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While many Global South contexts rely on community-based natural resource management, out-migration has the potential to change rural peoples’ incentives to participate in such management. We argue that remittance income from out-migration reduces dependence on natural resource commons, which may in turn weaken the voluntary participation upon which community-based natural resource management initiatives depend. We studied this relationship empirically in Nepal, a country with a largely community-based model for the governance of its forests. In analyzing nationwide survey data that spanned nearly one decade, we fit a household-level fixed-effects regression model, which showed that households that received more remittance income were less likely to rely on commonly held forests compared to households in the same village that received less remittance income. Using a similar estimation approach and more detailed survey data from the districts of Mustang and Gorkha, we also showed that larger remittance incomes predicted less participation in forest governance and management activities. These results suggest that the remittances associated with out-migration from rural areas can weaken incentives for local participation in natural resource management among the people left behind. If remittance income has these effects, policymakers may need to reconsider how to sustain community-based resource management in countries or regions that are experiencing widespread rural out-migration. Future research is needed to establish causality, validate the results cross-nationally, and explore new policy innovations that could support resource governance in contexts where many resource users receive remittances.

Interventions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions strive to promote gender balance so that men and women have equal rights to participate in, and benefit from, decision-making about such interventions. One conventional way to achieve gender balance is to introduce gender quotas. Here we show that gender quotas make interventions more effective and lead to more equal sharing of intervention benefits. We conducted a randomized ‘lab’-in-the-field experiment in which 440 forest users from Indonesia, Peru and Tanzania made decisions about extraction and conservation in a forest common. We randomly assigned a gender quota to half of the participating groups, requiring that at least 50% of group members were women. Groups with the gender quota conserved more trees as a response to a ‘payment for ecosystem services’ intervention and shared the payment more equally. We attribute this effect to the gender composition of the group, not the presence of female leaders.Decision-making structures in forest-user communities often exclude women. This lab-in-field experiment shows that groups in which at least 50% of members were women conserved more trees, and distributed benefits more equally, in a payment for ecosystem services intervention.

Agricultural technologies are vital for farmers adapting to climate change. However, while efforts have focused on improving access and initial adoption, little attention has been given to social disparities in rates of adoption and the benefits derived from these technologies. Our study investigates the adoption of groundwater irrigation technology in India, a transformative innovation that has historically enhanced productivity and food security, and helped agricultural households adapt to a changing climate. We use a nationwide household survey sample that spans nearly a decade, capturing a key period of groundwater expansion in India. Our analysis reveals that members of highly marginalized social groups are less likely to adopt groundwater irrigation technologies, and less likely to sustain their use of the technologies for long periods of time. Furthermore, the household-level benefits of the technologies–operationalized through the relationship between technology adoption and income–appear lower for households belonging to historically marginalized groups compared to the historically advantaged. Our study underscores the importance of addressing social inequalities in both adoption as well as the sustained utilization of agricultural technologies and other climate adaptation tools. Disparities in the utilization of these technologies can hinder farmers’ ability to access new innovations and adapt to increasing threats from climate change. Targeted policies and interventions are essential to not only provide historically marginalized groups access to technological innovations, but also facilitate their effective utilization.

Coral reef ecosystems have suffered an unprecedented loss of habitat-forming hard corals in recent decades. While marine conservation has historically focused on passive habitat protection, demand for and interest in active restoration has been growing in recent decades. However, a disconnect between coral restoration practitioners, coral reef managers and scientists has resulted in a disjointed field where it is difficult to gain an overview of existing knowledge. To address this, we aimed to synthesise the available knowledge in a comprehensive global review of coral restoration methods, incorporating data from the peer-reviewed scientific literature, complemented with grey literature and through a survey of coral restoration practitioners. We found that coral restoration case studies are dominated by short-term projects, with 60% of all projects reporting less than 18 months of monitoring of the restored sites. Similarly, most projects are relatively small in spatial scale, with a median size of restored area of 100 m2. A diverse range of species are represented in the dataset, with 229 different species from 72 coral genera. Overall, coral restoration projects focused primarily on fast-growing branching corals (59% of studies), and report survival between 60 and 70%. To date, the relatively young field of coral restoration has been plagued by similar 'growing pains' as ecological restoration in other ecosystems. These include 1) a lack of clear and achievable objectives, 2) a lack of appropriate and standardised monitoring and reporting and, 3) poorly designed projects in relation to stated objectives. Mitigating these will be crucial to successfully scale up projects, and to retain public trust in restoration as a tool for resilience based management. Finally, while it is clear that practitioners have developed effective methods to successfully grow corals at small scales, it is critical not to view restoration as a replacement for meaningful action on climate change.

Coal is the most abundant and readily combustible energy resource being used worldwide. However, its structural characteristic creates a perception that coal is only useful for producing energy via burning. Here we report a facile approach to synthesize tunable graphene quantum dots from various types of coal, and establish that the unique coal structure has an advantage over pure sp 2 -carbon allotropes for producing quantum dots. The crystalline carbon within the coal structure is easier to oxidatively displace than when pure sp 2 -carbon structures are used, resulting in nanometre-sized graphene quantum dots with amorphous carbon addends on the edges. The synthesized graphene quantum dots, produced in up to 20% isolated yield from coal, are soluble and fluorescent in aqueous solution, providing promise for applications in areas such as bioimaging, biomedicine, photovoltaics and optoelectronics, in addition to being inexpensive additives for structural composites. Coal is widely used for energy generation, but has not been considered for possible functional materials. Here, the authors report the one-step formation of graphene quantum dots from coal at yields of up to 20%, which is advantageous when compared with their syntheses from sp 2 -type carbon structures.

Objective:The Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS), conducted by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 2019, revealed that a large percentage of boys (30%) and girls (45%) reported serious difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions as a result of a physical, mental, or emotional problem. In 2021, the CDC conducted the Adolescent Behaviors and Experiences Survey (ABES). The ABES included similar methodology and content as the YRBS. This study analyzed ABES data to examine correlates of perceived cognitive impairment among high school students in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic.Participants and Methods:The ABES was a one-time, online survey that was conducted to assess and evaluate the challenges that high-school aged youth experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Students’ perceived cognitive impairment was assessed using the same question used in the 2019 YRBS: 'Because of a physical, mental, or emotional problem, do you have serious difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions?' Response options were binary: 'Yes’ or 'No.' The students’ responses were evaluated in relation to nine adversity, mental health, and lifestyle variables.Results:Participants were 6,992 students, age 14 to 18, with 3,294 boys (47%) and 3,698 girls (53%). A large proportion endorsed experiencing serious difficulties concentrating, remembering, and making decisions (45%). Girls (56%) were significantly more likely to endorse perceived cognitive impairment compared to boys (33%) [X2(1)=392.55, p<.001; OR=2.66, 95% CI=2.41-2.93]. Youth who reported that their mental health was poor most of the time or always were very likely to report perceived cognitive impairment (boys: 67%; girls: 81%). Binary logistic regressions were used to examine the associations between perceived cognitive impairment, adversity, and lifestyle variables while controlling for mental health. These analyses were conducted separately for boys [X2(9)=596.70, p<.001; Nagelkerke R2=.24] and girls [x2(9)=883.35, p<.001; Nagelkerke R2=.30]. After controlling for current mental health, significant independent predicters of cognitive problems in boys and girls included: a lifetime history of discrimination based on race or ethnicity, lifetime history of being sexually assaulted or abused, lifetime history of using illicit drugs, being bullied in the past year, current marijuana use, and getting insufficient sleep (5 of fewer hours per night). Participation in sports and exercising regularly were both independently associated with lower rates of cognitive impairment.Conclusions:Perceived cognitive impairment was endorsed by a strikingly high percentage of high school students in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic. More than half of high school aged girls and one third of boys reported having serious difficulty concentrating, remembering, and making decisions. These rates are considerably higher than in 2019. Current mental health, unfair treatment because of race or ethnicity, being sexually assaulted, being bullied, drug use, and insufficient sleep were associated with perceived cognitive impairment. Indicators of a physically active lifestyle (participation in sports and exercising regularly) were associated with lower rates of cognitive problems.

ABSTRACT Incentives are a widely used tool for addressing deforestation and are often implemented as collective contracts. Local institutions are crucial to the solution of collective action problems associated with forest conservation, but we still have little knowledge of how to encourage institutional creation through policy. Since collective contracts do not eliminate freeriding incentives, we argue that their success hinges on their ability to stimulate the creation of institutions for collective action. To test these ideas, we analyze data from an incentivized lab‐in‐the‐field experimental collective action game played with natural resource users in four developing countries. The experiment simulates management of a common forest, and groups were randomly assigned to a conservation incentive payment condition. We observe how much group members attempt to coordinate on the creation of institutional rules and find experimental evidence that an external incentive program can stimulate the endogenous creation of informal institutions.

While coral reefs in Australia have historically been a showcase of conventional management informed by research, recent declines in coral cover have triggered efforts to innovate and integrate intervention and restoration actions into management frameworks. Here we outline the multi-faceted intervention approaches that have developed in Australia since 2017, from newly implemented in-water programs, research to enhance coral resilience and investigations into socio-economic perspectives on restoration goals. We describe in-water projects using coral gardening, substrate stabilisation, coral repositioning, macro-algae removal, and larval-based restoration techniques. Three areas of research focus are also presented to illustrate the breadth of Australian research on coral restoration, (1) the transdisciplinary Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program (RRAP), one of the world’s largest research and development programs focused on coral reefs, (2) interventions to enhance coral performance under climate change, and (3) research into socio-cultural perspectives. Together, these projects and the recent research focus reflect an increasing urgency for action to confront the coral reef crisis, develop new and additional tools to manage coral reefs, and the consequent increase in funding opportunities and management appetite for implementation. The rapid progress in trialling and deploying coral restoration in Australia builds on decades of overseas experience, and advances in research and development are showing positive signs that coral restoration can be a valuable tool to improve resilience at local scales (i.e., high early survival rates across a variety of methods and coral species, strong community engagement with local stakeholders). RRAP is focused on creating interventions to help coral reefs at multiple scales, from micro scales (i.e., interventions targeting small areas within a specific reef site) to large scales (i.e., interventions targeting core ecosystem function and social-economic values at multiple select sites across the Great Barrier Reef) to resist, adapt to and recover from the impacts of climate change. None of these interventions aim to single-handedly restore the entirety of the Great Barrier Reef, nor do they negate the importance of urgent climate change mitigation action.

ObjectiveTo examine the one-year test-retest reliability of Child SCAT5 scores among middle school student athletes.DesignA prospective cohort study was conducted from August 2017 to May 2019 as part of George Mason University’s Advancing Healthcare Initiatives for Underserved Students (ACHIEVES) Project. Certified athletic trainers administered the Child SCAT5 baseline assessments each year at the beginning of two consecutive sports seasons.SettingMiddle school sports within a large public-school division in Virginia, USA.ParticipantsParticipants were 219 students (ages 11 and 12, M=11.7, SD=0.5; 52.1% girls, 47.9% boys) playing competitive school-sponsored sports during 2017–2018 and 2018–2019 academic years.Outcome MeasuresThe Child SCAT5 is comprised of: Total Symptoms; Symptom Severity; the Standardized Assessment of Concussion-Child Version (SAC-C), which includes Immediate Memory, Digits Backwards, Concentration, and Delayed Recall; and the Modified Balance Error Scoring System (mBESS).Main ResultsThe test-retest reliabilities of each Child SCAT5 component were low to moderate (all p’s<.001): Total Symptoms [ICC=0.53, (95%CI: 0.39,0.64)], Symptom Severity [ICC=0.55, (0.42,0.66)], SAC-C [ICC=0.49, (0.33,0.61)], Immediate Memory [ICC=0.40, (0.22,0.54)], Digits Backwards [ICC=0.50, (0.35,0.62)], Concentration [ICC=0.52, (0.37,0.63)], Delayed Recall [ICC=0.55, (0.41,0.66)], and mBESS [ICC=0.54, (0.40,0.65)]. Reliable change estimates were calculated for each score. Most children (69%–85%) scored within the same normative classification range each year.ConclusionsThe Child SCAT5 scores had low to moderate test-retest reliability. Most children scored within the same normative classification range across the two years. Recommendations for interpreting change on the Child SCAT5 are provided.

An exceptionally large coral Porites sp. has been identified and measured at Goolboodi (Orpheus Island), Great Barrier Reef (GBR). This coral was measured in March 2021 during citizen science research of coral reefs in the Palm Islands group. We conducted a literature review and consulted scientists to compare the size, age and health of the Porites with others in the GBR and internationally. This is the largest diameter Porites coral measured by scientists and the sixth highest coral measured in the GBR. The health of the Porites was assessed as very good with over 70% live coral cover and minor percentages of sponge, live coral rock and macroalgae. An estimated age of 421–438 years was calculated based on linear growth models. Manbarra Traditional Owners were consulted and suggested that the Porites be named Muga dhambi (big coral) to communicate traditional knowledge, language and culture to indigenous, tourists, scientists and students.