Changes in salinity, or salt content, due to climate change and land use can have potentially devastating impacts on vital coastal and estuarine ecosystems, yet this has rarely been studied until now. This new research provides valuable insights into the threats posed by anthropogenic salinity changes to marine and coastal ecosystems and outlines consequences for the health and economy of local communities in oftentimes densely populated regions.

The research team looked at how climate change-related variations in rainfall as well as local human-made impacts can lead to extreme flood and drought events, affecting freshwater availability and impacting salinity in sensitive ecosystems. As sea-levels rise, saltwater inflows in coastal and low-lying areas can also cause devastating impacts. Certain groups such as microorganisms, plankton, coral, mangroves, tidal marshes, macroalgae and seagrass are most at risk and can quickly face ecosystem collapse.

The researchers warn that salinity changes are predicted to intensify alongside ocean warming, and they stress the urgency of immediately addressing these salinity challenges to safeguard marine and coastal ecosystems and biodiversity.

“There is an injustice in terms of who uses energy, or carbon, for basic or luxury purposes, but it hasn’t been translated into explicit policy yet,” says Yannick Oswald, an economist at the University of Leeds. “In this study, we test policies derived from this knowledge for the first time.”

Several countries — such as Canada and Mexico — have active carbon pricing policies. These policies either price all emissions at an equal rate or target one type of emission, such as heat or fuel. However, past research has shown that, in high-income countries, these policies tend to affect low-income households the most while failing to have a large impact on emissions. This might be because resources such as heat or fuel make up a greater portion of low-income spending and are difficult to do without.

To test the impact of a tax program that distinguishes between carbon emissions from basic or luxury activities, the researchers built a model based on household carbon footprints from 88 different countries. For each country, they designed a tax rate for different types of purchases, ensuring activities that make up a greater proportion of low-income spending would be taxed less relative to activities that make up a greater proportion of high-income spending. In the US, for example, vacation travel would be taxed at a higher rate than heating.

They used this model to test the outcome of either their luxury carbon tax rates or a uniform carbon tax rate. Under a uniform tax rate, 37% of global carbon tax revenue would come from luxury purchases. This increases to 52% under a luxury-focused tax program.

Not only was the luxury tax “fairer” based on household income — affecting low-income households less and high-income households more — it also was slightly better at reducing yearly household emissions in the very short-term. The researchers note that this might be because it is more feasible to forgo luxury purchases than an essential purchase if the price increases.

While the luxury tax proved fairer in all countries studied, the researchers found that, in low-income countries, a uniform tax could also be fair. In South Africa, for example, low-income households already spend much less on fuel or heating than high-income households. Thus, a uniform carbon tax is already targeting high-income groups by design. In contrast, the luxury carbon tax is most beneficial in terms of fairness when applied to high-income countries. This tax can better account for flexible, nonessential purchases in countries like the United States, where it is difficult to avoid carbon-emitting activities like driving a car in a low-income lifestyle.

While this type of policy could make significant progress towards reducing global emissions, the researchers also note that this goal might be difficult to achieve in practice. Few countries have a carbon tax scheme that is currently this rigorous. Luxury-focused carbon taxation also targets high-income groups, which may be the most equipped to lobby against such a policy going into effect.

“Global support by the public for fair climate policies is high, and it is likely that luxury-focused carbon taxes are similarly popular,” says Oswald. “Despite the model’s limitations, the big takeaway is this: when designing climate policies, it is possible to pay attention to the different nature of consumption purposes, and this would improve the fairness of climate policy almost by default.”

Professor Jonathan Rhodes from the School of the Environment focused on koala populations in the fast-developing South East Queensland region and a government scheme which allows developers to make financial payments to compensate for environmental consequences.

“Just like when you make a financial contribution to offset your carbon emissions when purchasing a flight, developers can make a financial payment to the Queensland Government to offset their impacts on koala habitat,” Professor Rhodes said.

“These payments are then used to plant trees to restore koala habitat in offset sites elsewhere.

“But we found that when suitable places to restore koala habitat are difficult to find, the financial payments required under the Queensland Environmental Offset Policy are often insufficient to achieve its intended outcomes and this is a major problem.

“In the South East Queensland region, only 0.7 of 13.4 hectares of impacts on koala habitat offset through financial payments since 2018 so far have offset sites in place and this is concerning for the future of this beloved, endangered species.

“Unfortunately, land supply can make suitable offset sites hard to find and this pushes up the cost of delivering habitat restoration and securing those sites in the long-term can fail to guarantee sufficient gains in habitat to counterbalance losses.”

Professor Rhodes said funding from developer payments may be insufficient to buy enough offset sites for habitat restoration.

“South East Queensland is the most densely human-populated area in the state, growing from 2.4 million people in 2001 to 3.5 million people in 2016, with 5.3 million people expected by 2041,” Professor Rhodes said.

“It is also home to an enormous number of threatened species, including some of the most significant koala populations in Australia which have declined 50 to 80 per cent over the past two decades.

“This problem will become worse as the region expands and competition for land for development intensifies, making offset sites either impossible to find or more expensive to secure.”

The study mapped and modelled development in eight Local Government Areas (LGAs) within the South East Queensland Planning Region, applying ecological data and projecting anticipated development and offset outcomes.

While the researchers propose some solutions, they also call for consideration of immediate changes to the current offset policy.

“On one hand, financial payments by developers can provide flexibility for the State Government to deliver the most effective offsets to help threatened species such as koalas, but on the other hand, it’s essential that developers pay the true cost of those offsets,” Professor Rhodes said.

“Otherwise, offsets will fall short of compensating for habitat losses and species will continue to decline or taxpayers via the State Government will have to make up the shortfall in developer contributions.”

Christofer Skurka, Jessica Myrick and graduate student Yin Yang found that seeing bad news about climate change can make people more afraid over time, but it also may encourage audiences to think about what society can do to address the problem. They published the results of two separate studies in an article titled “Fanning the flames or burning out? Testing competing hypotheses about repeated exposure to threatening climate change messages,” which appeared in the journal Climatic Change.

“The public is surrounded by media coverage about climate change, and this messaging tends to be negative in tone, focusing on the threats that climate change poses to human prosperity and ecological health,” said Skurka, the paper’s lead author and an assistant professor of media studies in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications. “We know from years of research in the field of communication that media messaging can impact our emotions, our beliefs and, in turn, sometimes our behavior.”

The first study involved exposing participants to three days of negative news stories about climate change. A follow-up study consisted of participants reading negative news headlines about climate change in the form of Twitter posts for seven consecutive days.

“We found that three days in a row of reading doom-and-gloom news stories about climate change was linked to greater fear and less hope, which can potentially hurt an audience’s attitude that they can do anything to tackle the problem,” said Myrick, the Donald P. Bellisario Professor of Health Communication and co-funded faculty member of the Institutes of Energy and the Environment. “However, our follow-up study had people look only at headlines and not full news stories for a longer period of seven days in a row. In that study, we found that fear peaked after a few days and then held steady.”

The researchers reported that over time, people who repeatedly saw climate change headlines started to feel like they could do more to affect change and that the topic of climate change was important.

“You would think that as people are repeatedly exposed to threatening climate news devoid of solutions content that their efficacy beliefs will decrease over time,” Skurka said. “We saw the opposite pattern in our second study. People’s efficacy beliefs increased over time. In other words, the more exposure people had to these threatening news stories each day, they were increasingly likely to think that they can make a difference in addressing climate change.”

Skurka said one possibility is that as the public copes with unpleasant feelings about the enormous threat climate change presents, they may convince themselves that they have control over the situation, which translates into greater efficacy beliefs that their actions will make a difference.

“Our findings suggest that people have gotten used to doom-and-gloom reporting around climate change and what may be more important for motivating them to take action is that they see coverage of it on a daily basis,” Myrick said. “This is called an agenda-setting effect, where a topic that is covered more often in the news is then viewed as more important by people who consume the news.”

According to Skurka, decades of research in communication and psychology show that under certain circumstances, fear can be motivating.

“We found that people exposed to the high-threat headlines, which tended to evoke more fear, generally expressed greater intentions to share the information than people exposed to the low-threat headlines, which means there may be an advantage to evoking fear,” Skurka said. “However, people’s responses over time were essentially the same regardless of whether they were shown the high-threat or low-threat news headlines. That tells us that when it comes to over-time responses to repeated media exposure, simply mentioning climate change in the news activates pre-existing emotions and thoughts associated with climate change.”

Myrick added that this does not mean that fear-appeals should be used for all climate change communication. Instead, the more important factor may be communicating hope and solutions.

“For communication to be most impactful, people need to feel like there is still something we can do about it to make a difference,” Myrick said. “That should hopefully motivate reporters and strategic communicators to include information about solutions to climate change in their messaging.”

Recommerce is on the rise as retail locations struggle to attract customers after the pandemic, they are running short of backroom storage space while dealing with a rising tide of returned items. The situation is even more challenging for e-commerce companies, where returns accounted for $761 billion in lost revenue, the National Retail Federation recently reported. Meet Marcus Shen, CEO of San Mateo, CA-based B-Stock Solutions, an online marketplace for businesses that want to resell excess inventory. From the top 10 U.S. retailers, such as Walmart, Amazon, GameStop, and Costco, to small entrepreneurs looking to fill their shelves, businesses around the world use B-Stock to sell and buy returned and unsold merchandise, which is auctioned off or sold directly from the retailers’ distribution center at a fraction of the retail price.

A mind-boggling 21% of online purchases were returned during the 2021 holiday season — which suggests that the cost of returns at Amazon, which does not disclose its return volume, could have reached more than $98 billion in 2021. About a third of the items returned are burned to generate energy, which is the epitome of wastefulness and a symptom of very short-sighted thinking. Add to the idea that useful returned products are burned the carbon footprint of a return trip from the buyer’s home, and you can see how returns can almost double or more the environmental impact of a purchase. In the face of a rising tide of returned and excess inventory, giving those products a second chance at a useful life is critical to lowering the GHG emissions generated by our economy. Explore the crooked path of “reverse-logistics” and how the secondary market can help create a more circular economy.

To learn more about B-Stock and, if you are looking to start a small retail or e-commerce business, shop the excess inventory, visit bstock.com.

The article, published in Science, notes that animal welfare rarely is considered during policymaking, explains why current tools make it difficult to incorporate the well-being of animals into public policy and identifies methods for remedying these issues.

“Animal welfare is often ignored in policymaking, despite its relevance across many domains ranging from food systems to biomedical research to climate policy,” said Mark Budolfson, a faculty member of the Center for Population-Level Bioethics at the Rutgers Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research and coauthor of the study. “Part of the reason animal welfare is ignored is that policymakers currently lack established methods for integrating animal welfare into decision-making.”

According to the researchers, there are well-developed tools for incorporating human welfare into policy analysis, but comparable tools for incorporating animal welfare are in their earliest stages of development. For example, no-kill animal shelters help offset public discomfort with euthanizing unwanted animals. A policy question might be: Should these animal shelters be publicly subsidized to avoid having to euthanize pets if those subsidies diverted resources from other human interests?

New tools, such as those presented by study authors, may help policymakers assess the welfare impacts of a policy like this on humans and animals on a common scale.

“It is commonplace for decision makers to weigh the costs and benefits of different policies. We describe emerging methods that allow animal welfare impacts to be included in those calculations,” said Bob Fischer, coauthor of the study and an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at Texas State University.

Authors of the study suggested conducing interdisciplinary research to develop and refine methods for quantifying interspecies welfare; utilizing measurable correlations between animals and humans; and ensuring animal welfare is included in policy debates.

“There are so many areas where animal welfare matters, such as when governments aim to improve farm productivity while reducing land use and greenhouse gas emissions,” said Budolfson, a faculty member of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at the Rutgers School of Public Health who is also affiliated with the Population Wellbeing Initiative at the University of Texas at Austin. “Unfortunately, some of the most straightforward ways of doing this have negative implications for animal welfare, so policymakers should ask ‘When, if ever, is it better to increase environmental sustainability if it reduces animal welfare?'”

“The bottom line is that it’s a mistake to ignore the effect of our public policies on wild and domestic animals,” said Noah Scovronick, coauthor of the study and a faculty member at Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University. “Our decisions affect other species, and in turn other species affect us, whether it’s through diseases that can be transmitted back and forth, through the productivity of our food supply, or any of many other possible examples.”

“The urgency of climate change requires that all greenhouse gas emissions be abated as quickly as is technologically and economically feasible,” said lead author Eric Davidson, a professor with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. “Limiting nitrous oxide in an agricultural context is complicated, but mitigating it in industry is affordable and available right now. Here is a low-hanging fruit that we can pluck quickly.”

When greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere, they trap the heat from the sun, leading to a warming planet. In terms of emissions, nitrous oxide is third among greenhouse gases, topped only by carbon dioxide and methane. Also known as laughing gas, it has a global warming potential nearly 300 times that of carbon dioxide and stays in the atmosphere for more than 100 years. It also destroys the protective ozone layer in the stratosphere, so reducing nitrous oxide emissions provides a double benefit for the environment and humanity.

Nitrous oxide concentration in the atmosphere has increased at an accelerating rate in recent decades, mostly from increasing agricultural emissions, which contribute about two-thirds of the global human-caused nitrous oxide. However, agricultural sources are challenging to reduce. In contrast, for the industry and energy sectors, low-cost technologies already exist to reduce nitrous oxide emissions to nearly zero.

Industrial nitrous oxide emissions from the chemical industry are primarily by-products from the production of adipic acid (used in the production of nylon) and nitric acid (used to make nitrogen fertilizers, adipic acid, and explosives). Emissions also come from fossil fuel combustion used in manufacturing and internal combustion engines used in cars and trucks.

“We know that abatement is feasible and affordable. The European Union’s emissions trading system made it financially attractive to companies to remove nitrous oxide emissions in all adipic acid and nitric acid plants,” said co-author Wilfried Winiwarter of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. “The German government is also helping to fund abatement of nitrous oxide emissions from nitric acid plants in several low-income and middle-income countries.”

The private sector could also play a key role in nitrous oxide emissions reduction, encouraged by trends in consumer preferences for purchasing climate-friendly products. For example, 65% of the nitrous emissions embodied in nylon products globally are used in passenger cars and light vehicles. Automobile manufacturers could require supply chains to source nylon exclusively from plants that deploy efficient nitrous oxide abatement technology.

“Urgent abatement of industrial sources of nitrous oxide” is published in Nature Climate Change by Eric Davidson of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, Spark Climate Solutions, Wilfried Winiwarter of the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis, Austria, and the Institute for Environmental Engineering, University of Zielona Góra, Poland.

According to the World Economic Forum, between 75 and 199 million tons of plastic waste are floating in and polluting the world’s oceans. The 5 Gyres Institute reports that the volume of plastic entering the seas doubles every six years. There are genuine efforts to develop circular, sustainable packaging amid waves of greenwashing claims. Meet Vanessa Coleman, CEO of Oceanworks, which collects ocean plastics for recycling that it sells to companies committed to using post-consumer recycled, or PCR, plastics in new products and packaging. Oceanworks has developed a network of partners that collect and recycle plastics found on beaches and in waterways around the world, which the Oceanworks Guaranteed® label can identify — these programs’ environmental, social, and recycling practices are reviewed regularly. Oceanworks can provide end-to-end audits of its plastics supply chain to inform packaging designers about where the materials they choose are collected, processed, and remanufactured.

Oceanworks Guaranteed® certified recycled plastics are used in Glad to be Green products, Sperry Seacycled sneakers, Delta Faucets’ Ocean Plastic Shower Head, and many other products. While shoppers can browse these products at Oceanworks’ website, the real action happens in the company’s online materials catalog. It sells recycled PET (#1), HDPE (#2), and polypropylene (#5) plastics, as well as recycled yarns and fabrics, bottles, and zippers made from ocean plastics. Product designers and the teams responsible for packaging get access to a wide range of materials that contribute to a cleaner world as long as they continue to be recycled responsibly. We discuss the National Strategy to Prevent Plastic Pollution, the potential for “advanced recycling” technologies that promise to make plastic as recyclable as metals, and the environmental and recycling impacts of plastics and the additives they contain.

You can learn more about Oceanworks at oceanworks.co.