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Improvements in technology and data processing now enable the effects of air pollution to be monitored by individuals. However, as Dawn Nafus discusses this radical singularisation poses challenges for broad-based community action. From computer vision systems that detect smokestack emissions, to low-cost air quality sensor networks, data, and now AI, have become important resources for … Continued

By Daniel Nachtigall, OECD Environment Directorate and Antoine Dechezleprêtre, OECD Directorate for Science Technology and Innovation The European Union (EU) put forward an ambitious climate mitigation target of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by at least 55% below 1990 levels by 2030. How will...

We shouldn't be surprised, of course, for it's a long running problem. This is just the latest instance:Children's doctors are calling for an outright ban on disposable vapes to reduce their popularity among young people as the long-term impact on lungs, hearts and brains remains unknown.The government should ban single-use disposable vapes, which can be bought for just £1.99 and are most popular with young people, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health has said.This would reduce their environmental impact and discourage children who have never smoked from taking up vaping and risking long-term addiction and lung damage.As we've noted many a time vaping and smoking are substitutes, not complements. More people vaping means fewer people smoking. As we've seen with the Snowdon Curve, this is simply one of those things that are true. And as Chris Snowdon notes again. New Zealand has legal, nicotine containing, vaping, Australia does not. Smoking rates in New Zealand have fallen against those in Australia since the legalisation.Well, there we are, actual science, vaping reduces smoking rates. Therefore doctors who wish to reduce smoking rates should support vaping. Rather than try to ban it. Because that's what science tells us is true.Ho hum. Still, there is always that silver cloud. That latest proposal to bring in half-trained doctors has its merits. Maybe they'll take due regard of science as the full doctors don't?

The UC Davis Department of Environmental Science and Policy seeks a post-doctoral fellow in Governance Network Analysis and Climate Adaptation under the mentorship of Dr. Mark Lubell.  The position will be for one year residence with possible second year renewal depending on funding. The position will begin in January 2020, or as soon as possible after that time. Salary ranges from $50,760 to $59,100 annually depending on experience.

Does the public sector need the private sector's help to address the freshwater crisis? That's the thesis of Stanford law and environmental social sciences professor Barton "Buzz" Thompson's provocative new book. We sat down with him to hear more.

January 6, 2020. On December 23, 2019, the UNC Policy Collaboratory released a legislatively mandated report on nutrient pollution in Jordan Lake. The short version: A three year, multi-million dollar study has confirmed the science and policy underlying the 2009 Jordan Lake water quality rules. Background. In 2002, the North Carolina Environmental Management Commission (EMC) […]

Despite large investments in research and development, India struggles to translate sustainability research into tangible impacts that help solve environmental challenges across its large geography. Anjali Neelakantan and Veena Srinivasan suggest this is in part due to the challenge of finding sharply framed bottom-up research questions and discuss a new project to match such questions … Continued

The rise of digital networking and conference platforms in recent years has led many to question the value of conferences on environmental and accessibility grounds. Yet, one frequently cited example of their value is the opportunity for serendipitous unplanned interactions. Exploiting evidence from conference scheduling conflicts and subsequent publications, Misha Teplitskiy, Soya Park, Neil Thompson … Continued

The Center for Environmental Policy and Behavior and the Department of Water Resources organized a conference to connect researchers and practitioners working on the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) in California. The conference was held on February 6th, 2018 at the University of California Davis and assembled 55 social science researchers as well as practitioners from in and out of the state.

In Activist Affordances: How Disabled People Improvise More Habitable Worlds, Arseli Dokumacı argues that in the adaptive ways they improvise everyday tasks, disabled people demonstrate how all people can create a more habitable planet. Connecting ideas from the fields of ethnography, psychology, disability studies and performance studies, Dokumacı's original work challenges normative, ableist conceptions of activism and environmental protection, writes Kostadin Karavasilev. … Continued

In Confronting Climate Gridlock, environmental engineering professor Daniel Cohan argues that escaping the gravest perils of climate change will first require American diplomacy, technological innovation, and policy to catalyze decarbonization... READ MORE
The post Daniel Cohan on Heat Pumps, Policy, and Optimism appeared first on Yale University Press.

Contributor(s): Dr Ganga Shreedhar, David Shukman | Sea levels are rising, carbon emissions are increasing and deforestation is continuing at an alarming rate. Human created climate change is drastically reshaping life on earth, with up to 75% of the diversity of the species on our planet on their way to becoming extinct.
This month, LSE iQ asks: How can we survive the next mass extinction? We'll discuss the dangers of greenwashing, what it's like to witness an environmental catastrophe and how we can change our behaviour to benefit the planet.
Anna Bevan talks to: Dr Ganga Shreedhar, Assistant Professor in LSE's Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science, and Associate at the Grantham Research Institute of Climate Change and the Environment and the Inclusion Initiative; and former BBC Science Editor, and now Visiting Professor in Practice at the Grantham Research Institute, David Shukman.

Research
Stories of intentional action mobilise climate policy support and action intentions (2021) by
Sabherwal, Anandita and Shreedhar, Ganga
Personal or Planetary health? Direct, spillover and carryover effects of non-monetary benefits of vegetarian behaviour (2021) by Shreedhar, Ganga and Galizzi, Matteo

Romina Boccia and Dominik Lett


Within weeks of passing new discretionary spending limits, Congress is proposing to increase deficits by abusing emergency designations to prop up agency budgets.
The May Fiscal Responsibility Act established caps on discretionary funding, but provided an exception for spending designated as "emergency." And now the leaders of the Senate Appropriations Committee have said they plan on going around debt ceiling caps by adding $8 billion for defense and $5.7 billion for non‐​defense emergencies.
Is the added spending really for emergencies?
Let's look at the Commerce, Justice, and Science (CJS) appropriations bill to see whether its $2.4 billion in emergency spending really is urgent and disaster‐​related.
Science and technology
The Commerce, Justice, and Science appropriations bill (S.2321) provides $1.2 billion of emergency spending for science and technology agencies (see Table 1). Of that total, the National Space and Aeronautics Administration (NASA) receives $296 million for infrastructure and compliance with environmental regulations—70 percent of NASA's entire budget for construction and environmental compliance. The National Science Foundation receives a whopping $420 million for unspecified "research."
Building vehicles, constructing new facilities, and doing research are all well within the purview of normal operations for scientific agencies. Federally funded mission research, like that done by the National Science Foundation, has a long and useful history, but it is not without its limitations. Federal research and development subsidies can crowd out private R&D, leading to worse returns on investment. Congress should justify spending taxpayer dollars that could be more productively used in the private sector, especially if designating them for emergencies, which allows for spending in excess of agreed‐​upon cap levels.











Law enforcement and criminal justice
Law enforcement receives nearly $1 billion in emergency spending (see Table 2)—half of that is for the broad category of "salaries and expenses." All funding for local and state law enforcement grants for presidential nominating conventions—a full $100 million—is designated as emergency spending. Likewise, 86 percent of infrastructure funding for federal prisons—$179 million—is designated as emergency spending.
None of these line items are unexpected, sudden, or temporary. Salaries, expenses, and recurring predictable events like presidential nominations fall within normal budgetary operations. Law enforcement agencies deserve the same funding scrutiny that other agencies receive. For FY24, Senate appropriators plan on providing $38 billion to federal law enforcement agencies. Most of the year‐​to‐​year spending increases for law enforcement were provided through the abuse of emergency designations. If law enforcement requires additional resources, Congress should provide these through regular appropriations.











Economic aid
The Economic Development Administration (EDA) receives $25 million in emergency spending. EDA's track record of poor performance merits spending cuts, not increases. As Cato's Chris Edwards argues, "Federal funding of local projects is inefficient for many reasons, and it is not affordable given ongoing federal deficits of more than $1.5 trillion a year."
Congress is supposed to first authorize programs and then appropriate taxpayer dollars. Increasingly, Congress skips the first part, reducing oversight and allowing for more wasteful spending. EDA's authorization lapsed in 2008, yet Congress plans to spend $1.4 billion for FY24 on it. EDA is a ripe target for elimination. If Congress chooses to continue funding its operations, it should first re‐​authorize it and then fund it with regular appropriations.
Reject unwarranted emergency spending
Escape valves for urgent, sudden needs are necessary for statutory spending limits to operate effectively. However, abuse of emergency spending to prop up agency budgets, as Senate appropriators are proposing, undermines trust in the federal government's fiscal commitments and contributes to a worsening fiscal trajectory.
A wide range of promising reforms are available to address the abuse of emergencies. One such option: notional emergency spending accounts. Using a similar mechanism as CUTGO, Congress could account for emergency spending and offset it, reducing future abuse, increasing transparency, and strengthening fiscal responsibility. Tracking emergency spending (and associated interest costs) and reducing discretionary limits over the following five years would deter irresponsible emergency spending and incentivize forward‐​looking budgetary planning.
Emergency designations are a mechanism to avoid the difficult but important process of considering budgetary trade‐​offs. They evade spending limits, reducing oversight, promoting waste, and contributing to America's growing debt crisis. In 2018, a pre‐​pandemic Congress produced the same appropriation bill without a single emergency designation. Congress is capable of budgeting more responsibly. Legislators should reject unjustified and unnecessary emergency spending.

Contributor(s): Stephan Chambers, Dr Christian Busch, Dr Juli Huang, Dr Jason Hickel | Welcome to LSE IQ, a new monthly podcast from the London School of Economics and Political Science. This is the podcast where we ask some of the leading social scientists - and other experts - to answer intelligent questions about economics, politics or society. Over the last couple of decades Western aid agencies, the World Bank, NGOs and business schools have all enthusiastically embraced the concept of social entrepreneurship. This takes the methods and energy of business entrepreneurship and applies them to often intractable social, or environmental, problems. Social enterprises hold the promise of developing financially sustainable solutions and of providing dignity, rather than just charity, for those they seek to help. In this episode of LSE IQ, Sue Windebank asks, 'Could social entrepreneurship be the answer to world poverty?' This episode features: Dr Christian Busch, researcher, LSE Innovation Co-Creation Lab; Stephan Chambers, Director, Marshall Institute for Philanthropy and Social Entrepreneurship; Dr Jason Hickel, Fellow, LSE Department of Anthropology and; Dr Juli Huang, Lecturer in Anthropology of Development, The University of Edinburgh. For further information about the podcast visit lse.ac.uk/iq and please tell us what you think using the hashtag #LSEIQ.

There's no question that war leaves behind its lingering destruction. This includes both harm to people and to the environment. As the world marks the second year of Vladimir Putin's illegal invasion of Ukraine, we must reflect on the impact of war on Ukraine, the resiliency of its people and global response to resolving the issues of bomb contamination.Roughly one-third of Ukraine's territory is contaminated. This is the size of an average country in Europe. Ukraine is currently experiencing the worst environmental disaster in terms of soil pollution per unit of time.Toxic elements such as lead, cadmium, arsenic, and mercury leach from ammunition and weapons into the soil. If potential areas of contamination are not identified and recorded in time, harmful substances can enter the food chain and become carcinogenic. This threatens global food security and export opportunities. Failure to act now could result in the deterioration of human health.Prior to the war, about 400 million people worldwide relied on Ukraine for their food supply making this a large-scale problem. Spent ammunition and chemical weapons can contaminate soil for decades or longer. Land is not a renewable resource. Soils and their fertile layer are formed over thousands of years. Just 1 cm of soil is formed in 200-400 years, and 20 cm in 5,000-6,000 years. Military operations that take place for 2 years like in the case of Ukraine can destroy what has been formed over thousands of years.Contaminations left behind from war are nothing new. We know this from wars in SE Asia, conflicts in the Middle East, Africa, and the list goes on. It's no surprise then that at least 50 countries are impacted by landmines and other explosives. The good news is there are solutions to the long lasting impacts of conflicts like unexploded ordnance on humans, all living things and our planet.One example is a project called "Assessing farmland and ecosystems damage in north-eastern Ukraine from the Russian invasion" (UA-UK-CH) led by this article's co-author Dr. Olena Melnyk. This project is a joint initiative with researchers from Ukraine, England and Switzerland aimed at enhancing the capacity for mapping, environmental monitoring, and managing the effects of war-induced damage on Ukraine's agricultural land, utilizing existing networks of scientists and field-based analysis to safeguard food security. The first component of the project involves gathering ground truth data on the damage inflicted on Ukrainian farmland, which is then utilized to analyze the extent of soil pollution and calibrate remote sensing data.The second component focuses on developing an application for mapping farmland to document hazards and contamination and prioritize land for production and remediation.The third aspect involves building up "citizen science" by training non-combatant experts to inspect and analyze contaminated farmlands and contribute to land mapping efforts.The fourth component aims to facilitate the decontamination and remediation of Ukrainian lands to restore agricultural productivity while promoting post-war environmentally friendly agricultural practices to ensure sustainability and climate neutrality. This project will enable Ukrainian farmers to avoid dangerous areas and prioritize the land for targeted decontamination. The data collected from this research project will help inform government agencies, civil societies and other stakeholders.The United States is the largest funder of global humanitarian demining. Since 1993, the U.S. has provided at least $4.2 billion to over 100 countries from Laos to Ukraine. Funding is invested in activities such as bomb clearance, victims' assistance and explosive risk education.Environmental research like the UA-UK-CH in Ukraine has proven to be necessary and important to the future of soil rehabilitation post conflict. This should be a norm and donor countries, funders, academic institutions can leverage the future findings from Ukraine and leverage it as a model that can inspire research in other war impacted countries — especially 50-year-old legacy contaminations in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam—where no study has been done.