Search

Water quality monitoring can inform policies that address pollution; however, inconsistent measurement and reporting practices render many observations incomparable across bodies of water, thereby impeding efforts to characterize spatial patterns and long-term trends in pollution. Here, we harmonized 9.2 million publicly available monitor readings from 226 distinct water monitoring authorities spanning the entirety of the Mississippi/Atchafalaya River Basin (MARB) in the United States. We created the Standardized Nitrogen and Phosphorus Dataset (SNAPD), a novel dataset of 4.8 million standardized observations for nitrogen- and phosphorus-containing compounds from 107 thousand sites during 1980-2018. To the best of our knowledge, this dataset represents the largest record of these pollutants in a single river network where measurements can be compared across time and space. We addressed numerous well-documented issues associated with the reporting and interpretation of these water quality data, heretofore unaddressed at this scale, and our approach to water quality data processing can be applied to other nutrient compounds and regions.

We develop a supply model for ethanol production in Brazil with spatially disaggregated potential yield, freight costs, and pasture land available for conversion. We show that, under the assumptions of free capital markets, constant prices, and a modest increase over the current oil-equivalent price, a non-trivial amount of future global liquid fossil fuel can be profitably displaced by Brazilian ethanol production using existing pasture land. Along with policies to encourage the intensification of existing beef production, the dominant current land use, this new production can occur without the use of additional agricultural land, assuaging concerns about indirect land use change. At the current ethanol price, which includes the subsidizing eect of the mandate, the model predicts a substantial expansion of sugarcane ethanol, indicating that real-world considerations, such as capital controls and institutional, policy, and price uncertainty, are considerable barriers to investment in this context.potential yield, freight costs, and pasture land available for conversion. We show that, under the assumptions of free capital markets, constant prices, and a modest increase over the current oil-equivalent price, a non-trivial amount of future global liquid fossil fuel can be profitably displaced by Brazilian ethanol production using existing pasture land. Along with policies to encourage the intensification of existing beef production, the dominant current land use, this new production can occur without the use of additional agricultural land, assuaging concerns about indirect land use change. At the current ethanol price, which includes the subsidizing eect of the mandate, the model predicts a substantial expansion of sugarcane ethanol, indicating that real-world considerations, such as capital controls and institutional, policy, and price uncertainty, are considerable barriers to investment in this context.

Governments around the world are responding to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.sup.1, caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), with unprecedented policies designed to slow the growth rate of infections. Many policies, such as closing schools and restricting populations to their homes, impose large and visible costs on society; however, their benefits cannot be directly observed and are currently understood only through process-based simulations.sup.2-4. Here we compile data on 1,700 local, regional and national non-pharmaceutical interventions that were deployed in the ongoing pandemic across localities in China, South Korea, Italy, Iran, France and the United States. We then apply reduced-form econometric methods, commonly used to measure the effect of policies on economic growth.sup.5,6, to empirically evaluate the effect that these anti-contagion policies have had on the growth rate of infections. In the absence of policy actions, we estimate that early infections of COVID-19 exhibit exponential growth rates of approximately 38% per day. We find that anti-contagion policies have significantly and substantially slowed this growth. Some policies have different effects on different populations, but we obtain consistent evidence that the policy packages that were deployed to reduce the rate of transmission achieved large, beneficial and measurable health outcomes. We estimate that across these 6 countries, interventions prevented or delayed on the order of 61 million confirmed cases, corresponding to averting approximately 495 million total infections. These findings may help to inform decisions regarding whether or when these policies should be deployed, intensified or lifted, and they can support policy-making in the more than 180 other countries in which COVID-19 has been reported.sup.7. Analyses of COVID-19 infection rates show that non-pharmaceutical interventions achieved large, beneficial and measurable health outcomes in China, South Korea, Italy, Iran, France and the United States; these results may inform decisions on whether or when these interventions should be deployed, intensified or lifted., Author(s): Solomon Hsiang [sup.1] [sup.2] [sup.3] , Daniel Allen [sup.1] , Sébastien Annan-Phan [sup.1] [sup.4] , Kendon Bell [sup.1] [sup.5] , Ian Bolliger [sup.1] [sup.6] , Trinetta Chong [sup.1] , [...]