Case Study: ENVRI Science Demonstrators with D4Science

Whenever a community of practice starts developing an IT solution for its use case(s) it has to face the issue of carefully selecting “the platform” to use. Such a platform should match the requirements and the overall settings resulting from the specific application context (including legacy technologies and solutions to be integrated and reused, costs of adoption and operation, easiness in acquiring skills and competencies). There is no one-size-fits-all solution that is suitable for all application context, and this is particularly true for scientific communities and their cases because of the wide heterogeneity characterising them. However, there is a large consensus that solutions from scratch are inefficient and services that facilitate the development and maintenance of scientific community-specific solutions do exist. This chapter describes how a set of diverse communities of practice efficiently developed their science demonstrators (on analysing and producing user-defined atmosphere data products, greenhouse gases fluxes, particle formation, mosquito diseases) by leveraging the services offered by the D4Science infrastructure. It shows that the D4Science design decisions aiming at streamlining implementations are effective. The chapter discusses the added value injected in the science demonstrators and resulting from the reuse of D4Science services, especially regarding Open Science practices and overall quality of service

Assessing the impacts of climate change for Switzerland

Understanding the economic magnitude of climate change impacts is a prerequisite for developing adequate adaptation strategies. In Switzerland, despite new climate scenarios and impacts studies, only few impacts have been monetized. Our objective is to assess costs and opportunities of climate change for Switzerland by 2060, while enhancing the assessment methods. Using inputs from bottomup impact studies, we simulate the economic consequences of climate scenarios in a CGE framework. We cover health, buildings/infrastructure, energy, water, agriculture, tourism, the spill-overs to other sectors, and international effects. In 2060, welfare decreases by 0.30% to 1.03% relative to a reference without climate change. Higher summer temperatures increase mortality and decrease productivity. Contrariwise, tourism benefits from extended summer seasons. Regarding energy, increased demand for cooling is overcompensated by savings in heating. Due to data constraints, significant impacts have not been quantified, e.g. for heat waves and droughts more extreme than the 2060 average climate

Alternative consent methods used in the multinational, pragmatic, randomised clinical trial SafeBoosC-III

Background The process of obtaining prior informed consent for experimental treatment does not fit well into the clinical reality of acute and intensive care. The therapeutic window of interventions is often short, which may reduce the validity of the consent and the rate of enrolled participants, to delay trial completion and reduce the external validity of the results. Deferred consent and ‘opt-out’ are alternative consent methods. The SafeBoosC-III trial was a randomised clinical trial investigating the benefits and harms of cerebral oximetry monitoring in extremely preterm infants during the first 3 days after birth, starting within the first 6 h after birth. Prior, deferred and opt-out consent were all allowed by protocol. This study aimed to evaluate the use of different consent methods in the SafeBoosC-III trial, Furthermore, we aimed to describe and analyse concerns or complaints that arose during the first 6 months of trial conduct. Methods All 70 principal investigators were invited to join this descriptive ancillary study. Each principal investigator received a questionnaire on the use of consent methods in their centre during the SafeBoosC-III trial, including the possibility to describe any concerns related to the consent methods used during the first 6 months of the trial, as raised by the parents or the clinical staff. Results Data from 61 centres were available. In 43 centres, only prior informed consent was used: in seven, only deferred consent. No centres used the opt-out method only, but five centres used prior and deferred, five used prior, deferred and opt-out (all possibilities) and one used both deferred and opt-out. Six centres applied to use the opt-out method by their local research ethics committee but were denied using it. One centre applied to use deferred consent but was denied. There were only 23 registered concerns during the execution of the trial. Conclusions Consent by opt-out was allowed by the protocol in this multinational trial but only a few investigators opted for it and some research ethics boards did not accept its use. It is likely to need promotion by the clinical research community to unfold its potential

Mechanosensory interactions drive collective behaviour in Drosophila.

Collective behaviour enhances environmental sensing and decision-making in groups of animals. Experimental and theoretical investigations of schooling fish, flocking birds and human crowds have demonstrated that simple interactions between individuals can explain emergent group dynamics. These findings indicate the existence of neural circuits that support distributed behaviours, but the molecular and cellular identities of relevant sensory pathways are unknown. Here we show that Drosophila melanogaster exhibits collective responses to an aversive odour: individual flies weakly avoid the stimulus, but groups show enhanced escape reactions. Using high-resolution behavioural tracking, computational simulations, genetic perturbations, neural silencing and optogenetic activation we demonstrate that this collective odour avoidance arises from cascades of appendage touch interactions between pairs of flies. Inter-fly touch sensing and collective behaviour require the activity of distal leg mechanosensory sensilla neurons and the mechanosensory channel NOMPC. Remarkably, through these inter-fly encounters, wild-type flies can elicit avoidance behaviour in mutant animals that cannot sense the odour--a basic form of communication. Our data highlight the unexpected importance of social context in the sensory responses of a solitary species and open the door to a neural-circuit-level understanding of collective behaviour in animal groups

Mitochondrial physiology

As the knowledge base and importance of mitochondrial physiology to evolution, health and disease expands, the necessity for harmonizing the terminology concerning mitochondrial respiratory states and rates has become increasingly apparent. The chemiosmotic theory establishes the mechanism of energy transformation and coupling in oxidative phosphorylation. The unifying concept of the protonmotive force provides the framework for developing a consistent theoretical foundation of mitochondrial physiology and bioenergetics. We follow the latest SI guidelines and those of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) on terminology in physical chemistry, extended by considerations of open systems and thermodynamics of irreversible processes. The concept-driven constructive terminology incorporates the meaning of each quantity and aligns concepts and symbols with the nomenclature of classical bioenergetics. We endeavour to provide a balanced view of mitochondrial respiratory control and a critical discussion on reporting data of mitochondrial respiration in terms of metabolic flows and fluxes. Uniform standards for evaluation of respiratory states and rates will ultimately contribute to reproducibility between laboratories and thus support the development of data repositories of mitochondrial respiratory function in species, tissues, and cells. Clarity of concept and consistency of nomenclature facilitate effective transdisciplinary communication, education, and ultimately further discovery

Mitochondrial physiology

As the knowledge base and importance of mitochondrial physiology to evolution, health and disease expands, the necessity for harmonizing the terminology concerning mitochondrial respiratory states and rates has become increasingly apparent. The chemiosmotic theory establishes the mechanism of energy transformation and coupling in oxidative phosphorylation. The unifying concept of the protonmotive force provides the framework for developing a consistent theoretical foundation of mitochondrial physiology and bioenergetics. We follow the latest SI guidelines and those of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) on terminology in physical chemistry, extended by considerations of open systems and thermodynamics of irreversible processes. The concept-driven constructive terminology incorporates the meaning of each quantity and aligns concepts and symbols with the nomenclature of classical bioenergetics. We endeavour to provide a balanced view of mitochondrial respiratory control and a critical discussion on reporting data of mitochondrial respiration in terms of metabolic flows and fluxes. Uniform standards for evaluation of respiratory states and rates will ultimately contribute to reproducibility between laboratories and thus support the development of data repositories of mitochondrial respiratory function in species, tissues, and cells. Clarity of concept and consistency of nomenclature facilitate effective transdisciplinary communication, education, and ultimately further discovery

Quantifying differences in land use emission estimates implied by definition discrepancies

The quantification of CO2 emissions from anthropogenic land use and land use change (eLUC) is essential to understand the drivers of the atmospheric CO2 increase and to inform climate change mitigation policy. Reported values in synthesis reports are commonly derived from different approaches (observation-driven bookkeeping and process-modelling) but recent work has emphasized that inconsistencies between methods may imply substantial differences in eLUC estimates. However, a consistent quantification is lacking and no concise modelling protocol for the separation of primary and secondary components of eLUC has been established. Here, we review differences of eLUC quantification methods and apply an Earth System Model (ESM) of Intermediate Complexity to quantify them. We find that the magnitude of effects due to merely conceptual differences between ESM and offline vegetation model-based quantifications is ~ 20 % for today. Under a future business-as-usual scenario, differences tend to increase further due to slowing land conversion rates and an increasing impact of altered environmental conditions on land-atmosphere fluxes. We establish how coupled Earth System Models may be applied to separate secondary component fluxes of eLUC arising from the replacement of potential C sinks/sources and the land use feedback and show that secondary fluxes derived from offline vegetation models are conceptually and quantitatively not identical to either, nor their sum. Therefore, we argue that synthesis studies should resort to the "least common denominator" of different methods, following the bookkeeping approach where only primary land use emissions are quantified under the assumption of constant environmental boundary conditions

Asset exposure data for global physical risk assessment

One of the challenges in globally consistent assessments of physical climate risks is the fact that asset exposure data are either unavailable or restricted to single countries or regions. We introduce a global high-resolution asset exposure dataset responding to this challenge. The data are produced using “lit population” (LitPop), a globally consistent methodology to disaggregate asset value data proportional to a combination of nightlight intensity and geographical population data. By combining nightlight and population data, unwanted artefacts such as blooming, saturation, and lack of detail are mitigated. Thus, the combination of both data types improves the spatial distribution of macroeconomic indicators. Due to the lack of reported subnational asset data, the disaggregation methodology cannot be validated for asset values. Therefore, we compare disaggregated gross domestic product (GDP) per subnational administrative region to reported gross regional product (GRP) values for evaluation. The comparison for 14 industrialized and newly industrialized countries shows that the disaggregation skill for GDP using nightlights or population data alone is not as high as using a combination of both data types. The advantages of LitPop are global consistency, scalability, openness, replicability, and low entry threshold. The open-source LitPop methodology and the publicly available asset exposure data offer value for manifold use cases, including globally consistent economic disaster risk assessments and climate change adaptation studies, especially for larger regions, yet at considerably high resolution. The code is published on GitHub as part of the open-source software CLIMADA (CLIMate ADAptation) and archived in the ETH Data Archive with the link https://doi.org/10.5905/ethz-1007-226 (Bresch et al., 2019b). The resulting asset exposure dataset for 224 countries is archived in the ETH Research Repository with the link https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000331316 (Eberenz et al., 2019).ISSN:1866-3516ISSN:1866-350

Cost and benefits of climate change in Switzerland

Understanding the economic magnitude of climate change impacts is a prerequisite for developing adequate adaptation strategies. In Switzerland, despite new climate scenarios and impact studies, only few impacts have been monetized. Our objective is to assess costs and opportunities of climate change for Switzerland by 2060, while enhancing the assessment methods. Using inputs from bottom-up impact studies, we simulate the economic consequences of climate scenarios in a CGE framework. We cover health, buildings/infrastructure, energy, water, agriculture, tourism, the spill-overs to other sectors, and international effects. Due to data constraints, significant impacts have not been quantified, e.g. for heat waves and droughts more extreme than the 2060 average climate. For the considered impacts, welfare decreases by 0.37% to 1.37% in 2060 relative to a reference without climate change. Higher summer temperatures increase mortality and decrease productivity. Contrariwise, tourism benefits from extended summer seasons. Regarding energy, increased demand for cooling is overcompensated by savings in heating

Social Cushioning of Energy Price Increases and Public Acceptability

This report is about finding ways to make green taxes, such as taxes on 'dirty' energy, more acceptable, in particular by chosing a mode of revenue recycling that is prefered by the population. Thus, it investigates distributional and other effects of energy price increases and the acceptability of social cushioning measures. It also investigates how social cushioning and other measures can increase the acceptability of policy-induced energy price increases. Ce projet étudie les effets distributifs et autres des hausses de prix de l'énergie et l'acceptabilité des mesures d'amortissement social. Il examine donc comment l'amortissement social et d'autres mesures peuvent accroître l'acceptabilité de hausses de prix de l'énergie induites par la politique. Der Bericht zeigt auf, dass die Akzeptanz klimapolitischer Instrumente stark von der Ausgestaltung abhängt. Er zeigt auch, dass die Initiative der Grünliberalen in Sachen Akzeptanz den schlechtesten möglichen Vorschlag gemacht hat, u.a., weil die Argumentation mit einer doppelten Dividende nicht verfängt. Bei anderer Ausgestaltung steigen die Zustimmungsraten deutlich: Am überzeugendsten war für die Befragten eine ökologische Zweckbindung. Wenn man also die Finanzierung von Klimaschutzprogrammen zum Hauptzweck macht und die CO2-Abgabe als Finanzierungsinstrument dafür nutzt, trifft das wohl am ehesten auf Zustimmung. Wenn Verteilungsfragen als wichtig angesehen werden, genügt es, nur einen kleinen Teil der Einnahmen pauschal rückverteilen