Nursing students' attitudes towards climate change and sustainability: A cross-sectional multisite study

Background: Education is a social tipping intervention necessary for stabilising the earth's climate by 2050. Integrating sustainable healthcare into healthcare professions curricula is a key action to raise awareness. Objectives: This study aimed to: i) investigate nursing students' attitudes towards and awareness of climate change and sustainability issues and its inclusion in nurse education, ii) explore differences across a range of countries, and iii) compare attitudes in 2019 with those of a similar sample in 2014. Design: A cross-sectional multicentre study. Data were collected through the Sustainability Attitudes in Nursing Survey (SANS_2) questionnaire. Settings: Seven different universities and schools of nursing in five countries (UK, Spain, Germany, Sweden, and Australia). Participants: A convenience sample of first-year undergraduate nursing students. Methods: The SANS_2 questionnaire was self-administered by nursing students at the seven participating universities at the start of their undergraduate degree, between September 2019 and February 2020. Results: Participants from all seven universities (N = 846) consistently showed awareness and held positive attitudes towards the inclusion of climate change and sustainability issues in the nursing curriculum (M = 5.472; SD: 1.05; min-max 1–6). The relevance of climate change and sustainability to nursing were the highest scored items. Esslingen-Tübingen students scored the highest in the ‘inclusion of climate change and sustainability in the nursing curricula’. Students at all universities applied the principles of sustainability to a significant extent at home. Nursing students' attitudes towards climate change and sustainability showed significantly higher values in 2019 (Universities of Plymouth, Brighton, Esslingen-Tübingen, Jaen, Murcia, Dalarna, and Queensland) than in 2014 (universities of Plymouth, Jaen, Esslingen, and Switzerland). Conclusions: Nursing students have increasingly positive attitudes towards the inclusion of sustainability and climate change in their nursing curriculum. They also recognise the importance of education regarding sustainability and the impact of climate change on health, supporting formal preparation for environmental literacy. It is time to act on this positive trend in nursing students' attitudes by integrating these competencies into nursing curricula.</p

Integrated monitoring of mola mola behaviour in space and time

Over the last decade, ocean sunfish movements have been monitored worldwide using various satellite tracking methods. This study reports the near-real time monitoring of finescale (< 10 m) behaviour of sunfish. The study was conducted in southern Portugal in May 2014 and involved satellite tags and underwater and surface robotic vehicles to measure both the movements and the contextual environment of the fish. A total of four individuals were tracked using custom-made GPS satellite tags providing geolocation estimates of fine-scale resolution. These accurate positions further informed sunfish areas of restricted search (ARS), which were directly correlated to steep thermal frontal zones. Simultaneously, and for two different occasions, an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) videorecorded the path of the tracked fish and detected buoyant particles in the water column. Importantly, the densities of these particles were also directly correlated to steep thermal gradients. Thus, both sunfish foraging behaviour (ARS) and possibly prey densities, were found to be influenced by analogous environmental conditions. In addition, the dynamic structure of the water transited by the tracked individuals was described by a Lagrangian modelling approach. The model informed the distribution of zooplankton in the region, both horizontally and in the water column, and the resultant simulated densities positively correlated with sunfish ARS behaviour estimator (r(s) = 0.184, p < 0.001). The model also revealed that tracked fish opportunistically displace with respect to subsurface current flow. Thus, we show how physical forcing and current structure provide a rationale for a predator's finescale behaviour observed over a two weeks in May 2014

A922 Sequential measurement of 1 hour creatinine clearance (1-CRCL) in critically ill patients at risk of acute kidney injury (AKI)

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A high‐performance IoT solution to reduce frost damages in stone fruits

[EN] Agriculture is one of the key sectors where technology is opening new opportunities to break up the market. The Internet of Things (IoT) could reduce the production costs and increase the product quality by providing intelligence services via IoT analytics. However, the hard weather conditions and the lack of connectivity in this field limit the successful deployment of such services as they require both, ie, fully connected infrastructures and highly computational resources. Edge computing has emerged as a solution to bring computing power in close proximity to the sensors, providing energy savings, highly responsive web services, and the ability to mask transient cloud outages. In this paper, we propose an IoT monitoring system to activate anti-frost techniques to avoid crop loss, by defining two intelligent services to detect outliers caused by the sensor errors. The former is a nearest neighbor technique and the latter is the k-means algorithm, which provides better quality results but it increases the computational cost. Cloud versus edge computing approaches are analyzed by targeting two different low-power GPUs. Our experimental results show that cloud-based approaches provides highest performance in general but edge computing is a compelling alternative to mask transient cloud outages and provide highly responsive data analytic services in technologically hostile environments.This work was partially supported by the Fundación Séneca del Centro de Coordinación de la Investigación de la Región de Murcia under Project 20813/PI/18, and by Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities under grants TIN2016-78799-P (AEI/FEDER, UE) and RTC-2017-6389-5. Finally, we thank the farmers for the availability of their resources to be able to asses and improve the IoT monitoring system proposed.Guillén-Navarro, MA.; Martínez-España, R.; López, B.; Cecilia-Canales, JM. (2021). A high-performance IoT solution to reduce frost damages in stone fruits. Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience (Online). 33(2):1-14. https://doi.org/10.1002/cpe.529911433

Potential for, and drivers of, private voluntary initiatives for the decarbonisation of short sea shipping: evidence from a Swedish ferry line

The aim of this paper is to analyse shipping firms’ reactions to environmental challenges and identify how significant reductions in energy consumption and air emissions can come about by implementing a variety of voluntary initiatives. The paper focuses on the various sustainability initiatives implemented by the Swedish short sea shipping operator, Stena Line, either on a purely voluntary basis as part of their corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategy or as their chosen route for compliance with regulations. A conceptual model is developed based on stakeholder theory, the theory of planned behaviour and resource dependence theory to understand the main drivers of the firm’s adoption of sustainability initiatives and the factors affecting the integration of CSR in maritime companies. According to our findings, the company operates within a strongly enforced regulatory environmental framework and needs to exceed this framework to differentiate its service and strengthen its relationships with its customers by addressing their social and environmental concerns. As the firm’s competitive strategy focuses on service differentiation, a large pool of complementary resources is available for CSR and the implementation of sustainability practices. The results of this paper bring new insights to the potential of local private voluntary initiatives for the reduction of maritime air emissions. These include the provision of onshore power supply, the conversion of vessels to use methanol, ferry electrification, the construction of larger RoPax vessels and the implementation of an energy-saving program that focuses on crew involvement and continuous training. The environmental outcomes derived from a combination of local operational and technical energy efficiency measures are found to be significant and can contribute to the efforts for the achievement of sustainable maritime transport undertaken by international and regional organisations. The main barriers for the adoption of voluntary sustainability initiatives in the maritime sector are economic and technological. To encourage the wider adoption of these initiatives, the provision of economic incentives at national or regional level is crucial, as such initiatives usually imply high initial installation costs that should be somehow compensated for both vessels and terminals. Document type: Articl