Human activities are causing Earth's sixth major extinction event-an accelerating decline of the world's stocks of biological diversity at rates 100 to 1,000 times pre-human levels. Historically, ...low-impact intrusion into species habitats arose from local demands for food, fuel and living space. However, in today's increasingly globalized economy, international trade chains accelerate habitat degradation far removed from the place of consumption. Although adverse effects of economic prosperity and economic inequality have been confirmed, the importance of international trade as a driver of threats to species is poorly understood. Here we show that a significant number of species are threatened as a result of international trade along complex routes, and that, in particular, consumers in developed countries cause threats to species through their demand of commodities that are ultimately produced in developing countries. We linked 25,000 Animalia species threat records from the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List to more than 15,000 commodities produced in 187 countries and evaluated more than 5 billion supply chains in terms of their biodiversity impacts. Excluding invasive species, we found that 30% of global species threats are due to international trade. In many developed countries, the consumption of imported coffee, tea, sugar, textiles, fish and other manufactured items causes a biodiversity footprint that is larger abroad than at home. Our results emphasize the importance of examining biodiversity loss as a global systemic phenomenon, instead of looking at the degrading or polluting producers in isolation. We anticipate that our findings will facilitate better regulation, sustainable supply-chain certification and consumer product labelling.
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DOBA, IJS, IZUM, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
•Accounting for embodied CO2 in imports, Annex I countries have not met Kyoto targets.•Other non-CO2 GHGs exhibit the same, or stronger, leakage trend.•Historically, SOx and NOx burdens have also ...shifted to developing countries.•Despite strong national emissions targets, global SOx and NOx emissions have risen.•We raise the concern that leakage may undermine national emissions reductions targets.
Many developed countries in Annex B of the Kyoto Protocol have been able to report decreasing emissions, and some have officially fulfilled their CO2 reduction commitments. This is in part because current reporting and regulatory regimes allow these countries to displace emissions intensive production offshore. Using a new highly detailed account of emissions embodied in international trade we investigate this phenomenon of emissions leakage. We independently confirm previous findings that adjusting for trade, developed countries emissions have increased, not decreased. We find that the sectors successfully holding or lowering their domestic emissions are often the same as those increasing their imports of embodied CO2. We also find that the fastest growing flow paths of embodied CO2 largely originate outside the Kyoto Annex B signatory nations. Finally, we find that historically the same phenomenon of emissions displacement has already occurred for air pollution, with the result that despite aggressive legislation in major emitters total global air pollution emissions have increased. If regulatory policies do not account for embodied imports, global emissions are likely to rise even if developed countries emitters enforce strong national emissions targets.
A sustainable livestock economy depends on both production and consumption, inextricably linked in local, national and global markets. At each scale, technical innovation and production practices ...need to respond to evolving demand for both market and non-market attributes of livestock systems. This review considers recent and evolving demand-side challenges focussing on emerging preferences related to environmental, dietary and health impacts, arising from both production and consumption. It suggests that these attributes need to be integral to any definition of high-producing animal systems. This discussion is mostly framed using neoclassical economic theory, which highlights market failure and the role of negative and positive external effects or social costs. It examines how our understanding of the demand for these attributes is evolving, leading to market segmentation in some cases, and an existential threat to livestock production as consumption decisions change, investors seek to avoid potential liabilities related to greenhouse gas emissions and potentially antimicrobial resistance, and governments intervene to control other undesirable social costs. The discussion distinguishes between market imperatives in high- and lower-income countries, and how income and consumption trajectories may be less deterministic in a more hyperlinked world where product information may accelerate the evolution of preferences towards and away from livestock products. The review acknowledges the limits of a neoclassical approach, drawing attention to more fundamental concepts of biophysical limits to growth and value pluralism, which indicates values (e.g. intrinsic) that lie beyond the neoclassical framing of demand and value.
Sulfur dioxide (SO2) measurements from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) satellite sensor processed with the new principal component analysis (PCA) algorithm were used to detect large point ...emission sources or clusters of sources. The total of 491 continuously emitting point sources releasing from about 30ktyr-1 to more than 4000ktyr-1 of SO2 per year have been identified and grouped by country and by primary source origin: volcanoes (76 sources); power plants (297); smelters (53); and sources related to the oil and gas industry (65). The sources were identified using different methods, including through OMI measurements themselves applied to a new emission detection algorithm, and their evolution during the 2005-2014 period was traced by estimating annual emissions from each source. For volcanic sources, the study focused on continuous degassing, and emissions from explosive eruptions were excluded. Emissions from degassing volcanic sources were measured, many for the first time, and collectively they account for about 30% of total SO2 emissions estimated from OMI measurements, but that fraction has increased in recent years given that cumulative global emissions from power plants and smelters are declining while emissions from oil and gas industry remained nearly constant. Anthropogenic emissions from the USA declined by 80% over the 2005-2014 period as did emissions from western and central Europe, whereas emissions from India nearly doubled, and emissions from other large SO2-emitting regions (South Africa, Russia, Mexico, and the Middle East) remained fairly constant. In total, OMI-based estimates account for about a half of total reported anthropogenic SO2 emissions; the remaining half is likely related to sources emitting less than 30ktyr-1 and not detected by OMI.
Through a fascinating discussion of religion's role in the rhetoric of American civilizing empire, The Imperial Church undertakes an exploration of how Catholic mission histories served as a useful ...reference for Americans narrating US settler colonialism on the North American continent and seeking to extend military, political, and cultural power around the world. Katherine D. Moran traces historical celebrations of Catholic missionary histories in the upper Midwest, Southern California, and the US colonial Philippines to demonstrate the improbable centrality of the Catholic missions to ostensibly Protestant imperial endeavors. Moran shows that, as the United States built its continental and global dominion and an empire of production and commerce in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Protestant and Catholic Americans began to celebrate Catholic imperial pasts. She demonstrates that American Protestants joined their Catholic compatriots in speaking with admiration about historical Catholic missionaries: the Jesuit Jacques Marquette in the Midwest, the Franciscan Junípero Serra in Southern California, and the Spanish friars in the Philippines. Comparing them favorably to the Puritans, Pilgrims, and the American Revolutionary generation, commemorators drew these missionaries into a cross-confessional pantheon of US national and imperial founding fathers. In the process, they cast Catholic missionaries as gentle and effective agents of conquest, uplift, and economic growth, arguing that they could serve as both origins and models for an American civilizing empire. The Imperial Church connects Catholic history and the history of US empire by demonstrating that the religious dimensions of American imperial rhetoric have been as cross-confessional as the imperial nation itself.
Estimates of potential harmful effects on ecosystems in the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan due to acidifying deposition were calculated, using a 1-year simulation of a high-resolution ...implementation of the Global Environmental Multiscale-Modelling Air-quality and Chemistry (GEM-MACH) model, and estimates of aquatic and terrestrial ecosystem critical loads. The model simulation was evaluated against two different sources of deposition data: total deposition in precipitation and total deposition to snowpack in the vicinity of the Athabasca oil sands. The model captured much of the variability of observed ions in wet deposition in precipitation (observed versus model sulfur, nitrogen and base cation R.sup.2 values of 0.90, 0.76 and 0.72, respectively), while being biased high for sulfur deposition, and low for nitrogen and base cations (slopes 2.2, 0.89 and 0.40, respectively). Aircraft-based estimates of fugitive dust emissions, shown to be a factor of 10 higher than reported to national emissions inventories (Zhang et al., 2018), were used to estimate the impact of increased levels of fugitive dust on model results. Model comparisons to open snowpack observations were shown to be biased high, but in reasonable agreement for sulfur deposition when observations were corrected to account for throughfall in needleleaf forests. The model-observation relationships for precipitation deposition data, along with the expected effects of increased (unreported) base cation emissions, were used to provide a simple observation-based correction to model deposition fields. Base cation deposition was estimated using published observations of base cation fractions in surface-collected particles (Wang et al., 2015).
Sustainable development represents a commitment to advancing human well-being, with the added constraint that this development needs to take place within the ecological limits of the biosphere. ...Progress in both these dimensions of sustainable development can be assessed: we use the UN Human Development Index (HDI) as an indicator of development and the Ecological Footprint as an indicator of human demand on the biosphere. We argue that an HDI of no less than 0.8 and a per capita Ecological Footprint less than the globally available biocapacity per person represent minimum requirements for sustainable development that is globally replicable. Despite growing global adoption of sustainable development as an explicit policy goal, we find that in the year 2003 only one of the 93 countries surveyed met both of these minimum requirements. We also find an overall trend in high-income countries over the past twenty five years that improvements to HDI come with disproportionately larger increases in Ecological Footprint, showing a movement away from sustainability. Some lower-income countries, however, have achieved higher levels of development without a corresponding increase in per capita demand on ecosystem resources.
Current theoretical and empirical size-resolved parameterizations of the scavenging coefficient (Λ), a parameter commonly used in aerosol transport models to describe below-cloud particle scavenging ...by rain, have been reviewed in detail and compared with available field and laboratory measurements. Use of different formulations for raindrop-particle collection efficiency can cause uncertainties in size-resolved Λ values of one to two orders of magnitude for particles in the 0.01–3 μm diameter range. Use of different formulations of raindrop number size distribution can cause Λ values to vary by a factor of 3 to 5 for all particle sizes. The uncertainty in Λ caused by the use of different droplet terminal velocity formulations is generally small than a factor of 2. The combined uncertainty due to the use of different formulations of raindrop-particle collection efficiency, raindrop size spectrum, and raindrop terminal velocity in the current theoretical framework is not sufficient to explain the one to two order of magnitude under-prediction of Λ for the theoretical calculations relative to the majority of field measurements. These large discrepancies are likely caused by additional known physical processes (i.e, turbulent transport and mixing, cloud and aerosol microphysics) that influence field data but that are not considered in current theoretical Λ parameterizations. The predicted size-resolved particle concentrations using different theoretical Λ parameterization can differ by up to a factor of 2 for particles smaller than 0.01 μm and by a factor of >10 for particles larger than 3 μm after 2–5 mm of rain. The predicted bulk mass and number concentrations (integrated over the particle size distribution) can differ by a factor of 2 between theoretical and empirical Λ parameterizations after 2–5 mm of moderate intensity rainfall.
Potassium channels are responsible for the selective permeation of K⁺ ions across cell membranes. K⁺ ions permeate in single file through the selectivity filter, a narrow pore lined by backbone ...carbonyls that compose four K⁺ binding sites. Here, we report on the two-dimensional infrared (2D IR) spectra of a semisynthetic KcsA channel with sitespecific heavy (¹³C¹⁸O) isotope labels in the selectivity filter. The ultrafast time resolution of 2D IR spectroscopy provides an instantaneous snapshot of the multi-ion configurations and structural distributions that occur spontaneously in the filter. Two elongated features are resolved, revealing the statistical weighting of two structural conformations. The spectra are reproduced by molecular dynamics simulations of structures with water separating two K⁺ ions in the binding sites, ruling out configurations with ions occupying adjacent sites.
Through a fascinating discussion of religion's role in the rhetoric of American civilizing empire, The Imperial Church undertakes an exploration of how Catholic mission histories served as a useful ...reference for Americans narrating US settler colonialism on the North American continent and seeking to extend military, political, and cultural power around the world. Katherine D. Moran traces historical celebrations of Catholic missionary histories in the upper Midwest, Southern California, and the US colonial Philippines to demonstrate the improbable centrality of the Catholic missions to ostensibly Protestant imperial endeavors. Moran shows that, as the United States built its continental and global dominion and an empire of production and commerce in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Protestant and Catholic Americans began to celebrate Catholic imperial pasts. She demonstrates that American Protestants joined their Catholic compatriots in speaking with admiration about historical Catholic missionaries: the Jesuit Jacques Marquette in the Midwest, the Franciscan Junípero Serra in Southern California, and the Spanish friars in the Philippines. Comparing them favorably to the Puritans, Pilgrims, and the American Revolutionary generation, commemorators drew these missionaries into a cross-confessional pantheon of US national and imperial founding fathers. In the process, they cast Catholic missionaries as gentle and effective agents of conquest, uplift, and economic growth, arguing that they could serve as both origins and models for an American civilizing empire. The Imperial Church connects Catholic history and the history of US empire by demonstrating that the religious dimensions of American imperial rhetoric have been as cross-confessional as the imperial nation itself.
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