Agricultural Social Networks: An Agricultural Value Chain-Based Digitalization Framework for an Inclusive Digital Economy

Sustainable agriculture is the backbone of food security systems and a driver of human well-being in global economic development (Sustainable Development Goal SDG 3). With the increase in world population and the effects of climate change due to the industrialization of economies, food security systems are under pressure to sustain communities. This situation calls for the implementation of innovative solutions to increase and sustain efficacy from farm to table. Agricultural social networks (ASNs) are central in agriculture value chain (AVC) management and sustainability and consist of a complex network inclusive of interdependent actors such as farmers, distributors, processors, and retailers. Hence, social network structures (SNSs) and practices are a means to contextualize user scenarios in agricultural value chain digitalization and digital solutions development. Therefore, this research aimed to unearth the roles of agricultural social networks in AVC digitalization, enabling an inclusive digital economy. We conducted automated literature content analysis followed by the application of case studies to develop a conceptual framework for the digitalization of the AVC toward an inclusive digital economy. Furthermore, we propose a transdisciplinary framework that guides the digitalization systematization of the AVC, while articulating resilience principles that aim to attain sustainability. The outcomes of this study offer software developers, agricultural stakeholders, and policymakers a platform to gain an understanding of technological infrastructure capabilities toward sustaining communities through digitalized AVCs.

High time for surgeons to engage with the universal right to a healthy environment

On Thursday, 28 July 2022, the General Assembly of the United Nations (UN) declared access to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment constitutes as a universal human right. This motion prompts action from diverse stakeholders across the globe. The surgical community has already taken consequent steps towards social participation and environmental sustainability in the recent years. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has increased the carbon footprint of surgical practice putting further impediments on the way towards a clean and healthy environment. Therefore, it is high time for surgeons to engage with the environment, mitigate the impact of the environmental crisis on surgical diseases and reduce the carbon footprint of surgical practice. Rethinking the use of energy - intensive technologies in the operating theater and collaborating with allied medical specialties and health professionals to decrease the ecological footprint of healthcare is pivotal.Copyright © 2022 The Author(s)

Municipal authorities' climate change adaptation plans: Barriers to the inclusion of intensified needs of vulnerable populations

Climate Adaptation Plans (CAPs) usually include a section on urban resilience, in which policymakers are expected to address human needs created or exacerbated by climate-related emergency events. However, the urban resilience sections of CAPs tend to remain under-developed, with welfare-related risks often overlooked. Until recently, there has been limited acknowledgement of the barriers preventing the positioning of human need at the core of CAPs. To conceptualize and understand the impact of such barriers, this study used an agenda-setting approach. We examined the incorporation of vulnerable populations' needs into CAPs drawn up by municipal authorities in Israel, using the COVID-19 pandemic as a prompt for the assessment of barriers to agenda setting and lessons learned. Drawing on twenty interviews with senior administrators in Israeli municipal authorities, we identified three administrative barriers hindering the integration of vulnerable populations' intensified needs into CAPs. The barriers were created by disparities between confidence in their succeesful emergency management and their knowledge of unmet needs;between acceptance of responsibility and access to training, resources or impact;and between local initiatives and reliance on national funds. Overlooking administrative barriers is bound to leave scholarly understanding of the slow pace at which CAPs translate lessons learned from human crises into policy, limited or lacking. © 2023 Elsevier B.V.

The resilient city

This chapter emphasizes the importance not only of why we need resilient cities but also of how we can implement resilient strategies in cities. It examines the various steps the city has taken: through its creation of the Chief Resilience Officer role in 2014, its climate adaptation programme, the release of the first documented resilience strategy, and its formerly assigning resilience as a governmental responsibility, among other things. The chapter looks at the post-pandemic steps the city has taken, the updating of resilience strategy, and the Seven City projects, which aim to boost the economy and liveability, with a focus on green infrastructure and climate adaptation and creating jobs and attracting businesses. The COVID-19 crisis has focused the minds of local governments in the USA and Europe on the need to build resilience into their recovery strategies. Cities are seeing their digitalization planning as a way of supporting and driving a resilience strategy. © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. All rights reserved.

Reciprocity and design for an era of compressed temporal and spatial scale

Haraway and others have suggested reciprocity with the non-human world is a pathway to un-derstanding our humanness. Two urgent trends accelerate our need for this reciprocity: the first is the COVID-19 pandemic as a harbinger of future pandemics, and the second is our changing planetary climate. Our present time is increasingly becoming a "present-future,” linked irreversibly by scientific models to specific future states of our planet and local regions. At the same time our bodies are co-evolving with a virus in a global reciprocal process with no end in sight, collapsing our sense of scale and separation among bodies. A long view of time in the past could act as a counterbalance to this experience. Bringing the longue durée model of time into our present requires reestablishing our knowledge of a long-term past in which humans adapted to major changes in climate earlier in the Holocene. Forms of future urban adaptation can embody reciprocity by emphasizing strategies that anticipate change rather than seeking to prevent it, leap-ing forward in time to embrace global changes we are no longer able to prevent. © 2022 Author(s).

Public Health Measures to Address the Impact of Climate Change on Population Health-Proceedings from a Stakeholder Workshop.

BACKGROUND: The World Health Organization identified climate change as the 21st century's biggest health threat. This study aimed to identify the current knowledge base, evidence gaps, and implications for climate action and health policymaking to address the health impact of climate change, including in the most underserved groups. METHODS: The Horizon-funded project ENBEL ('Enhancing Belmont Research Action to support EU policy making on climate change and health') organised a workshop at the 2021-European Public Health conference. Following presentations of mitigation and adaptation strategies, seven international researchers and public health experts participated in a panel discussion linking climate change and health. Two researchers transcribed and thematically analysed the panel discussion recording. RESULTS: Four themes were identified: (1) 'Evidence is key' in leading the climate debate, (2) the need for 'messaging about health for policymaking and behaviour change' including health co-benefits of climate action, (3) existing 'inequalities between and within countries', and (4) 'insufficient resources and funding' to implement national health adaptation plans and facilitate evidence generation and climate action, particularly in vulnerable populations. CONCLUSION: More capacity is needed to monitor health effects and inequities, evaluate adaptation and mitigation interventions, address current under-representations of low- or middle-income countries, and translate research into effective policymaking.

Climate change and COVID-19: Assessing the vulnerability and resilience of U.S. Indigenous communities to syndemic crises.

The rapid emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic and the insidiously evolving climate crisis represent two of the most pressing public health threats to Indigenous Peoples in the United States. Understanding the ways in which these syndemics uniquely impact Indigenous Peoples, given the existing health disparities for such communities, is essential if we are to address modifiable root causes of health vulnerability and devise effective and equitable strategies to protect and improve health in the evolving climate landscape. We explore the compounding burden of the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change on Indigenous Peoples' health, and present several case studies which outline novel Indigenous approaches and perspectives that address climate change, COVID-19 and future health threats.

Synergies Between COVID-19 and Climate Change Impacts and Responses

The COVID-19 pandemic and anthropogenic climate change are global crises. We show how strongly these crises are connected, including the underlying societal inequities and problems of poverty, substandard housing, and infrastructure including clean water supplies. The origins of all these crises are related to modern consumptive industrialisation, including burning of fossil fuels, increasing human population density, and replacement of natural with human dominated ecosystems. Because business as usual is unsustainable on all three fronts, transformative responses are needed. We review the literature on risk management interventions, implications for COVID-19, for climate change risk and for equity associated with biodiversity, water and WaSH, health systems, food systems, urbanization and governance. This paper details the considerable evidence base of observed synergies between actions to reduce pandemic and climate change risks while enhancing social justice and biodiversity conservation. It also highlights constraints imposed by governance that can impede deployment of synergistic solutions. In contrast to the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, governance systems have procrastinated on addressing climate change and biodiversity loss as these are interconnected chronic crises. It is now time to address all three to avoid a multiplication of future crises across health, food, water, nature, and climate systems.

COVID Connections: Lessons from Adaptations to COVID-19 as Strategies for Building Food System Resilience

To identify elements of crisis response that might hold lessons for resilience beyond the current moment, we studied a central North Carolina food system during the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on ethnographic interviews with farmers, employees and volunteers of food access organizations, and local government employees, our work found that connection, networking, innovation, and technology adoption were sources of strength and growth. Lessons: food system actors found that their social connections helped them to exchange information and resources, meet increased food needs among SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) participants and Latina/os immigrants, and combine efforts to adopt technologies and learn from new labor pools. Challenges: while navigating COVID-19, food system actors faced challenges spanning labor, safety, information, government policies, supply shortages, weather, and unreliable information. In addition to lessons and challenges, we offer a series of future research directions that we identified in our study findings. Our study shows that small-scale production and local food organization and government responses are important and dynamic parts of a resilient food system. Regional systems' actors were able to pivot more quickly than large-scale systems and presented a more flexible, locally suitable model that will likely prove adaptive beyond the pandemic.

Pathways linking climate change and HIV/AIDS: An updated conceptual framework and implications for the Philippines.

As we commemorate the 40th anniversary of the discovery of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) while fighting the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, another global crisis - climate change - is threatening the progress achieved so far in the global fight against HIV/AIDS. The climate emergency is anticipated to generate dire health consequences worldwide in the coming decades. While the pathways that link climate change and different disease areas are better understood, the connection between climate change and HIV/AIDS is still yet to be recognized both in research and practice. In this review, we update one of the frameworks on the HIV-climate nexus described in earlier literature. Four major pathways have been identified: extreme weather events; sea level rise; changes in precipitation and temperature; and increased air pollution. These pathways impact the spectrum of HIV/AIDS-related outcomes through changes in social systems, healthcare disruption, and other climate-sensitive diseases, influenced by the social determinants of health. We also reflect on the significance of this updated framework for the Philippines, a country that is both highly vulnerable to the climate crisis and facing a rising HIV/AIDS epidemic. The framework can aid countries like the Philippines in filling gaps in research, policy, and program design to mount climate-adaptive HIV/AIDS responses. The HIV/AIDS and climate justice movements must also join forces in calling for accelerated worldwide decline in greenhouse gas emissions from all sectors to stabilize the global climate - this will benefit not just people affected by HIV/AIDS but everyone.

Cities on the Coast and Patterns of Movement between Population Growth and Diffusion.

Sea level rise and high-impact coastal hazards due to on-going and projected climate change dramatically affect many coastal urban areas worldwide, including those with the highest urbanization growth rates. To develop tailored coastal climate services that can inform decision makers on climate adaptation in coastal cities, a better understanding and modeling of multifaceted urban dynamics is important. We develop a coastal urban model family, where the population growth and urbanization rates are modeled in the framework of diffusion over the half-bounded and bounded domains, and apply the maximum entropy principle to the latter case. Population density distributions are derived analytically whenever possible. Steady-state wave solutions balancing the width of inhabited coastal zones, with the skewed distributions maximizing population entropy, might be responsible for the coastward migrations outstripping the demographic development of the hinterland. With appropriate modifications of boundary conditions, the developed family of diffusion models can describe coastal urban dynamics affected by climate change.

The impacts of the early outset of the COVID-19 pandemic on climate change research: Implications for policy-making.

Since January 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has dominated the media and exercises pressure on governments worldwide. Apart from its effects on economies, education systems and societies, the pandemic has also influenced climate change research. This paper examines the extent to which COVID-19 has influenced climate change research worldwide during the first wave at the beginning of 2020 and how it is perceived to exploit it in the future. This study utilised an international survey involving those dedicated to climate change science and management research from Academia, Government, NGOs, and international agencies in 83 countries. The analysis of responses encompasses four independent variables: Institutions, Regions, Scientific Areas, and the level of economic development represented by the Human Development Index (HDI). Results show that: (1) COVID-19 modified the way the surveyed researchers work, (2) there are indicators that COVID-19 has already influenced the direction of climate change and adaptation policy implementation, and (3) respondents perceived (explicitly concerning the COVID-19 lockdowns of March-April 2020), that the pandemic has drawn attention away from climate policy. COVID- 19 has influenced the agenda of climate change research for more than half of the respondents and is likely to continue in the future, suggesting that the impacts on their research will still be felt for many years. The paper concludes by outlining critical implications for policy-making.