Global environmental change has implications for the spatial and temporal distribution of water resources, but quantifying its effects remains a challenge. The impact of vegetation responses to increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations on the hydrologic cycle is particularly poorly constrained1, 2, 3.

Anthropogenic nutrient flows exceed the planetary boundaries. The boundaries and the current excesses vary spatially. Such variations have both an ecological and a social facet. We explored the spatial variation using a bottom-up approach. The local critical boundaries were determined through the current or accumulated flow of the preceding five years before the planetary boundary criteria were met. Finland and Ethiopia served as cases with contrasting ecology and wealth. The variation in excess depends on historical global inequities in the access to nutrients.

To forge a strong climate accord in Paris, nations must agree on a common goal in everyone's self-interest, say David J. C. MacKay and colleagues.

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Policy makers have called for a 'fair and ambitious' global climate agreement. Scientific constraints, such as the allowable carbon emissions to avoid exceeding a 2 °C global warming limit with 66% probability, can help define ambitious approaches to climate targets. However, fairly sharing the mitigation challenge to meet a global target involves human values rather than just scientific facts.

hagas disease is a parasitic infection due to Trypanosoma cruzi that is endemic in Latin America, where Triatominae vectors are present. The parasite, multiplying inside various cell types, disseminates into its vertebrate host as blood trypomastigotes, and can be transmitted through blood transfusion as well as by organ transplantation or congenitally. Due to important migration of chronically infected people from LA, Chagas disease is now encountered in non-endemic countries as well.

Solar dimming and wind stilling (slowdown) are two outstanding climate changes occurred in China over the last four decades. The wind stilling may have suppressed the dispersion of aerosols and amplified the impact of aerosol emission on solar dimming. However, there is a lack of long-term aerosol monitoring and associated study in China to confirm this hypothesis. Here, long-term meteorological data at weather stations combined with short-term aerosol data were used to assess this hypothesis.

Land use change can have negative or positive effects on soil quality. Our objective was to assess the effects of land uses changes on the dynamics of selected soil physical and chemical properties. Soil samples were collected from three adjacent land uses, namely forestland, grazing land and cultivated land at 0–15 cm depth, and tested in National Soil Testing Center, Ministry of Agriculture of Ethiopia.

Metrics that synthesize the complex effects of climate change are essential tools for mapping future threats to biodiversity and predicting which species are likely to adapt in place to new climatic conditions, disperse and establish in areas with newly suitable climate, or face the prospect of extirpation. The most commonly used of such metrics is the velocity of climate change, which estimates the speed at which species must migrate over the earth’s surface to maintain constant climatic conditions.

In this study, researchers explored the relationships between the satellite-retrievedfire counts(FC), fire radiative power(FRP) and aerosol indices using multi-satellite datasets at a daily time-step covering ten different biomass burning regions in Asia.Wefirst assessed the variations inMODIS-retrieved aerosol optical depths (AOD’s)in agriculture,forests, plantation and peat land burning regions and then usedMODIS FC and FRP (hereafter FC/FRP)to explain the variations in AOD characteristics.

Cloud droplet mobility is referred to here as a measure of the droplets' ability to move with ambient air. We claim that an important part of the aerosol effect on convective clouds is driven by changes in droplet mobility.

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