The COVID-19 pandemic and global environmental change: Emerging research needs

The outbreak of COVID-19 raised numerous questions on the interactions between the occurrence of new infections, the environment, climate and health. The European Union requested the H2020 HERA project which aims at setting priorities in research on environment, climate and health, to identify relevant research needs regarding Covid-19. The emergence and spread of SARS-CoV-2 appears to be related to urbanization, habitat destruction, live animal trade, intensive livestock farming and global travel. The contribution of climate and air pollution requires additional studies. Importantly, the severity of COVID-19 depends on the interactions between the viral infection, ageing and chronic diseases such as metabolic, respiratory and cardiovascular diseases and obesity which are themselves influenced by environmental stressors. The mechanisms of these interactions deserve additional scrutiny. Both the pandemic and the social response to the disease have elicited an array of behavioural and societal changes that may remain long after the pandemic and that may have long term health effects including on mental health. Recovery plans are currently being discussed or implemented and the environmental and health impacts of those plans are not clearly foreseen. Clearly, COVID-19 will have a long-lasting impact on the environmental health field and will open new research perspectives and policy needs.     

Formation of early water oceans on rocky planets

Terrestrial planets, with silicate mantles and metallic cores, are likely to obtain water and carbon compounds during accretion. Here I examine the conditions that allow early formation of a surface water ocean (simultaneous with cooling to clement surface conditions), and the timeline of degassing the planetary interior into the atmosphere. The greatest fraction of a planet’s initial volatile budget is degassed into the atmosphere during the end of magma ocean solidification, leaving only a small fraction of the original volatiles to be released into the atmosphere through later volcanism. Rocky planets that accrete with water in their bulk mantle have two mechanisms for producing an early water ocean: First, if they accrete with at least 1 to 3 mass% of water in their bulk composition, liquid water may be extruded onto the planetary surface at the end of magma ocean solidification. Second, at initial water contents as low as 0.01 mass% or lower, during solidification a massive supercritical fluid and steam atmosphere is produced that collapses into a water ocean upon cooling. The low water contents required for this process indicate that rocky super-Earth exoplanets may be expected to commonly produce water oceans within tens to hundreds of millions of years of their last major accretionary impact, through collapse of their atmosphere.     

Modeling the integrated roles of insurance and retrofit in managing natural disaster risk: a multi-stakeholder perspective

This paper introduces a new modeling framework to understand and improve regional natural disaster risk management in the USA, including the interactions among key stakeholders and between the two important risk management mechanisms of insurance and retrofit. The framework includes a stochastic programming optimization to represent insurer decisions, which interacts with a utility-based model of individual homeowners’ decisions to insure and/or retrofit. Reinsurer and government roles are represented as inputs, and the decision models are integrated with a detailed regional catastrophe loss estimation model. This modeling framework is applied to a full-scale, realistic case study for hurricane risk to residential buildings in Eastern North Carolina. Several alternative system configurations are considered that affect the incentives for adoption of alternative risk management methods. They include providing a government subsidy for insured homeowners to encourage retrofit, providing both a government subsidy and insurance rebate to reduce retrofit costs, and mandating insurance purchase with a cap on insurance premiums. For each configuration, outcomes are presented from the perspectives of all key stakeholders—primary insurer, homeowners (insured and uninsured, in high- and low-risk areas), reinsurers, and the government. Results suggest that it is possible to design policies in which all stakeholders can be better off simultaneously. Retrofit incentives for insured homeowners can be effective in linking and strengthening the benefits of retrofit and insurance. Mandatory insurance coupled with capped profit loading factors and possibly retrofit rebates from the insurer to the homeowner can also reduce overall system risk.     

Hypoxia and benthic community recovery in Korean coastal waters

Low dissolved oxygen (hypoxia and/or anoxia) has become a major cause of change to the benthic component of ecosystems around the world. We present the response of a benthic community to hypoxia in organically enriched environments in Korean coastal waters. Disturbances due to low dissolved oxygen (DO), and organic enrichment altered community dynamics, result in defaunation during summer hypoxia with delayed recolonization occurring in winter. As DO decreased, the number of taxa, their abundance and biomass of macrofauna dropped significantly at inner bay stations in Chinhae Bay and Youngsan River estuarine bay affected by hypoxia. With the return of normoxic conditions in Chinhae Bay, recolonization was initiated by opportunistic species, with a 1-4months lag. The polychaetes, Sigambra tentaculata, Mesochaetopterus sp., and Lumbrineris longifolia, were most persistent under hypoxia. The first recolonizers were the polychaetes Paraprionospio pinnata, S. tantaculata, Glycinde gurjanovae and Nectoneanthes multignatha and the bivalve Theora fragilis. The second group of colonizers included the polychaetes Capitella capitata, Mesochaetopterus sp. and L. longifolia, and the bivalve Raetellops pulchella. Hypoxic and near anoxic conditions resulted in mass mortality in Chinhae Bay and Youngsan River estuarine bay, but communities did partially recover after return to normoxic conditions despite delayed recolonization.     

Patterns and Rates of Recovery of Macrobenthic Communities in a Polyhaline Temperate Estuary Following Sediment Disturbance: Effects of Disturbance Severity and Potential Importance of Non-local Processes

Community-level responses of soft sediment macrobenthos to two relatively large-scale disturbance events associated with dredged material (DM) disposal are examined for subtidal (>10 m) lower Chesapeake Bay. Disturbance severity (DM thickness on initial sampling date following disposal) and date of sampling were important factors explaining the patterns and rates of recovery for species richness, abundance, biomass, and community composition, but sediment disposal had minimal effects when DM thickness was ≤15 cm. It took 1.5 years or less following the cessation of disposal activities for richness, abundance, biomass and community composition at high disposal severity (DM > 15 cm) to attain levels measured at reference stations representing the ambient community of the region. Positive correlations of community structure metrics between the disposal area and reference stations provide evidence that non-local processes influenced patterns of recovery in this estuarine setting. Species interactions and food limitation may also have been important at local scales.     

Experimental and petrological constraints on lunar differentiation from the Apollo 15 green picritic glasses

Abstract— Phase equilibrium experiments on the most magnesian Apollo 15C green picritic glass composition indicate a multiple saturation point with olivine and orthopyroxene at 1520°C and 1.3 GPa (about 260 km depth in the moon). This composition has the highest Mg# of any lunar picritic glass and the shallowest multiple saturation point. Experiments on an Apollo 15A composition indicate a multiple saturation point with olivine and orthopyroxene at 1520°C and 2.2 GPa (about 440 km depth in the moon). The importance of the distinctive compositional trends of the Apollo 15 groups A, B, and C picritic glasses merits the reanalysis of NASA slide 15426,72 with modern electron microprobe techniques. We confirm the compositional trends reported by Delano (1979, 1986) in the major element oxides SiO₂, TiO₂, Al₂O₃, Cr₂O₃, FeO, MnO, MgO, and CaO, and we also obtained data for the trace elements P₂O₅, K₂O, Na₂O, NiO, S, Cu, Cl, Zn, and F. Petrogenetic modeling demonstrates that the Apollo 15 A‐B‐C glass trends could not have been formed by fractional crystallization or any continuous assimilation/fractional crystallization (AFC) process. The B and C glass compositional trends could not have been formed by batch or incremental melting of an olivine + orthopyroxene source or any other homogeneous source, though the A glasses may have been formed by congruent melting over a small pressure range at depth. The B compositional trend is well modeled by starting with an intermediate A composition and assimilating a shallower, melted cumulate, and the C compositional trend is well modeled by a second assimilation event. The assimilation process envisioned is one in which heat and mass transfer were separated in space and time. In an initial intrusive event, a picritic magma crystallized and provided heat to melt magma ocean cumulates. In a later replenishment event, the picritic magma incrementally mixed with the melted cumulate (creating the compositional trends in the green glass data set), ascended to the lunar surface, and erupted as a fire fountain. A barometer created from multiple saturation points provides a depth estimate of other glasses in the A‐B‐C trend and of the depths of assimilation. This barometer demonstrates that the Apollo 15 A‐B‐C trend originated over a depth range of ?460 km to ?260 km within the moon.     

Staying cool in a changing climate: Reaching vulnerable populations during heat events

The frequency and intensity of hot weather events are expected to increase globally, threatening human health, especially among the elderly, poor, and chronically ill. Current literature indicates that emergency preparedness plans, heat health warning systems, and related interventions may not be reaching or supporting behavior change among those most vulnerable in heat events. Using a qualitative multiple case study design, we comprehensively examined practices of these populations to stay cool during hot weather (“cooling behaviors”) in four U.S. cities with documented racial/ethnic and socio-economic disparities and diverse heat preparedness strategies: Phoenix, Arizona; Detroit, Michigan; New York City, New York; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Based on semi-structured in-depth interviews we conducted with 173 community members and organizational leaders during 2009–2010, we assessed why vulnerable populations do or do not participate in health-promoting behaviors at home or in their community during heat events, inquiring about perceptions of heat-related threats and vulnerability and the role of social support. While vulnerable populations often recognize heat's potential health threats, many overlook or disassociate from risk factors or rely on experiences living in or visiting warmer climates as a protective factor. Many adopt basic cooling behaviors, but unknowingly harmful behaviors such as improper use of fans and heating and cooling systems are also adopted. Decision-making related to commonly promoted behaviors such as air conditioner use and cooling center attendance is complex, and these resources are often inaccessible financially, physically, or culturally. Interviewees expressed how interpersonal, intergenerational relationships are generally but not always protective, where peer relationships are a valuable mechanism for facilitating cooling behaviors among the elderly during heat events. To prevent disparities in heat morbidity and mortality in an increasingly changing climate, we note the implications of local context, and we broadly inform heat preparedness plans, interventions, and messages by sharing the perspectives and words of community members representing vulnerable populations and leaders who work most closely with them.     

Mapping beach morphodynamics remotely: A novel application tested on South African sandy shores

Sandy beaches have been identified as threatened ecosystems but despite the need to conserve them, they have been generally overlooked. Systematic conservation planning (SCP) has emerged as an efficient method of selecting areas for conservation priority. However, SCP analyses require digital shapefiles of habitat and species diversity. Mapping these attributes for beaches from field data can take years and requires exhaustive resources. This study thus sought to derive a methodology to classify and map beach morphodynamic types from satellite imagery. Since beach morphodynamics is a strong predictor of macrofauna diversity, they could be considered a good surrogate for mapping beach biodiversity. A dataset was generated for 45 microtidal beaches (of known morphodynamic type) by measuring or coding for several physical characteristics from imagery acquired from Google Earth. Conditional inference trees revealed beach width to be the only factor that significantly predicted beach morphodynamic type, giving four categories: dissipative, dissipative-intermediate, intermediate and reflective. The derived model was tested by using it to predict the morphodynamic type of 28 other beaches of known classification. Model performance was good (75% prediction accuracy) but misclassifications occurred at the three breaks between the four categories. For beaches around these breaks, consideration of surf zone characteristics in addition to beach width ameliorated the misclassifications. The final methodology yielded a 93% prediction accuracy of beach morphodynamic type. Overlaying other considerations on this classification scheme could provide additional value to the layer, such that it also describes species’ spatial patterns. These could include: biogeographic regions, estuarine versus sandy beaches and short versus long beaches. The classification scheme was applied to the South African shoreline as a case study. The distribution of the beach morphodynamic types was partly influenced by geography. Most of the long, dissipative beaches are found along the west coast of the country, the south coast beaches are mostly dissipative-intermediate, and the east coast beaches range from short, estuarine pocket and embayed beaches in the former Transkei (south east), to longer intermediate and reflective beaches in KwaZulu-Natal (in the north east). Once combined with the three biogeographic regions, and distinguishing between estuarine and sandy shores, the South African coast comprised 24 different beach types. Representing shorelines in this form opens up potential for numerous spatial analyses that can not only further our understanding of sandy beach ecology at large spatial scales but also aid in deriving conservation strategies for this threatened ecosystem.