Invest in Our Planet. That’s the theme for Earth Day 2022, coming up on April 22. How are you celebrating Earth Day? There’s so much you can do to invest in our planet, from joining a cleanup, planting trees, and civic action to hosting an event online or in your community.

We have a chance to completely rethink everything, from what we’re eating, to what we’re wearing, to what we’re sitting on, to our buildings and cars, everything. It’s happening, but it could happen at lightning speed if we bring the companies in, if we bring in and celebrate and support the inventors, if we find a way to educate our kids and promote climate literacy.” —Kathleen Rogers, president of EarthDay.org

Join an Earth Day Event

One of the easiest ways to take action is by participating in a local cleanup. Find a cleanup near you on the Great Global Cleanup interactive map. You can also find additional events to join on the Earth Day event map. Check back for additional events that will be added to the map as we get closer to Earth Day.

If you can’t wait until Earth Day to take action, no problem! Check out 52 Ways To Invest in Our Planet for a list of practical actions you can take now or any day.

Host an Earth Day Event

Donate to EarthDay.org

Unable to participate in an event? EarthDay.org works to diversify, educate, and activate the environmental movement worldwide to drive positive action for our planet. You can support this work by donating to EarthDay.org (previously the Earth Day Network). (EarthDay.org is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization.)

The study, led by researchers from the University of Michigan in collaboration with Florida Atlantic University, Temple University, and the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, National Institutes of Health, used genetically engineered mice to examine the neural and behavioral effects of a choline transporter (CHT) variant. Prior work by the team has shown that the variant associated with heightened distractibility in humans, though whether the variant was itself causal for inattention was unclear.

In the new study, researchers made a single change in the gene encoding the neuronal CHT and then searched for physiological changes in the brain, focusing on their ability to sustain production and release of the powerful brain chemical acetylcholine, which is synthetized from choline.

In humans, disruption of acetylcholine signaling impairs one’s capacity to filter distractors and to perform focus-demanding tasks. A total loss of CHT function in mice and people leads to early death due to the role played by acetylcholine in muscle contraction, particularly the muscles that control breathing. Lesser reductions in CHT activity allow for normal growth and movement, but mice with these changes exhibit premature fatigue when made to run on a treadmill. Work from the new study reveals that the mice show signs of mental fatigue as well.

Results of the study, published in The Journal of Neuroscience, indicate that the CHT gene variant known as Val89, reduces the rate of choline uptake and the capacity to sustain acetylcholine production during attention-demanding conditions, effects that lead to diminished cognitive performance when the mice are faced with attentional challenges. Evidence from the mouse studies provides direct evidence that Val89 drives increased vulnerability to distraction and provides a mechanistic basis for the diminished frontal cortex activation observed in Val89-expressing humans.

“Our mouse studies, along with prior behavioral and brain imaging studies, indicate that a single copy of the variant is sufficient to change acetylcholine availability and its resulting cognitive effects,” said Randy D. Blakely, Ph.D., co-author, executive director of the FAU Stiles-Nicholson Brain Institute and professor, FAU Schmidt College of Medicine. “Seeing effects from a single copy of Val89 suggests that choline transport may be mediated by a pair of CHT proteins such that one poorly functioning copy can impact the normal function of the other, leading to stronger effects than expected from simply having one copy compromised.”

This finding has been reported before in people with neuromuscular disorder causing CHT mutations, but this also appears to be the case for brain function.

“Val89 mice lack cognitive flexibility in response to an attentional challenge,” said Eryn Donovan, lead author and a graduate student in the Department of Psychology, University of Michigan. “Our findings from this mouse model suggest the potential for a more complete investigation of the effects of the CHT Val89 mutation in the brain as well as the development of therapeutic strategies for those with disrupted acetylcholine signaling.”

According to the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the estimated number of children ever diagnosed with ADHD, according to a 2016 parent survey, is 6.1 million. This same survey shows that 6 in 10 children with ADHD had at least one other mental, emotional or behavioral disorder and 62 percent were taking ADHD medication. Although ADHD most often occurs in children, it also can be diagnosed in adulthood.

“We think that the CHT Val89 mouse can be a valuable model to study heritable risk for cognitive disorders that arise from cholinergic dysfunction,” said Blakely. “We now can gain much more insight into the brain effects of the Val89 variant in ways that cannot be done in humans and possibly lead to new ways to treat disorders associated with brain acetylcholine signaling that appear in childhood, such as ADHD, or during aging, as with Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease.”

In addition to new insights into a potential risk factor for psychiatric and neurological disorders, Martin Sarter, Ph.D., a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Michigan and the communicating author of the study says that their findings explain why healthy humans expressing this genetic variant exhibit robust attentional vulnerabilities.

“As this genetic variant is quite common, occurring in about 9 to 10 percent of humans, we now understand exactly how this variant influences the brain mechanisms that are essential for paying attention,” said Sarter.

Other study co-authors are Cassandra Avila, a graduate student and Sarah Klausner, an undergraduate student, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan; Vinay Parikh, Ph.D., an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience, Temple University; Maria Cristina Fenollar Ferrer, Ph.D., Laboratory of Molecular Genetics, Section of Human Genetics, National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.

A new study from Jenna Krall, assistant professor of the Department of Global and Community Health, develops a new approach to aid air quality modelers in determining whether their air pollution prediction models can be used in epidemiologic studies, studies that assess health effects.

“Understanding the relationship between air pollution and health often requires predicting air pollution concentrations. Our approach will be useful for determining whether an air pollution prediction model can be used in subsequent health studies. As a result, our work can help translate new prediction models to better understand air pollution health impacts,” said Krall.

Existing air pollution prediction models are generally evaluated on how well they can predict air pollution levels. Using data from 17 locations in the US, Krall found that the new evaluation approach was able to better identify errors in air pollution prediction models most relevant for health studies.

“Assessing the health estimation capacity of air pollution exposure prediction models” was published in Environmental Health in March 2022.

Joshua P. Keller of Colorado State University and Roger D. Peng of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health were a part of the research team. Krall was supported in part by the Thomas F. and Kate Miller Jeffress Memorial Trust, Bank of America, Trustee. Peng was supported in part by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) through award RD835871. This work has not been formally reviewed by the EPA. The views expressed in this document are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the agency. EPA does not endorse any products or commercial services mentioned in this publication.

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The research, conducted by the University of Maine, University of Maine at Augusta, University of Vermont and Universite Laval in Quebec, Canada, attempted to understand how society can accomplish major, transformative social change, particularly the kind of social change necessary to tackle the growing problem of climate change.

The researchers studied a behavior that benefits groups, but does not spread without policy support, such as a costly measure to mitigate the effects of climate change. They created a mathematical model using an innovative combination of epidemiological and evolutionary techniques, which simulates a society where agents live in groups and adopt the beneficial behavior of peers — behavior that, given the right conditions, can spread virally, but not if the institutional costs are too high.

The model considers factors like the prevalence of adopters and non-adopters in a group; the diffusion of behaviors, both within the group and globally; the strength of institutions supporting the behavior and facilitating its spread; and the cost of those institutions.

“Our model is unique because it combines behavioral change and policy change in a single system, and encourages us to think about social change in a richer way. Large-scale social change is not just policy or behavior, but the emergence of a new self-reinforcing system that combines both. This allows us to ask new questions, such as ‘how would a new pattern of behavior and policy spread?'” says Timothy Waring, associate professor of social-ecological systems modeling at the University of Maine and co-author of the study.

The results showed that both behavioral change and policy change are required to achieve large-scale social change — and that they need to happen together. Though neither can get the job done on its own, policy change is especially critical.

The researchers found that sometimes the beneficial behavior can spread too far. In some cases, the spread of behavior beyond groups with supporting policy can reduce its perceived success and slow the spread of the policy, thereby limiting beneficial social change overall.

The simulation suggests that projects that involve both bottom-up viral spread of behavior and top-down policy change may be the best type of solution for large sustainability issues like climate change because they serve as an example and can spread between groups to influence major change.

“For example, let’s say a state wants to spread participation in a new organic composting law which would benefit towns,” Waring says. “To make the system work, the collected waste must be purely organic material. But contributing pure organic waste takes effort for households, so the behavior does not take off on its own. This is a common problem for policy implementation. But if towns experiment with systems to help support and spread the behavior, the successful town programs can spread between towns along with household contributions, resulting in effective, large-scale change.”

Laurent Hébert-Dufresne, lead author on the study and associate professor at the University of Vermont, says, “Our model can help figure out how to balance bottom-up and top-down effects so that new solutions can scale. For example, it can help determine when we should promote a behavior like composting all over the country to normalize it and when we should instead focus on a local well-funded pilot project to show the potential benefits of composting.”

Waring said that in future research, the team aims to apply these types of models to all sorts of beneficial social change, particularly the challenge of tackling climate change.

The study was published in the Royal Society Open Science on March 23, 2022. The research is part of track 2 of UMaine’s Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) project.

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Making the switch to a green economy will affect every aspect of our lives. As Kathleen Rogers, president and CEO of EarthDay.org recently told Earth911, “We have a chance to completely rethink everything, from what we’re eating, to what we’re wearing, to what we’re sitting on, to our buildings and cars, everything.” In fact, just eliminating plastic will involve that level of change. Plastic is so ubiquitous in our lives – from the packaging protecting our vegetables to the fleece sweatshirts on our backs – that it’s hard to imagine how we would live without it. But if we want to stop climate change, we have to achieve a post-plastic world.

The Problems With Plastic

Just like electricity, plastic is made from natural gas. Between 4% and 8% of global oil consumption is related to plastics. Fossil fuel extraction generates tremendous greenhouse gas emissions. In 2015, emissions from plastics manufacturing released as much GHG as 45 million passenger vehicles.

That same year, U.S. emissions from plastics incineration were 5.9 million metric tons of CO2-eq. That’s an environmental justice problem since incinerators are disproportionately located near impoverished communities and communities of color. Even more unjust, in places without adequate waste processing, plastic is often burned in the open, where it releases a cocktail of poisonous chemicals including “black carbon,” a pollutant with global warming potential 5,000 times higher than carbon.

When people don’t burn or landfill it, plastic frequently makes its way into waterways and oceans. There, it poses a serious pollution problem forming massive garbage gyres and directly harming sea life. Plastic does not biodegrade, but sunlight and heat do cause it to release greenhouse gases methane and ethylene as it breaks down into microscopic particles that enter the food chain and bioaccumulate. Studies have found plastic in seafood. Bioaccumulation is not the only source of plastic in the human diet; people are eating plastic directly from packaging like water bottles, too. Because microplastics are a new problem, scientists haven’t had time to perform long-term studies on them. As a result, no one knows what their long-term impacts on human health will be.

Plastic-Free Living

Plastic-free lifestyles are something of a fringe trend in the environmental movement. Few people have the dedication and resources to reorder their lives around eliminating plastic. But those few people, like Beth Terry, inspire the rest of us to reduce our plastic waste as much as possible. Plastic Free July is a month-long challenge that encourages people to reduce their plastic use. And EarthDay.org has a year-round campaign to end plastic pollution.

“We eat the equivalent of a plastic credit card probably once a month. It’s everywhere in our bodies,” says Rogers. “Finally, two relatively small countries, Rwanda and Peru, got together and now have 53 countries signed onto the beginnings of what I hope will be a global plastics treaty which we are really focused on.” (Since this interview, the treaty was adopted by the U.N. with the ambition of completing a global legally binding draft agreement by the end of 2024.)

“The other thing we’re focused on – and this is part of plastics because there’s so much in our of it in our clothes – is the incredible impact of fast fashion,” says Rogers.

Individuals can do their part by supporting sustainable brands and avoiding fast fashion. Consumers can choose repurposed furniture and other upcycled items, from ornaments to light fixtures. We can get better at eliminating our own plastic waste – especially single-use plastics like grocery bags, water bottles, and plastic cutlery. To be more hands-on, you can also join in the Great Global Cleanup to help remove waste plastic from the environment. Let your elected representatives know that you support them in pushing for a strong final draft of the plastics treaty and you support the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act.

Post-Plastic Products

But for now, even construction materials and furniture contain plastics. Most people will not be able to go plastic-free until there are convenient alternatives to plastic in all of the products we need. If you are a scientist, engineer, or inventor, you can turn your attention to developing some of those options. But the rest of us can do our part by supporting innovation when we find it. Keep an eye out for emergent technologies that provide the same benefits as plastic without the ecological drawbacks. There are a lot of promising developments in bioplastics, which are starting to replace some beverage bottles. Some mushroom and plant-based leathers are beginning to replace vinyl in clothing. Mushrooms are also being used to make packaging and even insulation. The options for a post-plastic world are growing every day.

A new study has revealed that changes to ozone levels in the upper and lower atmosphere were responsible for almost a third of the warming seen in ocean waters bordering Antarctica in the second half of the 20^th century.

The deep and rapid warming in the Southern Ocean affects its role as one of the main regions for soaking up excess heat as the planet warms.

The majority of this warming was the result of ozone increases in the lower atmosphere. Ozone — one of the main components of smog — is already hazardous as a pollutant, but the research shows it may also play a significant role in driving climate change in the coming years.

Dr Michaela Hegglin, an Associate Professor in atmospheric chemistry and one of the study’s authors, said: “Ozone close to Earth’s surface is harmful to people and the environment, but this study reveals it also has a big impact on the ocean’s ability to absorb excess heat from the atmosphere.

“These findings are an eye-opener and hammer home the importance of regulating air pollution to prevent increased ozone levels and global temperatures rising further still.”

The new research by an international team of scientists, and led by the University of California Riverside, is published in Nature Climate Change.

The team used models to simulate changes in ozone levels in the upper and lower atmosphere between 1955 and 2000, to isolate them from other influences and increase the currently poor understanding of their impact on the Southern Ocean heat uptake.

These simulations showed that a decrease in ozone in the upper atmosphere and increase in the lower atmosphere both contributed to warming seen in the upper 2km of the ocean waters in the high latitudes by overall greenhouse gas increases.

They revealed that the increased ozone in the lower atmosphere caused 60% of the overall ozone-induced warming seen in the Southern Ocean over the period studied — far more than previously thought. This was surprising because tropospheric ozone increases are mainly thought of as a climate forcing in the Northern hemisphere since that is where the main pollution occurs.

Ozone hit the headlines in the 1980s when a hole was discovered in the ozone layer high in the atmosphere over the South Pole, due to damage caused by chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), a gas used in industry and consumer products.

The ozone layer is vital as it filters dangerous ultraviolet radiation from reaching Earth’s surface. This discovery led to the Montreal Protocol, an international agreement to halt the production of CFCs.

Dr Hegglin said: “We have known for a while that ozone depletion high in the atmosphere has affected surface climate in the Southern Hemisphere. Our research has shown that ozone increases in the lower atmosphere due to air pollution, which occurs primarily in the Northern Hemisphere and ‘leaks’ into the Southern Hemisphere, is a serious problem as well.

“There is hope to find solutions, and the success of the Montreal Protocol at cutting CFC use shows that international action is possible to prevent damage to the planet.”

Ozone is created in the upper atmosphere by interaction between oxygen molecules and UV radiation from the sun. In the lower atmosphere, it forms due to chemical reactions between pollutants like vehicle exhaust fumes and other emissions.

Changes in ozone concentrations in the atmosphere affect westerly winds in the Southern Hemisphere as well as causing contrasting levels of salt and temperature close to the surface in the Southern Ocean. Both affect ocean currents in distinct ways, thereby affecting ocean heat uptake.

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So when researchers from the lab of University of Michigan aerosol scientist Kerri Pratt collected aerosols from the Arctic atmosphere during summer 2015, Rachel Kirpes, then a doctoral student, discovered a curious thing: Aerosolized ammonium sulfate particles didn’t look like typical liquid aerosols.

Working with fellow aerosol scientist Andrew Ault, Kirpes discovered that ammonium sulfate particles, which should have been liquid, were actually solid. The team’s results are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Solid aerosols can change how clouds form in the Arctic. And, as the Arctic loses ice, researchers expect to see more of these unique particles formed from oceanic emissions combined with ammonia from birds, which will impact cloud formation and climate. Additionally, understanding the characteristics of aerosols in the atmosphere is critical for improving the ability of climate models to predict current and future climate in the Arctic and beyond.

“The Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else in the world. As we have more emissions from open water in the atmosphere, these types of particles could become more important,” said Pratt, associate professor of chemistry, and earth and environmental sciences. “These types of observations are so critical because we have so few observations to even evaluate the accuracy of models of the Arctic atmosphere.

“With so few observations, sometimes you get surprises like this when you make measurements. These particles didn’t look like anything we had ever seen in the literature, in the Arctic, or anywhere else in the world.”

The aerosols observed in the study were up to 400 nanometers, or about 300 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. Ault, associate professor of chemistry, says that aerosols in the Arctic are typically assumed to be liquid.

Once the relative humidity of the atmosphere reaches 80% — about the level of a humid day — the particle becomes liquid. When you dry the aerosol back out, it doesn’t turn into a solid until the relative humidity is about 35%-40%. Because the air over the Arctic Ocean — or any ocean — is humid, researchers expect to see liquid aerosols.

“But what we saw is a pretty new phenomenon where a small particle collides with our droplets when it’s below 80% humidity, but above 40% humidity. Essentially, this provides a surface for the aerosol to solidify and become a solid at a higher relative humidity than you would have expected,” Ault said.

“These particles were much more like a marble than a droplet. That’s really important, particularly in a region where there haven’t been a lot of measurements because those particles can eventually end up acting as the seeds of clouds or having reactions happen on them.”

Additionally, the researchers say, the size, composition and phase of atmospheric aerosols impact climate change through water uptake and cloud formation.

“It’s our job to keep helping modelers refine their models,” Ault said. “It’s not that the models are wrong, but they always need more new information as events on the ground change, and what we saw was something completely unexpected.”

Pratt’s team collected aerosols in August-September 2015 in Utqia?vik, the northernmost point of Alaska. To do this, they used what’s called a multistage impactor, a device that has several stages that collect particles according to their size. Kirpes later analyzed these particles in Ault’s lab using microscopy and spectroscopy techniques that can examine the composition and phase of particles less than 100 nanometers in size.

“If we were to go back several decades when there was ice near the shore, even in August and September, we would not be observing these particles. We’re observing the consequences of this climate already changing,” Pratt said. “We need to have the reality captured in models that simulate clouds and the atmosphere, which are critical for understanding the energy budget of the Arctic atmosphere, for this place that is changing faster than anywhere else.”

Road traffic is the main source of environmental noise. Previous research has linked environmental noise to a range of adverse health effects: sleep disturbance, annoyance, cardiovascular and metabolic disease, adverse birth outcomes, cognitive impairment, poor mental health and well-being, and premature mortality. Long-term exposure to road traffic noise can cause a sustained stress reaction, which results in the release of stress hormones and increases in heart rate, blood pressure and vasoconstriction, eventually leading to chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, depression and anxiety disorders.

For this study, data on European cities were retrieved from the Urban Audit 2018 dataset. Road traffic noise exposure was estimated using noise maps produced by countries and cities under the current European legislative framework (Environmental Noise Directive) or available from local sources (e.g. city governments and research institutions). For cases in which city-level data were not available, country-specific predictive models were developed and applied to estimate exposure to road traffic noise. Data on different causes of mortality for the year 2015 were retrieved from the Eurostat database.

The results showed that more than 48% of the 123 million adults (aged 20 years or older) included in the study were exposed to noise levels exceeding the WHO-recommended threshold. Specifically, the WHO recommendation states that the average noise level recorded over a 24-hour period should not exceed 53 decibels (53 dB Lden). The percentage of the population exposed to higher-than-recommended noise levels in Europe’s capital cities ranges from 29.8% in Berlin to 86.5% in Vienna, including 43.8% in Madrid and 60.5% in Rome.

Preventable Deaths and Annoyance

Building on previous research that established associations between noise and mortality caused by ischaemic heart disease, the researchers estimated that compliance with WHO guidelines would prevent more than 3,600 deaths each year from ischaemic heart disease alone.

The study also found that more than 11 million adults were highly annoyed by road traffic noise. Annoyance was defined as the repeated disturbance of everyday activities, such as communicating, reading, working and sleeping. In this sense, annoyance goes beyond mere inconvenience, as it can increase stress and eventually give rise to various health problems.

“Our results provide, for the first time, a comprehensive picture of European cities and a clearer understanding of why transport-generated noise is the second major environmental cause of adverse health outcomes in western Europe, after airborne particulate matter,” explained ISGlobal researcher Sasha Khomenko, lead author of the study. “Even so, we are convinced that the true health impact of traffic noise is much greater, as the lack of city-level data limits the health effects we can assess, thus leading to an underestimation of the impact. Moreover, the available data have only allowed us to analyse the population exposed to more than 55 dB Lden, whereas the WHO-recommended threshold is 53 dB Lden, and we suspect that adverse effects could occur even with exposure to lower noise levels.”

The team encountered methodological difficulties due to the heterogeneity and quality of the available data. The quality of each noise map was assessed, with most maps falling into the low or moderate quality categories; less than 17% of the maps were considered to be of good quality.

“The European directive on environmental noise made strategic noise mapping mandatory, but it did not set out a specific methodology or guidelines, so the results have been mixed,” commented Mark Nieuwenhuijsen, head of the Air Pollution and Urban Environment programme at ISGlobal and senior author of the study. “The EU member states have had a common methodology since January 2019, so we can expect to see much more comprehensive and accurate health impact assessments of traffic noise in the coming years.”

Consult Data for All 749 Cities

This study forms part of the European Urban Burden of Disease Project, which so far has produced rankings of mortality associated with air pollution and green space, respectively, in European cities. However, due to differences in methodologies and sources of traffic noise data, the results obtained for the various cities analysed are not considered to be comparable. As a result, a road-noise ranking was not produced, although all data have been posted on the project website, where values for all 749 cities can be consulted.