The role of nitrogen in achieving sustainable food systems for healthy diets

The ‘food system’ urgently needs a sustainable transformation. Two major challenges have to be solved: the food system has to provide food security with healthy, accessible, affordable, safe and diverse food for all, and it has to do so within the safe operating space of the planetary boundaries, where the pollution from reactive nitrogen turned out to be the largest bottleneck. Here we argue that thinking strategically about how to balance nitrogen flows throughout the food system will make current food systems more resilient and robust. Looking from a material and a governance perspective on the food system, we highlight major nitrogen losses and policy blind spots originating from a compartmentalization of food system spheres. We conclude that a participatory and integrated approach to manage nitrogen flows throughout the food system is necessary to stay within regional and global nitrogen boundaries, and will additionally provide synergies with a sustainable and healthy diet for all. © 2020 The Author

Public policy, social marketing and neuromarketing: from addressing the consumer behaviour to addressing the social behaviour - a study on the assessment of Public Service Announcements’ efficacy by neuro-metric indexes and techniques

The overall aim of this thesis is to investigate to what extent marketing can be a useful science for the public policy in developing effective Public Service Announcements (PSAs). In particular, hereby a specific discipline will be taken in consideration: the one that merges marketing with neuroscience, that is the so-called ‘neuromarketing’, which - in order to assess the advertising efficacy - adopts biometric and neurometric indexes. The objective of this work is to gain insights into the above-mentioned fields (marketing, neuroscience and public policy) by: - reviewing previous studies, as well as topical literature; - exploring the latest case studies and best practises; - examining the traditional methods’ results for the assessment of the PSAs (i.e. polls, surveys, focus groups) in their evolutionary path (till arriving to birth of the the neurometric methods) Such kind of research has the purpose to identify the factors that are considered relevant to answer the ultimate research question: is it possible today, by using state-of-the-art neurometric indexes and techniques, to provide policymakers with precise guidelines for developing effective PSAs, so that marketing will be able to address no more just the consumer behaviour, but also the social behaviour? In fact, the goal of any advertising campaign is to convey a specific message and reach a specific audience: the consumers. But, when talking about PSAs, many things changes: the KPIs for the assessment of their efficacy are no longer the commercial ones (GRP, reach etc.), but rather the gain obtained in public health after the airing of the campaign. Consequently, the specific message will be a different ‘call-to-action’: no more an invite to purchase, but rather to change a (wrong) social behaviour or adopt a (right) civil conscience. Given these premises, it is possible that marketing could be invested with a precise responsibility in terms of lives saved and public health. The practical and managerial implications of the research are the following: EU policymakers and local governments will have the opportunity to dispose of scientific data and information about the society that might be transformed in guidelines for producing effective PSAs based on the inner audience’s insights. The originality of this research resides in having framed the new neuromarketing protocols in the traditional Consumer Behaviour theory, combining thus future and past of the marketing research

Undoing Networks

How do we think beyond the dominant images and imaginaries of connectivity? Undoing Networks enables a different connectivity: "digital detox" is a luxury for stressed urbanites wishing to lead a mindful life. Self-help books advocate "digital minimalism" to recover authentic experiences of the offline. Artists envision a world without the internet. Activists mobilize against the expansion of the 5G network. If connectivity brought us virtual communities, information superhighways, and participatory culture, disconnection comes with privacy tools, Faraday shields, and figures of the shy. This book explores non-usage and the "right to disconnect" from work and from the excessive demands of digital capitalism

Integrated data requirements for natural resource management

We do not have sufficient data to adequately describe the integrated socio-ecologicalsystems that support us. It is prohibitively expensive to collect enough data to describe all,so it is important to think strategically about how to (i) use the information we do have and (ii) prioritise the collection of new data. We aim to help by finding efficient ways of improving the information that is available for policy-makers to generate better human–nature outcomes

An exploration of the social inequities underpinning nutritional intake in high risk communities

The Abstract is currently unavailable, due to the thesis being under Embargo

Theory-based emergent constraints on climate sensitivities

Earth system models show a wide variation of possible futures under climate change. To develop appropriate policy for curbing global warming and adapting to unavoidable change, better understanding of the climate system is crucial. One of the approaches to reduce uncertainty in climate models is the identification of emergent constraints. These are physically plausible empirical relationships between a particular simulated characteristic of the current climate versus future climate change from an ensemble of climate models, which can be exploited to reduce uncertainty using current observations. This thesis discusses various interpretations of this technique and includes a comparison with other methods that combine models and observations in climate. A mathematical theory based on linear response theory is developed for an important subset of constraints showing how nonlinear relationships appear from an interplay of system and forcing time scales. Several statistical issues are examined, such as the best way to deal with internal variability. This theory is applied to three emergent relationships. Decadal climate variability and climate sensitivity are found to be related in both conceptual climate models and in CMIP5 climate model ensemble. This results in compound risk: significant temperature surges on top of the long-term trend are more likely if climate sensitivity is high. Two additional emergent relationships are used to find a constraint on transient warming and climate sensitivity from observed warming. They exploit the fact that uncertain aerosol cooling is increasingly overshadowed by greenhouse gas warming. Many of the CMIP6 climate models show a warming inconsistent with observed trends. The thesis concludes with suggestions for future work.ER

Active learning toward food-waste prevention: an educational program for college students

openAccording to the World Bank and FAO, almost 30% of the total amount of food produced is lost or wasted along the food supply chain (FSC), meaning that around 1.3 billion tonnes of food per year do not reach the final consumers. These data denote the need for immediate and resolute interventions. Food waste implies numerous consequences, such as diffused hunger, unfair food distribution, or elevated GHG emissions, affecting our society in every aspect of sustainability. Despite being a worldwide issue, data are often ambiguous, due to their complexity and a diffused lack of knowledge. Developed countries (i.e. North America and Europe) generally observe a higher amount of food waste, which notably occurs at a micro level within households. Studies have tried to understand the causes of such approaches toward food, and despite the lack of shared definitions, the reasons lay usually in wrong habits, lack of awareness, lack of culinary skills, etc. Consequently, reasonable solutions are interventions to spur behavioral change and a higher level of awareness toward this issue. This work will focus, therefore, on the design of a project proposal to support university students in reducing and preventing their food waste practices

The medieval climate anomaly and Byzantium: a review of the evidence on climatic fluctuations, economic performance and societal change

At the beginning of the Medieval Climate Anomaly, in the ninth and tenth century, the medieval eastern Roman empire, more usually known as Byzantium, was recovering from its early medieval crisis and experiencing favourable climatic conditions for the agricultural and demographic growth. Although in the Balkans and Anatolia such favourable climate conditions were prevalent during the eleventh century, parts of the imperial territories were facing significant challenges as a result of external political/military pressure. The apogee of medieval Byzantine socio-economic development, around AD 1150, coincides with a period of adverse climatic conditions for its economy, so it becomes obvious that the winter dryness and high climate variability at this time did not hinder Byzantine society and economy from achieving that level of expansion. Soon after this peak, towards the end of the twelfth century, the populations of the Byzantine world were experiencing unusual climatic conditions with marked dryness and cooler phases. The weakened Byzantine socio-political system must have contributed to the events leading to the fall of Constantinople in AD 1204 and the sack of the city. The final collapse of the Byzantine political control over western Anatolia took place half century later, thus contemporaneous with the strong cooling effect after a tropical volcanic eruption in AD 1257. We suggest that, regardless of a range of other influential factors, climate change was also an important contributing factor to the socio-economic changes that took place in Byzantium during the Medieval Climate Anomaly. Crucially, therefore, while the relatively sophisticated and complex Byzantine society was certainly influenced by climatic conditions, and while it nevertheless displayed a significant degree of resilience, external pressures as well as tensions within the Byzantine society more broadly contributed to an increasing vulnerability in respect of climate impacts. Our interdisciplinary analysis is based on all available sources of information on the climate and society of Byzantium, that is textual (documentary), archaeological, environmental, climate and climate model-based evidence about the nature and extent of climate variability in the eastern Mediterranean. The key challenge was, therefore, to assess the relative influence to be ascribed to climate variability and change on the one hand, and on the other to the anthropogenic factors in the evolution of Byzantine state and society (such as invasions, changes in international or regional market demand and patterns of production and consumption, etc.). The focus of this interdisciplinar

‘Getting the Right Nutrients to Those Who Need Them Most’:towards nutrition-sensitive governance of fisheries in the Global South

Here we propose a framework and agenda for nutrition-sensitive governance (NSG) of fisheries that rethink dominant paradigms of fisheries governance and propose measures to incorporate nutrition-related objectives into fisheries governance. Fish, rich in micronutrients, have potential for improving the nutritional status of coastal and riparian communities, particularly in the Global South where inadequate nutrition is prevalent. Yet, the potential for fish to alleviate malnutrition remains limited to policy documents and high-level government commitments. We propose an agenda for NSG in the Global South grounded in three main pillars: 1-extending the boundaries of fisheries governance, 2-integrating multiple forms of knowledge, and 3-prioritizing domestic and local needs; each of these pillars links different levels of governance starting at the level of conceptualization and images connected to what fisheries are and should do, to a more policy-oriented level with hands-on recommendations, through an intermediate level that links the two. Overall, we propose a concept and agenda for NSG grounded in a human-centred approach to fisheries governance with social sciences playing a crucial role in unearthing the nodes of power that limit access and agency of poor and vulnerable (fishing) communities to the nutritional benefits of fish. In doing so, we critically analyze dominant fisheries governance agendas (‘Blue Economy’, ‘Blue Growth’) through the lens of food and nutrition security and anchor these debates to the objective of getting the right nutrients to those who need them mos