Regional disparities and seasonal differences in climate risk to rice labour.

The 880 million agricultural workers of the world are especially vulnerable to increasing heat stress due to climate change, affecting the health of individuals and reducing labour productivity. In this study, we focus on rice harvests across Asia and estimate the future impact on labour productivity by considering changes in climate at the time of the annual harvest. During these specific times of the year, heat stress is often high compared to the rest of the year. Examining climate simulations of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 6 (CMIP6), we identified that labour productivity metrics for the rice harvest, based on local wet-bulb globe temperature, are strongly correlated with global mean near-surface air temperature in the long term (p ≪ 0.01, R 2 > 0.98 in all models). Limiting global warming to 1.5 °C rather than 2.0 °C prevents a clear reduction in labour capacity of 1% across all Asia and 2% across Southeast Asia, affecting the livelihoods of around 100 million people. Due to differences in mechanization between and within countries, we find that rice labour is especially vulnerable in Indonesia, the Philippines, Bangladesh, and the Indian states of West Bengal and Kerala. Our results highlight the regional disparities and importance in considering seasonal differences in the estimation of the effect of climate change on labour productivity and occupational heat-stress

Rethinking architectural education - the new EU directive and the role of live projects

The symposium was held as part of the 2nd Annual AAE Conference 2014 - Living and Learning - at the University of Sheffield and encouraged the participants to discuss the teaching method of Live Projects as part of the typical 5 year architectural education in the UK. Within the context of the new EU directive and the potential for a rethinking of the “3+2 years” (+ 2 years in practice) usual architectural education in the UK, Live Projects play an important role, adding practical experience to a shorter “5+0 years” model (without the year in practice). The information and knowledge delivered in the symposium could play a demonstrative and exemplary role in future architectural educational reform. At the Cass. School of Architecture, several studios at Undergraduate and Diploma level choose to work on Live Projects with their students as the year-long programme. These Live Projects play an important role within the students’ architectural education and increasingly will do so also in the future, as Live Projects add practical experience to a potentially reduced architectural education to 5 years without a year out. The studios at the Cass do not only teach students about the professional side of architectural practice (e.g. real clients), but also contribute to research in architecture. Three studios presented their work and methodologies as a base for discussion at the beginning of the Symposium, this was followed by a short Q+A session, involving the audience and other institutions to discuss: • What makes a project live? • What support is needed for Live Projects? • What is the role of the architect within the Live Project

The myriad challenges of the Paris Agreement

The much awaited and intensely negotiated Paris Agreement was adopted on 12 December 2015 by the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The agreement set out a more ambitious long-term temperature goal than many had anticipated, implying more stringent emissions reductions that have been under-explored by the research community. By its very nature a multidisciplinary challenge, filling the knowledge gap requires not only climate scientists, but the whole Earth system science community, as well as economists, engineers, lawyers, philosophers, politicians, emergency planners and others to step up. To kick start cross-disciplinary discussions, the University of Oxford's Environmental Change Institute focused its 25th anniversary conference upon meeting the challenges of the Paris Agreement for science and society. This theme issue consists of review papers, opinion pieces and original research from some of the presentations within that meeting, covering a wide range of issues underpinning the Paris Agreement

The day the 2003 European heatwave record was broken

On June 28, 2019, a temperature of 45·9°C was recorded at a weather station in France, exceeding the country's previous temperature record—set during the infamous 2003 heatwave—by almost 2°C. The heatwave peaked over central and northern Europe, fuelled by a very persistent planetary-scale Rossby wave (giant meanders in upper-tropospheric winds), which turned into an omega block, so named because its shape resembles the Greek letter (Ω). This blocking event led to hot air from northern Africa being transferred to Europe. Given the extraordinary nature of this event, the public and media are now wondering: is such weather the new norm, and how bad could it get in the future

Microbial micropatches within microbial hotspots

© 2018 Dann et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The spatial distributions of organism abundance and diversity are often heterogeneous. This includes the sub-centimetre distributions of microbes, which have ‘hotspots’ of high abundance, and ‘coldspots’ of low abundance. Previously we showed that 300 μl abundance hotspots, coldspots and background regions were distinct at all taxonomic levels. Here we build on these results by showing taxonomic micropatches within these 300 μl microscale hotspots, coldspots and background regions at the 1 μl scale. This heterogeneity among 1 μl subsamples was driven by heightened abundance of specific genera. The micropatches were most pronounced within hotspots. Micropatches were dominated by Pseudomonas, Bacteroides, Parasporobacterium and Lachnospiraceae incertae sedis, with Pseudomonas and Bacteroides being responsible for a shift in the most dominant genera in individual hotspot subsamples, representing up to 80.6% and 47.3% average abundance, respectively. The presence of these micropatches implies the ability these groups have to create, establish themselves in, or exploit heterogeneous microenvironments. These genera are often particle-associated, from which we infer that these micropatches are evidence for sub-millimetre aggregates and the aquatic polymer matrix. These findings support the emerging paradigm that the microscale distributions of planktonic microbes are numerically and taxonomically heterogeneous at scales of millimetres and less. We show that microscale microbial hotspots have internal structure within which specific local nutrient exchanges and cellular interactions might occur

Estimating heat-related mortality in near real time for national heatwave plans.

Heatwaves are a serious threat to human life. Public health agencies that are responsible for delivering heat-health action plans need to assess and reduce the mortality impacts of heat. Statistical models developed in epidemiology have previously been used to attribute past observed deaths to high temperatures and project future heat-related deaths. Here, we investigate the novel use of summer temperature-mortality associations established by these models for monitoring heat-related deaths in regions in England in near real time. For four summers in the period 2011-2020, we find that coupling these associations with observed daily mean temperatures results in England-wide heatwave mortality estimates that are consistent with the excess deaths estimated by UK Health Security Agency. However, our results for 2013, 2018 and 2020 highlight that the lagged effects of heat and characteristics of individual summers contribute to disagreement between the two methods. We suggest that our method can be used for heatwave mortality monitoring in England because it has the advantages of including lagged effects and controlling for other risk factors. It could also be employed by health agencies elsewhere for reliably estimating the health burden of heat in near real time and near-term forecasts

Larger spatial footprint of wintertime total precipitation extremes in a warmer climate

The simultaneous occurrence of extremely wet winters at multiple locations in the same region can contribute to widespread flooding and associated socio-economic losses. However, the spatial extent of precipitation extremes (i.e. the area in which nearby locations experience precipitation extremes simultaneously) and its future changes are largely overlooked in climate assessments. Employing new multi-thousand-year climate model simulations, we show that under both 2.0C and 1.5C warming scenarios, wintertime total precipitation extreme extents would increase over about 80-90% of the Northern Hemisphere extratropics (i.e. the latitude band 28-78N). Stabilising at 1.5C rather than 2.0C would reduce the average magnitude of the increase by 1.7-2 times. According to the climate model, the increased extents are caused by increases in precipitation intensity rather than changes in the spatial organisation of the events. Relatively small percentage increases in precipitation intensities (e.g., by 4%) can drive disproportionately larger, by 1-2 orders of magnitude, growth in the spatial extents (by 93%)