A diverse, international group of marine researchers and practitioners met to discuss marine identity — based on testimony and photos from multiple countries.

The group included Diz Glithero of the Canadian Ocean Literacy Coalition, Dr Emma McKinley of Cardiff University who helped deliver the workshop, and others from across Europe, Africa, Indonesia, North America, and Australasia.

They found many common themes, including traditions and customs; and dependency on the ocean for recreation, livelihoods, health and sustenance.

They also found differences, such as negative ways the ocean can form part of identity — particularly for those whose communities and livelihoods are at risk from extreme weather.

The group agreed upon a broad definition of marine identity: “An identity rooted in how the ocean as a place supports the sense of self.” This is the first time that an international, cross-cultural definition of marine identity has been agreed upon.

Dr Pamela Buchan, a marine social science researcher, said: “Challenge 10 of the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021-2030) calls for the restoration of society’s relationship with the ocean.

“We know identity drives people more than values — and people react to threats to their sense of self.

“As a result, marine identity could have a powerful impact on protecting and restoring the ocean.

“While many people feel deeply connected to the ocean, they may not think of this in terms of ‘marine identity’.”

By helping to define and raise awareness of the term, the researchers hope to promote “marine citizenship” — people exercising their right to be involved in marine decision-making and taking responsibility for the ocean.

Dr Buchan added: “We can foster this by encouraging easy access to the ocean for everyone, from a young age.

“In the UK, for example, as an island nation, many people have a strong marine identity — but often the sea is seen as something remote, to visit then retreat from.

“We see conservation and management of marine resources as a matter for government policy, and we do not have policies that directly enable local stewardship.

“We hope our research will help strengthen the concept of marine identity, empower people to protect the ocean, and encourage decision-makers to actively consider the relationships that people have with the sea.”

The researchers focused on spike-in normalization, a widely-used molecular biology technique that helps ensure accurate and reliable results. Spike-in normalization involves adding a known quantity of chromatin (DNA and the associated proteins) to a sample before it is studied, which helps researchers account for variations between multiple samples being compared to one another. Spike-in normalization is particularly useful for comparing two conditions — such as to evaluate the impact of a drug (comparing treated vs untreated) or a mutation or a deletion in a key gene (comparing normal vs mutant).

By exploring publicly-available datasets that utilize spike-in normalization, the researchers were able to identify common scenarios where spike-in normalization is easily misused and in which building in additional quality control measures and other “guardrails” into the technique could improve results or avoid misinterpretation. By reanalyzing these data and conducting additional experiments of their own, the team was able to develop a list of nine key recommendations for researchers using spike-in normalization that could greatly increase the accuracy of their results. These measures include ensuring consistent quality control steps are taken, following best practices for computational analysis, and validating the results with other analysis techniques.

“Many studies utilize spike-in normalization, and our results call the biological conclusions drawn from this approach into question,” said senior author Alon Goren, Ph.D. “Our recommendations can help account for some of the pitfalls of spike-in normalization so we can still reap the benefits of this valuable technique.”

The study published on September 13, 2024 in Nature Biotechnology and was conducted by Lauren Patel and Yuwei Cao at UC San Diego and Eric Mendenhall, Ph.D. at HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology. The study was co-led by Alon Goren, Ph.D., and Christopher Benner, Ph.D., both associate professors in the Department of Medicine at UC San Diego School of Medicine.

The results confirm previous studies that the poorest people worldwide bear the greatest economic risks from climate change. Surprisingly, the risk for the wealthy is growing the fastest. Economies in transition like Brazil or China are also highly vulnerable to severe impacts and negative trade effects. Across countries, these countriesface the highest risks due to severe impacts of volatile weather and adverse trade effects.

As the planet continues to warm, these risks are expected to worsen across most countries, with ripple effects along global supply chains, impacting goods and services worldwide.

“In the next 20 years, climate change will increase economic risks from erratic weather,” states PIK scientist Anders Levermann. “The highest risks remain with the poorest around the world. But the increase of economic risk is strongest for the wealthy, in countries like the US and the EU. Consumers all around the world, regardless of their income, will thus face increasing challenges due to global warming — without a transition towards carbon neutrality we will eventually not be able to meet these challenges.”

The authors point out that greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture are now 18 times higher than they were in the 1960s, accounting for about 30% of global warming. Excess fertilizer left on farm soil is broken down by bacteria to form nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas that is 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Strategic efforts to reduce the warming impact of agriculture while maintaining high yields are essential to both mitigating climate change and protecting our food supply from its impacts.

“It is important to recognize that the impact of agriculture on public health, from pesticide usage to water quality, is almost certainly going to be exacerbated with climate change,” said Lewis Ziska, PhD, associate professor of Environmental Health Sciences at the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health and a co-author.

The research found:

• Climate change has broad-ranging impacts on agricultural practices, increasing water use and scarcity, nitrous oxide and methane emissions, soil degradation, nitrogen and phosphorus pollution, pest pressure, pesticide pollution and biodiversity loss.
• Climate-agriculture feedback pathways could dramatically increase agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. Without changes in agriculture, this feedback loop could make it impossible to achieve the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius to 2 degrees Celsius.
• Existing sustainable agricultural practices and technologies, if they are implemented on a wide scale, can greatly reduce agricultural emissions and prevent a feedback loop from developing. To achieve this, governments must work to remove socioeconomic barriers and make climate-resilient solutions accessible to farmers and food producers.

“We need agriculture, but the future of humanity also requires that we reduce agriculture’s environmental harms,” said co-author David Tilman, a professor at the University of Minnesota College of Biological Sciences. “By evaluating new practices being tried around the world we have identified practices that appear to increase harvests while decreasing environmental harm. Once these new practices are tested and verified, we need a farm bill that pays farmers both for producing food and for improving the environment. Enabling better stewardship has tremendous benefits for all of us.”

The researchers looked at all aspects of the relationship between agriculture and climate to determine where new practices are the most effective. While carbon sequestration is currently a priority, an integrated approach that factors in farming efficiency and pollutants like nitrous oxide could deliver much larger climate benefits and a more stable future for agriculture. Practices such as precision fertilizer use and crop rotation can prevent a feedback loop from developing.”

The team identified a number of next steps. First and foremost, stakeholders should accelerate the adaptation and cost-reduction of efficient and climate-friendly agriculture. Precision farming, perennial crop integration, agrivoltaics, nitrogen fixation, and novel genome editing are among the emerging techniques that could increase production and efficiency in agriculture while reducing climate change impacts. They recommend further research on climate-agriculture feedback pathways and new technologies like on-farm robots.

Earth911 Mattress Ranking research is sponsored by Avocado Brands

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends all babies be placed on their backs to sleep. Sleeping on a firm, flat mattress without pillows, blankets, and bumpers eliminates the risk of suffocation. But once a child graduates to regular bedding, environmentally-minded parents will need a pillow that is as safe for the planet as it is for their child.

Most experts seem to agree that introducing a pillow when a child transitions from a crib to a regular bed is safe. This usually happens between 18-24 months of age. Parents should look for a pillow scaled to a toddler’s body — around 12 by 16 inches long and only 2 to 3 inches thick to eliminate neck strain. Ideally, a pillow would also be sustainably manufactured.

As long as your child is sleeping well without a pillow, there is no need to make a change. But eventually, a child’s shoulders will become enough wider than their head that sleeping with a pillow will be more comfortable. By this time the risk of suffocation is small, but a firm toddler pillow filled with hypoallergenic material is safest.

For babies who are too young for pillows, SavvyRest makes GOTS-certified latex crib mattresses that are free from toxic flame retardants, phthalates, or pesticides. New parents know that it can be hard to stay green with a baby. Earth911 has researched the greenest pillow manufacturers, and fortunately, several of them make pillows for toddlers.

Holy Lamb Organics

Ranked very highly on Earth911’s list is Holy Lamb Organics, a family-owned company with a strong environmental ethic. Holy Lamb makes five different toddler and child-sized pillows. All of them use the same Eco-Wool and organic cotton as their full-sized pillows. Their smallest pillow uses wool fleece for a soft texture.

Naturepedic

Naturepedic makes an excellent organic children’s pillow, using PLA (a non-GMO plant-based polyester) and an organic cotton cover to make a machine washable toddler pillow. They also offer a GOTS-certified organic children’s pillow with an organic cotton cover around a blend of PLA batting and organic cotton.

White Lotus

While not specifically made as a toddler pillow, White Lotus’ travel pillow is toddler-sized. Available with four different fillers, the organic buckwheat hull fill is firm enough for safety. Parents can add or remove fill to achieve the appropriate thickness. Buckwheat hulls could be a good alternative for children with wool sensitivity or who find latex memory foam too hot.

Nest Bedding

If you’ve waited a little longer to transition your child to sleep with a pillow, Nest Bedding’s Easy Breather, Jr. child’s pillow is a bit larger and softer than a toddler pillow, but still small enough to be comfortable for a child. This foam pillow is covered in Tencel fabric.

Avocado

We’ve long been impressed with Avocado’s organic mattresses, and the Organic Toddler Pillow continues the tradition. Made with GOTS-certified organic latex, the Toddler Pillos is filled with kapok fiber from a tropical tree that produces an environmentally responsible alternative to synthetic fibers because it is biodegradable, renewable, and harvested without cutting down the tree.

What you surround your child with shapes their future choices. Making the investment in their early health and restful sleep by eliminating synthetic materials made of plastic or other allergy-inducing materials will prepare them to shop with the environment in mind throughout their lives. Set a green example from the start!

The new study finds that more storms form over urban areas and their boundaries than in surrounding areas, and that larger cities intensify rainfall more than smaller cities. The research was published in Earth’s Future, an open-access AGU journal that publishes interdisciplinary research on the past, present and future of our planet and its inhabitants.

“Cities are expected to become more populated and increase in size in the coming decades,” said Herminia Torelló-Sentelles, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Lausanne and the study’s lead author. “Being able to quantify urban flood risk is important for urban planning and when designing urban drainage systems.”

The rain effect has been reported in studies of single cities, but the new research looked for trends and differences across multiple cities. Differences in urban rainfall patterns highlight the need to keep studying storm activity in cities across the globe, Torelló-Sentelles said.

Taking cities by storm

Some storms have rain that falls evenly, like a sprinkler, while others drop rain in concentrated bursts, like a fire hose. The new study finds that cities can turn storms into fire hoses, dropping bursts of rainfall over small urban areas instead of spreading out the rain over a larger area. Those concentrated bursts of rainfall can exacerbate flood risks if city infrastructure cannot handle the deluge.

Most cities are producing more fire hose-like storms than rural areas. Cities are also spawning more storms than their surroundings, and bigger cities are generating stronger storms than smaller cities.

“It’s not only intensity of rainfall that matters when you look at flood risk. It’s also how it’s distributed over space,” Torelló-Sentelles said. “If you have a very large amount of rainfall falling over a very small area, that can collapse the drainage system in an urban area.”

Several factors could be causing urban storm creation and intensification, Torelló-Sentelles said. Cities are generally warmer than their cool, moist and vegetation-dense surroundings, which could cause air to be drawn toward the cities and uplifted. That warm, uplifted air then condenses into rainclouds over urban centers.

Storms are also often formed as air is uplifted over mountain ranges, producing rain clouds at the mountains’ peaks. Like mini mountain ranges, city skylines can create favorable environments for the uplift of airmasses and the creation of storms.

“You can think of a city like an obstacle,” Torelló-Sentelles said. “When a storm is moving toward it, the air can be lifted over and around it.”

Aerosol pollution suspended in the atmosphere over cities may also either enhance or suppress rainfall.

The researchers used seven years of high-resolution weather data from eight cities in Europe and the United States (Milan, Italy; Berlin, Germany; London and Birmingham, United Kingdom; Phoenix, Arizona; Charlotte, North Carolina; Atlanta, Georgia; and Indianapolis, Indiana) to track summer storm formation and intensity in cities and their surroundings. The cities varied in size, climate and urban shape, but all are in relatively flat regions and far from large bodies of water — factors which could influence local rainfall patterns.

The researchers tracked storm formation and evolution outside of and over cities and their boundaries, identifying the average direction, average intensity, maximum intensity and area of each storm.

They found that more storms overall formed over cities and their boundaries compared to nearby rural areas. Storms typically were most intense over city centers, or over the city edges as in Berlin and Birmingham. Larger cities had greater rainfall intensification than smaller cities: in smaller cities, rainfall intensified by 0.9% to 3.4%, while it increased from 5.2% to 11% in the largest cities compared to outlying areas. Some cities also had much higher rainfall intensification during specific times of the day.

Rainfall also became more spatially concentrated over urban areas by up to 15%. Concentrated bursts of rainfall can tax urban water management systems more than rainfall that is evenly distributed.

Strong storms increase urban flood risk

Increasingly large urban areas could generate and amplify more storms than their surroundings, even as climate change continues to intensify storms worldwide. The combined impact of urban growth and climate change could stress urban stormwater systems and lead to more frequent and severe floods.

While the researchers found some consistent trends across all cities, every city changed rainfall patterns in unique ways. For instance, while most of the cities had storms with stronger bursts of rainfall than their surroundings, Berlin and Charlotte had more dispersed rainfall. In Atlanta, storms intensified the most in the daytime hours, while storms in Birmingham only intensified overnight. And unlike the other six cities studied, Berlin and Phoenix did not have more storms initiate over the city than in surrounding areas.

These results highlight the need for individual city planning strategies and studies including more cities, Torelló-Sentelles said. As the climate changes and the world urbanizes, individual cities will need to develop their own adaptation and mitigation strategies.

“We need to study a wider variety of cities so that we can generalize findings and determine which city characteristics have the largest effects on cities’ rainfall-modifying potential,” she said. “The mechanisms driving urban rainfall are quite complex, and we still need to research these processes more.”

Led by scientists from the CICERO Center for International Climate Research and supported by the University of Reading, the research shows that 20 per cent of the population could face extreme weather risks if emissions are cut enough to reach the aims of the Paris Agreement, compared to 70% if limited action is taken.

The new paper, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, shows how global warming can combine with normal variations in the weather, to produce decade-long periods of very rapid changes in both extreme temperatures and rainfall.

Few studies have explored the impact extreme weather will have on different countries. Dr Carley Iles, lead author of the research at CICERO, said: “We focus on regional changes, due to their increased relevance to the experience of people and ecosystems compared with the global mean, and identify regions projected to experience substantial changes in rates of one or more extreme event indices over the coming decades.”

Unprecedented conditions

Large climate model simulations were used in the study to show that large parts of the tropics and subtropics, encompassing 70 percent of current population, are expected to experience strong joint rates of change in temperature and precipitation extremes combined over the next 20 years, under a high-emissions scenario. With strong emissions mitigation, the number is expected to drop to 20 percent, or around 1.5 billion people.

Rapid changes increase the risk of unprecedented conditions and extreme events that currently account for a disproportionate share of the realised impacts of climate change. For example, heatwaves may cause heat stress and excess mortality of both people and livestock, stress to ecosystems, reduced agricultural yields, difficulties in cooling power plants, and transport disruption. Similarly, precipitation extremes can lead to flooding and damage to settlements, infrastructure, crops and ecosystems, increased erosion and reduced water quality. Thus, society seems particularly vulnerable to high rates of change of extremes, especially when multiple hazards increase at once.

Clean-up risks

Dr Laura Wilcox, co-author at the University of Reading, said: “We also find that rapid clean-up of air pollution, mostly over Asia, leads to accelerated co-located increases in warm extremes and influences the Asian summer monsoons. While cleaning the air is critical for health reasons, air pollution has also masked some of the effects of global warming. Now, the necessary cleanup may combine with global warming and give very strong changes in extreme conditions over the coming decades.”

While the new paper focuses on the likelihood of rapid change, the authors emphasise that the results have important implications for climate adaptation. “In the best case, we calculate that rapid changes will affect 1.5 billion people. The only way to deal with this is to prepare for a situation with a much higher likelihood of unprecedented extreme events, already in the next 1-2 decades”, says Dr. Bjørn H. Samset at CICERO Center for International Climate Research. Samset has contributed to the newly published study.