rests on understandings and practices that assume that bodies are transformable and the locus of human and more-than-human sociality and agency, not being able to see the diagnosis reveals how biomedical and toxicological practices enact bodies as indicators of unspecific conditions and environmental degradation, and as incurable. Using Kichwa analytics shows the situatedness of these practices and counteracts a common disposition to undertake a colonizing reduction that defines our own categories as the only ones adequate for analysis of the consequences of extractive capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past three decades, non-Indigenous peoples have repeatedly positioned Indigenous peoples as the bearers of redemptive environmental knowledge, particularly in relation to climate change and natural hazards. In southeast Australia, recent widespread interest in Aboriginal peoples' fire management practices has been bolstered by these international trends but more directly driven by a succession of severe bushfire seasons as well as popular accounts suggesting that such practices might "save" the fire-prone nation. This situation is one of both continuity and novelty. While the ways Aboriginal peoples burn landscapes have been previously (re)discovered by bushfire managers and scientists, contemporary Aboriginal "cultural burning" initiatives also represent new contact zones of encounter and recognition, offering paradoxical affordances for individuals and groups able to perform different articulations of Indigeneity. As non-Indigenous people search for Indigenous solutions, in Australia and elsewhere, they raise expectations and fuel emerging tensions, with potentially incendiary results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Torpor is a highly effective response to counter various ecological and physiological bottlenecks in endotherms. In this study, we examined interrelations between thermoregulatory responses and key environmental variables in free-living squirrel gliders (Petaurus norfolcensis) in a habitat with drastic climatic and ecological changes across seasons. To this end, we measured body temperature (T b) and heart rate (f H) simultaneously throughout the year using implanted data loggers. Squirrel gliders in our study experienced fluctuations in ambient temperature (T a) between −4.0°C and 44.1°C and expressed torpor at different times during the year. In contrast to our expectations, torpor seemed to be employed flexibly, on demand, and most frequently in spring rather than during the coldest and/or hottest periods. Torpor bouts lasted, on average, about 5 h, and T b during torpor dropped as low as 17.9°C. The f H during torpor decreased below 50 bpm, which is about one-third of the basal level. The ability to record f H alongside T b enabled us to also report periods of low f H during thermoconforming hyperthermia at T a's above 35°C that likely occurred to conserve energy and water. Our findings double the body size of Australian gliders for which data on torpor are available and advance our ecological understanding of the dynamics of torpor expression in wild mammals and of how animals cope with varying conditions. Moreover, they highlight that the flexibility of physiology and thermoregulatory responses are clearly more complex than previously thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the U.S. Supreme Court case West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency relating to the Clean Air Act, and the extent to which the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) can regulate carbon dioxide emissions related to climate change. The court held that EPA may still continue to regulate emissions at existing power plants through emissions reduction technologies.

Youth in sub-Saharan Africa are extremely vulnerable to the negative consequences of climate change and environmental degradation. The interest in education for sustainable development (ESD) to support African youth in learning about and adapting to climate change is growing in response. This study examines the messages about human-earth relationships, environmental change, and responsibilities for mitigation that are presented in official grade 8 Ghana and Malawi textbooks. Utilizing a political ecology framework, it shows that the curricula normalize an anthropocentric earth view that disappears global power dynamic, neglects widespread commodification of scarce resources, fails to question the developmentalist dream of endless growth, and translates local ecological contexts into universal commodities. We discuss the need to develop educational theories and practices that account for the complexity and deep contextuality of human-earth relationship if we hope to help students around the world envision alternative ways more likely to ensure species survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments have long faced pressure to address the climate crisis by increasing taxes on fossil fuels. It is unclear how they have responded. Fossil fuel taxes and subsidies are hard to measure and often hidden in complex policy instruments. We collect and analyze an original high-frequency measure of gasoline taxes and subsidies, covering 157 countries. Our analysis yields three findings: despite rising alarm about climate change, from 2003 to 2015 there was little change in net fuel taxes and subsidies at a global level; these taxes and subsidies appear to be driven by the same fiscal conditions that determine other types of taxes; and reforms are overwhelmingly associated with idiosyncratic country-level conditions. These patterns suggest that fossil fuel taxes are determined by a country's revenue needs, not its political institutions or environmental commitments. They also have significant implications for debates over policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Little Ice Age of the early modern centuries, close to a third of the globe's population perished. Because this period serves as the most recent example of the global impacts of climate change, historians and others interested in developing conceptual and methodological tools for understanding contemporary climate change regularly look to the historiography of the Little Ice Age for direction and inspiration. This article adds to this toolkit by arguing for the place of gender and sexuality in analyses of climate change, something environmental historians have seldom done. It does so through the discussion of a seemingly fantastical account of a young woman who gave birth to an elephant in the Ottoman Empire in the 1640s. Focusing on the experience of one woman, her rape by an elephant from India, the sad fate of her child, and her community's social and economic hardships shows how individuals both experienced and interpreted the environmental calamities of the Little Ice Age as a species crisis. Her story furthermore analogizes the political fortunes of the Ottoman Empire in a moment of weakness. By connecting the literatures of environmental and natural history, women's history and histories of sexuality, empire and science, this article centers the roles of women as prime agents of population, history, and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experiences in real-world pollution markets suggest that firms make persistent errors in forecasting allowance and credit prices that inform their investment decisions. The residual uncertainty characterizing allowance and credit trading means that pollution markets may fail to deliver cost-effective abatement. This contrasts with price-based policies under which firms make investments that equate marginal abatement cost to an emission tax. We incorporate the additional cost of forecast errors under quantity-based programs into a standard Weitzman-style prices versus quantities framework. We distinguish between individual firms' uncertainty over competitors' private information and systemic uncertainty over future cost shocks. We show that a welfare-maximizing regulator would favor price instruments in response to the prospect of firm-specific forecast errors under quantity instruments, ceteris paribus, and the relative benefit of price instruments increases with forecast error variance. We discuss the role of policy design, such as incorporating price collars, in mitigating cost inefficiencies from price forecast errors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental policy with uncertainty is often posed as a choice between price and quantity instruments. Adding flexibility to fixed policy instruments can improve outcomes. Roberts and Spence noted the efficiency advantages of matching emissions allowances supply to the marginal damage schedule. We propose an implementable approach to making that match, an approach we call "price-responsive supply," which treats prices and quantities as simultaneously determined in the allowance auction. For competitive environments, price-responsive supply outperforms fixed-price and fixed-quantity instruments. Price-responsive supply can enhance the performance of real-world regulatory environments through an automatic adjustment mechanism that responds instantaneously to new information about abatement costs. We demonstrate the improved performance of price-responsive supply in experiments and simulations. A price-responsive supply schedule, while offering efficiency advantages, also translates the cost-lowering effects of other, coincident policies into accelerated reductions under an emissions cap, thereby helping to resolve the waterbed effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies consistently find important economic effects of year-to-year weather fluctuations. I study the economic effects of long-term and gradual climate change over 250 years in the Little Ice Age (1600–1850), during which people and economies had time to adapt. Results show significant negative economic effects of long-term climate change. Temperature impacted the economy through its effect on agricultural productivity and mortality. To adapt to the Little Ice Age, economies increased trade and changed land use. I discuss the relevance of these results for understanding the impact of today's climate change, especially in developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Species distribution models assume that at broad spatial scales, environmental conditions determine species ranges and, as such, source-sink dynamics can be ignored. A rationale behind this assumption is that source-sink dynamics manifest at length scales comparable to species mean dispersal distance, which is much smaller than length scales of species distribution and variation in climate. Using a two-dimensional reaction-diffusion model, we show that species can use sink habitats near the niche limit as stepping-stones to occupy sink habitats much further than the mean dispersal distance, thereby extending the distribution far beyond the environmental niche limit. This mismatch between range and niche limits is mediated by the shape (local curvature) of the niche limit. These curvature effects may be significant for a highly dispersive species with low per capita growth rate sensitivity to changes in the environment. These findings underscore the potential importance of stepping-stone dispersal in determining range limits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change predictions for Southern Europe indicate an increase in the frequency and duration of summer low flows and water scarcity in streams. Droughts can cause substantial changes in aquatic communities and biogeochemical processes because they modify stream environmental conditions. Among the many physical, chemical, and biological variables that influence stream metabolism, nutrients may affect algae and heterotrophic microorganisms, and nutrient concentrations may vary with reduction in water discharge. We experimentally manipulated stream discharge and used a before–after control–impact paired design to assess how reduction of stream discharge affected metabolism (i.e., ecosystem respiration [ER] and gross primary production [GPP]). The study was done in 2 lowland forested streams in northwestern Spain with contrasting nutrient concentrations (i.e., mesotrophic: Caselas stream; eutrophic: Pego stream). In the 2 streams, metabolism was estimated before and after discharge manipulation. Prior to discharge reduction, the 2 streams were heterotrophic (i.e., GPP∶ER < 1), and GPP and ER were related in the eutrophic Pego. Discharge reduction increased GPP at the impacted reaches of the mesotrophic Caselas and decoupled GPP and ER at the Pego. An information-theoretic approach was used to assess which combinations of physical, chemical, and biological variables were most important to explain the variation in ER and GPP under the different hydrologic conditions. The observed differences between the 2 streams suggest that the metabolic response to stream drought can be modulated by the interplay between nutrient availability and the density of consumers feeding on resources, among other environmental variables. We show that longer summer periods and reduced stream discharge have the potential to increase daily hypoxia in nutrient-rich lowland stream ecosystems. Increased hypoxia can threaten biodiversity of stream ecosystems and reduce consumer pressure on basal instream resources, such as algae, bacteria, and fungi, which may, in turn, favor instream GPP. In addition, drying conditions seemed to favor autotrophic over heterotrophic activity under moderate nutrient availability (i.e., increase in the GPP∶ER ratio in the impacted Caselas reaches). Therefore, drought conditions not only affect overall daily rates of metabolic activity, but also the relative importance of different energy sources and organic matter for instream function. Our results show that discharge reduction caused by increased water scarcity, due to both climate change and water demand by human activities, can influence energy flow and organic matter dynamics through effects on the metabolism of forested lowland streams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decades ago, Dr Noel Hynes eloquently summarized the inherent interconnectedness of a stream and its valley and made the case that human alteration of the valley would have direct negative consequences for freshwater systems. Currently, the freshwater biodiversity crisis extends across all continents and demands urgent attention from environmental planners, practitioners, and policymakers to protect streams and their valleys. As we work to slow losses of freshwater biodiversity and restore freshwater ecosystems, it is time to revisit the important messages from Hynes. One of the most obvious and immediate actions that could be undertaken is to "back off"—that is, to limit human activity and new development in floodplain and riparian areas immediately adjacent to freshwater systems, including streams, rivers, lakes, and wetlands, while minimizing impacts and risks in areas with existing development. From reducing erosion and flood damage to maintaining cool water temperatures, filtering pollutants, protecting critical habitats, and enabling lateral connectivity, intact riparian zones mitigate many of the threats that degrade freshwater ecosystems. There has been much research to identify optimal setbacks and buffer-strip widths to protect against harm. As such, in many areas, our ability to protect the stream and its valley is not limited by natural science but rather our failure to consistently apply floodplain and riparian regulations and the absence of political will. We are too quick to trade off the environment for short-term economic development. In areas that are already developed, solutions are more complicated but, in many cases, represent a key priority for healing damaged ecosystems and for addressing economic and social risks of vulnerable development. We need to redefine our relationship with freshwater ecosystems, and the first step is to back off and give freshwater ecosystems the opportunity to heal while ensuring that as-of-yet intact riparian areas continue to support freshwater resiliency. In doing so, we will also gain climate adaptive benefits, given that maintaining intact riparian areas is an effective nature-based solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Premise of research. Pterocarya (Juglandaceae) was widespread in the Cenozoic of the Northern Hemisphere, including western and eastern North America, but presently survives only in the Caucasus Mountains and eastern Asia. We describe two macrofossil fruit occurrences, one from the Miocene of Maryland and one from the Pliocene of Alabama. These augment existing palynological evidence of its survival in eastern North America to the Pliocene. We also explore hypotheses for its demise in what should have been a promising modern-day refugium. Methodology. The morphology of both fossils was observed using a dissecting microscope, and characters of extant and previously described fossil species of Pterocarya , both from the literature and from living specimens, were examined. Measurements of wing size and fruit size were made with imaging software to establish a wing-to-fruit ratio. Pivotal results. The fossils from the Miocene of Maryland can be assigned to Pterocarya section Platyptera , aff. P. rhoifolia , of Japan. The new Pterocarya fruit from the Pliocene of Alabama cannot be assigned to a modern section. It possesses an abnormally large nut and the lowest wing-to-fruit ratio of any living or fossil species. We describe this fruit as P. magnifructa , a new species. Conclusions. Pterocarya was a common constituent of the Miocene flora of the mid-Atlantic coast but became restricted to southeastern North America in the Pliocene, where it was apparently less common. The size and wing-to-fruit ratio of the Pliocene specimen suggest that it may have been evolving toward biotic dispersal, perhaps in response to climate change and/or competition from the radiating diversity of accompanying Carya species. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How shall we judge the element of practicality or urgency for scholars working in the era of the 2030 deadline for action on climate change? This essay surveys the reaction to climate change by scholars who work with data, using the philosopher Stephen Gardiner's conceit of "corrupt institutions" to organize the approaches according to an index of pragmatic orientation. This survey will lead to the identification of some challenges for those seeking to engage the climate deadline with data, especially work making climate data more transparent, text mining to identify aspects of corruption and reform within contemporary institutions, and building infrastructure for citizen participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although climate warming poses a grave threat to amphibians, little is known about the capacity of this group to evolve in response to warming. The capacity of key traits to evolve depends on the presence of genetic variation on which selection can act. Here, we use repeatability estimates to estimate the potential upper bounds of heritable genetic variation in voluntary and critical thermal maxima of gray-cheeked salamanders (Plethodon metcalfi). Increases in thermal tolerance may also require concordant increases in resistance to water loss because hotter temperatures incur greater evaporative risk. Therefore, we also tested for a correlation between voluntary thermal maxima and resistance to water loss and conducted an acclimation study to test for covariation between these traits in response to warming. Voluntary thermal maxima exhibited low to moderate levels of repeatability (R = 0.32 , P = 0.045), while critical thermal maxima exhibited no statistically significant repeatability (R = 0.10 , P = 0.57). Voluntary thermal maxima also correlated positively with resistance to water loss (R = 0.31 , P = 0.025) but only when controlling for body mass. Voluntary thermal maxima and resistance to water loss also exhibited different acclimatory responses across control (12°C–18°C) and warm (18°C–24°C) temperature regimes, indicating a potential decoupling of traits in different thermal environments. By addressing the repeatability of thermal tolerance and the potential for covariation with resistance to water loss, we begin to address some of the key requirements of amphibians to evolve in warming climates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Canada and the United States have a rich history of policy interventions aimed at improving environmental outcomes from agricultural production. We review the agri-environmental programs in these two countries as well as the related economic literature. Despite the impacts of agriculture on land, water, and climate quality, the literature on agri-environmental programs has largely focused on a few major programs or the adoption of specific management practices. Far less research evaluates programs on active farmland, environmental regulation of agriculture, and the interactions of these policies and programs. Further research is also needed on how the heterogeneity of environmental characteristics and processes affects the outcomes of management practices and how these outcomes might be affected by climate change. Given the continued substantial impacts of agriculture on environmental outcomes, the increased interest of agricultural processors and consumers in these outcomes, and the potential for new models and data to inform research, we conclude that this is an ideal time to examine and apply lessons learned from past program successes and failures as we seek to improve the performance of the next generation of agri-environmental policy interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although climate change adaptation was historically relegated to a marginal role in science and policy relative to climate mitigation and primary Earth science, it has now ascended out of absolute necessity to represent a critical area of scientific and social scientific inquiry. At its core, adaptation science is concerned with how biological units, ecological systems, humans, social systems and institutions, and engineered systems respond to and prepare for external perturbations - namely climate change impacts. Students of adaptation science desperately need a textbook that shows how they can approach the tradeoffs, conflicts, impacts, and distributional equity challenges associated with adaptation action. [Extracted from the article]