Professor Jonghun Kam from the Division of Environmental Science and Engineering at POSTECH used climate model simulations to examine individual effects of aerosols and greenhouse gases produced by human activities, focusing on the spring drought in 2022 that caused severe agricultural damage in the central Andes mountainous region. This research was recently published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, one of international journals in atmospheric science and meteorology.

Drought occurs when there is a prolonged absence of rainfall, leading to a lack of precipitation. It begins as a meteorological drought and progresses to an agricultural drought where the soil loses moisture. More severe droughts can escalate to hydrological droughts, characterized by reduced stream flows. When droughts significantly impact society and the economy, they are termed “socioeconomic droughts.”

The socioeconomic impact of drought is especially severe in societies and countries heavily dependent on agriculture. During the globally severe spring drought of 2022, the central Andean mountainous region of South America (including southern Peru, western Bolivia, and northern Chile), where agriculture is a major industry, experienced greater economic hardship than other regions. However, at that time, a shortage of human resources and funding limited an opportunity to better understand the causes of the 2022 drought.

In the study, Professor Jonghun Kam from POSTECH used 11 different climate models to analyze the impact of human activities on the spring drought that struck the Central Andean region in 2022, the most severe since 1951.

Climate model experiments revealed that human socio-economic activities have increased anthropogenic aerosols in the atmosphere, affecting its chemical composition and worsening the spring drought in the Central Andes. Conversely, the rise in greenhouse gases due to human activities has led to increased precipitation in the region, mitigating extreme spring droughts and reducing the likelihood of such events. Thus, aerosols and greenhouse gases from human activities have had opposite effects on atmospheric chemical composition and precipitation mechanisms.

The study is significant because it challenges previous conclusions that greenhouse gases are the primary cause of drought in South Africa and Iran, highlighting the need for more comprehensive research on the effects of human socio-economic activities.

Professor Jonghun Kam stated, “Some countries are disproportionately affected by extreme weather events due to the climate crisis, yet they often face the lacking of not only human but also financial resources to respond proactively.” He added, “Our goal is to address the global climate crisis by conducting research that supports these countries and thoroughly analyzing the impact of human activities on nature.”

The research was conducted with the support from the Basic Research Program of the National Research Foundation of Korea.

Migratory locusts differ from other insects in the anatomical structure of their olfactory brain, the antennal lobe, which receives and processes olfactory information from the antenna. The locust antennal lobe has a unique and unconventional neuronal architecture with more than 2000 spherical functional olfactory units, the glomeruli, whereas most other insects have only between 20 and 300 glomeruli in the antennal lobe.

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology are interested in how insects perceive odors and process them in their brains. Above all, however, they want to know how odor perception affects their behavior.

“Our goal was to solve the long-standing puzzle of how odors are encoded in the extremely large population of glomeruli, the structural and functional units in the antennal lobe of migratory locusts. This highly complex architecture of the locust antennal lobe has been observed for decades, but the underlying mechanisms of odor coding have remained a mystery due to the lack of suitable methods,” says Xingcong Jiang, first author of the study.

The introduction of the CRISPR/Cas9 method represented a methodological breakthrough for the researchers, as it enabled the establishment of the first transgenic migratory locusts expressing the genetically encoded calcium sensor GCaMP in olfactory sensory neurons. GCaMP is a protein that fluoresces when it binds calcium, which is released into cells when they are active. Using functional 2-photon calcium imaging, the scientists were able to measure and map the spatial activation patterns for a broad spectrum of ecologically relevant odors in all six developmental stages of the migratory locust.

“Our results reveal an unusual functional ring-shaped organization of the antennal lobe consisting of specific glomerular clusters. This glomerular arrangement, which we could confirm by targeted genetic expression of a well-characterized olfactory receptor, is present throughout development, and the pattern of olfactory coding within the glomerular population is consistent at all developmental stages, from the first nymph stage to the adult locust,” summarizes Silke Sachse, head of the Olfactory Coding Research Group at the Max Planck Institute, one of the study leaders.

The migratory locust is not a model organism like the vinegar fly Drosophila melanogaster. Gene transformation was therefore a major challenge for the researchers. Many parameters have to be studied, which makes the process very time-consuming. The unusually large brain volume of the locust also makes it difficult to capture and analyze image data. “We are the first group in the world to successfully apply the site-specific knock-in method to locusts. We know from the literature that the success rate for this type of transgenesis is very low, but we have succeeded,” says Xingcong Jiang.

Interestingly, the spatial coding of odors in the locust antennal lobe reflects the chemical structure of the odors rather than their valence — whether pleasant or repulsive — unlike in flies, for example, where the valence of odors is already represented in the antennal lobe, with pleasant odors activating different structures than unpleasant ones. “We have observed that odors of certain chemical classes evoke a certain pattern: For example, aromatic compounds with similar chemical structure but opposite behavioral significance evoke stronger responses in the peripheral regions of the antennal lobe. We conclude that the representation of odor valence is not encoded in the antennal lobe, but in higher brain centers such as the mushroom body and the lateral horn,” says Bill Hansson, Director of the Department of Evolutionary Neuroethology, and one of the lead authors.

The ring structure of the olfactory code is a unique anatomical feature of the migratory locust. However, this coding mechanism is not necessarily transferable to other locust species. “We wonder whether this ring-shaped structure is a worse alternative or a better solution with advantages over the glomerular arrangement we found in flies. Future studies investigating the rules of odor coding in other insect species will show whether other locust species have developed a similar coding pattern,” says Silke Sachse, who already has further studies in mind.

How insects perceive and process odors and how odor perception ultimately affects their behavior is important for a deeper understanding of the ecological interactions of insects with their environment. This can, for example, help to optimize the control of crop pests such as migratory locusts. “We believe that a better understanding of the odor coding mechanisms in the primary olfactory center of the locust brain will significantly deepen our knowledge of the neuronal modulation underlying olfaction-mediated behaviors, such as the formation of locust swarms,” says Bill Hansson.

Three researchers at UC Santa Barbara have proposed a market-based approach to achieving the 30×30 targets in the ocean. They tested whether a system that allowed countries to trade conservation credits could reduce costs, incentivizing nations to actually meet their goals. Allowing voluntary trade always reduced the cost of conservation, sometimes by more than 90%. The study, published in Science, is the first to draft and analyze a conservation market for achieving 30×30 targets in the ocean.

The 30×30 initiative is one aspect of the Convention on Biological Diversity, a multilateral treaty developed in the early 1990s. In fact, it’s target No. 3 of the larger Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) adopted by the 196 countries that convened for the UN Biodiversity Conference in 2022. It calls for the effective protection and management of 30% of the world’s terrestrial, freshwater, coastal and marine areas by the year 2030 — a goal that many scientists say humanity must achieve to secure our planet’s long-term health. And while the GBF requires countries to commit to conservation targets, it does not outline which areas should be protected, how to do so inclusively or how to pay for it.

“This project started just over four years ago,” said co-author Juan Carlos Villaseñor-Derbez, who completed his doctorate at UCSB’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management. At this point, countries were falling short of the 10% protection benchmark as they drafted plans for 30% protection. “It seemed like most nations were genuinely committed to marine conservation, but that the costs of conserving were preventing some from engaging in it at all.

“At the same time,” he added, “a lot of research had already shown that if you could get nations to cooperate around conservation, you could substantially reduce the costs of conserving.” He and his co-authors realized the world needed an institution, policy or framework that could support this.

Uneven costs and benefits

The cost of protecting acres of ocean is not the only aspect that differs from place to place. The ecological benefits of conservation also vary based on location. Achieving 30×30 in the ocean will require coastal nations to consider potential trade-offs associated with these protections. Because high-value fisheries can coincide with important marine ecosystems — such as coral reefs, seagrass meadows and kelp forests — meeting the obligation could come at a high cost for some nations but not others. “Without an innovative policy solution, the cost of conservation for many nations could stall progress toward 30×30,” said Villasenor-Derbez.

This variability means that trade could incentivize additional gains. Instead of investing in areas with high conservation costs, or low benefits, nations could exchange their duties to double down on regions where protection yields higher returns.

Environmental economists and scientists at UC Santa Barbara’s Environmental Markets Lab (emLab) wondered if a conservation credit system could help meet 30×30 targets in the ocean. They devised a system whereby nations could trade their conservation obligation with other nations through a “transferable conservation market” policy built around ecological principles.

“Like existing mandates, this approach requires every country to protect a certain fraction (say 30%) of its marine habitat,” said Distinguished Professor Christopher Costello, emLab’s director. “But unlike other approaches, we allow those obligations to be traded across countries, within strict ecological constraints.” In this way, countries with higher conservation costs pay others to increase their conservation efforts. This study estimates the potential global cost savings under various trading constraints.

“For example, Norway, which has valuable fisheries, might pay Palau, a country that has already invested significantly in coastal conservation, to conserve additional areas on Norway’s behalf,” Costello said. This enables Norway to fulfill its conservation obligations in another part of the world.

Achieving 30×30 in the ocean

Costello, Villaseñor-Derbez and co-author Professor Andrew Plantinga developed a model to estimate the potential costs and benefits that could be achieved through a conservation market like this. They combined distribution data for 23,699 marine species with fisheries revenue data to build conservation supply curves for the world’s coastal nations.

They then defined “trade bubbles” based on biological and geographic factors. A country could trade conservation credits only with other nations within these predefined bubbles in order to ensure conservation was equitably spread across Earth’s different marine habitats. The authors examined five bubble policies that allow nations to trade within hemispheres, biogeographic realms, provinces, ecoregions, or globally, to determine potential costs.

Regardless of how they tweaked this setup, a market for marine conservation always reduced the costs of conservation. The model estimated savings could range from 37.4% all the way to 98% under the 30×30 target.

“It just highlighted how inefficient it is to require uniform conservation obligations from each nation,” Villaseñor-Derbez said. “After all, national boundaries don’t really overlap or line-up with the distribution patterns of marine biodiversity.”

Savings were highest in a global market, where every nation stands to gain from trade. But a global market could inadvertently focus conservation efforts on only a single type of habitat, neglecting others. That was precisely why the team introduced the trade bubble constraint.

“When nations facing large costs are allowed to trade, they can ask themselves ‘should I conserve in my waters at this high cost, or can I find someone in my bubble that has habitat just as good as mine but at a lower price?'” Villaseñor-Derbez said. The same would be true for a selling nation. They could decide whether to conserve more than they are required depending on the trading price.

Of course, a country could always go it alone, fulfilling their conservation obligations (and theirs alone) entirely within their own territory. Indeed, this is precisely how the 30×30 initiative currently looks. But the authors’ analysis suggests that very few countries will. Most find it far more economical to either buy or sell conservation obligations.

Conservation colonialism vs fair compensation

If a market system were established, some might wonder what would prevent wealthy nations from simply “paying off” their conservation obligations and offloading them onto poorer nations. For Costello, Villaseñor-Derbez and Plantinga, the market itself offers a solution. “All such exchanges are purely voluntary,” said Plantinga, who heads emLab’s Productive Landscapes Group. “The selling nation (the poor country in this example) only engages in trade if they find it advantageous.”

In fact, the market could be a boon for developing nations. The current 30×30 scheme requires even a cash-poor country with high conservation to conserve 30% of their territorial waters. The market approach offers a degree of flexibility: The country can weigh their finances against their conservation costs. They can then decide how much of their obligation to fulfill within their own waters, how much to buy from another nation, and how much to offer up for sale. This flexibility is not possible under the current approach to 30×30.

This system could also incentivize habitat restoration, target No. 2 of the GBF. Nations that tend to specialize in exploiting marine resources could compensate those who specialize in conserving marine biodiversity. “Our approach provides an explicit payment for conserving marine ecosystems,” Costello said. “Under the current system, there is rarely a payment to conserve.”

Lowering costs incentivizes action. This measurable effect is a central tenet of economics employed by governments, companies and industries across sectors and countries. So why not harness this principle for conservation? According to the authors, these savings could be redirected towards solving other pressing issues.

Movement of the inner core has been debated by the scientific community for two decades, with some research indicating that the inner core rotates faster than the planet’s surface. The new USC study provides unambiguous evidence that the inner core began to decrease its speed around 2010, moving slower than the Earth’s surface.

“When I first saw the seismograms that hinted at this change, I was stumped,” said John Vidale, Dean’s Professor of Earth Sciences at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. “But when we found two dozen more observations signaling the same pattern, the result was inescapable. The inner core had slowed down for the first time in many decades. Other scientists have recently argued for similar and different models, but our latest study provides the most convincing resolution.”

The relativity of backtracking and slowing down

The inner core is considered to be reversing and backtracking relative to the planet’s surface due to moving slightly slower instead of faster than the Earth’s mantle for the first time in approximately 40 years. Relative to its speed in previous decades, the inner core is slowing down.

The inner core is a solid iron-nickel sphere surrounded by the liquid iron-nickel outer core. Roughly the size of the moon, the inner core sits more than 3,000 miles under our feet and presents a challenge to researchers: It can’t be visited or viewed. Scientists must use the seismic waves of earthquakes to create renderings of the inner core’s movement.

A new take on a repetitive approach

Vidale and Wei Wang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences utilized waveforms and repeating earthquakes in contrast to other research. Repeating earthquakes are seismic events that occur at the same location to produce identical seismograms.

In this study, the researchers compiled and analyzed seismic data recorded around the South Sandwich Islands from 121 repeating earthquakes that occurred between 1991 and 2023. They have also utilized data from twin Soviet nuclear tests between 1971 and 1974, as well as repeated French and American nuclear tests from other studies of the inner core.

Vidale said the inner core’s slowing speed was caused by the churning of the liquid iron outer core that surrounds it, which generates Earth’s magnetic field, as well as gravitational tugs from the dense regions of the overlying rocky mantle.

The impact on the Earth’s surface

The implications of this change in the inner core’s movement for Earth’s surface can only be speculated. Vidale said the backtracking of the inner core may alter the length of a day by fractions of a second: “It’s very hard to notice, on the order of a thousandth of a second, almost lost in the noise of the churning oceans and atmosphere.”

The USC scientists’ future research aspires to chart the trajectory of the inner core in even greater detail to reveal exactly why it is shifting.

“The dance of the inner core might be even more lively than we know so far,” Vidale said.

About the study: In addition to Vidale, other study authors include Ruoyan Wang of USC Dornsife, Wei Wang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guanning Pang of Cornell University and Keith Koper of the University of Utah.

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (EAR-2041892) and the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IGGCAS-201904 and IGGCAS-202204).

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The recent study found that politics and personal experience played significant roles in people’s responses: Self-identified Republicans were less likely than Democrats to attribute extreme weather events to climate change, though Republicans who had personally experienced negative impacts from extreme weather events were more likely to link them to climate change than those who hadn’t.

Looking at extreme weather events across the board, 83% of survey respondents said there is some link between these events and anthropogenic, or human-caused, climate change. About 17% thought climate change had nothing to do with extreme weather.

“There is a growing field of scientific extreme event attribution to climate change, but we know less about what the public thinks,” said Hilary Boudet, co-author on the study and an associate professor in OSU’s College of Liberal Arts. “This work helps us to better understand public perceptions of event attribution to climate change. What the public thinks is important because these perceptions shape individual behavior and policy support.”

The study, published in the journal Climatic Change, used data from September 2021 from 1,071 adults across the U.S. who participated in a recurring biweekly AmeriSpeak Omnibus survey. The researchers asked respondents about five different extreme climate events — wildfires, heat, rainfall/flooding, hurricanes and tornadoes — and how confident they felt linking the increasing frequency and severity of each event to anthropogenic climate change.

Respondents had to rate their confidence on a scale of 1 to 5, so someone who felt absolutely certain that climate change is to blame for increased wildfires would choose “5” for that question. The survey also asked whether respondents had personally experienced any negative impacts from the five different types of extreme weather.

Researchers found that more than 47% of people were “very” or “extremely confident” in linking increased wildfires to climate change, and roughly 42% of people were very or extremely confident linking extreme heat to climate change.

Out of all five weather event types, Republicans and Democrats were farthest apart on the measure of extreme heat, and closest on hurricanes. Race, education and income also played a role in people’s responses.

The survey did not ask why respondents chose the numbers they did, but co-author Philip Mote, a professor in OSU’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, said researchers have some theories.

For example, the impact of wildfires spreads far beyond the physical flames. During the massive wildfires in eastern Canada last year, New Yorkers 1,500 miles away were suffering from poor air quality as a result of smoke drifting from those fires, Mote said. Conversely, hurricanes, tornadoes and floods in the U.S. tend to affect a relatively narrow areas, he said.

The study also reported how closely the public attribution of extreme weather events aligned with scientific consensus around extreme weather and climate change. Alignment was weakest on the measure of wildfires; Mote linked this to the narrow scientific definition, which only records the number of extreme fires, rather than overall fire weather. The general public is more likely considering all the hot, dry conditions that contribute to worsening wildfires amid climate change, he said.

Researchers say that understanding and improving public perceptions of extreme weather linked to climate change is crucial for maximizing the impact of mitigation efforts, such that resources are directed toward actions that can make a real difference, rather than toward the types of events that trigger the largest public response.

Lead author on the study was recent OSU doctoral graduate Chad Zanocco, now at Stanford University. Mote is also the vice provost and dean of OSU’s Graduate School.

Two-thirds of the areas that are most important to forest birds — including 67 species of migratory birds that breed in the U.S. and Canada and overwinter in Central America — are at increased risk from cocaine trafficking activities, according to the study, “Intersection of Narco-Trafficking, Enforcement and Bird Conservation in the Americas,” published June 12 in Nature Sustainability.

“When drug traffickers are pushed into remote forested areas, they clear land to create landing strips, roads and cattle pastures,” said lead author Amanda Rodewald, senior director of the Center for Avian Population Studies at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “Those activities — and the counterdrug strategies that contribute to them — can deforest landscapes and threaten species.”

In the study, scientists from four universities, as well as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, combined measures of various landscape characteristics and concentrations of migratory birds in Central America to highlight the unexpected connection between a pervasive social problem and biodiversity.

More than half of the global population of one in five migratory species inhabit areas that became more attractive to trafficking following peak law enforcement pressure, measured as the volume of cocaine seized. For example, 90% of the world’s population of federally endangered golden-cheeked warblers and 70% of golden-winged warblers and Philadelphia vireos winter in those vulnerable landscapes.

The largest remaining forests in Central America, which are disproportionately inhabited by Indigenous people — known as the Five Great Forests — are seeing growing levels of cocaine trafficking.

“U.S. drug policy in Central America focuses on the supply side of the equation, and law-enforcement pressure plays a significant role in the movement of trafficking routes and locations of narco-deforestation,” said co-author Nicholas Magliocca, associate professor at the University of Alabama. “After 40 years that approach has not worked. In fact, cocaine trafficking has only expanded and become a worldwide network. It used to be that cocaine was just passing through Central America, but now it’s become a hub of global trans-shipment.”

This study builds upon previous ethnographic and modeling work done by Magliocca and a core group of researchers examining land-use conditions and decisions made by the traffickers themselves based on perceived risk and profit.

“This research gives an even fuller accounting of the harms caused by drug trafficking and the way we currently go about fighting it,” Magliocca said. “Adaptive behavior by the traffickers must be taken into consideration. You have to do more than reactively chase after the drug traffickers, who have nearly unlimited money and power in the region. No question it’s a complex, fluid and dangerous situation.”

“Incorporating measures that build capacity in local communities and governments to monitor and protect their forests, grow alternate forms of income, and resolve unclear land tenure would go a long way,” Rodewald said. “Our study is a reminder that we can’t address social problems in a vacuum because they can have unintended environmental consequences that undermine conservation.”

This research was conducted by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, University of Alabama, Ohio State University, Northern Arizona University, and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service with funding from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Cornell University and NASA.