Existential Threat Research Articles

Global Landslide Finder: Detecting the Time and Place of Landslides with Dense Earth Observation Time Series

This paper presents a remote sensing approach for rapidly and automatically generating maps of surface disturbances caused by landslides on the global scale. Our approach not only identifies the locations of these disturbances but also pinpoints the estimated time of their occurrence. Using the Continuous Change Detection and Classification (CCDC) algorithm within the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform, we analyzed two decades of Landsat 5, 7, and 8 surface reflectance data. We tested this approach in five landslide-prone regions: Iburi (Japan), Kashmir (Pakistan), Karnataka (India), Porgera (Papua New Guinea), and Pasang Lhamu (Nepal). The results were promising, with R2 values ranging up to 0.85, indicating a robust correlation between detected disturbances and actual landslide events compared to manually made inventories. The accuracy metrics further validated our method, with a producer’s accuracy of 75%, a user’s accuracy of 73%, and an F1 score of 75%. Furthermore, the method proved well transferable across different locations. These findings demonstrate the method’s potential as a valuable tool for near real-time and historical analysis of landslide activity, thereby contributing to global disaster management and mitigation efforts.

Instrumentalization of Fake News and Fake News Laws: A Content Analysis of Hong Kong Newspapers in Transitional Times

ABSTRACT The debate around disinformation has shifted to the political instrumentalization of the term fake news, a growing global trend affecting both democratic and less-democratic countries. While researchers have paid much attention to the consequences of disinformation or how fake news allegations could harm journalism and democracies, few have examined how the term may be instrumentalized to restrict press and political freedoms in non-Western contexts under an authoritarian turn. Through a quantitative content analysis, this paper explores how the term fake news is used in Hong Kong’s newspapers with diverse political inclinations. The paper goes on to analyze how the discursive uses of the term may be connected to the framing of fake news as an existential threat and to the legitimization or critique of fake news laws. The findings show that uses of the term as an attack to adverse media outlets and political opponents are most frequent in state-owned newspapers. State-owned newspapers are also most likely to frame fake news as an existential security issue and legislation as a solution. Implications of the findings as well as theoretical and empirical contributions are discussed.

Severe cold-water bleaching of a deep-water reef underscores future challenges for Mesophotic Coral Ecosystems

Elevated sea surface temperatures are causing an increase in coral bleaching events worldwide, and represent an existential threat to coral reefs. Early studies of Mesophotic Coral Ecosystems (MCEs) highlighted their potential as thermal refuges for shallow-water coral species in the face of predicted 21st century warming. However, recent genetic evidence implies that limited ecological connectivity between shallow- and deep-water coral communities inhibits their effectiveness as refugia; instead MCEs host distinct endemic communities that are ecologically significant in and of themselves. In either scenario, understanding the response of MCEs to climate change is critical given their ecological significance and widespread global distribution. Such an understanding has so far eluded the community, however, because of the challenges associated with long-term field monitoring, the stochastic nature of climatic events that drive bleaching, and the paucity of deep-water observations. Here we document the first observed cold-water bleaching of a mesophotic coral reef at Clipperton Atoll, a remote Eastern Tropical Pacific (ETP) atoll with high coral cover and a well-developed MCE. The severe bleaching (>70 % partially or fully bleached coral cover at 32 m depth) was driven by an anomalously shallow thermocline, and highlights a significant and previously unreported challenge for MCEs. Prompted by these observations, we compiled published cold-water bleaching events for the ETP, and demonstrate that the timing of past cold-water bleaching events in the ETP coincides with decadal oscillations in mean zonal wind strength and thermocline depth. The latter observation suggests any future intensification of easterly winds in the Pacific could be a significant concern for its MCEs. Our observations, in combination with recent reports of warm-water bleaching of Red Sea and Indian Ocean MCEs, highlight that 21st century MCEs in the Eastern Pacific face a two-pronged challenge: warm-water bleaching from above, and cold-water bleaching from below.

The Coronavirus Pandemic and Mental Health Presentations of Young Children.

Children under the age of four are emotionally vulnerable to global disasters, such as the COVID-19 pandemic given the lack of socialization opportunities and coping mechanisms, and susceptibility to heightened caregiver stress. Currently, the extent to which the pandemic impacted the mental health of clinically referred young children is unknown. To evaluate how children's mental health outcomes were impacted during the pandemic, interRAI Early Years assessments (N = 1343) were obtained from 11 agencies across the Province of Ontario, during pre-pandemic and pandemic timepoints. Findings demonstrated that the number of completed assessments declined during the pandemic. Further, children's emotional concerns differed before and during the pandemic, whereby children exhibited greater emotional dysregulation during the pandemic. However, there were no significant differences when examining caregiver distress, parenting strengths, child distractibility/inattention or behavioural issues. Implications for young children and their families, clinicians, and policy makers are discussed.

Nutritional Composition of Post-Catastrophic Foods.

In addition to current challenges in food production arising from climate change, soil salinization, drought, flooding, and human-caused disruption, abrupt sunlight reduction scenarios (ASRS), e.g., a nuclear winter, supervolcano eruption, or large asteroid or comet strike, are catastrophes that would severely disrupt the global food supply and decimate normal agricultural practices. In such global catastrophes, teragrams of particulate matter, such as aerosols of soot, dust, and sulfates, would be injected into the stratosphere and block sunlight for multiple years. The reduction of incident sunlight would cause a decrease in temperature and precipitation and major shifts to climate patterns leading to devastating reductions in agricultural production of traditional food crops. To survive a catastrophic ASRS or endure current and future disasters and famines, humans might need to rely on post-catastrophic foods, or those that could be foraged, grown, or produced under the new climate conditions to supplement reduced availability of traditional foods. These foods have sometimes been referred to as emergency, alternate, or resilient foods in the literature. While there is a growing body of work that summarizes potential post-catastrophic foods and their nutritional profiles based on existing data in the literature, this article documents a list of protocols to experimentally determine fundamental nutritional properties of post-catastrophic foods that can be used to assess the relative contributions of those foods to a balanced human diet that meets established nutritional requirements while avoiding toxic levels of nutrients. © 2024 The Author(s). Current Protocols published by Wiley Periodicals LLC. Basic Protocol 1: Total digestible glucans Basic Protocol 2: Apparent protein digestibility Basic Protocol 3: Vitamins B1, B3, B9, C, and D2 by HPLC Basic Protocol 4: Total antioxidant activity (DPPH-scavenging activity) Basic Protocol 5: Total phenolic compounds (Folin-Ciocalteu reagent method) Basic Protocol 6: Mineral content by ICP-OES.

Storable, neglected, and underutilized species of Southern Africa for greater agricultural resilience.

The Southern African region suffers from drought and food system uncertainty with increased risks due to climate change, natural disasters, and global catastrophes. Increasing crop diversity with more appropriate and resilient crops is an effective way of increasing food system resilience. We focus on crop species that are native or naturalized to an area because of their increased resilience than those that are not naturally occurring. Additionally, crops that are easily stored are more useful in times of drought and disaster. In this systematic review, we use scientific interest in neglected and underutilized species (NUS) from Southern Africa to help define next steps toward their cultivation and development as a marketable crop. We found that although scientific interest is minimal for storable Southern African NUS, these crops are worth scaling up due to their economic and nutritional value. We outline next actionable steps and specific NUS for production in a more agrobiodiverse and resilient agriculture system.

Global trend and epidemiological profiles of climate-related disasters from 2000 to 2021.

The objective of this study is to analyse the epidemiological profile of global climate-related disasters in terms of morbidity and mortality, as well as to examine their temporal trends. This cross-sectional study analysed climate-related global disasters from 2000 to 2021, utilising definitions and criteria from the United Nations Strategy for Disaster Reduction and the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters. Data were sourced from the EM-DAT database. The study assessed trends over the entire period and compared them with previous years (1978-2000). A total of 7398 climate-related disasters were recorded, with hydrological disasters being the most frequent, followed by meteorological and climatological disasters. Statistically significant differences were noted in the average rates of affected individuals and injuries per million inhabitants. No significant trends were found in mortality rates, but the frequency trends for the entire period (1978-2021) and the subperiod (1978-2000) were increasing and statistically significant. However, the trend from 2000 onwards showed a non-significant decrease, potentially reflecting better disaster preparedness and response strategies under the Hyogo and Sendai Framework. The study highlights hydrological disasters as the most frequent and deadliest climate-related events, with climatological disasters affecting and injuring the most people. The lack of standardised criteria for disaster inclusion in databases presents a significant challenge in comparing results and analysing trends. Establishing uniform inclusion criteria is crucial for effective data analysis and disaster management.

The Global Resurgence of Authoritarianism and Its Existential Threats to Education: Implications for Scholarship in Comparative and International Education

The Global Resurgence of Authoritarianism and Its Existential Threats to Education: Implications for Scholarship in Comparative and International Education

Automated Disaster Monitoring From Social Media Posts Using AI-Based Location Intelligence and Sentiment Analysis

Worldwide disasters like bushfires, earthquakes, floods, cyclones, and heatwaves have affected the lives of social media users in an unprecedented manner. They are constantly posting their level of negativity over the disaster situations at their location of interest. Understanding location-oriented sentiments about disaster situation is of prime importance for political leaders, and strategic decision-makers. To this end, we present a new fully automated algorithm based on artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP), for extraction of location-oriented public sentiments on global disaster situation. We designed the proposed system to obtain exhaustive knowledge and insights on social media feeds related to disaster in 110 languages through AI- and NLP-based sentiment analysis, named entity recognition (NER), anomaly detection, regression, and Getis Ord Gi* algorithms. We deployed and tested this algorithm on live Twitter feeds from 28 September to 6 October 2021. Tweets with 67 515 entities in 39 different languages were processed during this period. Our novel algorithm extracted 9727 location entities with greater than 70% confidence from live Twitter feed and displayed the locations of possible disasters with disaster intelligence. The rates of average precision, recall, and F₁-Score were measured to be 0.93, 0.88, and 0.90, respectively. Overall, the fully automated disaster monitoring solution demonstrated 97% accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to report location intelligence with NER, sentiment analysis, regression and anomaly detection on social media messages related to disasters and has covered the largest set of languages.

Existential risk and equal political liberty

Rawls famously argues that the parties in the original position would agree upon the two principles of justice. Among other things, these principles guarantee equal political liberty—that is, democracy—as a requirement of justice. We argue on the contrary that the parties have reason to reject this requirement. As we show, by Rawls’ own lights, the parties would be greatly concerned to mitigate existential risk. But it is doubtful whether democracy always minimizes such risk. Indeed, no one currently knows which political systems would. Consequently, the parties—and we ourselves—have reason to reject democracy as a requirement of justice in favor of political experimentalism, a general approach to political justice which rules in at least some non-democratic political systems which might minimize existential risk.

Strengthening Micro and Small-scale Enterprises' (MSE's) Resilience and Adaptability to Accelerate Economic Recovery Post-Covid-19 Pandemic in Indonesia

The Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak 2020 opened a new discourse that a global health disaster could trigger an economic crisis. For Indonesia, this crisis was marked by a significant decline in economic activity in almost all sectors, so gross domestic product (GDP) growth was corrected to –2.19%. COVID-19 has had a tangible impact on the decline in the performance of MSMEs. In responding to the global crisis caused by COVID-19, MSMEs must have a crisis management strategy. Efforts to strengthen the resilience of MSMEs amidst the uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic require external support, especially from the government. This research generally aims to improve the strength and adaptive capacity of MSEs to accelerate economic recovery after the COVID-19 pandemic. From the results of the analysis, fintech financing has a significant influence on capital productivity. If fintech sets high interest rates, it will have an impact on reducing MSEs’ capital productivity. The value of loans during the pandemic era for access to online loans has the potential to strengthen the resilience of MSEs from the pressures of the economic crisis. The suitability of the loan value to business needs shows that MSEs whose fintech loans match business needs will be able to increase capital productivity compared to MSEs with unsuitable fintech loans, and the usefulness of fintech loans means that fintech has a positive impact on MSEs’ capital productivity by looking at its effectiveness. Keywords: SMEs, financial technology, capital, productivity

The role of online crisis actors in teachers’ work and lives

ABSTRACT It is not surprising that various sources have recently described the teaching profession in Australia as ‘in crisis’. The consequences of pandemic policy have provided opportunities for groups to exploit the cascading crises facing teachers. We argue the online political ecosystem recognises teachers as a trope useful for retaining or gaining power. Astroturfing is the process by which political actors seek to present policy platforms emerging in an organic way from ‘the people’. We detail how teachers were targeted as political leverage, within political frames that centred vaccinated teachers. We examine theTeachers’ Professional Association of Australia (TPAA), an example of an astroturfed member group. Using a qualitative approach to digital sociology we analysed the strategies used by the TPAA to manufacture a crisis associated with teacher vaccinations and answer this research question: in what ways was digital astroturfing present in the TPAA campaign against mandatory vaccinations? We find sufficient evidence to indicate that astroturfing did occur, and was employed by the TPAA in an effort to weaken traditional union movements in Australia producing a form of union uberfication. Such a development poses an existential risk to existing teacher associations and trade unions and more broadly to the health of democracies.

Unveiling factors shaping distress levels over 2.5 years of enduring adversity

In the face of global adversities such as pandemics, military conflicts, and socio-political unrest, the resilience and well-being of populations can be severely tested. This study examines the fluctuating levels of distress within the Israeli population over a period of 2.5 years, encompassing events like the COVID-19 pandemic and various socio-political and security crises. Utilizing a quasi-longitudinal design, data were collected at thirteen time-points, mirroring the demographic makeup of the Israeli Jewish adult population. Measures of psychological distress, societal and individual resilience, hope, morale, and perceived danger were assessed, alongside demographic variables. Statistical analyses included ANOVA and stepwise regression models. Distress levels displayed significant oscillations in response to adverse events. High distress was noted during the latter stages of the study, particularly following a major security incident on October 7, 2023. The regression analyses identified morale and perceived danger as consistent important associations with distress, with individual resilience also inversely related across all time points. The study reveals the dynamic nature of psychological distress in relation to a range of adversities. Morale emerged as a key buffer against distress, whereas perceived danger was a significant stressor, especially during acute- existential threats. These findings have important implications for mental health interventions and policy-making aimed at fostering resilience and mitigating distress in crisis conditions.

Confronting the United Nations’ Pro-growth Agenda

In this article, we enjoin the United Nations (UN) to forge a path out of our plight of multiple environmental and social crises. With other analysts, we identify ‘overshoot’ – the state in which humanity has substantially outpaced Earth’s capacity to regenerate its natural systems and to absorb our waste output – as the root cause of the existential threats we face. This dangerous condition demands rethinking our relationship with Earth and embarking on scaling down the human enterprise within policy frameworks of equity and rights. We argue that when the UN first articulated its international unity and prosperity mission, it did so within a ‘growth’ paradigm that treats Earth and its nonhuman inhabitants as mere resources at humanity’s disposal. The 1994 Cairo Conference on Population and Development reinforced this agenda, with its sharp turn away from the earlier emphasis on population concerns and their link to environmental protection. Today, it is clear that the UN’s foundational goals of peace, human rights and sustainability flounder within a growth-driven framework of human exceptionalism and nature domination. To correct course and reverse our advanced state of ecological overshoot we urge the UN to lead in contracting the large-scale variables of the human enterprise – population, economy, technosphere – and to resist co-optation by political, ideological and special interest pressures that would derail this mandate.

Significant challenges to the sustainability of the California coast considering climate change

Climate change is an existential threat to the environmental and socioeconomic sustainability of the coastal zone and impacts will be complex and widespread. Evidence from California and across the United States shows that climate change is impacting coastal communities and challenging managers with a plethora of stressors already present. Widespread action could be taken that would sustain California’s coastal ecosystems and communities. In this perspective, we highlight the main threat to coastal sustainability: the compound effects of episodic events amplified with ongoing climate change, which will present unprecedented challenges to the state. We present two key challenges for California’s sustainability in the coastal zone: 1) accelerating sea-level rise combined with storm impacts, and 2) continued warming of the oceans and marine heatwaves. Cascading effects from these types of compounding events will occur within the context of an already stressed system that has experienced extensive alterations due to intensive development, resource extraction and harvesting, spatial containment, and other human use pressures. There are critical components that could be used to address these immediate concerns, including comanagement strategies that include diverse groups and organizations, strategic planning integrated across large areas, rapid implementation of solutions, and a cohesive and policy relevant research agenda for the California coast. Much of this has been started in the state, but the scale could be increased, and timelines accelerated. The ideas and information presented here are intended to help expand discussions to sharpen the focus on how to encourage sustainability of California’s iconic coastal region.

Housing, COVID & Climate: Urban Social Housing Post-COVID Climate Change Mitigation and Redress

This short paper, draws on 40 years of research and advisory work, rather than a single, short-term, finite research project. It examines recent and current examples of urban housing policies, programmes and projects in a wide range of countries in both the Global North and South in its aim order to meet its aim to stimulate and contribute to the search for strategic approaches to the production, maintenance and management of urban low-income group housing; it examines the historical, geographic, cultural/political and economic contexts within which they are set, laying some emphasis on the prevailing existential threats to humanity caused by: (1) global heating, and (2) the pandemic pervasiveness of viral pathogen transmissions and their social, economic and legislative impact on physical settlement planning and management. Emphasis is given to distinguishing between ‘public housing’, for which all governing decisions are unilaterally made by relevant state agencies and institutions, and ‘social housing’, in which non-governmental beneficiary households and enterprises, communities and organisations are engaged in risk- and benefit-sharing partnership with responsible state agencies at all levels of the governance and management of affordable and accessible urban housing. The paper concludes by drawing attention to the urgency of need to build the capability of the extensive range of actors and stake-holders, worldwide and calling for the initiation and dissemination of successful policy approaches and their administration.

WFH at the Maison de Molière: the Comédie-Française’s use of rehearsal to respond to Covid-19

ABSTRACT France’s policy of confinement in response to Covid-19 posed an existential threat to theatres. The Comédie-Française responded with a range of digital and cinematic programming. This article examines Christophe Honoré’s film Guermantes (2021), created following the cancellation of his stage adaptation of Marcel Proust’s Le Côté de Guermantes, and Théâtre à la table, a series of staged readings posted to YouTube between November 2020 and June 2021. These projects are notable for how they centred rehearsal. The article shows how the Comédie-Française mobilised the intimacy of the rehearsal room to compensate for the loss of corporeal presence, and then interrogates Guermantes’s argument for the aesthetic value of rehearsal as an end in itself. However, while these works claim to show the process rather than the product, they in fact show little of the repetitive work of the répétition. Both were also preceded by rehearsals to which audiences were not given access. Noting the proliferation in recent years of rehearsal diaries and documentaries in France, the article concludes by arguing that the Comédie-Française’s response to the pandemic reflects a broader interrogation in contemporary French theatre of the aesthetic value of the rehearsal.

Nonindustrial pretreatment and enzymes can yield sufficient calories from lignocellulosic biomass for human survival

AbstractFollowing a global catastrophe causing reduced sunlight, the environment would become unfavorable for crop growth. Under such conditions, people might need to convert inedible plant biomass into food to meet their daily nutritional requirements. However, the possibility of converting biomass into food under low‐resource conditions has not been thoroughly studied. To address this uncertainty, we evaluated the potential for using resources available in a typical household to extract sugars from willow biomass and meet the carbohydrate needs of an adult. Grinding willow biomass in a household blender for 24 min produced willow particles similar to those produced in a laboratory‐scale Wiley mill. Thermal treatments of these particles with hot water extraction, pressure cooking, or microwaving only extracted 0.5%–0.8% (w/w) glucose from the biomass. Household acid or alkali treatments yielded only 0.5% (w/w) glucose. These sugar yields would be insufficient to provide nutrition to an adult. In contrast, enzymatic hydrolysis of pretreated willow at 50°C for 72 h yielded 2%–8% (w/w) glucose, and pretreating willow with sodium hydroxide and pressure before enzymatic treatment increased glucose yields to 28% (w/w). With this pretreatment approach and subsequent enzymatic conversion, ~1.4 kg of biomass/day could potentially fulfill the energy needs of an adult under post‐catastrophic conditions. We posit that while biomass can be successfully pretreated for enzymatic deconstruction at a household level, producing sufficient enzymes for efficient sugar extraction from inedible plant biomass in a post‐catastrophic environment might not be feasible at the household scale, thus requiring community‐scale infrastructure and coordination.

Probing the humanitarian securitisation approach to great-power wars: from Bush’s ‘war on terror’ to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine

ABSTRACT How do great-power leaders instrumentalise humanitarianism in sustaining the institutional and public mandate demanded by their war agendas? We examine the ‘humanitarian securitisation’ approach adopted by powerful state leaders as the domestic credibility and popularity of their war efforts become increasingly more difficult to guarantee over time. We define humanitarian securitisation as a discursive-hermeneutic process through which powerful initiator states frame the humanitarian crises arising from the terrorism and internal conflicts confronting less powerful target states as existential threats to the former’s own survival to bolster and justify their agendas further. Using Bush’s ‘war on terror’ and Putin’s Ukraine invasion as empirical cases, we argue that the humanitarian securitisation resulting from the artificial insertion of humanitarianism into the securitisation process becomes a double-edged sword that reinforces the legitimising and mobilising powers required by great-power leaders to pursue their narrow self-interests, but at the risk of being entangled into long drawn-out wars that damage genuine humanitarian efforts. In framing these ‘extraterritorial’ humanitarian crises as collective borderless existential threats that all parties affected must decisively defeat, this ad hoc and predatory process of humanitarian securitisation alters the form and substance of contemporary humanitarianism in a way that ultimately exacerbates existing power hierarchies.

Exploring the Mitigation Actions of the Epidemic Impacts on Construction Projects in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Background The construction industry has an important role in the economy of countries, as the construction industry represents 6.1 percent of the gross domestic product in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. A global disaster such as an epidemic causes long-term damage to society, the economy, and related industries. The recent COVID-19 epidemic is one of such disasters. The construction industry was greatly affected by the epidemic globally, as well as in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Methods This research aims to determine the impact of the epidemic on construction projects and shed light on the actions taken to mitigate the impact of the epidemic through a multiple case study of three construction projects in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where a questionnaire and a semi-structured interview were conducted with professionals in these projects. Descriptive analysis and the Relative Importance Index (RII) were used. Results The impact was of high importance on the project time throughout all projects, especially on the project schedule; the RII value was the maximum. Secondly for material delivery within time ranged from 0.8 – 0.91 for RII value and in terms of the mitigation actions taken, communication between project management and employees witnessed maximum effectiveness reached to 83% of participants reported a very effective response, with the help of modern technologies. Most factors ranged from limited effectiveness to ineffective. Conclusion This research contributes to determine the effects of the epidemic and the actions taken to mitigate it, which benefits the organizations and stakeholders in the field of construction and engineering project management, to develop and improve actions, and to prepare and plan for similar circumstances in the future.