Centre for the Observation and Modelling of Earthquakes, Volcanoes and Tectonics
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Pharmaceutical and personal care products (PPCPs) in global surface waters: risk and drivers
No full textPharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) are significant contaminants of global concern, yet their aquatic ecological risks and associated driving factors remain poorly understood. Here, we analyzed 190 PPCPs in surface waters across 60 countries on five continents, screened the priority PPCP list, and identified key ecological risk driving factors. Results showed that antihyperglycemics and antibiotics dominated concentration profiles, while hormones and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) posed the most severe ecological risks. 76 PPCPs exhibited potential risks in at least one country, with ibuprofen, 17β-estradiol, and carbamazepine identified as critical compounds, and estrone posing high risks to aquatic ecosystems globally. Across income levels, PPCP concentrations peaked in lower-middle-income countries, while ecological risks were highest in upper-middle-income regions. PPCP risks were correlated with multiple factors such as environmental infrastructure, healthcare systems, unemployment rates, and the Gini index. In addition, hydrological dilution and PPCP usage were also important driving factors that might be affected by climate change. Here, we offer the perspective that enhancing treatment capacity, improving healthcare accessibility, mitigating socioeconomic disparities, and adapting to climate change are imperative to mitigate PPCP risks while advancing across many of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
Impacts of climate change interventions on biodiversity, water, the food system and human health and well-being
Get PDFClimate change threatens biodiversity, water, food and human health and well‐being. Rapid, sustained mitigation and adaptation actions can benefit all these elements of the nexus. Key transitions in energy, land and marine ecosystems, urban areas, industry and society are essential for climate change mitigation, adaptation and sustainable development. These transitions require interdisciplinary research, policy support and societal engagement. Here we present an assessment of 69 response options, a subset of which (15) was used in the climate change chapter of the IPBES Nexus Assessment. We show that the majority of climate change response options for land, oceans and ecosystems, settlement and infrastructure, industrial and societal system transitions have broadly positive impacts across the nexus. However, energy system transitions show more apparent trade‐offs. Most of these impacts result from energy infrastructure that would also be required for fossil fuel‐based systems and should be compared to the far more damaging consequences of continued fossil fuel use. Transitioning to cleaner, renewable energy sources reduces these risks and offers significant improvements across the nexus by reducing climate change impacts. Of the 69 response options assessed, 59% have entirely positive effects, or at least no negative effects, across all nexus elements and can be considered as low‐risk, immediately actionable options. The remaining 41% show either negative or variable impacts on at least one nexus element. However, this does not render them unviable; rather, their implementation must be carefully managed. Where impacts are variable, strategies should be tailored to ensure positive outcomes; where trade‐offs are unavoidable, efforts should focus on minimising negative effects and maximising synergies. Our findings suggest that prioritising policies that address the interconnected challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss, land degradation, pollution, food insecurity, access to clean water, energy for all and sustainable development will deliver more effective and equitable climate action
Advancing causal inference in ecology: pathways for biodiversity change detection and attribution
Get PDF•1. Understanding the causes of biodiversity change is essential for addressing environmental challenges. While causal attribution has advanced in other fields, ecologists remain cautious about causal claims or misinterpret predictive models as causal. With growing spatio‐temporal data, computational power and cross‐disciplinary collaboration, discussions on improving attribution methods in ecology are gaining momentum. However, practical guidance remains limited for non‐experts. Here, we identify the challenges and decisions involved in detecting and attributing biodiversity change and provide an overview of suitable methods based on available data and specific research questions.
•2. The first challenge we address pertains to biodiversity and driver data. Unlike controlled experimental data in other disciplines, ecological data often stem from monitoring programs or field samplings with varying degrees of rigour, which complicates the analysis due to sampling biases, interacting drivers, measurement error or spatio‐temporal variations. We specifically outline how data structure (e.g. structured vs. opportunistic data) and data coverage along the spatial and temporal scale impact detection and attribution.
•3. The second challenge involves the ability to detect directional change in the system of interest, which is associated with numerous hurdles. We provide an overview of the most relevant approaches to deal with sampling variability, gaps and biases in the data, non‐linearity in the temporal trends and to identify the most appropriate spatio‐temporal resolution.
•4. For the third challenge, causal attribution, we focus on data‐driven approaches. We review recent frameworks that draw on methodologies from other disciplines, offering analytical roadmaps and step‐by‐step guidance for causal inference. These include constructing theoretical causal models a priori, full causal models based on data and theory and posterior causal interpretation tailored to specific data and research questions.
•5. Moving forward, it is essential to foster interdisciplinary collaboration to adapt and refine methodologies from other fields, ensure robust data collection and sharing practices, promote the integration of advanced computational tools and improve the link between data‐driven and theory‐driven approaches. This approach will enhance our ability to make robust causal inferences; thereby improving our understanding of biodiversity changes and informing effective conservation strategies
Enriching the European shared socio-economic pathways with considerations of biodiversity and nature using a nexus approach
Get PDFThe global climate and biodiversity crises are deeply interconnected, yet current research and policy frameworks often treat them in isolation. The widely used Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs), which underpin climate change assessments and guide policy, exemplify this gap: they neglect biodiversity and nature, overlooking critical feedbacks between socio-economic and environmental systems. This omission constrains options for addressing both crises simultaneously and obscures cascading risks. We address this gap through a co-creation process at the European scale, enriching the European-SSPs with considerations of biodiversity and nature using a nexus approach (spanning biodiversity, energy, food, health, water, and transport). We compare the original and enriched narratives through a systems analysis, revealing a substantial increase in system complexity that shifts the relative significance of indirect drivers across SSPs due to novel feedbacks with biodiversity and other sectors. For example, across several scenarios economic and technological development reinforce unsustainable resource extraction, even if partially oriented toward sustainability. In contrast, governance, environmental respect and social cohesion prove critical to enabling positive outcomes for biodiversity but can also perpetuate biodiversity loss if not fully aligned with environmental goals. These findings highlight the need for adaptive approaches that respond to emergent socio-economic conditions and systemic policymaking that accompanies technical interventions with improvements in governance. They also demonstrate how ‘biodiversity-centric’ scenarios can strengthen the IPCC scenario framework by capturing critical feedbacks between biodiversity and socio-economic drivers of climate change, enabling more integrated research and policy
Review article: AntArchitecture – building an age–depth model from Antarctica's radiostratigraphy to explore ice-sheet evolution
Get PDFRadio-echo sounding (RES) has revealed an internal architecture within both the West and East Antarctic ice sheets that records their depositional, deformational and melting histories. Crucially, RES-imaged internal-reflecting horizons, tied to ice-core age–depth profiles, can be treated as isochrones that record the age–depth structure across the Antarctic ice sheets. These enable the reconstruction of past climate and ice dynamical processes on large scales, which are complementary to but more spatially extensive than commonly used proxy records (e.g. former ice limits constrained by cosmogenic dating or offshore sediment sequences) around Antarctica. We review the progress towards building a pan-Antarctic age–depth model from these data by first introducing the relevant RES datasets that have been acquired across Antarctica over the last 6 decades (focussing specifically on those that detected internal-reflecting horizons) and outlining the processing steps typically undertaken to visualise, trace and date (by intersection with ice cores or modelling) the RES-imaged isochrones. We summarise the scientific applications for which Antarctica's internal architecture has been used to date and present a pathway to expanding Antarctic radiostratigraphy across the continent to provide a benchmark for a wider range of investigations: (1) identification of optimal sites for retrieving new ice-core palaeoclimate records targeting different periods; (2) reconstruction of surface mass balance on millennial or historical timescales; (3) estimation of basal melting and geothermal heat flux from radiostratigraphy and comprehensive mapping of basal-ice units to complement inferences from other geophysical and geological methods; (4) advancement of the knowledge of volcanic activity and fallout across Antarctica; and (5) refinement of numerical models that leverage radiostratigraphy to tune time-varying accumulation, basal melting and ice flow, firstly to reconstruct past behaviour and then to reduce uncertainties in projecting future ice-sheet behaviour
Aspects of the Global Thermohaline Circulation in the Absence of Wind Forcing
Get PDFThe global ocean’s overturning circulation plays an important role in climate and climate variability through its transport of heat, freshwater and nutrients. As part of this three-dimensional overturning circulation, dense waters sink in narrow regions at high latitudes in the North Atlantic and along the Antarctic coast. To close this circulation, it is generally assumed that either intense interior mixing by winds and internal tides, or wind-driven upwelling is required to bring these water masses back to the surface. Nevertheless, more recent work questions this requirement for winds and tides, arguing that surface buoyancy forcing alone can drive such a circulation through a process known as rotating horizontal convection. In particular, it has been shown that the presence of a re-entrant channel, such as the Southern Ocean, is required for rotating horizontal convection to generate many features of the global ocean’s overturning circulation. Building on previous work in which rotating horizontal convection was forced by only thermal forcing, here we demonstrate, using an idealised eddying ocean model with both thermal and haline surface forcing, that rotating horizontal convection can produce many of the observed features of the global ocean’s overturning circulation. These results therefore suggest that a global “thermohaline circulation” can exist in the ocean in the absence of winds and in the limit of small vertical diffusion
Monitoring shear-zone weakening in East Antarctic outlet glaciers through differential InSAR measurements
Get PDFThe stability of the Antarctic Ice Sheet depends on ice flux into the ocean through major outlet glaciers, which is resisted by shear stresses in the lateral shear margins, both on grounded ice and on floating ice shelves. Within the tidal-flexure zone, where the ice sheet transitions from fully grounded to freely floating, ocean tides lead to a characteristic flexural pattern, which can be detected by radar satellites in differential interferograms. Here, we investigate how spatially heterogeneous elastic ice-shelf properties in the shear zones affect tidal flexure and whether a corresponding signature can be detected in satellite observations. We use the Young's modulus (which, among others, depends on ice temperature and/or ice-crystal orientation fabric and damage) as a bulk tuning variable for changing ice stiffness across shear zones and show that this leads to centimeter-scale deviations in vertical displacement, compared with a homogeneous elastic flexure model. Using the tidal-flexure zone of Priestley Glacier as an example, we compare homogeneous and heterogeneous flexure-model predictions with observations from 31 differential interferograms. After adjusting the local tide model and validating it with in situ GPS data, we find that a 5-fold reduction of the Young's modulus in the shear zone, i.e., an effective shear-zone weakening, reduces the root-mean-square error of predicted and observed vertical displacement by 33 % within the central part of the ice shelf. This suggests that satellite interferometry can detect changing ice stiffness across shear zones, with the potential to inform ice-flow models about the often unknown spatial variability in ice-shelf properties along the grounding zone
A new vascular plant Red List for Great Britain
Get PDFThis report presents a comprehensive revision of the Great Britain (GB) Red List for all native and archaeophyte vascular plants, utilising verified datasets published by the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland (BSBI) covering three distribution atlas time periods (1930-1969; 1987-1999; 2000-2019). Assessments of threat were undertaken using the latest International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Guidelines and Criteria. Of 1720 taxa evaluated, 434 (25%) were assessed as Critically Endangered (55), Endangered (117) or Vulnerable (262). A further 22 taxa were assessed as Regionally Extinct, and 140 as Near Threatened. Factors associated with threat included rarity, the intensification of management, long-term neglect, development, eutrophication and pollution. Such factors have had a disproportionate impact on the flora of lowland regions. An elevated threat status for numerous historically widespread "positive indicator" taxa of semi-improved terrestrial habitats, and those of wetland and aquatic habitats, was associated with the degradation or destruction, and increased fragmentation, of suitable habitat, with such taxa increasingly confined to protected refugia. For a small number of montane plants present at their absolute southern European range limits in GB, threat was also linked to the symptoms of climate change
The use of ecoacoustics to monitor soil ecology: a critical review with reference to earthworms
Get PDFThe use of ecoacoustics to monitor soil ecology was identified as a priority in the 2024 horizon scan of global biological conservation issues. Proponents suggest it will have societal impacts by improving soil health assessments, enhance soil biodiversity monitoring and facilitate the conservation, remediation and management of soil ecosystems. Here we review soil ecoacoustics in terms of its definition, theoretical basis, acoustic indices and statistical inferences. To do this we explain mechanical wave behaviour, mechanoreception by fauna, and tactical signal design with reference to earthworms as ecosystem engineers. Ecoacoustics emerged from research on animal long‐distance communication systems, and its direct application to soils has been identified as a problem area. A new field within ecoacoustics has been created for soils, sonoscape investigations, to capture spatio‐temporal complexity of ecological features (rather than soil ecology). There is a good case for reclassifying soil ecoacoustic ‘soundscape’ studies as sonoscapes. We identify that further refinement of ecoacoustics is required for applications to soil habitats. The performance of sonoscape investigations is dependent on acoustic indices and statistical inferences, and we question why stationary signal processing is used as the base transform for soils data, and highlight the issue of unbalanced data sets, particularly pertinent to soils as there is limited understanding of what exactly is being detected. We list the key research needs and highlight that integrating soil science and mechanistic modelling of soil processes and wave propagation as an essential component of developing reliable monitoring solutions. Embracing these interdisciplinary avenues will help develop sensing capabilities for soils in robust scientific principles and mitigate the risks of speculative overreach
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