Decarbonization and sustainable shipping in a post COVID-19 world

Shipping is a pivotal industry not only for transportation, but for the global economy. In today's globalized world, most goods are being transported by ships. However, the high utilization of maritime transport entails a negative environmental footprint. This challenge has brought greening and decarbonization at the forefront of research in the maritime literature. Despite the efforts of policy makers and relevant stakeholders, the most effective pathway to sustainability remains unclear. The pandemic has created additional complexities, making the achievement of sustainability goals even more challenging. Through a structured literature review, the aim of this study is to present the main avenues of sustainable shipping within a typology of clean fuel and clean propulsion systems. The analysis provides an assessment of the drawbacks and benefits of new solutions that may be implemented toward a greener post COVID-19 maritime industry

Impact of vaccine herd-protection effects in cost-effectiveness analyses of childhood vaccinations. A quantitative comparative analysis

<div><p>Background</p><p>Inclusion of vaccine herd-protection effects in cost-effectiveness analyses (CEAs) can impact the CEAs-conclusions. However, empirical epidemiologic data on the size of herd-protection effects from original studies are limited.</p><p>Methods</p><p>We performed a quantitative comparative analysis of the impact of herd-protection effects in CEAs for four childhood vaccinations (pneumococcal, meningococcal, rotavirus and influenza). We considered CEAs reporting incremental-cost-effectiveness-ratios (ICERs) (per quality-adjusted-life-years [QALY] gained; per life-years [LY] gained or per disability-adjusted-life-years [DALY] avoided), both with and without herd protection, while keeping all other model parameters stable. We calculated the size of the ICER-differences without vs with-herd-protection and estimated how often inclusion of herd-protection led to crossing of the cost-effectiveness threshold (of an assumed societal-willingness-to-pay) of $50,000 for more-developed countries or X3GDP/capita (WHO-threshold) for less-developed countries.</p><p>Results</p><p>We identified 35 CEA studies (20 pneumococcal, 4 meningococcal, 8 rotavirus and 3 influenza vaccines) with 99 ICER-analyses (55 per-QALY, 27 per-LY and 17 per-DALY). The median ICER-absolute differences per QALY, LY and DALY (without minus with herd-protection) were$15,620 (IQR: $877 to$48,376); $54,871 (IQR:$787 to $115,026) and$49 (IQR: $15 to$1,636) respectively. When the target-vaccination strategy was not cost-saving without herd-protection, inclusion of herd-protection always resulted in more favorable results. In CEAs that had ICERs above the cost-effectiveness threshold without herd-protection, inclusion of herd-protection led to crossing of that threshold in 45% of the cases. This impacted only CEAs for more developed countries, as all but one CEAs for less developed countries had ICERs below the WHO-cost-effectiveness threshold even without herd-protection. In several analyses, recommendation for the adoption of the target vaccination strategy depended on the inclusion of the herd protection effect.</p><p>Conclusions</p><p>Inclusion of herd-protection effects in CEAs had a substantial impact in the estimated ICERs and made target-vaccination strategies more attractive options in almost half of the cases where ICERs were above the societal-willingness to pay threshold without herd-protection. More empirical epidemiologic data are needed to determine the size of herd-protection effects across diverse settings and also the size of negative vaccine effects, e.g. from serotype substitution.</p></div

Scatterplot of ICERs (per-QALY gained, per-LY gained and per-DALY averted) with vs. without herd-protection across all four vaccines.

<p>Y-axis: ICERs without herd protection and X-axis: ICERs with herd-protection (values inflated to 2016 US dollars, [<a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0172414#pone.0172414.ref029" target="_blank">29</a>]); Dashed lines in the horizontal and vertical axis correspond to $50,000 threshold without and with herd-protection respectively. (ICERs in the left upper quadrant indicate cases where ICERs were >$50,000 without herd-protection and crossed that threshold with Herd Protection).</p

Barplot of ICER per-QALYs without vs. with herd-protection across all four childhood vaccines.

<p>X-axis: ICERs per-QALY with herd protection (values inflated to 2016 US dollars, [<a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0172414#pone.0172414.ref029" target="_blank">29</a>]); Grey bars: ICERs per-QALY without Herd Protection; Black bars: ICERs per-QALY with herd-protection. <b>Abbreviations</b>: P = pneumococcal vaccines, M = meningococcal vaccines, R = rotavirus vaccines, F = influenza vaccines.</p

Differences in ICER/QALY, ICER/LY and ICER/DALY with vs. without Herd protection^*.

<p>Differences in ICER/QALY, ICER/LY and ICER/DALY with vs. without Herd protection^{<a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0172414#t002fn002" target="_blank">*</a>}.</p

Characteristics of CEA studies (n = 35).

<p>Characteristics of CEA studies (n = 35).</p

Flow chart.

<p>Additional information in Text D in <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0172414#pone.0172414.s001" target="_blank">S1 File</a>.</p

Soundscape Attributes Translation Project (SATP) Dataset

The data and audio included here were collected for the Soundscape Attributes Translation Project (SATP). First introduced in Aletta et. al. (2020), the SATP is an attempt to provide validated translations of soundscape attributes in languages other than English. The recordings were used for headphones - based listening experiments. The data are provided to accompany publications resulting from this project and to provide a unique dataset of 1000s of perceptual responses to a standardised set of urban soundscape recordings. This dataset is the result of efforts from hundreds of researchers, students, assistants, PIs, and participants from institutions around the world. We have made an attempt to list every contributor to this Zenodo repo; if you feel you should be included, please get in touch. Citation: If you use the SATP dataset or part of it, please cite our paper describing the data collection and this dataset itself. Overview: The SATP dataset consists of 27 30-sec binaural audio recordings made in urban public spaces in London and one 60 sec stereo calibration signal. The recordings were made at locations as reported in Table 1 of the README.md (Recording locations), at various times of day by an operator wearing a binaural kit consisting of BHS II microphones and a SQobold (HEAD acoustics) device. Recordings were then exported to WAV via the ArtemiS SUITE software, using the original dynamic range from HDF. The listening experiment and the calibration procedure were intended for a headphone playback system (Sennheiser HD650 or similar open-back headphones recommended).  The recordings were selected from an initial set of 80 recordings through a pilot study to ensure the test set had an even coverage of the soundscape circumplex space. These recordings were sent to the partner institutions (see Table 2 of the README.md) and assessed by approximately 30 participants in the institution's target language. The questionnaire used in each assessment is a translation of Method A Questionnaire, ISO 12913-2:2018. Each institution carried out their own lab experiment to collect data, then submitted their data to the team at UCL to compile into a single dataset. Some institutions included additional questions or translation options; the combined dataset (`SATP Dataset v1.x.xlsx`) includes only the base set of questions, the extended set of questions from each institution is included in the `Institution Datasets` folder. In all, SATP Dataset v1.2 contains 17,441 samples, including 645 participants, for 27 recordings, in 19 languages with contributions from 29 institutions. Format: The audio recordings are provided as 24 bit, 48 kHz, stereo WAV files. The combined dataset and Institutional datasets are provided as long tidy data tables in .xlsx files. Calibration: The recommended calibration approach was based on the open-circuit voltage (OCV) procedure which was considered most accessible but other calibration procedures are also possible (Lam et. al. (2022)). The provided calibration file is a computer generated sine wave at 1kHz, matching a sine wave recorded using the exact same setup at SPL of 94 dB. In case of the calibration signal playback level set to match SPL of 94 dB at the eardrum, all the 27 samples should be reproduced at realistic loudness. More details on OCV calibration procedure and other options you can find in Lam et. al. (2022) and the attached documentation. PLEASE DO NOT EXPOSE YOURSELF NOR THE PARTICIPANTS TO THE CALIBRATION SIGNAL SET AT THE REALISTIC LEVEL AS IT CAN CAUSE HARM. License and reuse: All SATP recordings are provided under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License and are free to use. We encourage other researchers to replicate the SATP protocol and contribute new languages to the dataset. We also encourage the use of these recordings and the perceptual data for further soundscape research purposes. Please provide the proper attribution and get in touch with the authors if you would like to contribute a new translation or for any other collaborations