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The prevalence of overweight and obesity in childhood and adolescence are rapidly increasing and influenced by genetic, familial, environmental, socioeconomic and cultural factors. The aim of the study was to compare risk factors for childhood obesity in Ukraine (UA) and Germany (DE) using comparable investigative tools. Two groups of children, aged 8 to 18 years, from DE (93 children) and UA (95 children) were divided into overweight and obese groups. Anthropometric data and detailed medical history were collected. Risk factors in pregnancy (prematurity, weight gain >20 kg, early contractions) were equally frequent in both groups. Positive correlations of body mass index (BMI)-standard deviation score (SDS) between children and mothers were noted. The proportion of family members with diabetes mellitus was lower in the UA group. Obesity was more frequent at one year of age in DE children. The DE group also became overweight at an earlier age and remained overweight over a longer period of time compared to UA. The mean BMI-SDS of obese children was lower in the UA group. In both groups waist circumference to height ratio was >0.5, indicating presence of a cardiometabolic risk factor. About half of the patients in both groups had blood pressure values exceeding the 95 percentile. Similar risk factors for obesity were observed among two groups of children in UA and DE. Differences were observed regarding the prevalence of specific risk factors for childhood obesity. Population-specific distribution of risk factors needs to be considered in order to optimize prevention and treatment strategies.

Premise of the study: Field methodology and image analysis protocols using acoustic tomography were developed and evaluated as a tool to estimate the amount of internal decay and damage of living trees, with special attention to tropical rainforest trees with irregular trunk shapes. Methods and Results: Living trunks of a diversity of tree species in tropical rainforests in the Republic of Panama were scanned using an Argus Electronic PiCUS 3 Sonic Tomograph and evaluated for the amount and patterns of internal decay. A protocol using ImageJ analysis software was used to quantify the proportions of intact and compromised wood. The protocols provide replicable estimates of internal decay and cavities for trees of varying shapes, wood density, and bark thickness. Conclusions: Sonic tomography, coupled with image analysis, provides an efficient, noninvasive approach to evaluate decay patterns and structural integrity of even irregularly shaped living trees.

Sufficiency is one important strategy for sustainable development. At an individual level, we need a better understanding of the relationship between sufficiency attitude and CO2 footprint. In this paper, we analyze sufficiency as a psychological determinant of low-carbon lifestyles and introduce an empirical measurement scale for individual sufficiency attitudes.Sufficiency aims at a total reduction of resource consumption, which is urgently needed to achieve our climate and sustainable development goals. This paper explores individual attitude towards a sufficiency-oriented lifestyle as a driver of a low carbon footprint. Survey data of 310 participants was analyzed to test whether individual sufficiency attitude manifests in people's carbon footprint. The results provide evidence for this relationship but its strength varies between behavioral domains - that is, heating, electricity, food consumption, everyday mobility, air travel. Potential structural and individual barriers to reducing CO2 emissions are discussed as possible factors that could explain differences between the behavioral domains. We argue that intrapersonal factors matter for sustainable lifestyles but that policy-making and structural change should complement and facilitate voluntary endeavors to achieve low-carbon lifestyles.

Behavioural science has yielded insights about the actions of individuals, particularly as consumers, that affect climate change. Behaviours in other spheres of life remain understudied. In this Perspective, we propose a collaborative research agenda that integrates behavioural science insights across multiple disciplines. To this end, we offer six recommendations for optimizing the quality and impact of research on individual climate behaviour. The recommendations are united by a shift towards more solutions-focused research that is directly useful to citizens, policymakers and other change agents. Achieving this vision will require overcoming challenges such as the limited funding for behavioural and social sciences and structural barriers within and beyond the academic system that impede collaborations across disciplines.Behavioural science offers valuable insights for mitigating climate change, but existing work focuses mostly on consumption and lacks coordination across disciplines. In this Perspective, the authors make six recommendations for improving the quality and impact of behavioural research on mitigation.

The need to tailor environmental policies in Africa with an understanding of public attitudes is commonly acknowledged, but efforts to generate such understanding are generally constrained by a lack of reliable context-appropriate measures. Attempts to ‘borrow’ Western measures in African research are typically undermined by the cross-cultural inequivalence of constructs and theoretical models. Consequently, we tested the potential of the Campbell paradigm—an approach that enables context-specific adaptation of attitude measurement, among a Nigerian sample (N = 543). Data were gathered with a questionnaire survey. Our findings show that a context-appropriate environmental attitude measure can be obtained by assessing the behaviours and intention statements Nigerians execute in response to environmental issues. On average, pro-environmental attitude levels among our sample were characterized by professed intentions to perform the most difficult behaviours and actual engagement in the least difficult behaviours. The environmental attitude measure derived using the Campbell paradigm is positively related to other conventional attitude indicators including the perceived threat of climate change, concern, efficacy beliefs and acceptance of responsibility for mitigation. We conclude that the Campbell paradigm offers a viable avenue to proceed beyond simple assessments of professed environmental attitudes to more accurate evaluations of Africans’ disposition to strive for the achievement of ecological goals in difficult circumstances.

A shift towards a bioeconomy is not sustainable per se. In order to contribute to sustainable development, a bioeconomy must meet certain conditions. These conditions have been discussed with respect to technology and also to the importance of ethical aspects. Consumers’ behavior has also been acknowledged. However, consumers still have to choose sustainable consumption options, and this choice depends on their psychological makeup, which can be related to two factors: behavioral costs and individual sustainability motivation. Behavioral costs determine how difficult the consumption of a bio-based product is, relative to other less sustainable consumption options. Sustainability motivation determines how much effort a person is willing to expend for a more sustainable consumption option, for the sustainable use and recycling of a product, or even to refrain from engaging in consumption. In addition, in a complex bioeconomic system, the sustainability of a bio-based consumption option is not always clear cut. After providing an introduction to the systemic and technological background of bio-based products, we present how consumers’ sustainability motivation is an essential and decisive pull factor for a circular sustainable bioeconomy. We also present the drivers of consumers’ sustainability motivation as necessary components of a sustainable bioeconomic system.

A change in lifestyle is often necessary in order to reduce humanity’s excessive consumption of resources to a sustainable level. However, because lifestyles vary greatly between individuals – even when they live in the same sociocultural context – we need to understand the main determinants of people’s sustainable performance. Whether a person will perform a specific sustainable behaviour or not (for example, buying organic products) depends on the specific behavioural costs of the behaviour (for example, required effort) and on a particular person’s environmental attitude level (his or her motivation to protect the environment). Thus, reducing the behavioural costs, for example, by incentivising organic products and increasing one’s environmental attitude, can promote sustainable behaviour in individuals. However, in the effort to promote sustainable lifestyles, it is not efficient to tackle the costs of one behaviour at a time. Only a significant boost in people’s environmental attitude will eventually lead to necessary lifestyle changes. We conclude that sustainable societies need both (a) conditions that facilitate sustainable behaviour, and (b) individuals who are distinctly committed to sustainability. This is because the choice of ambitious sustainability goals by politicians and the establishment of favourable conditions for sustainable lifestyles by policy-makers require the support of a sustainability-minded populace in democratic pluralistic societies. Since Western societies consume resources at a rate that exceeds by far the capacity of our planet to replenish them, sustainability requires a massive reduction in energy and resource consumption. The two factors independently control behaviour in a compensatory manner: that is, the higher the costs of a behaviour, the higher the attitude level that is necessary to overcome these costs. Attitudes become apparent in the face of behavioural costs. Sustainable behaviours that are easy to implement, such as separating waste or turning off lights in unused rooms, are performed by many people, even people who have only a low level of environmental attitude. Environmental attitude is correlated with knowledge about the environment and knowledge about effective action for alleviating negative environmental consequences. Effectively promoting individual sustainability involves finding ways to increase people’s environmental attitude so that people are motivated to act sustainably in all aspects and areas of their lives.

North African populations are distinct from sub-Saharan Africans based on cultural, linguistic, and phenotypic attributes; however, the time and the extent of genetic divergence between populations north and south of the Sahara remain poorly understood. Here, we interrogate the multilayered history of North Africa by characterizing the effect of hypothesized migrations from the Near East, Europe, and sub-Saharan Africa on current genetic diversity. We present dense, genome-wide SNP genotyping array data (730,000 sites) from seven North African populations, spanning from Egypt to Morocco, and one Spanish population. We identify a gradient of likely autochthonous Maghrebi ancestry that increases from east to west across northern Africa; this ancestry is likely derived from \"back-to-Africa\" gene flow more than 12,000 years ago (ya), prior to the Holocene. The indigenous North African ancestry is more frequent in populations with historical Berber ethnicity. In most North African populations we also see substantial shared ancestry with the Near East, and to a lesser extent sub-Saharan Africa and Europe. To estimate the time of migration from sub-Saharan populations into North Africa, we implement a maximum likelihood dating method based on the distribution of migrant tracts. In order to first identify migrant tracts, we assign local ancestry to haplotypes using a novel, principal component-based analysis of three ancestral populations. We estimate that a migration of western African origin into Morocco began about 40 generations ago (approximately 1,200 ya); a migration of individuals with Nilotic ancestry into Egypt occurred about 25 generations ago (approximately 750 ya). Our genomic data reveal an extraordinarily complex history of migrations, involving at least five ancestral populations, into North Africa.

Key Points Millions of new genetic variants have been discovered through sequencing studies and deposited in human genomic databases. Many of these, particularly rare variants, have been annotated as deleterious. Recent research has examined whether different human populations have a varying burden of deleterious alleles — a concept referred to as mutation load. Several recent studies have suggested that there is no significant difference among populations in the estimated number of deleterious alleles per individual. However, these analyses are sensitive to annotation prediction algorithms and summary statistics, leading to different, sometimes contradictory, interpretations. These calculations also involved a number of simplifying assumptions, including additive allelic effects, no epistasis and simple distributions of selection coefficients across deleterious variants and across populations. Following classical models of mutation load, we consider genotype frequencies in order to highlight how mutation load can change under different models of dominance. Additionally, genetic drift has shifted the allele frequency spectrum of deleterious variants such that the genomes of individuals in Out-of-Africa populations carry more common deleterious variants. The frequency distribution of deleterious variants has implications for characterizing the genetic architecture of diseases across populations. A large proportion of genetic variants in the human genome have been predicted to be deleterious. This Review examines the frequency and patterns of deleterious alleles in the human genome and considers recent studies with conflicting findings on whether the mutation load, or burden of deleterious alleles, differs across populations. Next-generation sequencing technology has facilitated the discovery of millions of genetic variants in human genomes. A sizeable fraction of these variants are predicted to be deleterious. Here, we review the pattern of deleterious alleles as ascertained in genome sequencing data sets and ask whether human populations differ in their predicted burden of deleterious alleles — a phenomenon known as mutation load. We discuss three demographic models that are predicted to affect mutation load and relate these models to the evidence (or the lack thereof) for variation in the efficacy of purifying selection in diverse human genomes. We also emphasize why accurate estimation of mutation load depends on assumptions regarding the distribution of dominance and selection coefficients — quantities that remain poorly characterized for current genomic data sets.