Abstract Young people will experience stronger consequences of climate change in their future adult lives than older people are facing today. Against this background, large demonstrations and school strikes for climate protection started all over the globe, called the Fridays For Future (FFF) movement. Drawing on the social identity model of pro-environmental action (SIMPEA) and theories on pro-environmental actions of children and adolescents, we examined psychological drivers of pro-environmental activism in the FFF movement. Young people recruited during a FFF demonstration in a German city (N = 144, 16–25 years old) and from all over Germany recruited through an online panel (N = 418, 13–25 years old) participated in our online survey study. A comparison of these samples and a regression analysis with the joint sample both revealed that perceiving friends participating in the movement, identification with others engaging in climate protection, and personal norms in the form of a felt obligation based on values were most strongly related to their participation in FFF protests. We discuss theoretical implications of our findings as well as practical implications for interventions to encourage young people's pro-environmental engagement.
Examining lake-area evolution and influencing factors is essential for understanding global environmental and societal changes and supporting ecological sustainability. Inner Mongolia, China, given its unique geographical and climatic conditions, serves as a natural laboratory for investigating the complex coupling mechanisms of “climate–hydrology–humanities.” Accordingly, we analyzed data regarding annual area changes in 655 lakes across five basins obtained from Landsat, Sentinel-2, and pushbroom multispectral scanner (1987–2023), combined with meteorological, hydrological, and human factors affecting lake-area changes. Results indicated that lake areas varied from 4059.36 to 6489.46 km2 in 1987–2023, exhibiting an overall decline of 38.06 km2/a (R2 = 0.39, p < 0.001). This trend was nonlinear, exhibiting area expansion (1987–1998), rapid shrinkage (1998–2010), and stabilization after a slight rebound (2010–2023). Natural factors dominated lake-area dynamics in the Songhua and Northwest River Basins, while human activities, particularly agriculture, were key drivers in the Liaohe, Haihe, and Yellow River Basins. These findings provide critical insights into the drivers of lake-area changes and establish a scientific basis for developing effective water-resource management and ecological protection strategies.
Giovanni Borsoi, João L. Parracha, Jéssica D. Bersch
et al.
External Thermal Insulation Composite Systems (ETICSs) are increasingly applied in both new construction and energy retrofitting, where long-term durability under environmental exposure is critical to preserving thermal efficiency. Moisture ingress represents a key degradation factor, reducing insulation performance and undermining energy savings promoted by the ETICS. The effectiveness of these systems is strongly influenced by surface protection, which also reflects aesthetic and biological resistance. This study investigates the influence of three commercial protective surface coatings, characterized by hydrophobicity, photocatalytic activity, and resistance to biological growth, on ETICS finishes based on acrylic, natural hydraulic lime (NHL), and silicate binders. An artificial aging protocol was employed to evaluate coating stability and compatibility with the finishing layers. Results show that acrylic-based finishes provided superior durability and protection, while coatings on NHL and silicate substrates exhibited lower performance. Notably, a TiO<sub>2</sub> enriched photocatalytic coating, despite improved self-cleaning potential, demonstrated the least durability. The findings highlight that optimal ETICS protection requires coatings that combine low water absorption, effective drying, and biological resistance, thereby ensuring sustained thermal and energy performance over time.
We study the secret protection problem (SPP), where the objective is to find a policy of minimal cost ensuring that every execution path from an initial state to a secret state contains a sufficient number of protected events. The problem was originally introduced and studied in the setting of finite automata. In this paper, we extend the framework to labeled Petri nets. We consider two variants of the problem: the Parikh variant, where all occurrences of protected events along an execution path contribute to the security requirement, and the indicator variant, where each protected event is counted only once per execution path. We show that both variants can be solved in exponential space for labeled Petri nets, and that their decision versions are ExpSpace-complete. As a consequence, there is no polynomial-time or polynomial-space algorithm for these problems.
<p>The Greenland Ice Sheet is a large contributor to global sea level rise, and current mass losses are projected to accelerate. However, model projections of future ice sheet evolution are limited by the fact that the ice sheet is not in equilibrium with present-day climate but is still adjusting to past changes that occurred over thousands of years. While the influence of such committed adjustments on future ice sheet evolution remains unquantified, it could be addressed by calibrating numerical ice sheet models over larger timescales and, importantly, against empirical data on ice margin positions. To enable such paleo data–model interactions, we need Greenland-wide empirical reconstructions of past ice sheet extent that combine geomorphological and geochronological evidence. Despite an increasing number of field studies producing new chronologies, such a reconstruction is currently lacking in Greenland. Furthermore, a time slice reconstruction can help to (i) answer open questions regarding the rate and pattern of ice margin evolution in Greenland since the glacial maximum, (ii) develop a standardised record of empirical data, and (iii) identify new sites for future field campaigns. Based on these motivations, we here present PaleoGrIS 1.0, a new Greenland-wide isochrone reconstruction of ice sheet extent evolution through the Late Glacial and early- to mid-Holocene informed by both geomorphological and geochronological markers. Our isochrones have a temporal resolution of 500 years and span <span class="inline-formula">∼</span> 7.5 kyr from approximately 14 to 6.5 kyr BP. We describe the resulting reconstruction of the shrinking ice sheet and conduct a series of ice-sheet-wide and regional analyses to quantify retreat rates, areal extent change, and their variability across space and time. During the Late Glacial and early- to mid-Holocene, we find the Greenland Ice Sheet has lost about one-third of its areal extent (0.89 million km<span class="inline-formula"><sup>2</sup></span>). Between <span class="inline-formula">∼</span> 14 and <span class="inline-formula">∼</span> 8.5 kyr BP, it experienced a near-constant rate of areal extent loss of 170 <span class="inline-formula">±</span> 27 km<span class="inline-formula"><sup>2</sup></span> yr<span class="inline-formula"><sup>−1</sup></span>. We find that the ice-sheet-scale pattern of margin retreat is well correlated to atmospheric and oceanic temperature variations, which implies a high sensitivity of the ice sheet to deglacial warming. However, during the Holocene, we observe inertia in the ice sheet system that likely caused a centennial- to millennial-scale time lag in ice extent response. At the regional scale, we observe highly heterogeneous deglacial responses in ice extent evident in both the magnitude and rate of retreat. We hypothesise that non-climatic factors, such as the asymmetrical nature of continental shelves and onshore bed topographies, play important roles in determining the regional- to valley-scale dynamics. PaleoGrIS 1.0 is an open-access database designed to be used by both the empirical and numerical modelling communities. It should prove a useful basis for improved future versions of the reconstruction when new geomorphological and geochronological data become available.</p>
Unequal error protection (UEP) codes can facilitate the transmission of messages with different protection levels. In this paper, we study the achievability bounds on UEP by the generalization of Gilbert-Varshamov (GV) bound. For the first time, we show that under certain conditions, UEP enhances the code rate comparing with time-sharing (TS) strategies asymptotically.
During its annual conference in 2024, the French Society of Astronomy & Astrophysics (SF2A) hosted a special session dedicated to discussing the environmental transition within the scope of our occupation. Since 2021, thinking on this subject has progressed significantly, both quantitatively and qualitatively. This year was an opportunity to take stock of the main areas of reflection that we need to keep in mind in order to implement a fair, collective and effective environmental transition. This proceeding summarizes the key points from the plenary session related to the environmental transition special session. The purpose of the messages disseminated here is to suggest ideas for reflection and inspiration, so as to initiate, stimulate, and foster discussions within the A&A research community, towards the implementation of concrete measures to mitigate our environmental footprint.
Rapid economic growth puts the natural environment under tremendous pressure. As a traditional chemical company, it is important to reconsider outdated business development models, develop innovative green initiatives for long-term growth, and choose approaches to address environmental issues. Determining how to encourage employees’ green performance while balancing environmental issues is crucial for chemical companies in the current social and economic environment. This study investigates the green transformational leadership style to enhance green performance of chemical company employees. It expands the field of environmental protection by employing two novel constructs: creative process engagement and green creativity. We collected 623 valid questionnaires from 98 teams (98 leaders and 525 employees) and used SPSS 26.0, HLM 6.0, and MPlus 8.3 to test the hypothesis. The findings revealed that (1) green transformational leadership positively influences individual green performance, (2) creative process engagement and green creativity mediate the relationship between green transformational leadership and individual green performance, and (3) individual environmental awareness positively moderates the relationship between green transformational leadership and green creativity. These novel findings contribute to the environmental literature and help chemical company managers in enhancing employee innovation and performance.
James A. Richards, Daniel J. M. Hodgson, Rory E. O'Neill
et al.
Non-Newtonian fluids can be used for the protection of flexible laminates. Understanding the coupling between the flow of the protecting fluid and the deformation of the protected solids is necessary in order to optimise this functionality. We present a scaling analysis of the problem based on a single coupling variable, the effective width of a squeeze flow between flat rigid plates, and predict that impact protection for laminates is optimised by using shear-thinning, and not shear-thickening, fluids. The prediction is verified experimentally by measuring the velocity and pressure in impact experiments. Our scaling analysis should be generically applicable for non-Newtonian fluid-solid interactions in diverse applications.
Data protection laws and policies have been studied extensively in recent years, but little is known about the parliamentary politics of data protection. This imitation applies even to the European Union (EU) that has taken the global lead in data protection and privacy regulation. For patching this notable gap in existing research, this paper explores the data protection questions raised by the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) in the Parliament's plenary sessions and the answers given to these by the European Commission. Over a thousand of such questions and answers are covered in a period from 1995 to early 2023. Given computational analysis based on text mining, the results indicate that (a) data protection has been actively debated in the Parliament during the past twenty years. No noticeable longitudinal trends are present; the debates have been relatively constant. As could be expected, (b) the specific data protection laws in the EU have frequently been referenced in these debates, which (c) do not seem to align along conventional political dimensions such as the left-right axis. Furthermore, (d) numerous distinct data protection topics have been debated by the parliamentarians, indicating that data protection politics in the EU go well-beyond the recently enacted regulations.
Agriculture affects global warming, while its yields are threatened by it. Information and communication technology (ICT) is often considered as a potential lever to mitigate this tension, through monitoring and process optimization. However, while agricultural ICT is actively promoted, its environmental impact appears to be overlooked. Possible rebound effects could put at stake its net expected benefits and hamper agriculture sustainability. By adapting environmental footprint assessment methods to digital agriculture context, this research aims at defining a methodology taking into account the environmental footprint of agricultural ICT systems and their required infrastructures. The expected contribution is to propose present and prospective models based on possible digitalization scenarios, in order to assess effects and consequences of different technological paths on agriculture sustainability, sufficiency and resilience. The final results could be useful to enlighten societal debates and political decisions.
Huajian Fang, Niklas Wittmer, Johannes Twiefel
et al.
Human-robot interaction relies on a noise-robust audio processing module capable of estimating target speech from audio recordings impacted by environmental noise, as well as self-induced noise, so-called ego-noise. While external ambient noise sources vary from environment to environment, ego-noise is mainly caused by the internal motors and joints of a robot. Ego-noise and environmental noise reduction are often decoupled, i.e., ego-noise reduction is performed without considering environmental noise. Recently, a variational autoencoder (VAE)-based speech model has been combined with a fully adaptive non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) noise model to recover clean speech under different environmental noise disturbances. However, its enhancement performance is limited in adverse acoustic scenarios involving, e.g. ego-noise. In this paper, we propose a multichannel partially adaptive scheme to jointly model ego-noise and environmental noise utilizing the VAE-NMF framework, where we take advantage of spatially and spectrally structured characteristics of ego-noise by pre-training the ego-noise model, while retaining the ability to adapt to unknown environmental noise. Experimental results show that our proposed approach outperforms the methods based on a completely fixed scheme and a fully adaptive scheme when ego-noise and environmental noise are present simultaneously.
Khairul Nizam Abdul Maulud, Siti Norsakinah Selamat, Fazly Amri Mohd
et al.
Coastal areas are fragile and changeable due to natural and anthropogenic factors. The resulting changes could have a significant impact on the coastal community. Thus, monitoring shoreline changes for environmental protection in the Selangor coastal area is an important task to address these issues. The main objective of this study is to analyse the pattern of shoreline changes and predict the shoreline position along the Selangor coast. The geospatial approach can provide information on the history and pattern of shoreline changes. This study used temporal datasets and satellite imagery (SPOT 5) to monitor the shoreline changes throughout the 11 identified study areas. It comprises three methods: shoreline change envelope (SCE), net shoreline movement (NSM), and end-point rate (EPR). The findings indicated that the Selangor coast was more exposed to the erosion phenomenon than to the accretion phenomenon, with 77.3% and 22.7%, respectively. This study reveals significant erosion phenomena in 2 out of 11 areas: Bagan Pasir and Pantai Kelanang. Meanwhile, significant accretion occurred at Bagan Sungai Burong and Sungai Nibong. Consequently, providing complete information would be helpful for researchers, decision-makers, and those in charge of planning and managing the coastal zone.
Geography. Anthropology. Recreation, Social Sciences
Carlos Andres Gallegos-Riofrío, Hassan Arab, Amaya Carrasco-Torrontegui
et al.
We explore two as-yet-unconnected trends: evidence of nature's effects on mental health/wellbeing, and acknowledgment that behavioral research is overwhelmingly informed by globally non-representative societies. We assess geographies, ethnicities, and conceptualizations in 174 peer-reviewed studies of nature's mental-health/wellbeing connection. Findings reveal a Western-World bias: over-representation of White participants; ethnicity overlooked (62% of studies do not report participants' ethnicity); narrow views of mental health/wellbeing; and nature operationalized largely as greenspace and forests. Because planetary health is largely contingent on the Ethnosphere (the planet's rich cultural web), we encourage future studies to test nature's mental health/wellbeing effects pluralistically and beyond unrepresentative subsets of humankind.
Nicolas Dubos, Maxime Lenormand, Leandro Castello
et al.
The Amazon floodplains represent important surfaces of highly valuable ecosystems, yet they remain neglected from protected areas. While the efficiency of the protected area network of the Amazon basin may be jeopardised by climate change, floodplains are exposed to important consequences of climate change but are omitted from species distribution models and protection gap analyses. We modelled the current and future (2070) distribution of the giant bony-tongue fish Arapaima sp. accounting for climate and habitat requirements, with consideration of dam presence (already existing and planned constructions) and hydroperiod (high- and low-water stages). We further quantified the amount of suitable environment which falls inside and outside the current network of protected areas to identify spatial conservation gaps. We predict climate change to cause the decline of environmental suitability by 16.6% during the high-water stage, and by 19.4% during the low-water stage. We found that about 70% of the suitable environments of Arapaima sp. remain currently unprotected, which is likely to increase by 5% with future climate change effects. Both current and projected dam constructions may hamper population flows between the central and the Bolivian and Peruvian parts of the basin. We highlight protection gaps mostly in the southwestern part of the basin and recommend the extension of the current network of protected areas in the floodplains of the upper Ucayali, Juruà and Purus Rivers and their tributaries. This study showed the importance of taking into account hydroperiods and dispersal barriers in forecasting the distribution of freshwater fish species, and stresses the urgent need to integrate floodplains to the protected area networks.