Savanna fire management can generate enough carbon revenue to help restore Africa's rangelands and fill protected area funding gaps

Many savanna-dependent species in Africa including large herbivores and apex predators are at increasing risk of extinction. Achieving effective management of protected areas (PAs) in Africa where lions live will cost an estimated US$>1–2 billion/year in new funding. We explore the potential for fire-management-based carbon financing programs to fill this funding gap and benefit degrading savanna ecosystems. We demonstrate how introducing early dry season fire management programs could produce potential carbon revenues (PCRs) from either a single carbon financing method (avoided emissions) or from multiple sequestration methods ranging from US$ 59.6–655.9 million/year (at US$5/ton) or US$ 155.0 million/year to US$1.7 billion/year (at US$ 13/ton). We highlight variable but significant PCRs for savanna PAs from US$ 1.5–44.4 million/year per PA. We suggest investing in fire management programs to jump-start the United Nations Decade of Ecological Restoration to help restore degraded African savannas and conserve imperiled keystone herbivores and apex predators.https://www.cell.com/one-earth/homeam2022Zoology and Entomolog

Diversity and ethics in trauma and acute care surgery teams: results from an international survey

Background Investigating the context of trauma and acute care surgery, the article aims at understanding the factors that can enhance some ethical aspects, namely the importance of patient consent, the perceptiveness of the ethical role of the trauma leader, and the perceived importance of ethics as an educational subject. Methods The article employs an international questionnaire promoted by the World Society of Emergency Surgery. Results Through the analysis of 402 fully filled questionnaires by surgeons from 72 different countries, the three main ethical topics are investigated through the lens of gender, membership of an academic or non-academic institution, an official trauma team, and a diverse group. In general terms, results highlight greater attention paid by surgeons belonging to academic institutions, official trauma teams, and diverse groups. Conclusions Our results underline that some organizational factors (e.g., the fact that the team belongs to a university context or is more diverse) might lead to the development of a higher sensibility on ethical matters. Embracing cultural diversity forces trauma teams to deal with different mindsets. Organizations should, therefore, consider those elements in defining their organizational procedures. Level of evidence Trauma and acute care teams work under tremendous pressure and complex circumstances, with their members needing to make ethical decisions quickly. The international survey allowed to shed light on how team assembly decisions might represent an opportunity to coordinate team member actions and increase performance

Partners No More: Relational Transformation and the Turn to Litigation in Two Conservationist Organizations

The rise in litigation against administrative bodies by environmental and other political interest groups worldwide has been explained predominantly through the liberalization of standing doctrines. Under this explanation, termed here the floodgate model, restrictive standing rules have dammed the flow of suits that groups were otherwise ready and eager to pursue. I examine this hypothesis by analyzing processes of institutional transformation in two conservationist organizations: the Sierra Club in the United States and the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI). Rather than an eagerness to embrace newly available litigation opportunities, as the floodgate model would predict, the groups\u27 history reveals a gradual process of transformation marked by internal, largely intergenerational divisions between those who abhorred conflict with state institutions and those who saw such conflict as not only appropriate but necessary to the mission of the group. Furthermore, in contrast to the pluralist interactions that the floodgate model imagines, both groups\u27 relations with pertinent agencies in earlier eras better accorded with the partnership-based corporatist paradigm. Sociolegal research has long indicated the importance of relational distance to the transformation of interpersonal disputes. I argue that, at the group level as well, the presence or absence of a (national) partnership-centered relationship determines propensities to bring political issues to court. As such, well beyond change in groups\u27 legal capacity and resources, current increases in levels of political litigation suggest more fundamental transformations in the structure and meaning of relations between citizen groups and the state