Research priorities for managing the impacts and dependencies of business upon food,energy, water and the environment

Delivering access to sufficient food, energy and water resources to ensure human wellbeing is a major concern for governments worldwide. However, it is crucial to account for the ‘nexus’ of interactions between these natural resources and the consequent implications for human wellbeing. The private sector has a critical role in driving positive change towards more sustainable nexus management and could reap considerable benefits from collaboration with researchers to devise solutions to some of the foremost sustainability challenges of today. Yet opportunities are missed because the private sector is rarely involved in the formulation of deliverable research priorities. We convened senior research scientists and influential business leaders to collaboratively identify the top forty questions that, if answered, would best help companies understand and manage their food-energy-water-environment nexus dependencies and impacts. Codification of the top order nexus themes highlighted research priorities around development of pragmatic yet credible tools that allow businesses to incorporate nexus interactions into their decision-making; demonstration of the business case for more sustainable nexus management; identification of the most effective levers for behaviour change; and understanding incentives or circumstances that allow individuals and businesses to take a leadership stance. Greater investment in the complex but productive relations between the private sector and research community will create deeper and more meaningful collaboration and cooperation.     

Climate engineering and human rights

ABSTRACT

In this Forum, three scholars discuss how climate engineering will pose novel human rights challenges, and may well force reconsideration of how human rights are applied as a guide to action. Following a short introduction, the first section introduces three competing approaches to human rights, arguing views which emphasize fairness or attempt to maximize satisfaction are more promising than one viewing human rights as inviolable ‘side-constraints’. The second section draws lessons from climate migration that are relevant for climate engineering in terms of incorporating a human rights approach to duties, rights, and participation. The final section compares the ‘needs-based’ and ‘rights-based’ approaches to humanitarian work in the face of climate change and climate engineering, raising concerns for duty-bearers and right-holders. The Forum’s conclusion draws together points of overlap and suggests a path forward for policy and research on this topic.     

The mediating role of job characteristics in job redesign interventions: A serendipitous quasi‐experiment

The aim of this paper is to examine the mediating role played by five key job characteristics in the relationship between employee participation in a job redesign intervention and employee well‐being. In studies of job redesign interventions, it has been assumed that any effects of employee participation in job redesign on well‐being are a result of changes in job characteristics rather than participation in change per se. It is therefore important to statistically test for mediation in job redesign intervention studies to help establish that the change in job characteristics is the mechanism through which job redesign interventions work. However, this has rarely been tested directly, either because data to allow tests of mediation have not been collected (e.g. assessments of job characteristics) or because data have been collected but mediation has not been tested using accepted procedures. This makes it unclear whether changes in job characteristics explain the effects. Results from multilevel analyses of a longitudinal 9‐month long serendipitous quasi‐experimental participative job redesign intervention showed that changes in job control, participation, skill utilization and feedback, but not task obstacles, were sufficient to account for the relationship between the intervention and employee well‐being. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A river is reborn--Use Attainability Analysis for the Lower Des Plaines River, Illinois.

The goal of the Use Attainability Analysis (UAA) of the Lower Des Plaines River was to upgrade the designated "Secondary Contact Recreation and Indigenous Aquatic Life Use" to a higher use that would be commensurate with the goals of the Clean Water Act (CWA). In Illinois, the water body use in compliance with the goals of the CWA is named "General Use". The river has been extensively modified and receives most point-source and urban runoff discharges from the Chicago metropolitan area (9.5 million inhabitants). The study included an extensive assessment of the physical, chemical, biological, and bacteriological integrity status of the water body and sediments. The UAA found that the water quality situation of the river has improved significantly since the 1970s, when the Illinois Pollution Control Board defined and assigned the Secondary Contact Recreation and Indigenous Aquatic Life Use designation to the Lower Des Plaines River. The study defined and suggested a "Modified Impounded Use" for one highly modified reach, with adjusted standards for dissolved oxygen and recreation. The study also recommended adoption of the General Use standards, some of them in a modified form, for other water quality parameters. Standards for limited recreation were also developed. The UAA also outlines a suggested action plan that will bring UAA segments of the Lower Des Plaines River in compliance with UAA goals.     

Defining core outcomes of reproductive genetic carrier screening: A Delphi survey of Australian and New Zealand stakeholders

Objective

Understanding the value, benefits and harms of health interventions is needed to inform best practice and ensure responsible implementation of new approaches to patient care. Such value is demonstrated through the assessment of outcomes; however, which outcomes are assessed is often highly varied across studies and can hinder the ability to draw robust conclusions. The Core Outcome Development for Carrier Screening study aims to understand the outcomes that can meaningfully capture the value of reproductive genetic carrier screening (RGCS).

Method

The authors report an iterative, two-round online Delphi survey of Australian and New Zealand stakeholders to determine the degree of consensus regarding the core outcomes of RGCS. Panellists ranked 83 outcomes according to their perceived importance on a nine-point Likert scale. Using the distribution of rankings, outcomes were grouped into tiers representative of their perceived level of importance and agreement between groups.

Results

The top tier outcomes represent those agreed to be critically important for all future studies of RGCS to assess and were used to define a preliminary core outcome set encompassing the domains (1) primary laboratory outcomes, (2) pregnancy outcomes, (3) resource use and, (4) perceived utility of RGCS.

Conclusion

These findings can guide the selection of meaningful outcomes in studies aiming to demonstrate the value of RGCS. A future international consensus process will expand on these findings and guide the inclusion of diverse perspectives across the range of settings in which RGCS is offered.     

Mutualistic stability in the arbuscular mycorrhizal symbiosis: exploring hypotheses of evolutionary cooperation

The 450-million-year-old symbiosis between the majority of land plants and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) is one of the most ancient, abundant, and ecologically important mutualisms on Earth. Yet, the evolutionary stability of mycorrhizal associations is still poorly understood, as it follows none of the constraints thought to stabilize cooperation in other well-known mutualisms. The capacity of both host and symbiont to simultaneously interact with several partners introduces a unique dilemma; detecting and punishing those exploiting the mutualism becomes increasingly difficult if these individuals can continue to access resources from alternative sources. Here, we explore four hypotheses to explain evolutionary cooperation in the arbuscular mycorrhizal symbiosis: (1) pseudo-vertical transmission and spatial structuring of plant and fungal populations leading to local adaptation of partners; (2) luxury resource exchange in which plants trade surplus carbon for excess fungal nutrients; (3) partner choice allowing partners to associate with better cooperators; and (4) host and symbiont sanctions which actively reward good partners and punish less cooperative ones. We propose that mycorrhizal cooperation is promoted by an exchange of surplus resources between partners and enforced through sanctions by one or both partners. These mechanisms may allow plant and fungal genotypes to discriminate against individuals employing exploitative strategies, promoting patterns of partner choice. Together these selection pressures provide a framework for understanding the stabilization of mycorrhizal cooperation over evolutionary time.     

Relations between Conspecific Density and Effects of Ultraviolet‐B Radiation on Tadpole Size in the Striped Marsh Frog

Global increases in ultraviolet‐B radiation (UVBR) associated with stratospheric ozone depletion are potentially contributing to the decline of numerous amphibian species around the world. Exposure to UVBR alone reduces survival and induces a range of sublethal effects in embryonic and larval amphibians. When additional environmental stressors are present, UVBR can have compounding negative effects. Thus, examination of the effects of UVBR in the absence of other stressors may substantially underestimate its potential to affect amphibians in natural habitats. We examined the independent and interactive effects of increased UVBR and high conspecific density would have embryonic and larval striped marsh frogs (Limnodynastes peronii). We exposed individuals to a factorial combination of low and high UVBR levels and low, medium, and high densities of striped marsh frog tadpoles. The response variables were time to hatching, hatching success, posthatch survival, burst‐swimming performance of tadpoles (maximum instantaneous swim speed following an escape response), and size and morphology of tadpoles. Consistent with results of previous studies, we found that exposure to UVBR alone increased the time to hatching of embryos and reduced the burst‐swimming performance and size of tadpoles. Similarly, increasing conspecific density increased the time to hatching of embryos and reduced the size of tadpoles, but had no effect on burst‐swimming performance. The negative effect of UVBR on tadpole size was not apparent at high densities of tadpoles. This result suggests that tadpoles living at higher densities may invest relatively less energy in growth and thus have more energy to repair UVBR‐induced damage. Lower densities of conspecifics increased the negative effects of UVBR on developing amphibians. Thus, low‐density populations, which may include declining populations, may be particularly susceptible to the detrimental effects of increased UVBR and thus may be driven toward extinction faster than might be expected on the basis of results from single‐factor studies. Relaciones entre la Densidad Conespecífica y los Efectos de la Radiación Ultravioleta‐B sobre el Tamaño de Renacuajos de Limnodynastes peronei     

DUAL URBAN AND RURAL HYDROGRAPH SIGNALS IN THREE SMALL WATERSHEDS1

ABSTRACT: Many studies can be found in the literature pertaining to the effects of urbanization on surface runoff in small watersheds and the hydrologic response of undeveloped watersheds. However, an extensive literature review yielded few published studies that illustrate differing hydrologic responses from multiple source areas within a watershed. The concepts discussed here are not new, but the methods used provide a unique, basic procedure for investigating stormwater hydrology in topographically diverse basins. Six storm hydrographs from three small central Pennsylvania watersheds were analyzed for this paper; five are presented. Two important conclusions are deduced from this investigation. First, in all cases we found two distinct peaks in stream discharge, each representing different contributing areas to direct discharge with greatly differing curve numbers and lags representative of urban and rural source regions. Second, the direct discharge represents only a small fraction of the total drainage area with the urban peak becoming increasingly important with respect to the rural peak with the amount of urbanization and as the magnitude of the rain event decreases.