Abstract Dietary shifts are needed to align the global food systems with the planetary boundaries and contribute to Sustainable Development Goals. We employed a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) framework, extended with indicators on human health and animal welfare, to assess 2020 food consumption data (N=189) collected through an online survey in the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolis (Germany). Feasible optimisation scenarios representing alternative sustainable choices towards overarching environmental, societal and policy goals were explored. Meat and meat products contributed most to overall environmental impacts (e.g., climate change, terrestrial acidification), and fish and seafood to animal welfare loss (e.g., animal lives lost, animal life years suffered). Sodium intake was the most contributing risk factor for life minutes lost. The combined optimisation scenario reduces 55% of greenhouse gas emissions, improves human health indicators by 25% and reduces animal welfare loss substantially (by 52-97%). This is possible with a shift towards flexitarian and vegetarian dietary scenarios. Although the sample is not representative of the entire population, optimisations deliver sustainability improvements with few changes in dietary scenarios. The extended LCA framework can assess the implications of food consumption towards One Health, provided that further indicators on animal health are developed.

Enacting stringent climate policy has proven politically challenging, not least because of concentrated losses in fossil fuel-producing communities. “Just transition” strategies have been proposed to mitigate this distributional challenge. Yet, little is known about how such strategies affect voting behavior. Using a mixed-methods approach, we exploit a local climate policy in Spain—a “Just Transition Agreement” (JTA) to phase out coalmining, support affected workers, and invest in affected municipalities—which was negotiated by the incumbent Socialist Party (PSOE) government with affected unions and businesses shortly before a national election. A difference-in-differences study shows that PSOE’s vote share in coalmining municipalities increased at the 2019 election relative to similar municipalities, implying that the JTA was electorally successful. Further statistical tests and elite interviews suggest that this electoral boost was driven by unions’ support of the JTA. Our findings have implications for how parties can craft popular climate policy.

Growing awareness of global challenges and increasing pressures on the farming sector, including the urgent requirement to rapidly cut greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions, emphasize the need for sustainable production, which is particularly relevant for dairy production systems. Comparing dairy production systems across the three sustainability dimensions is a considerable challenge, notably due to the heterogeneity of production conditions in Europe. To overcome this, we developed an ex post multicriteria assessment tool that adopts a holistic approach across the three sustainability dimensions. This tool is based on the DEXi framework, which associates a hierarchical decision model with an expert perspective and follows a tree shaped structure; thus, we called it the DEXi-Dairy tool. For each dimension of sustainability, qualitative attributes were defined and organized in themes, sub-themes, and indicators. Their choice was guided by three objectives: (i) better describe main challenges faced by European dairy production systems, (ii) point out synergies and trade-offs across sustainability dimensions, and (iii) contribute to the identification of GHG mitigation strategies at the farm level. Qualitative scales for each theme, sub-theme, and indicator were defined together with weighting factors used to aggregate each level of the tree. Based on selected indicators, a list of farm data requirements was developed to populate the sustainability tree. The model was then tested on seven case study farms distributed across Europe. DEXi-Dairy presents a qualitative method that allows for the comparison of different inputs and the evaluation of the three sustainability dimensions in an integrated manner. By assessing synergies and trade-offs across sustainability dimensions, DEXi-Dairy is able to reflect the heterogeneity of dairy production systems. Results indicate that, while trade-offs occasionally exist among respective selected sub-themes, certain farming systems tend to achieve a higher sustainability score than others and hence could serve as benchmarks for further analyses.

Abstract Globally, land and seascapes across the bioculturally diverse tropics are in transition. Impacted by the demands of distant consumers, the processes of global environmental change and numerous interventions seeking climate, conservation and development goals, these transitions have the potential to impact the relationships and plurality of values held between people and place. This paper is a Synthesis of seven empirical studies within the Special Feature (SF): ‘What is lost in transition? Capturing the impacts of conservation and development interventions on relational values and human wellbeing in the tropics’. Through two Open Forum workshops, and critical review, contributing authors explored emergent properties across the papers of the SF. Six core themes were identified and are subsumed within broad categories of: (i) the problem of reconciling scale and complexity, (ii) key challenges to be overcome for more plural understanding of social dimensions of landscape change and (iii) ways forward: the potential of an environmental justice framework, and a practical overview of methods available to do so. The Synthesis interprets disparate fields and complex academic work on relational values, human well‐being and de‐colonial approaches in impact appraisal. It offers a practical and actionable catalogue of methods for plural valuation in the field, and reflects on their combinations, strengths and weaknesses. The research contribution is policy relevant because it builds the case for why a more plural approach in intervention design and evaluation is essential for achieving more just and sustainable futures, and highlights some of the key actions points deemed necessary to achieve such a transition to conventional practice. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

Despite being well adapted to the long seasonal droughts of the Mediterranean Basin, the holm oak (Quercus ilex L. subsp. ballota (Desf.) Samp.) has undergone a gradual decline during the last decades. The reasons of this decline are not fully understood, but evidence suggests that the quality and quantity of the interactions of holm oaks with the soil microbiota are playing a central role in the resilience of this species. With the aim to test the previous statement as our hypothesis, 9 oak savannah sites (called dehesas from here on) were sampled, in which asymptomatic (healthy) and symptomatic (early stage of decline) trees were interspersed. Using high throughput amplicon sequencing, soil bacterial and fungal biota (called soil microbiota from here on) were sequenced. Our results showed that soil fungal community composition differed between healthy and declining trees whereas bacterial communities did not show significant differences. Specifically, the degree of holm-oak defoliation was negatively correlated to the relative abundance of ectomycorrhizal (ECM) fungi and fungal endophytes, suggesting a relation between trees' health and soil fungal symbionts. Although our observational study cannot give a final answer to the directionality of the relationships observed, our results support the idea that small changes in symbiont abundance might be causing holm oaks to lose their ability to withstand the strong environmental pressures.

AbstractCoupled human‐water systems (CHWS) are diverse and have been studied across a wide variety of disciplines. Integrating multiple disciplinary perspectives on CHWS provides a comprehensive and actionable understanding of these complex systems. While interdisciplinary integration has often remained elusive, specific combinations of disciplines might be comparably easier to integrate (compatible), and/or their combination might be particularly likely to uncover previously unobtainable insights (complementary). This paper systematically identifies such promising combinations by mapping disciplines along a common set of topical, philosophical, and methodological dimensions. It also identifies key challenges and lessons for multidisciplinary research teams seeking to integrate highly promising (complementary) but poorly compatible disciplines. Applied to eight disciplines that span the environmental physical sciences and the quantitative and qualitative social sciences, we found that promising combinations of disciplines identified by the typology broadly reproduce patterns of recent interdisciplinary collaborative research revealed by a bibliometric analysis. We also found that some disciplines are centrally located within the typology by being compatible and complementary to multiple other disciplines along distinct dimensions. This points to the potential for these disciplines to act as catalysts for wider interdisciplinary integration.This article is categorized under: Engineering Water > Methods Human Water > Methods Science of Water > Methods

Despite having some fluctuations and the impact of the COVID-19 crisis, the demand for flights had a general growing trend for the past years. As the airspace is limited, efforts to better manage the total number of flights are noteworthy. In addition, volatility (i.e., unpredicted changes) in the number of flights has been observed to be increasing. Efforts to improve flight forecasting are thus necessary to improve air traffic efficiency and reduce costs. In this study, volatility in the number of flights is estimated based on past trends, and the outcomes are used to project future levels. This enables risk situations such as having to manage unexpectedly high numbers of flights to be predicted. The methodological approach analyses the Functional Airspace Block of Central Europe (FABEC). Based on the number of flights for 2015–2019, the following are calculated: historic mean, variance, volatility, 95th percentile, flights per hour and flights per day of the week in different time zones in six countries. Due to the nature of air traffic and the overdispersion observed, this study uses counting data models such as negative binomial regressions. This makes it possible to calculate risk measures including expected shortfall (ES) and value at risk (VaR), showing for each hour that the number of flights can exceed planned levels by a certain number. The study finds that in Germany and Belgium at 13:00 h there is a 5% worst-case possibility of having averages of 683 and 246 flights, respectively. The method proposed is useful for planning under uncertainties. It is conducive to efficient airspace management, so risk indicators help Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs) to plan for low-probability situations in which there may be large numbers of flights.

Early energy analyses of agriculture revealed that behind higher labor and land productivity of industrial farming, there was a decrease in energy returns on energy (EROI) invested, in comparison to more traditional organic agricultural systems. Studies on recent trends show that efficiency gains in production and use of inputs have again somewhat improved energy returns. However, most of these agricultural energy studies have focused only on external inputs at the crop level, concealing the important role of internal biomass flows that livestock and forestry recirculate within agroecosystems. Here, we synthesize the results of 82 farm systems in North America and Europe from 1830 to 2012 that for the first time show the changing energy profiles of agroecosystems, including livestock and forestry, with a multi-EROI approach that accounts for the energy returns on external inputs, on internal biomass reuses, and on all inputs invested. With this historical circular bioeconomic approach, we found a general trend towards much lower external returns, little or no increases in internal returns, and almost no improvement in total returns. This “energy trap” was driven by shifts towards a growing dependence of crop production on fossil-fueled external inputs, much more intensive livestock production based on feed grains, less forestry, and a structural disintegration of agroecosystem components by increasingly linear industrial farm managements. We conclude that overcoming the energy trap requires nature-based solutions to reduce current dependence on fossil-fueled external industrial inputs and increase the circularity and complexity of agroecosystems to provide healthier diets with less animal products.

Abstract Monte Perdido Glacier, located in the central Pyrenees, is one of the southernmost glaciers in Europe. Due to climate change, this glacier is suffering an accelerated mass loss, especially in the last decades. If the current trends persist, this glacier is expected to disappear in the next 50 years. As part of the efforts of the scientific community to increase the knowledge about this glacier, this research presents the first microstructural characterization of the Monte Perdido Glacier, focused on a high-impurity concentration segment that belongs to an ice core drilled in 2017. The results reveal the ice has a layering defined by air bubbles and non-soluble impurities. The bubble-defined layering exhibits features of both a primary (sedimentary) and a secondary (strain-induced) origin. We found a clear inverse correspondence between the particle concentration and the grains' size and roundness index. A preliminary micro-Raman characterization of the particles shows the occurrence of atacamite, anatase (likely related to ancient mining activities in the vicinity of the glacier) and quartz. The latter could be an indicator of mineral dust, probably suggesting the arrival of dust-laden air masses from the north of the African continent.