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This article explores the relationship between personal sacrifice and identity work within conditions of profound structural insecurity. We develop the concept of sacrificial labour to describe how individual self-sacrifice aligns workers��� identities to the needs of organizations while gradually foreclosing the actualization of individuals��� desired future selves. Drawing upon qualitative data from a longitudinal study of healthy individuals who enrol in paid clinical trials for the pharmaceutical industry, we make two contributions to the identity-work literature. First, we argue that the ongoing project of building stable and secure identities may become damaging when structural and cultural conditions defy even provisional, fragile attainment of this goal. Second, we reflect on how racialization and social marginalization erode identities and constrain possibilities for identity recuperation. Whereas the identity-work literature often focuses on the agential accomplishments of individuals, we provide a troubling account of how persistent social and economic inequalities confound identity realization efforts.

Using five long-running ground-based atmospheric observatories in Europe, we demonstrate the utility of long-term, stationary, ground-based measurements of atmospheric total columns for verifying annual methane emission inventories. Our results indicate that the methane emissions for the region in Europe between Orléans, Bremen, Białystok, and Garmisch-Partenkirchen are overestimated by the state-of-the-art inventories of the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR) v4.2 FT2010 and the high-resolution emissions database developed by the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) as part of the Monitoring Atmospheric Composition and Climate project (TNO-MACC_III), possibly due to the disaggregation of emissions onto a spatial grid. Uncertainties in the carbon monoxide inventories used to compute the methaneemissionscontributetothediscrepancybetweenour inferred emissions and those from the inventories.

Land-use intensification in agrarian landscapes is seen as a key strategy to simultaneously feed humanity and use ecosystems sustainably, but the conditions that support positive social-ecological outcomes remain poorly documented. We address this knowledge gap by synthesizing research that analyses how agricultural intensification affects both ecosystem services and human well-being in low- and middle-income countries. Overall, we find that agricultural intensification is rarely found to lead to simultaneous positive ecosystem service and well-being outcomes. This is particularly the case when ecosystem services other than food provisioning are taken into consideration. © 2018 The Publisher. This paper has been developed as part of the project ‘Landscapes in transition: synthesising knowledge on trade-offs between land use changes, ecosystem services and wellbeing’ (grant no. NE/P008356/1), funded with support from the ESPA programme. The ESPA programme (http://www.espa.ac.uk) is funded by the DFID, the ESRC and NERC. The research contributes to the Global Land Programme (https://glp.earth). E.C. acknowledges the financial support of the UAB-Banco de Santander Talent Retention Programme and notes that this work contributes to ICTA-UAB ‘Unit of Excellence’ (MinECo, MDM2015-0552). We thank T. Dale for assistance during the coding process.

The process of informed consent is fundamental to basic scientific research with human subjects. As one aspect of the scientific enterprise, clinical drug trials rely on informed consent documents to safeguard the ethical treatment of trial participants. This paper explores the role of heteronormative assumptions within this process, postulating the ways in which the biomedical texts that make up the informed consent process may render gay, lesbian, and non-binary gender-identifying participants discursively invisible. We argue that trial criteria and informed consent practices may reproduce a binary sex and gender system in which ‘male’ and ‘female’ subjects are presumed to identify as heterosexual and engage in procreative sex. This binary is not one of equivalence as female subjects who are able to have children may be wholly excluded or excessively controlled in studies while male subjects are merely admonished to use medically sanctioned birth control methods. Furthermore, we claim that the assumption of procreative heterosexual behaviors may pervade the informed consent process and the mundane practices of biomedical research more broadly. Given that these assumptions have important implications for risk and inclusivity in clinical trials, in the last part of this paper we outline directions for future research on the reproduction of heteronormativity in scientific discourse and practice.