Covid-19 and outdoor recreation – Lessons learned? Introduction to the special issue on "Outdoor recreation and Covid-19: Its effects on people, parks and landscapes”

The special issue presents international experiences with COVID-19 in the years 2020 and 2021 on outdoor recreation and nature-based tourism. To set the scene, a bibliometric and qualitative analysis illustrates and clusters recent publications on COVID-19. Against this background contributions from Japan, China, Brazil, Indonesia, Austria, Croatia, the United States, New Zealand, Taiwan, Australia, Sweden, Poland and Ireland draw a truly international picture of the pandemic crisis, the effects, coping behavior and related strategies. The papers contribute to the COVID-19 related research by documenting the shock in the field of outdoor recreation and tourism, by understanding the immediate consequences on behavior and the required managerial consequences and finally, by analyzing the possible follow up effects including long term effects, discussing resilient solutions and proposing new strategies. In the discussion section we try to answer the questions whether the high visitation rate in recreation facilities, forests, parks and protected areas will remain, and whether adapted visitor management concepts will be required. In addition, we discuss possible implications for urban planning and management. Finally, based on a changing connectedness to nature also possible positive effects by the pandemic are discussed which may lead to a new target group in outdoor recreation and nature-based tourism. Management implications: The overview on the Covid-19 related literature suggests improvements in planning and management, such as - new concepts for destination and visitor management, considering an ongoing risk-management, - proactive urban planning and management considering short-term effects in the existing built environment as well as a long-term perspective with strategically planned green infrastructure, including not only the supply of green infrastructure, but also its accessibility, its amenities, and aspects of environmental justice, - the consideration of new target groups in tourism and outdoor recreation. © 2022

Crossing the Same River Multiple Times: Cautiously setting aside pandemic practices, pharma workers appear ready for flux, change, evolution, and expanding molecular diversity

The article presents results of an employment survey on trends and the state of the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry in 2022. Findings reveal COVID-19 measures that are important to daily operations, stagnation of wage growth and decline in overall salary satisfaction, job security changes and drop in job satisfaction, and business concerns including corporate performance and industry growth.

The impact of COVID-19 on route-level changes in transit demand an analysis of five transit agencies in Florida, USA

This study examined the impacts of COVID-19 on changes in route-level transit demand across five transit agencies in the state of Florida. Data for 120 routes from five transit agencies were used to develop two-stage instrumental variable models. Data from January of 2019 to December of 2020 were used in the analysis. Routes that served a greater mix of land-uses experienced a smaller decline in ridership. The impacts of several other land-use variables were, however, not consistent across the five transit agencies. Fare suspension was estimated to have a positive impact on ridership. In contrast, occupancy reduction measures (to promote social distancing within the transit vehicle) had a very strong negative impact on demand. The magnitude of the negative impact of occupancy reduction was larger than the positive impacts of fare suspension. Extending this analysis to a larger set of routes across more agencies would be useful in enhancing the robustness of the findings from our models. Extending our analysis to include data from 2021 and later to capture the recovery phase is also an important direction for future work. © 2022

A social media-based framework for quantifying temporal changes to wildlife viewing intensity: Quantifying changes to wildlife viewing intensity

Documenting how human pressure on wildlife changes over time is important to minimise potential adverse effects through implementing appropriate management and policy actions;however, obtaining objective measures of these changes and their potential impacts is often logistically challenging, particularly in the natural environment. Here, we developed a modular stochastic model that infers the ratio of actual viewing pressure on wildlife in consecutive time periods (years) using social media, as this medium is widespread and easily accessible. Pressure was calculated from the number of times individual animals appeared in social media in pre-defined time windows, accounting for time-dependent variables that influence them (e.g. number of people with access to social media). Formulas for the confidence intervals of viewing pressure ratios were rigorously developed and validated, and corresponding uncertainty was quantified. We applied the developed framework to calculate changes to wildlife viewing pressure on loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) at Zakynthos island (Greece) before and during the COVID-19 pandemic (2019–2021) based on 2646 social media entries. Our model ensured temporal comparability across years of social media data grouped in time window sizes, by correcting for the interannual increase of social media use. Optimal sizes for these windows were delineated, reducing uncertainty while maintaining high time-scale resolution. The optimal time window was around 7-days during the peak tourist season when more data were available in all three years, and >15 days during the low season. In contrast, raw social media data exhibited clear bias when quantifying changes to viewing pressure, with unknown uncertainty. The framework developed here allows widely-available social media data to be used objectively when quantifying temporal changes to wildlife viewing pressure. Its modularity allowed viewing pressure to be quantified for all data combined, or subsets of data (different groups, situations or locations), and could be applied to any site supporting wildlife exposed to tourism. © 2022 The Author(s)

Back to future: International social work in the new era

An editorial is presented on International social work in the new era. Topics include number of infected cases being decreasing, the loss of life being reducing, and social and economic activities again started resuming;and globalization moving towards de-globalization and various supply chains such as human talents, financial capital, ideas, and information.

An assessment of tendencies toward teleworking using TAMs: lessons from Covid-19 era for post-pandemic days

Purpose: During the Covid-19 period, when human beings are socially isolated, telework is a viable solution to safeguard employees' health. Because many employees have never experienced such a working system and organizations have not planned for it before the pandemic, imposing employees to telework has adversely affected their productivity and efficiency. This study aims to identify factors affecting individuals' tendency toward teleworking during the pandemic, which can lead to practical solutions for the post-pandemic era. Design/methodology/approach: Through the use of technology acceptance models, a conceptual model was designed. Data used to assess the model were cross-sectional and derived from 229 questionnaires filled out by employees in Tehran. The AMOS24 software processed the corresponding structural equation model. Findings: The results from the cross-sectional data indicated that attitude toward telework and perceived behavioral control over the system were significantly correlated directly with the intention to telework, while perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use of telework were correlated indirectly. Therefore, the integrated model predicts behavioral intentions better than single models performed separately. Originality/value: Psychological and mental health research describing adoption intentions of telework, particularly those focusing on employees, is still lacking. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study in this regard that has used a conceptual model derived from two technology acceptance models during the Covid-19 outbreak. An era in which the extent of the pandemic has forced employees to experience such working systems and thus the importance and practicality of teleworking have been more evident to nearly every individual. © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited.

Tryst with the unknown: navigating an unplanned transition to online examinations

Purpose: This paper aims to investigate the major challenges faced and lessons learned during the unplanned transition to online examinations (OE) at a traditional university following the COVID-19 pandemic. Design/methodology/approach: This exploratory study involved two distinct samples (110 students and 30 instructors) drawn from a large public university and triangulated the qualitative and quantitative data to analyze how the university navigated the unplanned transition to OE. Findings: The university faced several challenges related to a lack of proper institutional infrastructure, non-familiarity of the stakeholders with OE, lack of effective communication, limited student access to technology resources because of socio-economic impediments and academic integrity issues. Practical implications: Short- and medium-term recommendations are proposed to enable continuity of teaching and learning in future emergency situations, including the establishment of technology-enabled exam centers, as well as strategies to assure instructor readiness for OE, academic integrity among students and the validity of the evaluation procedure for future OE. Originality/value: This study shows how the unplanned transition to OE in a public university exposed new challenges for conducting OE, particularly in resource challenged emerging countries, where full integration of OE was a new experience and prior knowledge of potential issues was lacking. © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited.

Inward-looking policies, finite change, and employment: The capital reallocation effect

It is well recognized that there emerged a trend of inward-looking trade policies even before the COVID pandemic crippled the world. These were reflected in both BREXIT and US-China trade conflicts. As countries become inward-oriented, usually local prices start rising. With this backdrop, this paper explores how rising local prices are likely to affect employment in the short and long runs when we accommodate for the finite change in a general equilibrium structure whereby sectors not only contract but might also close down altogether due to the capital reallocation effect following a price incentive. © 2022 International Association for Economic Theory.

Tracking disclosure change trajectories for financial fraud detection

The global economic disruption brought by COVID-19 crisis can set a stage for the prevalence of financial statement frauds, which jeopardize the efficient functioning of capital markets. In this paper, we propose a nuanced method to detect frauds by tracking granular changes in disclosures over time. Specifically, we first align paragraphs between consecutive disclosures by their similarities. This alignment can be solved as an optimization-based matching problem. Then we identify three types of changed contents: recurrent, newly added, and deleted contents. For each type, we measure the changes in terms of fraud-relevant linguistics features, such as sentiment and uncertainties. Further, we formulate a firm's Management Discussion and Analysis change trajectory over years as a multivariate time series composed of these granular metrics. We implement a deep learning model to predict frauds using the change trajectory as an input. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms benchmark models, and its performance increases with the length of the change trajectory. Moreover, we found specific types of changes are strongly associated with frauds, including weak modal or reward words in newly added or deleted contents. Our work provides an optimization-based method to define change trajectories and trace information mutation in narratives. Finally, our study contributes to the fraud detection literature with a new predictive signal—disclosure change trajectories with an effective deep learning architecture. © 2022 Production and Operations Management Society.

Reflections From Implementing a Virtual Social Innovation Lab

Qualitative research methods had to quickly adapt to using online platforms due to the COVID-19 pandemic to limit in-person interactions. Online platforms have been used extensively for interviews and focus groups, but workshops with larger groups requiring more complex interactions have not been widely implemented. This paper presents a case study of a fully virtual social innovation lab on bioplastics packaging, which was adapted from a series of in-person workshops. A positive outcome of the online setting was diversifying the types of participants who could participate. Highly interactive activities such as icebreakers, networking, bricolage, and prototyping were particularly challenging to shift from in-person to online using traditional web conferencing platforms like Zoom. Creative use of online tools, such as Gather.Town and Kahoot!, helped unlock more innovative thinking by employing novel techniques such as gamification. However, challenges such as adapting facilitation for an online environment and exclusion of groups that do not have consistent access to internet and/or computers still need to be addressed. The reflections and lessons learned from this paper can help researchers adapt qualitative methods to virtual environments. © The Author(s) 2023.

The impact of early-stage COVID-19 pandemic on the diagnosis and treatment of gastric cancer: A cross-sectional study using a large-scale cancer registry in Hiroshima, Japan

BACKGROUND: After the confirmation of coronavirus infection in Japan, a behavioral change caused people and physicians to refrain from visiting hospitals or undergoing examinations. This study aimed to assess how the trend of diagnosis in gastric cancers changed, and how it affected the therapeutic strategies and the interval from diagnosis to treatment during the COVID-19 pandemic. METHODS: We use 15 cancer-designated hospitals' registries in Hiroshima, Japan. The target period was March to December 2020, and the same period in 2019 was set as the control period. The monthly mean of diagnoses and the interval from diagnosis to treatment were compared overall and separately by age, treatment procedure, diagnostic process, and clinical stage. RESULT: In 2020, the monthly mean (standard deviation [SD]) of patients was 192.2 (29.9), a significant 20.1% decrease from 240.7 (20.7) in 2019 due to older age and curative treatment groups. By reason for performing endoscopy, the change rate in cancer screening, endoscopic follow-up, and symptomatic status were -27.0%, -18.0%, and -17.3%, respectively. Meanwhile, the interval (days) from diagnosis to treatment (SD) was 37.8 (26.5) in 2020, significantly shorter than 46 (31.5) in 2019. CONCLUSION: From 2019 to 2020, we observed a significant decrease in the diagnosis of curable early-stage gastric cancer and treatments, although the interval from diagnosis to treatment decreased. This study suggests that cancer screening played a significant role in the decline in cancer diagnosis that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. Even under COVID-19 pandemic conditions, there should be an awareness of cancer screening and endoscopic follow-up.

SSP economic growth projections: Major changes of key drivers in integrated assessment modelling

GDP scenarios are major drivers of climate change and climate change mitigation assessment studies. In this paper, a major update of the SSP GDP projections is presented. By using the most recent economic data and short-term projections by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, the update captures changes in the system of national accounting and purchasing power parities, as well as the impact of the Covid 19 pandemic. Harmonization between the data and the original end-of-the century SSP projections was carried out in terms of GDP per capita in order to preserve the underlying narrative of income convergence. The result is a set of projections compatible with the most recent data and the SSP narratives. A comparison of DICE models calibrated to the original and updated SSP2 GDP per capita projections illustrates how significant the impact of an update of income data on integrated assessment results can be. The estimated global social costs of carbon in 2015 and 2030 rose by almost 30%. © 2023 Elsevier B.V.

Intercrisis learning in disaster response network: experience of Korea from MERS and COVID-19

This paper critically reviews whether the hierarchical system or intercrisis learning can be sufficient to understand Korea's COVID-19 responses. Our case study suggests that a Korean response system is a hybrid form that uses a hierarchical structure together with a network approach. To unveil theoretical models of how learning may occur and evolve during a crisis, we employ a policy learning model combining the network perspective and the four Cs model (cognition, communication, coordination, and control). We analyse the change in government manuals, response policies, and agenda streams observed in government documents. This analysis reveals far more complex interactions among actors and policies, both flexible and rigid at different phases of COVID-19. On top of policy learning, we conclude that it is necessary to rediscover the power of citizen voluntary responses and collaboration among actors of the response network through value change.

Managing organizational change in responding to global crises

To cope with global crises, organizations go through various internal changes and adopt different survival strategies. Several researchers and practitioners have highlighted that employees are the key factors in implementing such changes. However, organizations often face difficulties in managing manpower effectively due to the complexities and ambiguities related to the said changes. To address this challenge, the present study proposes a comprehensive model to manage organizational change to effectively respond to global crises. This study highlights that "employee change-championing behavior” (ECB) – also known as effective change-supportive behavior of employees – is the key to successfully implementing the necessary organizational changes to tackle global crises. Utilizing the 3-Stage Lewin's Model of Change as the foundation for analysis, this study proposes for "transformational leadership style” to substitute the "unfreezing stage,” "trust in leadership and work engagement” to substitute the "moving stage,” and "employee change championing behavior” to substitute the "refreezing stage.” Additionally, this study found that transformational leadership (TL) influences employee change-championing behavior, while employee trust in leadership (ETL) influences employee work engagement (EWE). Moreover, trust in leadership and work engagement individually and sequentially mediate the relationship between TL and employee change-championing behavior. This study offers a unique perspective for business leaders on how to manage organizational changes during global crises. © 2022 Wiley Periodicals LLC.

Using the big data analysis and basic information from lecture Halls to predict air change rate

School lecture halls are often designed as confined spaces. During the period of COVID-19, indoor ventilation has played an even more important role. Considering the economic reasons and the immediacy of the effect, the natural ventilation mechanism becomes the primary issue to be evaluated. However, the commonly used CO2 tracer gas concentration decay method consumes a lot of time and cost. To evaluate the ventilation rate fast and effectively, we use the common methods of big data analysis - Principal Component Analysis (PCA), K-means and linear regression to analyze the basic information of the lecture hall to explore the relation between variables and air change rate. The analysis results show that the target 37 lecture halls are divided into two clusters, and the measured 11 lecture halls contributed 64.65%. When analyzing the two clusters separately, there is a linear relation between the opening area and air change rate (ACH), and the model error is between 6% and 12%, which proves the feasibility of the basic information of the lecture hall by calculating the air change rate. © 2023 Elsevier Ltd

Climate Change and Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery

The COVID-19 pandemic has illustrated that global events can have a profound impact on our health systems. While the pandemic is unprecedented, it does underscore the need to prepare for future global health concerns. Climate change is a looming threat with significant consequences for otolaryngologists and our patients. In this commentary, we discuss the need to assess our preparedness for climate change as well as the importance of reflecting on our responsibility to minimize our footprint.

A review of air travel behavior and climate change

Air transport challenges the world's net-zero carbon ambitions. The sector has consistently grown and causes warming as a result of both CO2 and other, short-lived emissions. Two principal solutions have been proposed to reduce the contribution of aviation to climate change: innovations of technology and the development of interventions to trigger behavioral change. Technological innovations include new propulsion technologies and the use of sustainable aviation fuels. Behavioral change includes flight avoidance, substitution with other means of transport, the choice of efficient flight options, and carbon offsetting. This article focuses on behavior;it offers an overview of factors that lead to consumers traveling by air and discusses demand distribution complexities. The importance of price for air travel decisions is assessed, and evidence of travel "wants” are contrasted with "needs,” the latter investigated in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. The review of relevant scholarly work culminates in an action list enabling air travelers, policy makers, the aviation industry, researchers and society to meaningfully advance low-carbon air transport trajectories. This article is categorized under: Perceptions, Behavior, and Communication of Climate Change > Behavior Change and Responses The Carbon Economy and Climate Mitigation > Policies, Instruments, Lifestyles, Behavior. © 2022 The Authors. WIREs Climate Change published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.