Although climate and nature related scenario analysis is increasingly important in finance, operational implementations remain limited for translating long horizon environmental scenarios into counterparty credit risk measures used in pricing and regulatory capital. We propose an environmental valuation adjustment framework for CVA with three components: (i) a scenario to credit translation that maps environmental scenario drivers into hazard rates; (ii) nature specific tail generators that quantify model risk in scenario generation; and (iii) a distributionally robust wrong way risk bound based on Kullback Leibler (KL) divergence. We compute climate CVAs using transition scenarios and nature CVAs using biodiversity indicators. Our results show that nature CVAs can vary materially across alternative ecosystem generators, highlighting an additional source of model uncertainty.
Recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI), and particularly in deep learning (DL), have created tremendous excitement and opportunities in the earth and environmental sciences communitie...
Hanna V. Jardel, Kristen N. Cowen, Irva Hertz-Picciotto
et al.
Wildfires in the United States (US) require tens of thousands of personnel a day to manage and suppress. Some US states use incarcerated wildland firefighters (IWFF) to perform wildland firefighting duties, but risks to IWFFs have not been investigated. We provide an overview of the potential hazards that wildland firefighting poses to IWFFs while considering inherent socio-environmental injustices that may compound adverse effects of hazardous exposures. Chronic health conditions are more common in the US prison population than the general US population. IWFFs do work involving exposure to hazards that can include smoke, fire, and soil. More research on IWFFs is necessary to best inform allocation of resources and reduce environmental injustice.
Granular bentonite (GB), offering better pourability and workability than traditional powder bentonites, has been proposed as a candidate material for engineered barriers in deep geological repositories of radioactive waste. During service, involving complex hydro-mechanical (HM) stress paths, GB barriers are expected to seal technological gaps within the system. However, few studies have examined the HM behaviour of GB related to gap sealing. To address this, a technological gap was initially fabricated within the compacted GB samples used for HM testing. The gap enhanced the compressibility of the sample, promoting a hardening effect under high stress and thereby reducing the volumetric collapse during subsequent wetting. Under low stress, the gap accelerated the hydration swelling, while the final swelling strain depended on the sample’s initial global dry density. Similarly, gap sealing had little effect on the development of swelling pressure when the sample was wetted under constant volume. Furthermore, the water permeability after saturation at a comparable global void ratio was higher in the initially gapped sample than in the intact one. These findings are anticipated to support a long-term safety assessment of GB barriers.
Cooperation is fundamental to human societies. While several basic theoretical mechanisms underlying its evolution have been established, research addressing more realistic settings remains underdeveloped. Drawing on the hypothesis that intensified environmental fluctuations drove early behavioral evolution in humans during the Middle Stone Age in Africa, we examine the effects of environmental variability and human mobility on the evolution of cooperation. In our model, the variability is represented by randomly moving resource-rich spots across a two-dimensional space, and the mobility is represented by resource-seeking migration of agents. These agents interact cooperatively or competitively for resources while adopting behavioral strategies from more successful neighbors. Through extensive simulations of this model, we reveal three key findings: (i) with sufficient agent mobility, even modest environmental variability promotes cooperation, but further variability does not enhance cooperation; (ii) with any level of environmental variability, agent mobility promotes cooperation; and (iii) these effects occur because the joint effect of environmental variability and agent mobility disrupts defector groups in resource-rich areas, forming cooperator groups on those sites. Although previous studies examine environmental variability and mobility separately, to our knowledge this is the first study to analyze their joint effects on the evolution of cooperation. These findings suggest that environmental variability can promote cooperative group formation without enhanced cognitive abilities, providing new insights into the evolution of human cooperation and, by extension, sociality.
Human activities degrade the Earth environment at an unprecedented scale and pace, threatening Earth-system stability, resilience and life-support functions. We can of course deny the facts, get angry about them, or try to bargain. Or we may overcome these stages of grief and move towards accepting that human activities need to change, including our own ones. The purpose of this paper is to support astronomers in this transition, by providing insights into the origins of environmental impacts in astronomical research and proposing changes that would make the field sustainable. The paper focuses on the environmental impacts of research infrastructures, since these are the dominant sources of greenhouse gas emissions in astronomy, acknowledging that impact reductions in other areas, for example professional air travelling, need also to be achieved.
The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) is a proposed long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment that will project an on-axis wide-band neutrino beam over a distance of 1300 km to determine the unknowns in the neutrino sector. Given the baseline of 1300 km and the intense beam facility, DUNE is a promising experiment to study the sub-leading effects such as environmental decoherence, matter induced non-standard interactions (NSIs), neutrino decay, etc. In this study, we investigate how NSI and environmental decoherence affect the neutrino oscillation probabilities simultaneously. Considering the modified probabilities we obtain the updated mass hierarchy (MH) and CP violation (CPV) sensitivities of DUNE. Furthermore, we demonstrate the sensitivity of DUNE to distinguish between the effects of NSI and environmental decoherence.
Ana Clara Araújo Gomes da Silva, Gilmar Teixeira Junior, Lívia Mancine C. de Campos
et al.
Environmental sustainability in Systems-of-Systems (SoS) is an emerging field that seeks to integrate technological solutions to promote the efficient management of natural resources. While systematic reviews address sustainability in the context of Smart Cities (a category of SoS), a systematic study synthesizing the existing knowledge on environmental sustainability applied to SoS in general does not exist. Although literature includes other types of sustainability, such as financial and social, this study focuses on environmental sustainability, analyzing how SoS contribute to sustainable practices such as carbon emission reduction, energy efficiency, and biodiversity conservation. We conducted a Systematic Mapping Study to identify the application domains of SoS in sustainability, the challenges faced, and research opportunities. We planned and executed a research protocol including an automated search over four scientific databases. Of 926 studies retrieved, we selected, analyzed, and reported the results of 39 relevant studies. Our findings reveal that most studies focus on Smart Cities and Smart Grids, while applications such as sustainable agriculture and wildfire prevention are less explored. We identified challenges such as system interoperability, scalability, and data governance. Finally, we propose future research directions for SoS and environmental sustainability.
This paper presents a theoretical discussion for environmentally-conscious job deployment and migration in cloud environments, aiming to minimize the environmental impact of resource provisioning while incorporating sustainability requirements. As the demand for sustainable cloud services grows, it is crucial for cloud customers to select data center operators based on sustainability metrics and to accurately report the ecological footprint of their services. To this end, we analyze sustainability reports and define comprehensive environmental impact profiles for data centers, incorporating key sustainability indicators. We formalize the problem as an optimization model, balancing multiple environmental factors while respecting user preferences. A simulative case study demonstrates the {potential} of our approach compared to baseline strategies that optimize for single sustainability factors.