International commitment to the appropriately ambitious Paris climate agreement and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in 2015 has pulled into the limelight the urgent need for major ...scientific progress in understanding and modelling the Anthropocene, the tightly intertwined social-environmental planetary system that humanity now inhabits. The Anthropocene qualitatively differs from previous eras in Earth’s history in three key characteristics: (1) There is planetary-scale human agency. (2) There are social and economic networks of teleconnections spanning the globe. (3) It is dominated by planetary-scale social-ecological feedbacks. Bolting together old concepts and methodologies cannot be an adequate approach to describing this new geological era. Instead, we need a new paradigm in Earth System science that is founded equally on a deep understanding of the physical and biological Earth System – and of the economic, social and cultural forces that are now an intrinsic part of it. It is time to close the loop and bring socially mediated dynamics explicitly into theory, analysis and models that let us study the whole Earth System.
Cities are vital for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), but different local strategies to advance on the same SDG may cause different ‘spillovers’ elsewhere. Research efforts that ...support governance of such spillovers are urgently needed to empower ambitious cities to ‘account globally’ when acting locally on SDG implementation strategies.
This article tells the story of how a public charter school serving students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) adopted Direct Instruction (DI) as their primary form of instruction. The journey from ...recognizing the need for evidence-based curriculum focused on academic skills to integrating DI on a daily basis was outlined using a common implementation framework. We measured results of the implementation process on student outcomes using reading scores obtained from the Kaufman Test of Educational Achievement (KTEA-II Brief). Results for 67 students who participated in a DI reading program for at least 2 years suggest that the implementation of DI led to significantly improved reading scores; with some students demonstrating greatly accelerated rates of learning for their age. Our study suggests that the road to adoption of DI may be long, but the results are powerful for the individuals served. We offer our steps to implementation as a guide and resource to educators and behavior analysts eager to utilize DI in their settings.
This study evaluated 3 novel questions in a prospective clinical cohort of women undergoing evaluation for suspected myocardial ischemia: 1) What is the relationship between depression and ...cardiovascular costs? 2) Does the relationship vary by definition of depression? 3) Do depression-cost relationship patterns differ among women with versus without coronary artery disease (CAD)?
Comorbid depression has been linked to higher medical costs in previous studies of cardiovascular patients.
A total of 868 women presenting with suspected myocardial ischemia completed an extensive baseline examination including cardiovascular risk factor assessment and coronary angiogram. Depression was defined by: 1) current use of antidepressants; 2) a reported history of depression treatment; and 3) Beck Depression Inventory scores. Direct (hospitalizations, office visits, procedures, and medications) and indirect (out-of-pocket, lost productivity, and travel) costs were collected through 5 years of follow-up to estimate cardiovascular costs.
Using the study criteria, 17% to 45% of the women studied met study depression criteria. Depressed women showed adjusted annual cardiovascular costs $1,550 to $3,300 higher than nondepressed groups (r = 0.08 to 0.12, p < 0.05). Depression-cost relationships also varied by CAD status, with stronger associations present among women without evidence of significant CAD.
Depression was associated with 15% to 53% increases in 5-year cardiovascular costs, and cost differences were present using 3 definitions of depression. The results reinforce the importance of assessing depression in clinical populations and support the hypothesis that improved management of depression in women with suspected myocardial ischemia could reduce medical costs.
Non-technical abstract
Individual organisms on land and in the ocean sequester massive amounts of the carbon emitted into the atmosphere by humans. Yet the role of ecosystems as a whole in modulating ...this uptake of carbon is less clear. Here, we study several different mechanisms by which climate change and ecosystems could interact. We show that climate change could cause changes in ecosystems that reduce their capacity to take up carbon, further accelerating climate change. More research on – and better governance of – interactions between climate change and ecosystems is urgently required.
Technical abstract
Individual responses of terrestrial and marine species to future climate change will affect the capacity of the land and ocean to store carbon. How system-level changes in the integrity of the biosphere interact with climate change is more uncertain. Here, we explore the consequences of different hypotheses on the interactions between the climate–carbon system and the integrity of the terrestrial and marine biospheres. We investigate mechanisms including impairment of terrestrial ecosystem functioning due to lagged ecosystem responses, permafrost thaw, terrestrial biodiversity loss and impacts of changes in marine biodiversity on the marine biological pump. To investigate climate–biosphere interactions involving complex concepts such as biosphere integrity, we designed and implemented conceptual representations of these climate–biosphere interactions in a stylized climate–carbon model. We find that all four classes of interactions amplify climate change, potentially contributing up to an additional 0.4°C warming across all representative concentration pathway scenarios by the year 2100 and potentially turning the terrestrial biosphere into a net carbon source, although uncertainties are large. The results of this preliminary quantitative study call for more research on – and better integrated governance of – the interactions between climate change and biosphere integrity, the two core ‘planetary boundaries’.
To describe the prospective relationship between social networks and nonfatal stroke events in a sample of women with suspected myocardial ischemia. Social networks are an independent predictor of ...all-cause and cardiovascular mortality, but their relationship with stroke events in at-risk populations is largely unknown.
A total of 629 women (mean age = 59.6 +/- 11.6 years) were evaluated at baseline for cardiovascular disease risk factors as part of a protocol including coronary angiography; the subjects were followed over a median 5.9 years to track the incidence of cardiovascular events including stroke. Participants also completed the Social Network Index (SNI), measuring the presence/absence of 12 types of common social relationships.
Stroke events occurred among 5.1% of the sample over follow-up. More isolated women were older and less educated, with higher rates of smoking and hypertension, and increased use of cardiovascular medications. Women with smaller social networks were also more likely to show elevations (scores of > or =10) on the Beck Depression Inventory (54% versus 41%, respectively; p = .003). Relative to women with higher SNI scores, Cox regression results indicated that more isolated women experienced strokes at greater than twice the rate of those with more social relationships after adjusting for covariates (hazard ratio = 2.7; 95% Confidence Interval = 1.1-6.7).
Smaller social networks are a robust predictor of stroke in at-risk women, and the magnitude of the association rivals that of conventional risk factors.
There is a need for more integrated research on sustainable development and global environmental change. In this paper, we focus on the planetary boundaries framework to provide a systematic ...categorization of key research questions in relation to avoiding severe global environmental degradation. The four categories of key questions are those that relate to (1) the underlying processes and selection of key indicators for planetary boundaries, (2) understanding the impacts of environmental pressure and connections between different types of impacts, (3) better understanding of different response strategies to avoid further degradation, and (4) the available instruments to implement such strategies. Clearly, different categories of scientific disciplines and associated model types exist that can accommodate answering these questions. We identify the strength and weaknesses of different research areas in relation to the question categories, focusing specifically on different types of models. We discuss that more interdisciplinary research is need to increase our understanding by better linking human drivers and social and biophysical impacts. This requires better collaboration between relevant disciplines (associated with the model types), either by exchanging information or by fully linking or integrating them. As fully integrated models can become too complex, the appropriate type of model (the racehorse) should be applied for answering the target research question (the race course).
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