The Political Regulation Wave

Why has there been uneven success in reducing air pollution even in the same locality over time? This book offers an innovative theorization of how local political incentives can systematically affect bureaucratic regulation and empirically examines the control of different air pollutants in China and – to a lesser extent – in Mexico.

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Integrating Political Science into Climate Modeling: An Example of Internalizing the Costs of Climate-Induced Violence in the Optimal Management of the Climate

Extant modeling of the climate has largely left out political science; that needs to change. This paper provides an example of how a critical political concept—human security—can be accounted for in climate modeling. Scientific evidence points to an active link between climate change and the incidence of interpersonal and inter-group violence. This paper puts forth a new method to internalize the costs of climate-induced violence in the optimal management of the climate. Using the established MERGE integrated assessment model, this paper finds that based on the median estimates of the climate–violence relationship, such internalization can roughly double the optimal carbon price—the carbon price at which the net social benefit of carbon emissions would be maximized—consistently over time in most sensitivity scenarios. Sub-Saharan Africa is estimated to be the biggest beneficiary of such internalization in terms of avoided damages related to climate-induced violence as a percentage of the regional GDP, avoiding up to a 27 percent loss of GDP by 2200 under high-end estimates. That is significant for many African countries that have been suffering from underdevelopment and violence. The approach of this paper is a first for the climate modeling community, indicating directions for future modeling that could further integrate relevant political science considerations. This paper takes empirical findings that climate change mitigation can reduce violence-related damages to the next step toward understanding required to reach optimal policy decisions

Replication Package: Social Competition Drives Collective Action to Reduce Informal Waste Burning in Uganda

This directory contains the code and data needed to reproduce all analytical figures and tables in the main manuscript and Supporting Information of the following article: Buntaine, Mark T., Komakech, Polycarp, and Shen, Shiran Victoria. 2024. Social Competition Drives Collective Action to Reduce Informal Waste Burning in Uganda. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.231971212

Reducing Air Pollution and Waste Burning through Social Competition

Improving urban air quality is a pressing challenge in the Global South. A key source of air pollution is the informal burning of household waste. Reducing informal burning requires governments to develop formal systems for waste disposal and for residents to adopt new disposal behaviors. Using a randomized experiment, we show that social competitions between pairs of neighborhoods in Nansana municipality, Uganda, galvanized leadership and inspired collective action to reduce informal burning. All 44 neighborhoods in the study received a public health campaign, while 22 treated neighborhoods were paired and competed to reduce waste burning over an 8-month period. Treated neighborhoods showed a 24 percent reduction (95\% CI: 11-35 percent) in waste burning relative to control neighborhoods at the end of the competition period. There is no evidence that treated neighborhoods experienced a rebound in waste burning several months after the competitions. Community leaders reported greater effort in coordinating residents and more pride in their neighborhood when assigned to the competition treatment. These results suggest that creating focal points for leadership and collective action can be an effective and low-cost strategy to address policy problems that require broad participation and costly behavior change