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Adopting a scoping review method, we examined peer‐reviewed academic papers published about human–lion conflict (HLC) (including coexistence) and identified knowledge gaps. We searched papers published between January 1981 and December 2023 using academic databases, with the key terms African lion, human–lion conflict, human–lion coexistence, and human–lion interaction. This produced 485 records, reduced to 137 after using additional criteria. Ninety‐eight papers were focused on lions in Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and Botswana. Ten pan‐African studies were identified in our review. Our inductive analysis identified four themes related to HLC: attitudes and perceptions toward lions, causes of HLC, consequences of HLC, and mitigating HLC. Some limitations identified in systematic reviews of human–wildlife conflict have been addressed in recent years, such as broadening the geographical scale of research. However, some knowledge gaps remain, including a lack of assessment of mitigation strategies and studies on climate changes impact on human–lion conflict. Addressing the knowledge gaps highlighted in this review will require diversifying the disciplinary composition of the research teams and increasing researcher reflexivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Background Climate change is one of the greatest threats to health that societies face and can adversely affect mental health. Given the current lack of a European consensus paper on the interplay between climate change and mental health, we signal a need for a pan-European position paper about this topic, written by stakeholders working in mental health care. Methods On behalf of the European Psychiatric Association (EPA), we give recommendations to make mental health care, research, and education more sustainable based on a narrative review of the literature. Results Examples of sustainable mental healthcare comprise preventive strategies, interdisciplinary collaborations, evidence-based patient care, addressing social determinants of mental health, maintaining health services during extreme weather events, optimising use of resources, and sustainable facility management. In mental health research, sustainable strategies include investigating the impact of climate change on mental health, promoting research on climate change interventions, strengthening the evidence base for mental health-care recommendations, evaluating the allocation of research funding, and establishing evidence-based definitions and clinical approaches for emerging issues such as ‘eco-distress’. Regarding mental health education, planetary health, which refers to human health and how it is intertwined with ecosystems, may be integrated into educational courses. Conclusions The EPA is committed to combat climate change as the latter poses a threat to the future of mental health care. The current EPA position paper on climate change and mental health may be of interest to a diverse readership of stakeholders, including clinicians, researchers, educators, patients, and policymakers.

In this paper, we estimated the methane emissions by the disposal of sanitary and domestic-use paper consumed throughout Brazil from 1901 to 2016. The apparent consumption of this type of paper from 1961 to 2016, calculated from the data of the FAOSTAT system, was used to estimate the amount of waste disposed of annually in three site categories: sanitary landfill, controlled dump, and open-air, uncontrolled dump. The 2006 IPCC Guide methodology was used to calculate CH4emissions and long-term carbon storage. Nine scenarios based upon the law that establishes the National Solid Waste Policy (NSWP) were examined, considering 100% waste disposal and treatment in landfills or incineration from 2014. The total emission was estimated at 1.967 MtCH4, corresponding to 55.080 MtCO2eq by GWP-AR5, and the stored carbon at 3.724 Mt, corresponding to 13.655 MtCO2eq. CH4emission increased beyond the population growth rate due to an increase in the per capita paper consumption in the country, from 0.02 kgCH4.year-1 in 1961 to 0.30 kg CH4.year-1 in 2016. The NSWP has not yet been accomplished, and the scenarios outlined indicate that, from the point of view of CH4 emissions, it would be more advantageous to carry out incineration instead of applying other waste treatment technologies.

Climate change as a matter had little attention of public debate, especially in developing countries, until the recent floods caused by the dragon storms in the Middle East and the forest fires in the Mediterranean. Egypt, being strategically crucial in Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Arab world, with strong connections to other countries, aimed to go from promises to action and to discover real answers to climate change by building on past COPs. The administration assumed a more prominent role by coordinating the 27th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP27). People started to realize that this is not something only happening elsewhere in the world. Egypt took the initiative; Challenges have been assessed to reach suitable mitigation approaches, and Egypt's first NDC has been issued to meet the global agenda. Egypt's vision was to accelerate global climate action at the UNFCCC 27th Conference of the Parties (COP 27) through emissions reduction, advanced adaptation, and enhanced flow of appropriate finance, prioritizing developing countries worldwide.

While climate change is often understood as a collective action and a market problem, we look at it as a problem of planning and coordination. Long-term planning is necessary to promote structural change, which will be required to keep the Paris Agreement's temperature goals. By encouraging states to develop a long-term climate strategy, the Paris Agreement invites countries to turn anticipatory governance into an international governance instrument. In this paper we explore how these strategies describe countries' climate plans and what the perceptions of government officials are about the potential for realization of these strategies. Using mixed methods, we explore both 1) planning dimensions (actions, actors and policies described in the strategies) by applying a topic modeling analysis to 50 documents; and 2) perceptions of the content and challenges to their realization among domestic policy professionals of four major emitters. Our results show that the strategies lack a detailed discussion on how decarbonization pathways could be materialized and who has the responsibility for implementation of long-term targets. Moreover, rather than being a steering instrument, the strategies are dominated by scenario planning and there is also a lack of attention to political issues. Taken together, we contend that strategies are limited in the way they present the future possibilities of low emissions development. To make them more effective in steering long-term decarbonization, greater attention needs to be placed on potential conflicts, barriers and stumbling blocks that may arise along the way. • Long-term climate planning has potential to shift the way we address climate change. • The language used in the strategies are dominated by technical terms and GHG emissions scenarios. • The strategies tend to reduce the political and social complexities of climate change. • As governance instruments, the strategies lack capacity to guide implementation and guidance on how to solve goal conflicts. • The strategies' main value is to provide a platform for alternative discussions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simple Summary: During overwintering diapause, the gynes of paper wasps (Polistes sp.) are mainly dormant in sheltered hibernacles, protecting them against predators and adverse weather conditions but hardly against low temperatures. By measuring the temperature inside hibernacles occupied by species from both Mediterranean (Italian; P. dominula, P. gallicus) and temperate (Austrian; P. dominula) climates (mean hibernacle temperatures: 8.5 °C and 3.2 °C, respectively), we were able to calculate the energetic demand of overwintering. The cumulative energetic costs differed between the populations. Costs were lowest for the P. dominula population from the cooler Austrian winter climate and significantly higher in P. dominula and P. gallicus from the warmer Italian climate. The lower costs of the temperate species were a result of the lower winter temperature and physiological acclimation processes. Energetic calculations with an assumed temperature increase of up to 3 °C due to climate change predict a dramatic increase of up to 40% in overwintering costs in all species. Gynes of paper wasps (Polistes sp.) spend the cold season in sheltered hibernacles. These hibernacles protect against predators and adverse weather conditions but offer only limited protection against low temperatures. During overwintering diapause, wasps live on the energy they store. We investigated the hibernacles' microclimate conditions of species from the Mediterranean (Italy, P. dominula, P. gallicus) and temperate (Austria, P. dominula) climates in order to describe the environmental conditions and calculate the energetic demand of overwintering according to standard metabolic rate functions. The temperatures at the hibernacles differed significantly between the Mediterranean and temperate habitats (average in Austria: 3.2 ± 5.71 °C, in Italy: 8.5 ± 5.29 °C). In both habitats, the hibernacle temperatures showed variance, but the mean hibernacle temperature corresponded closely to the meteorological climate data. Cumulative mass-specific energetic costs over the studied period were the lowest for the temperate P. dominula population compared with both Mediterranean species. The lower costs of the temperate species were a result of the lower hibernacle temperature and acclimation to lower environmental temperatures. Model calculations with an increased mean temperature of up to 3 °C due to climate change indicate a dramatic increase of up to 40% in additional costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropogenic activity is considered a central driver of current climate change. A recent paper, studying the consensus regarding the hypothesis that the recent increase in global temperature is predominantly human-made via the emission of greenhouse gasses (see text for reference), argued that the scientific consensus in the peer-reviewed scientific literature pertaining to this hypothesis exceeds 99%. This conclusion was reached after the authors scanned the abstracts and titles of some 3000 papers and mapped them according to their (abstract) statements regarding the above hypothesis. Here, we point out some major flaws in the methodology, analysis, and conclusions of the study. Using the data provided in the study, we show that the 99% consensus, as defined by the authors, is actually an upper limit evaluation because of the large number of "neutral" papers which were counted as pro-consensus in the paper and probably does not reflect the true situation. We further analyze these results by evaluating how so-called "skeptic" papers fit the consensus and find that biases in the literature, which were not accounted for in the aforementioned study, may place the consensus on the low side. Finally, we show that the rating method used in the study suffers from a subjective bias which is reflected in large variations between ratings of the same paper by different raters. All these lead to the conclusion that the conclusions of the study does not follow from the data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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It is important to classify academic papers in a fine-grained manner to uncover deeper implicit themes and semantics in papers for better semantic retrieval, paper recommendation, research trend prediction, topic analysis, and a series of other functions. Based on the ontology of the climate change domain, this study used an unsupervised approach to combine two methods, syntactic structure and semantic modeling, to build a framework of subject-indexing techniques for academic papers in the climate change domain. The framework automatically indexes a set of conceptual terms as research topics from the domain ontology by inputting the titles, abstracts and keywords of the papers using natural language processing techniques such as syntactic dependencies, text similarity calculation, pre-trained language models, semantic similarity calculation, and weighting factors such as word frequency statistics and graph path calculation. Finally, we evaluated the proposed method using the gold standard of manually annotated articles and demonstrated significant improvements over the other five alternative methods in terms of precision, recall and F1-score. Overall, the method proposed in this study is able to identify the research topics of academic papers more accurately, and also provides useful references for the application of domain ontologies and unsupervised data annotation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainable degrowth offers effective alternative strategies for tackling social and environmental problems such as climate crisis, resource depletion, biodiversity loss, and species hecatomb. However, it plays a marginal role in policy. Moreover, researchers need to operationalise many degrowth proposals in a more sufficient way for the policy. This mainly conceptual-methodological article conceptualises the problem of sustainable degrowth in policy as the problem of knowledge utilisation. How well research papers on the topic adapt to the needs of policy-makers is an important factor influencing this utilisation. This adaptation is under the control of researchers and may be seen as a necessary first step in the introduction of degrowth proposals into policy-making and further implementation. I argue that translating research papers into legislative drafts by researchers can be understood as adaptation of these papers to the policy-makers' needs. This is because the law can be understood as universal basis of public policies and fundamental language to express these policies. The legal system has a systematic, hierarchical, and logical structure while its language tends to be precise, clear, and unambiguous. Legal language may also be salient for many policy-makers. I labelled this way of adaptation as the Translational Legal Approach to Knowledge Utilisation (TLA). It can be applied beyond texts on sustainable degrowth as well. Based on the literature review, I theoretically and conceptually discuss the aforementioned hypotheses by looking at the corresponding criteria of research adaptation with characteristics of law and legal language. I provide the strongest support for the theses that translation of research papers into provisions of legislative drafts can increase readability, comprehensibility, precision, and operationalisation of degrowth research proposals, as well as helps to give them more systemic nature and incorporate policy-makers' context. Future research is needed to create a methodological framework for TLA as well as to empirically verify hypotheses made in this article. • Degrowth plays a marginal role in policies and needs better operationalisation. • The role of degrowth in policy can be seen as a problem of knowledge utilisation. • Law could be a common language between researchers and policy-makers. • Translating research papers into legislative drafts adapts them for policy-makers. • Translating degrowth proposals into legislative drafts supports their utilisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate-change-induced unpredictable weather patterns are adversely affecting global agricultural productivity, posing a significant threat to sustainability and food security, particularly in developing regions. Wealthier nations can invest substantially in measures to mitigate climate change's impact on food production, but economically disadvantaged countries face challenges due to limited resources and heightened susceptibility to climate change. To enhance climate resilience in agriculture, technological solutions such as the Internet of Things (IoT) are being explored. This paper introduces a digital twin as a technological solution for monitoring and controlling temperatures in a greenhouse tunnel situated in Stellenbosch, South Africa. The study incorporates an aeroponics trial within the tunnel, analysing temperature variations caused by the fan and wet wall temperature regulatory systems. The research develops an analytical model and employs a support vector regression algorithm as an empirical model, successfully achieving accurate predictions. The analytical model demonstrated a root mean square error (RMSE) of 2.93 °C and an R 2 value of 0.8, while the empirical model outperformed it with an RMSE of 1.76 °C and an R 2 value of 0.9 for a one-hour-ahead simulation. Potential applications and future work using these modelling techniques are then discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper by K. L. Blaxter and J. L. Clapperton (1965) 'Prediction of the amount of methane produced by ruminants. Br J Nutr 19, 511–522' has been cited 656 times according to Web of Science and continues to be cited with increasing frequency to the present day. The analysis described in the paper, or meta-analysis as it would be known now, is of methane production from cattle and sheep based on forty-eight trials using closed-circuit respiration chambers, all carried out at the Hannah Research Institute, Ayr, UK, between 1955 and 1965. Methane emissions per unit of diet fed were shown to vary depending on diet, level of feeding and individual animal. As such, previous notions that methane emissions were essentially proportional to energy intake were set aside. The main reasons for the paper's continuing citation are the set of equations that can be used to predict methane emissions from ruminants when the technically demanding respiration chambers are unavailable, and that it was the first definitive study to describe the complexities of methane emissions with respect to animals and diets. The paper thus provided abundant insights of the relations between ruminant methane emissions and nutritional biology, and rumen microbiology, in particular, that have informed countless research projects in the intervening half-century. Given the importance of methane as a greenhouse gas in the climate change scenario, these insights are at least as relevant today as they were in 1965. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rising population and the ongoing climate crisis call for improved means to monitor and optimise agriculture. A promising approach to tackle current challenges in food production is the early diagnosis of plant diseases through non-invasive methods, such as the detection of volatiles. However, current devices for detection of multiple volatiles are based on electronic noses, which are expensive, require complex circuit assembly, may involve metal oxides with heating elements, and cannot easily be adapted for some applications that require miniaturisation or limit front-end use of electronic components. To address these challenges, a low-cost optoelectronic nose using chemo-responsive colorimetric dyes drop-casted onto filter paper has been developed in the current work. The final sensors could be used for the quantitative detection of up to six plant volatiles through changes in colour intensities with a sub-ppm level limit of detection, one of the lowest limits of detection reported so far using colorimetric gas sensors. Sensor colouration could be analysed using a low-cost spectrometer and the results could be processed using a microcontroller. The measured volatiles could be used for the early detection of plant abiotic stress as early as two days after exposure to two different stresses: high salinity and starvation. This approach allowed a lowering of costs to GBP 1 per diagnostic sensing paper. Furthermore, the small size of the paper sensors allows for their use in confined settings, such as Petri dishes. This detection of abiotic stress could be easily achieved by exposing the devices to living plants for 1 h. This technology has the potential to be used for monitoring of plant development in field applications, early recognition of stress, implementation of preventative measures, and mitigation of harvest losses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rainfall is one of the remarkable hydrologic variables that is directly connected to the sustainable environment for any region over the globe. The present study aims to review different research papers on rainfall forecasting using artificial intelligence (AI) models including a bibliographic assessment of the most popular AI models and a comparison of the results based on the accuracy parameters. 39 journal papers, published in renowned international journals from 2000 to 2023, were studied extensively to categorize modeling techniques, best models, characteristics of input data, the period for the input variables, data division, and so forth. Although certain drawbacks still exist, the results of reviewed studies suggest that AI models may help simulate rainfall in various geographic locations. In some cases, the data splitting mechanism was delivered to the model itself so that the model accuracy gets improved. The recommendations from the reviewed papers will help future researchers fill the research gaps, especially tuning the hyperparameters while building the training models. Hybrid models were advised in some cases to minimize the gap between the simulated and the observed data. All recommendations from reviewed papers aimed to achieve a resilient rainfall forecasting model in the era of climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change is impacting many aspects of human life in many ways. In Ghana, climate change knowledge remains low and discussions linking climate change and health are scarce. In this paper, authors contribute to the shaping of discussions about climate and health with a focus on how climate change increases certain ailments. First, the paper addresses the need for research in Ghanaian communities to link climate change and health. Second, the paper suggests the development of policies to address the link. Third, public health educators are advised in this paper to educate the public. Plain Language Summary: The paper addresses the link between climate change and health. Authors call for this link to be considered in Ghana and policies developed to meet worsening health problems. Key Points: Climate change is an important driver of negative health outcomesClimate change exacerbates the already precarious health inequality in GhanaResearchers, policymakers, and public health educators should focus on the impact of climate change on health in Ghana [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review research paper delves into the pivotal domain of Green Supply Chain Management (GSCM), exploring the strategies employed by businesses to adopt and implement eco-friendly practices. As the global community grapples with the pressing challenges of climate change and environmental degradation, organizations are increasingly recognizing the imperative to integrate sustainability into their supply chain operations. The paper begins by providing a comprehensive overview of the conceptual framework underpinning GSCM, emphasizing its role in fostering environmental stewardship and corporate responsibility. Subsequently, it delves into a meticulous analysis of diverse strategies that enterprises employ to imbue their supply chains with environmentally conscious practices. These strategies encompass procurement of sustainable materials, eco-design, waste reduction, energy efficiency, and the adoption of green technologies. Furthermore, the review elucidates the multifaceted benefits accruing from the adoption of GSCM, ranging from cost savings and enhanced brand reputation to regulatory compliance and risk mitigation. The paper also navigates through the challenges faced by businesses in implementing green strategies, including initial investment costs, stakeholder alignment, and supply chain complexities. The synthesis of findings from various empirical studies and industry reports facilitates the identification of emerging trends and best practices in GSCM. Additionally, the paper offers insights into the role of technology, government policies, and collaboration among supply chain partners in advancing eco-friendly initiatives. This review paper contributes to the burgeoning discourse on sustainable business practices by providing a nuanced understanding of GSCM strategies. It serves as a valuable resource for academics, practitioners, and policymakers seeking to foster eco-friendly supply chain practices in the pursuit of a more sustainable and resilient global economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]