Temporal trends in agricultural water use and the relationships to hydroclimatic factors in the High Plains aquifer region

The High Plains aquifer (HPA) is the primary water source for agricultural irrigation in the US Great Plains. The water levels in many locations of the aquifer have declined steadily over the past several decades because the rate of water withdrawals exceeds recharge, which has been a serious concern to the water resources management in the region. We evaluated temporal trends and variations in agricultural water use and hydroclimatic variables including precipitation, air temperature, reference evapotranspiration, runoff, groundwater level, and terrestrial water storage across the HPA region for different periods from 1985 to 2020 at the grid, county, or region scale. The results showed that water withdrawals decreased from 21.3 km³/year in 1985 to 18.2 km³/year in 2015, while irrigated croplands increased from 71,928 km² in 1985 to 78,464 km² in 2015 in the entire HPA. The hydroclimatic time-series showed wetting trends in most of the northern HPA, but drying and warming trends in the southern region from 1985 to 2020. The groundwater level time-series indicated flat trends in the north, but significant declining in the central and southern HPA. Trends in irrigation water withdrawals and irrigation area across the HPA were controlled by the advancement of irrigation systems and technologies and the management of sustainable water use, but also were affected by dynamical changes in the hydroclimatic conditions.     

Systematic review of conservation interventions to promote voluntary behavior change

Understanding human behavior is vital to developing interventions that effectively lead to proenvironmental behavior change, whether the focus is at the individual or societal level. However, interventions in many fields have historically lacked robust forms of evaluation, which makes it hard to be confident that these conservation interventions have successfully helped protect the environment. We conducted a systematic review to assess how effective nonpecuniary and nonregulatory interventions have been in changing environmental behavior. We applied the Office of Health Assessment and Translation systematic review methodology. We started with more than 300,000 papers and reports returned by our search terms and after critical appraisal of quality identified 128 individual studies that merited inclusion in the review. We classified interventions by thematic area, type of intervention, the number of times audiences were exposed to interventions, and the length of time interventions ran. Most studies reported a positive effect (n = 96). The next most common outcome was no effect (n = 28). Few studies reported negative (n = 1) or mixed (n = 3) effects. Education, prompts, and feedback interventions resulted in positive behavior change. Combining multiple interventions was the most effective. Neither exposure duration nor frequency affected the likelihood of desired behavioral change. Comparatively few studies tested the effects of voluntary interventions on non-Western populations (n = 17) or measured actual ecological outcome behavior (n = 1). Similarly, few studies examined conservation devices (e.g., energy-efficient stoves) (n = 9) and demonstrations (e.g., modeling the desired behavior) (n = 5). There is a clear need to both improve the quality of the impact evaluation conducted and the reporting standards for intervention results.     

Traditional agriculture in transition: examining the impacts of agricultural modernization on smallholder farming in Ghana under the new Green Revolution

Following the renewed effort at achieving a new green revolution for Africa, emphasis has been placed on modernizing smallholder agriculture through the deployment of improved inputs especially mechanized technologies. In Ghana, the government has in the last decade emphasized the provision of subsidized mechanized ploughing services to farmers alongside a rapidly growing private sector tractor service market. While mechanized technology adoption rates have increased rapidly, the deployment of these technologies has been without critical analysis of the impacts on production patterns and local agrarian systems. This paper examines the distributional impacts of agriculture mechanization on cropping patterns and farm sizes of smallholder farmers in northern Ghana using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) techniques, and semi-structured interviews with smallholder farmers (n=60). Specifically, comparative analysis of the field sizes and cropping patterns of participant farmers prior to and after the adoption of mechanized technologies was conducted. In-depth interviews were used to contextualize the experiences of smallholder farmers toward understanding how mechanization may be impacting traditional agriculture. Our findings reveal a mechanization paradox in which farm sizes are expanding, while cropping patterns are shifting away from traditional staple crops (pearl millet and sorghum bicolor) to market-oriented crops (maize, rice and groundnuts). This transition we argue, has adverse implications on the cultural dimension of food security, the organization of social life, and climate change adaptation. We recommend a retooling of the current agricultural policy focus to ensure context sensitivity for a more robust battle against food insecurity.     

Depoliticizing adaptation: a critical analysis of EU climate adaptation policy

The ways in which climate adaptation is understood in the European Union is examined via three key policy documents: the Strategy on adaptation and the Green and White Papers that preceded it. Drawing on Poststructuralist Discourse Theory, light is shed on the implicit values and assumptions that underpin this recent policy initiative. The findings demonstrate a tension between the declared ambition to act on adaptation and implicit suggestions that nothing really has to change, and the challenge can be addressed by market and technological innovations, and by mainstreaming adaptation into existing sectoral policies. The policy discourse effectively serves to depoliticize choices societies make in response to climate change, presenting adaptation as a non-political issue. Insight into European adaptation discourse enables deeper understanding of recent policy developments and opens up possible entry points for critique.     

Fast,cheap, and imperfect? US public opinion about solar geoengineering

ABSTRACT

Solar geoengineering, which seeks to cool the planet by reflecting a small fraction of sunlight back into space, has drawn the attention of scientists and policymakers as climate change remains unabated. Unlike mitigation, solar geoengineering could quickly and cheaply lower global temperatures. It is also imperfect. Its environmental impacts remain unpredictable, and its low cost and immediate effects may result in ‘moral hazard,’ potentially crowding out costly mitigation efforts. There is little understanding about how the public will respond to such tradeoffs. To address this, a 1000-subject nationally representative poll focused on solar geoengineering was conducted as part of the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) of the US electorate in October–November 2016. The importance that individuals place on solar geoengineering’s speed and cost predicts their support for it, but there is little to no relationship between their concerns about its shortcomings and support for its research and use. Acquiescence bias appears to be an important factor for attitudes around solar geoengineering and moral hazard.     

The spillover of race and racial attitudes into public opinion about climate change

The relationship between racial attitudes and public opinion about climate change is examined. Public opinion data from Pew and American National Election Studies surveys are used to show that racial identification and prejudices are increasingly correlated with opinions about climate change during the Obama presidency. Results show that racial identification became a significant predictor of climate change concern following Obama’s election in 2008, and that high levels of racial resentment are strongly correlated with reduced agreement with the scientific consensus on climate change. These results offer evidence for an effect termed the spillover of racialization. This helps further explain why the public remains so polarized on climate change, given the extent to which racial grievances and identities have become entangled with elite communication about climate change and its related policies today.     

Microtargeting for conservation

Widespread human action and behavior change is needed to achieve many conservation goals. Doing so at the requisite scale and pace will require the efficient delivery of outreach campaigns. Conservation gains will be greatest when efforts are directed toward places of high conservation value (or need) and tailored to critical actors. Recent strategic conservation planning has relied primarily on spatial assessments of biophysical attributes, largely ignoring the human dimensions. Elsewhere, marketers, political campaigns, and others use microtargeting—predictive analytics of big data—to identify people most likely to respond positively to particular messages or interventions. Conservationists have not yet widely capitalized on these techniques. To investigate the effectiveness of microtargeting to improve conservation, we developed a propensity model to predict restoration behavior among 203,645 private landowners in a 5,200,000 ha study area in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed (U.S.A.). To isolate the additional value microtargeting may offer beyond geospatial prioritization, we analyzed a new high-resolution land-cover data set and cadastral data to identify private owners of riparian areas needing restoration. Subsequently, we developed and evaluated a restoration propensity model based on a database of landowners who had conducted restoration in the past and those who had not (n = 4978). Model validation in a parallel database (n = 4989) showed owners with the highest scorers for propensity to conduct restoration (i.e., top decile) were over twice as likely as average landowners to have conducted restoration (135%). These results demonstrate that microtargeting techniques can dramatically increase the efficiency and efficacy of conservation programs, above and beyond the advances offered by biophysical prioritizations alone, as well as facilitate more robust research of many social–ecological systems.     

Who shapes local climate policy? Unpicking governance arrangements in English and German cities

A new framework for analysing subnational policymaking is applied to climate governance in the ‘twin towns’ of Newcastle upon Tyne and Gelsenkirchen. Low levels of resource interdependence between central and local government in England mean that Newcastle Council has to rely heavily on other horizontal actors to achieve its climate objectives. In contrast, Gelsenkirchen Council receives substantial support from higher tiers of government, which gives it greater control over policymaking within the locality. Greater independence between tiers of government can make it more difficult for subnational bodies to adopt the kind of ambitious policies that may be necessary to combat wicked and/or significant policy challenges such as climate change. Instead, interdependent ‘joint-decision’ systems, which facilitate mutual support across tiers of government, may be better equipped to ensure that subnational public bodies have the capacity to act appropriately.     

淮河支流污染物综合降解系数动态测算

确定河流污染物综合降解系数动态变化规律对提高水环境容量测算精度和水环境管理具有重要意义。通过现场模拟法,采用一维稳态模型测算了淮河支流洪河五沟营-塔桥乡河段COD、氨氮和总磷在枯水期、平水期和丰水期的综合降解系数,COD、氨氮和总磷降解系数在各水期的关系为枯水期平水期丰水期,提出了建议值并利用实测浓度对计算结果进行了检验,结果表明,不同水期综合降解系数吻合情况较好。     

Using the past to contextualize anthropogenic impacts on the present and future distribution of an endemic Caribbean mammal

Island species are difficult to conserve because they face the synergy of climate change, invasive species, deforestation, and increasing human population densities in areas where land mass is shrinking. The Caribbean island of Hispaniola presents particular challenges because of geopolitical complexities that span 2 countries and hinder coordinated management of species across the island. We employed species distribution modeling to evaluate the impacts of climatic change and anthropogenic activities on the distribution of an endemic mammal of conservation concern, the Hispaniolan solenodon (Solenodon paradoxus). We aggregated occurrence points for this poorly known species for the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) and the present (1975–2016) based on museum collections, online biodiversity databases, and new field surveys. We quantified degree of overlap between periods and scenarios with Schoener's D. Through a conservation paleobiology lens, we found that over time humans played an increasing role in shaping the distribution of S. paradoxus, thus, providing a foundation for developing conservation strategies on appropriate spatiotemporal scales. Human population density was the single most important predictor of S. paradoxus occurrence. Densities >166 people/km² corresponded to a near-zero probability of occurrence. Models that accounted for climate but not anthropogenic variables falsely identified suitable habitat in Haiti, where on-the-ground surveys confirm habitat is unavailable. Climate-only models also significantly overestimated the potential for habitat connectivity between isolated populations. Our work highlights that alternative fates for S. paradoxus in the Anthropocene exist across the political border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti due to the fundamentally different economic and political realities of each country. Relationships in the fossil record confirm that Hispaniola's sociopolitical boundary is not biologically significant but instead represents one imposed on the island's fauna in the past 500 years by colonial activity. Our approach reveals how a paleontological perspective can contribute to concrete management insights.