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"environmental threat"
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Flooding and environmental challenges for Venice and its lagoon : state of knowledge
Presenting scientific and technical synthesis of interdisciplinary research into the environmental threats to Venice and its lagoon, this text also looks at other cities under threat from rising sea levels, such as London and St. Petersburg.
Book
Cultural Tightness Promotes Pro-Environmental Behavior in the Ecological Threat Background
Pro-environmental behavior (PEB) is crucial for addressing global ecological threats, yet cultural factors are often overlooked in research on its determinants. This research explored the impact of cultural tightness–looseness on PEB, focusing on the mediating roles of the ascription of responsibility and personal norms, and the moderating role of environmental threats. In Study 1, we conducted both a measurement (Study 1a) and a manipulation (Study 1b) of cultural tightness–looseness and found that tight cultures effectively promote PEB. In Study 2, we tested the moderated mediation model, which revealed that the ascription of responsibility and personal norms, along with their chain effects, mediated the impact of cultural tightness–looseness on PEB. Environmental threats positively moderated the direct effect, with tight cultures predicting more PEB only under high–threat conditions. This study suggests that cultural tightness may have evolutionary benefits for promoting PEB. Practically, it reveals that promoting a tighter culture, coupled with messaging about environmental threats, may be more effective in encouraging PEB.
Journal Article
How Perceived Proximity to Climate Change Threats Affects Pro-Environmental Behaviors in South Korea?
This study explores how perceived proximity to environmental threats influences pro-environmental behaviors in South Korea. We find that individuals are more likely to engage in environmentally friendly actions, such as reducing their standard of living, paying higher taxes, and purchasing higher-priced eco-friendly products when they perceive climate change as a nearby threat. Our findings highlight the importance of perceived immediacy in motivating significant lifestyle changes and financial sacrifices for environmental protection. The results also reveal that political ideology influences these behaviors, with conservative individuals showing less support for green taxes and financial sacrifices. Additionally, higher levels of education and income, along with older age, correlate with a greater willingness to adopt pro-environmental behaviors. These insights contribute to environmental psychology by highlighting the role of perceived proximity in shaping environmental attitudes and behaviors, informing the development of targeted policies aimed at fostering sustainable behaviors, and addressing local environmental threats.
Journal Article
Ocean acidification through the lens of ecological theory
Ocean acidification, chemical changes to the carbonate system of seawater, is emerging as a key environmental challenge accompanying global warming and other human-induced perturbations. Considerable research seeks to define the scope and character of potential outcomes from this phenomenon, but a crucial impediment persists. Ecological theory, despite its power and utility, has been only peripherally applied to the problem. Here we sketch in broad strokes several areas where fundamental principles of ecology have the capacity to generate insight into ocean acidification's consequences. We focus on conceptual models that, when considered in the context of acidification, yield explicit predictions regarding a spectrum of population- and community-level effects, from narrowing of species ranges and shifts in patterns of demographic connectivity, to modified consumer-resource relationships, to ascendance of weedy taxa and loss of species diversity. Although our coverage represents only a small fraction of the breadth of possible insights achievable from the application of theory, our hope is that this initial foray will spur expanded efforts to blend experiments with theoretical approaches. The result promises to be a deeper and more nuanced understanding of ocean acidification and the ecological changes it portends.
Journal Article
Coastal Waste Detection Based on Deep Convolutional Neural Networks
Coastal waste not only has a seriously destructive effect on human life and marine ecosystems, but it also poses a long-term economic and environmental threat. To solve the issues of a poor manual coastal waste sorting environment, such as low sorting efficiency and heavy tasks, we develop a novel deep convolutional neural network by combining several strategies to realize intelligent waste recognition and classification based on the state-of-the-art Faster R-CNN framework. Firstly, to effectively detect small objects, we consider multiple-scale fusion to get rich semantic information from the shallower feature map. Secondly, RoI Align is introduced to solve positioning deviation caused by the regions of interest pooling. Moreover, it is necessary to correct key parameters and take on data augmentation to improve model performance. Besides, we create a new waste object dataset, named IST-Waste, which is made publicly to facilitate future research in this field. As a consequence, the experiment shows that the algorithm’s mAP reaches 83%. Detection performance is significantly better than Faster R-CNN and SSD. Thus, the developed scheme achieves higher accuracy and better performance against the state-of-the-art alternative.
Journal Article
Initial examination of marine microplastics along Jaffna Peninsula’s coastal stretch in the Palk Strait, northern Sri Lanka
Microplastics are pervasive pollutants in marine ecosystems worldwide and are increasingly recognized as a significant environmental threat. Sri Lanka, an island nation, is not exempt from this issue. While microplastic pollution has been extensively studied in the southern and western parts of Sri Lanka, limited data is available for the northern coastal regions. This first quantitative study aimed to assess the concentration of microplastics on three northern beaches: Mathagal, Point Pedro, and Charty Beach. This study reveals substantial microplastic contamination, with an average abundance of 11.06 ± 6.06 items/m
2
. The predominant size range of microplastics was 3 to 4 mm (32%). The most common shapes identified were fragments (58%), pellets (17%), and foam (10%), with the primary colours being white (42%), blue (26%), and green (21%). Polyethylene (53%) and polypropylene (18%) were the most prevalent polymers found. Among the beaches studied, Point Pedro had the highest pellet pollution index (PPI), although all three beaches were categorized as having a “very low” PPI level (0.0 < PPI ≤ 0.5). The study highlights the significant contribution of land-based sources to microplastic pollution on these beaches and emphasizes the urgent need for ongoing research and systematic monitoring of microplastic pollution in northern Sri Lanka.
Journal Article
Spatial prediction of forest fires in India: a machine learning approach for improved risk assessment and early warning systems
Forest fires pose a significant ecological and environmental threat globally, and India has seen a marked increase in both the frequency and severity of these events in recent years. This has led to extensive damage to natural resources, including forests and wildlife habitats. Effective management strategies are essential to mitigate these impacts, and this study aims to contribute to that effort through spatial prediction of forest fires in India using machine learning techniques. The research begins by analyzing spatial patterns and trends of forest fires and identifying key factors contributing to their occurrence. It then explores the relationships between forest fires and these factors. Using data from 2001 to 2020, the study develops a probability map of forest fire occurrences in India, leveraging data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on fire points and burned areas and the European Space Agency Climate Change Initiative (ESA-CCI) land use land cover. The analysis incorporates various fire occurrence conditioning factors, including climate variables (precipitation, air temperature, specific humidity, near-surface wind speed, net longwave radiation, and land surface temperature for both daytime and nighttime), biophysical factors (aspect, slope, elevation, soil moisture, and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index), and other factors such as proximity to railways, roads, and waterways. The maximum entropy model (MaxEnt) was employed to identify these factors and generate the probability map. The results indicate that forest fires are predominantly concentrated in three major regions: Northeast India, Uttarakhand-Himachal, and the Deccan Plateau. The study also highlights the link between forest fires and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 9, 12, 13, and 15). The findings can inform the identification of vulnerable areas, enabling the implementation of preventative measures. This research is crucial as it not only pinpoints regions at risk of forest fires but also elucidates their impacts on the environment and local livelihoods, thereby enhancing risk assessment and early warning systems.
Journal Article
Enacting the corporation
What are corporations, and to whom are they responsible? Anthropologist Marina Welker draws on two years of research at Newmont Mining Corporation’s Denver headquarters and its Batu Hijau copper and gold mine in Sumbawa, Indonesia, to address these questions. Against the backdrop of an emerging Corporate Social Responsibility movement and changing state dynamics in Indonesia, she shows how people enact the mining corporation in multiple ways: as an ore producer, employer, patron, promoter of sustainable development, religious sponsor, auditable organization, foreign imperialist, and environmental threat. Rather than assuming that corporations are monolithic, profit-maximizing subjects, Welker turns to anthropological theories of personhood to develop an analytic model of the corporation as an unstable collective subject with multiple authors, boundaries, and interests. Enacting the Corporation demonstrates that corporations are constituted through continuous struggles over relations with—and responsibilities to—local communities, workers, activists, governments, contractors, and shareholders.
eBook
Monte Carlo Simulation Approach to Shipping Accidents Consequences Assessment
The purpose of this study is to present and apply an innovative technique to model environmental consequences of shipping accidents in relations to events initiating those accidents. The Monte Carlo simulation technique is used to model shipping accidents and chemical release consequences within the world’s sea and ocean waters. The model was created based on the previously designed novel general probabilistic approach to critical infrastructure accident consequences, including three models: the process of initiating events generated by a critical infrastructure accident, the process of environmental threats coming from released chemicals that are a result of initiating events, and the process of environmental degradation stemming from environmental threats. It is a new approach that has never been proposed and applied before. The Monte Carlo simulation method is used under the assumption of the semi-Markov model of these three processes. A procedure for the realization and generation of this process and evaluation of its characteristics is proposed and applied in the preparation of the C# program. Using this program, the processes’ characteristics are predicted for a specific sea area. Namely, for the considered processes, the limit values of transient probabilities between the states and the mean values of total sojourn times at the particular states for the fixed time are determined. The results obtained can be used practically by maritime practitioners involved in making decisions related to the safety of maritime transport and to mitigation actions concerned with maritime accidents.
Journal Article
Internet Use on Closing Intention–Behavior Gap in Green Consumption—A Mediation and Moderation Theoretical Model
The rapid development of the Internet as an information medium has provided new opportunities for promoting green consumption. Therefore, a study on the theoretical mechanism is helpful to make better use of the Internet media to promote green consumption and close consumers’ green consumption intention–behavior gap. In this study, data from 419 valid questionnaires were collected and analyzed through PLS-SEM within the framework of the theory of planned behavior. The results show that there are two pathways of Internet media promoting green consumption, namely the moderating effect and the mediating effect. First, through the moderating effect, Internet use can promote the conversion of intention to behavior and perceived behavioral control to behavior, thus closing the intention–behavior gap. Second, through the mediating effect, Internet use promotes green consumption behavior through the mediator of personal perceived environmental threats. The research indicates that the potential of Internet information media should be fully explored in promoting green consumption, disseminating environmental knowledge, reporting environmental issues, and guiding the transformation of individual green consumption intention into behavior.
Journal Article