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Urban parks provide mental and physical health benefits by mitigating harmful environmental exposures, including heat and air pollution. Urban parks often cluster in more privileged neighborhoods. Health burdens from harmful environmental exposures are highest in less privileged ones. Using Trust for Public Land's ParkServe database of publicly accessible parks, sociodemographic data from the American Community Survey, and high-resolution satellite-imagery, we compared park size and environmental conditions by neighborhood privilege. To ascertain privilege, we calculated the combined race and income index of concentration at the extremes (ICEs) in each census tract of the 24 most populous urban areas in the United States (U.S.). We found that parks in the least privileged neighborhoods (i.e. bottom quartile of ICE) had on average 1.24 ppb higher concentrations of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and 1.00 μg/m-3 higher fine particulate matter (PM2.5) than parks in the most privileged neighborhoods (top ICE quartile). Parks in the most privileged neighborhoods were significantly larger and cooler in more than half of the included urban areas and significantly greener in over a third. Our results reveal disparities in the environmental conditions, and thus expected health benefits, between parks in the most and least privileged neighborhoods in the most populous urban areas in the U.S.

As cities in sub-Saharan Africa become more crowded, noise pollution is also emerging as an important environmental concern, after air pollution. Yet, unlike air pollution, which is enjoying relatively more public attention, there is limited measurement data and policy efforts on environmental noise pollution. We followed a recent city-wide measurement approach used in Accra (Ghana) and characterized environmental noise patterns in Kigali, a contrasting city with very different topography and regulatory system than Accra to inform urban policy. We established 10 'fixed' (yearlong) and 120 'rotating' (weeklong) monitoring sites to capture both the temporal and spatial patterns in Kigali's sound environment. The measurement occurred between November 2022 and December 2023, and samples were collected at 1 min interval, resulting in 5155 014 (3580 site-days) and 1190 620 (827 site-days) site-minutes of valid data from the fixed and rotating sites, respectively. The 130 monitoring sites covered a variety of geographic and land-use factors across diverse neighborhoods and sources. We computed several noise metrics, including 1 h (LAeq1 h), daily (LAeq24 h), day-time (L day), and night-time (L night). Daily noise (LAeq24 h) levels across the city ranged between 38 dBA and 85 dBA. Commercial, business, and industrial (CBI) and high-density residential (HD) communities experienced the highest noise levels, with some sites constantly above 70 dBA at day and 65 dBA at night. About 63% of our observed day-time values (up to ~72% in some areas) exceeded the Rwandan day-time standard (55 dBA) for residential areas, whereas 69% of the observed night-time values (up to 80% in some areas) exceeded the corresponding night-time standard (45 dBA). In Nyarugenge, the most urbanized district, as much as 75% of our site-days data exceeded day-time standard. However diurnal patterns throughout the city were similar, rising from ~5 am, peaking at about 8 am and plateauing until 6 pm before falling to their lowest at midnight. Overall, noise levels in the city did not vary much by day of the week, weekdays vs weekend, or dry vs wet seasons. Environmental noise in Kigali often exceeded both Rwandan standards and international guidelines, with residents in the city center district, CBI and HD areas at risk of higher exposure, and hence higher risk of adverse effects. Detailed assessment of the sources, at-risk population, and associated health effects may inform Rwandan's environmental policy efforts and city initiatives in the face of the ongoing urban growth and densification.

Livestock are a critical part of our food systems, yet their abundance globally has been cited as a driver of many environmental and human health concerns. Issues such as soil, water, and air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, aquifer depletion, antimicrobial resistance genes, and zoonotic disease outbreaks have all been linked to livestock operations. While many studies have examined these issues at depth at local scales, it has been difficult to complete studies at regional or national scales due to the dearth of livestock data, hindering pollution mitigation or response time for tracing and monitoring disease outbreaks. In the U.S. the National Agricultural Statistics Service completes a Census once every 5 years that includes livestock, but data are only available at the county level leaving little inference that can be made at such a coarse spatiotemporal scale. While other data exist through some regulated permitting programs, there are significant data gaps in where livestock are raised, how many livestock are on site at a given time, and how these livestock and, importantly, their waste emissions, are managed. In this perspective, we highlight the need for better livestock data, then discuss the accessibility and key limitations of currently available data. We then feature some recent work to improve livestock data availability through remote-sensing and machine learning, ending with our takeaways to address these data needs for the future of environmental and public health management.

Climate change and progressive population development (i.e., ageing and changes in population size) are altering the temporal patterns of temperature-related mortality in Switzerland. However, limited evidence exists on how current trends in heat- and cold-related mortality would evolve in future decades under composite scenarios of global warming and population development. Moreover, the contribution of these drivers to future mortality impacts is not well-understood. Therefore, we aimed to project heat- and cold-related mortality in Switzerland under various combinations of emission and population development scenarios and to disentangle the contribution of each of these two drivers using high-resolution mortality and temperature data. We combined age-specific (<75 and &#x2a7e;75 years) temperature-mortality associations in each district in Switzerland (1990-2010), estimated through a two-stage time series analysis, with 2 km downscaled CMIP5 temperature data and population and mortality rate projections under two scenarios: RCP4.5/SSP2 and RCP8.5/SSP5. We derived heat and cold-related mortality for different warming targets (1.5 &#xb0;C, 2.0 &#xb0;C and 3.0 &#xb0;C) using different emission and population development scenarios and compared this to the baseline period (1990-2010). Heat-related mortality is projected to increase from 312 (116; 510) in the 1990-2010 period to 1274 (537; 2284) annual deaths under 2.0 &#xb0;C of warming (RCP4.5/SSP2) and to 1871 (791; 3284) under 3.0 &#xb0;C of warming (RCP8.5/SSP5). Cold-related mortality will substantially increase from 4069 (1898; 6016) to 6558 (3223; 9589) annual deaths under 2.0 &#xb0;C (RCP4.5/SSP2) and to 5997 (2951; 8759) under 3.0 &#xb0;C (RCP8.5/SSP5). Moreover, while the increase in cold-related mortality is solely driven by population development, for heat, both components (i.e., changes in climate and population) have a similar contribution of around 50% to the projected heat-related mortality trends. In conclusion, our findings suggest that both heat- and cold-related mortality will substantially increase under all scenarios of climate change and population development in Switzerland. Population development will lead to an increase in cold-related mortality despite the decrease in cold temperature under warmer scenarios. Whereas the combination of the progressive warming of the climate and population development will substantially increase and exacerbate the total temperature-related mortality burden in Switzerland.

Climate change intensifies longstanding tensions over groundwater sustainability and equity of access among users. Though private land ownership is a primary mechanism for accessing groundwater in many regions, few studies have systematically examined the extent to which farmland markets transform groundwater access patterns over time. This study begins to fill this gap by examining farmland transactions overlying groundwater from 2003-17 in California. We construct a novel dataset that downscales well construction behavior to the parcel level, and we use it to characterize changes in groundwater access patterns by buyer type on newly transacted parcels in the San Joaquin Valley groundwater basin during the 2011-17 drought. Our results demonstrate large-scale transitions in farmland ownership, with 21.1% of overlying agricultural acreage statewide sold at least once during the study period and with the highest rates of turnover occurring in critically overdrafted basins. By 2017, annual individual farmland acquisitions had halved, while acquisitions by limited liability companies increased to one-third of all overlying acres purchased. Together, these trends signal increasing corporate farmland acquisitions; new corporate farmland owners are associated with the construction, on comparable parcels, of agricultural wells 77-81 feet deeper than those drilled by new individual landowners. We discuss the implications of our findings for near-term governance of groundwater, and their relevance for understanding structural inequities in exposure to future groundwater level declines.

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Addressing the mounting plastic waste problem requires system-level solutions, along with interventions that promote behavioral change. In low-resource countries, inadequate, if not absent, waste management systems lead to unsafe disposal practices, including open burning. While theory-informed approaches are essential for identifying enablers and barriers to target behavior change, their application is limited in these settings. Given the lack of a theory-driven synthesis of behavioral strategies to address plastic waste, this systematic review aimed to: (1) synthesize behavioral interventions related to plastic waste management in low-resource countries; (2) map these interventions to the behavior change wheel (BCW), using the capability-opportunity-motivation-behavior model, and the theoretical domains framework (TDF); and (3) classify implementation strategies to inform theory-driven intervention design. This review is the first to use the BCW to examine behavioral interventions related to plastic waste management in low-resource countries. Nine bibliographic databases: APA PsycInfo, CINAHL, Embase, Environment Complete, Global Health, GreenFile, Health Source: Nursing Academic, PubMed, and Web of Science Core Collection were searched. We included English-language human studies up to 9 April 2025, that evaluated interventions or policies targeting individual- or community-level behaviors related to plastic waste management in low-, lower-middle, or upper-middle income countries. We excluded studies from high-income countries, and those focused on environmental impacts, industrial or municipal waste streams, ecosystems or animals without human behavioral components, COVID-19-specific waste, or hypothetical modeling without real-life interventions. Forty-three studies met the inclusion criteria. Study quality was assessed using the mixed methods appraisal Tool. Interventions spanned 27 low-resource countries and targeted diverse populations, including schoolchildren, households, market vendors, and community organizations. Education was the most frequent BCW intervention function (76.7%), followed by environmental restructuring, incentivization, persuasion, and training. Mapping revealed that behavioral interventions relied most frequently on the TDF domains of environmental context, knowledge, skills, and social influences. Some domains, such as beliefs about capabilities, reinforcement, and identity, received moderate attention, while appealing to emotion or the use of behavioral regulation, were underutilized. Behavioral interventions for plastic waste management in low-resource countries have predominantly emphasized awareness-raising but insufficiently leveraged other BCW intervention functions and TDF domains. Integration of motivational, emotional, and identity-based strategies alongside structural support can enhance the sustainability of behavior change.

Human-induced climate change is leading to an increase in the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events, which are severely affecting the health of the population. The exceptional heat during the summer of 2022 in Europe is an example, with record-breaking temperatures only below the infamous 2003 summer. High ambient temperatures are associated with many health outcomes, including premature mortality. However, there is limited quantitative evidence on the contribution of anthropogenic activities to the substantial heat-related mortality observed in recent times. Here we combined methods in climate epidemiology and attribution to quantify the heat-related mortality burden attributed to human-induced climate change in Switzerland during the summer of 2022. We first estimated heat-mortality association in each canton and age/sex population between 1990 and 2017 in a two-stage time-series analysis. We then calculated the mortality attributed to heat in the summer of 2022 using observed mortality, and compared it with the hypothetical heat-related burden that would have occurred in absence of human-induced climate change. This counterfactual scenario was derived by regressing the Swiss average temperature against global mean temperature in both observations and CMIP6 models. We estimate 623 deaths [95% empirical confidence interval (95% eCI): 151-1068] due to heat between June and August 2022, corresponding to 3.5% of all-cause mortality. More importantly, we find that 60% of this burden (370 deaths [95% eCI: 133-644]) could have been avoided in absence of human-induced climate change. Older women were affected the most, as well as populations in western and southern Switzerland and more urbanized areas. Our findings demonstrate that human-induced climate change was a relevant driver of the exceptional excess health burden observed in the 2022 summer in Switzerland.

The climate crisis and mass incarceration are deeply intertwined. While climate change has intensified worldwide, incarcerated populations are disproportionately at risk of experiencing poor health related to climate change through multiple hazards including extreme heat, hurricanes, and wildfires. We detail how incarcerated individuals are at a heightened risk of experiencing multiple climate-related events, how climate change worsens the health of incarcerated individuals, and how carceral infrastructure and policies worsen these impacts. We then propose next steps including (1) further research to assess the full scope of climate-related health risks, (2) strong collaborations between researchers, policymakers, and community advocates, and (3) implementation of evidence-based policies that prioritize the well-being of incarcerated populations that span climate mitigation, climate adaptation, and decarceration measures.

Livestock underpin livelihoods and food security in Africa, using marginal lands to produce high-quality protein for the household or as a source of income. For mixed farmers, livestock provide draught power, manure for fields, and buffer variations in crop productivity. Livestock also hold cultural significance. However, African livestock farmers are especially vulnerable to climate hazards, and attempt to reduce impacts in different ways, with varied outcomes. A synthesis of the state of knowledge of livestock farmers' responses to climate variability and change would assist policymakers and practitioners to make informed decisions, and guide researchers towards gaps that need to be filled. To that end, we systematically reviewed articles published between 2014 and 2022-the period between the end of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fifth Assessment and the end of the Sixth, recording study metadata, farmers' responses, and their drivers, outcomes, barriers and enablers. We included 186 articles from 32 countries (most frequently Kenya or Ethiopia), from which 1089 responses were coded for analysis. Responses by small-scale farmers of cattle, sheep and goats, typically as part of mixed crop-livestock systems, were most common (n = 816), with few documented responses of commercial farmers (121). Most responses pertained to changing herd management (437), followed by feed or pasture management (294). Drought was the most common climate driver of responses (567), while the most commonly mentioned barriers included financial constraints (116), a lack of knowledge or information (98), and government support (67). While there is a sizable body of literature on climate impacts and adaptation of livestock farmers, notable gaps included any work in Central and Northern Africa, and responses of commercial farming systems. In general, future research should focus on these gaps and on improving the depth of information collected, such as on barriers and enablers of adaptation, to better inform future interventions.

Private passenger vehicles, with its high emissions of CO2 and air pollutants, poses a severe threat to global climate and human health, particularly for a large developing country like China. Although both energy efficiency improvement of internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs) and the wide adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) could contribute to reducing emissions, how they should be jointly implemented in provinces with a heterogeneous context to maximize their net benefits remains insufficiently explored. Here, based on an integrated modeling framework associated with one factual (REF) and four counterfactual scenarios to explore the priority and best-ranked ordering of both EVs' penetration and high energy-efficient ICEVs in 31 Chinese provinces to achieve the most environmental and human health benefits from 2011 to 2018. The results demonstrate that electrification of the passenger fleet, which is charged by a slightly cleaner power source relative to 2011, yields significant co-benefits of CO2 reduction and air quality improvement. Compared with REF, the fleet electrification scenario would lead to 3167 cases of avoided mortality and attain US$4.269 billion of health benefits in 2018, accounting for 0.03% of China's gross domestic product. Nonetheless, highly efficient ICEVs are found to harbor decarbonization potential and health benefits in northern China. Based on these results, Sichuan, Hebei and seven other provinces in east China should promote EVs imminently; conversely, eight provinces with a high share of thermal power must continually advance their implementation of ICEVs in the near future. Such prioritization of EVs and ICEV development at the provincial level provides timely insights for devising tailored policies regarding passenger car transition and for maximizing climate and health benefits based on regional heterogeneity.

Consumer-grade natural gas leaks contribute to methane-induced climate change and can degrade air quality. However, limited leakage and gas composition data exist outside of North America. Here, we measured stove-off gas leakage in 35 homes and chemically characterized 78 unburned gas samples from residential stoves across seven cities in the United Kingdom, Netherlands, and Italy. On average, benzene in unburned gas was substantially elevated compared to North America (9 to 73 times higher), while sulfur-based odorants were lower. Modeling of indoor and outdoor benzene enhancements from gas leaks showed potential for hazardous benzene exposure, often undetectable by odor. Three of 35 homes exhibited a stove-off leak that, combined with city-median benzene in gas, resulted in modeled benzene enhancements above the European Union's annual limit value (1.6 ppbv). The combination of high benzene and relatively low odorization in natural gas suggests that hazardous leaks are likely underreported in Europe.

Systematic assessments of climate change adaptation are critical for monitoring progress and planning effectively, but current approaches are limited in their scope, accuracy, and relevance to local contexts. Here, we present an improved approach using coproduction to quantitively assess adaptation based on local knowledge and priorities. This is applied to locally led adaptation (LLA) to flood risk in Tamale, Ghana, to provide the first quantitative assessments of this increasingly common adaptation practice. Through a multi-year process, including community marble distribution, focus groups, and household surveys, 11 LLA solutions were assessed. Assessments were based on adaptation success criteria that mattered most to local communities and included important considerations that are commonly missing from technical assessments, including multiple risk-reduction mechanisms, equity, sustainability, and co-impacts. Community-based and behavioural LLA solutions, such as collective action and tree planting, were deemed most effective, whilst structural and technical solutions were ranked lower. By integrating these assessments into a flood risk model, we show that LLA approaches significantly reduced flood risk overall but did not address existing inequalities. Our results showcase the potential of coproduction to increase the scope and robustness of adaptation assessments and highlight practical challenges of delivering on the LLA principles in real-world settings.

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Wildfires are an increasingly important source of toxic air pollutants, including carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), with implications for human health under a changing climate. Here, we quantify the influence of fire events on PAH concentrations, chemistry, and associated incremental lifetime cancer risk (ILCR) using a global three-dimensional chemical transport model. Fires contribute up to 42% of local PAH concentrations in fire-prone regions, including Australia, sub-Saharan Africa, Siberia, and Canada, and account for approximately 4.6% of global total PAH concentrations. Fire emissions also enhance fine particulate matter (PM2.5) levels, promoting partitioning of PAHs into the particle phase. Additionally, fires alter atmospheric oxidant levels, increasing the formation of highly toxic PAH degradation products, which contribute up to 55% of fire-sourced PAH cancer risk. As a result, fire-derived PAH mixtures are 51% more carcinogenic per unit mass than non-fire mixtures. Globally, fires contribute between 4 and 6% of the total all-source PAH ILCR, with some regions exceeding the recommended risk threshold of 1.0 &#xd7; 10 - 6 due solely to fire-related pollution. Sensitivity analyses indicate that even when fire emissions are dominated by less toxic lower molecular weight PAHs, fire-sourced PAHs are more toxic than anthropogenic-sourced PAHs, highlighting the critical role of atmospheric chemistry in modulating health impacts. These findings demonstrate that wildfires not only elevate PAH concentrations but also increase their per-mass toxicity through chemical transformations. With projections of increasing wildfire frequency and intensity under climate change, our results underscore the need for comprehensive monitoring, emission characterization, and mitigation strategies to address the growing public health risks of fire-related air pollution, particularly in regions frequently affected by wildfires.

Multiple cropping increases land productivity by allowing multiple harvests per year, offering production gains without cropland expansion. Irrigation is especially critical in the seasonally dry tropics, enabling multiple cropping where otherwise only a single rainfed cycle would be feasible. Estimates of the current state of multiple cropping and the multiple cropping expansion potential without changes in irrigation patterns exist, but the multiple cropping expansion potential through irrigation expansion has not yet been assessed at the global scale. Here, we estimate multiple cropping expansion potentials on existing cropland considering the interaction with irrigation and local water availability constraints to determine how much cropland area can be managed in multiple cropping systems and the associated increases in annual yields and crop production. We find that, under current climatic conditions, there is considerable global biophysical potential to expand multiple cropping on existing cropland, particularly when also expanding irrigation. Total global crop production could increase by 28% (from 4&#x2009;200&#x2009;mio.&#x2009;t&#x2009;DM to 5&#x2009;400&#x2009;mio.&#x2009;t&#x2009;DM). This gain stems from nearly quadrupling the area under rainfed multiple cropping, more than doubling multiple cropping area within already irrigated lands, and expanding irrigation into areas where it facilitates another growing season. Our study reveals a considerable multiple cropping expansion potential on existing cropland that-when tapped-could contribute to averting further cropland expansion to meet future demand for agricultural outputs. Local irrigation water availability constrains the irrigation-enabled multiple cropping potential, implying that the interaction of multiple cropping and irrigation is crucial to consider in comprehensive land and water assessments that account for biophysical and socio-economic constraints, sustainability criteria, and land competition under future global change.

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Urban informal settlement residents are vulnerable to mosquito-borne diseases, but little is known about the specific drivers of risk, or how they differ, within the diversity of informal settlements globally. Here we aimed to identify key drivers of mosquito abundance in different urban informal settlements to inform upgrading programs. We developed a causal framework of mosquito risk and tested it in two distinct geographic settings: Makassar, Indonesia and Suva, Fiji. Using longitudinal mosquito trapping surveys in 24 informal settlements between 2018 and 2024 (totalling 1534 successful trap sets in Makassar and 1216 in Suva), we fitted causal models to infer the relationships between climatic, environmental and socioeconomic drivers and the abundance of two dominant mosquito species: Aedes aegypti and Culex quinquefasciatus. Water supply and access, and variation in temperature and precipitation were key drivers of mosquito abundance in both informal settlement locations, but the direction of effects differed between vector species. Piped water supply in a settlement reduced the abundance of the dengue vector, Ae. aegypti but increased the abundance of Cx. quinquefasciatus. Higher temperature and precipitation were associated with more Ae. aegypti in both geographic locations. By identifying the pathways through which changes in informal settlement environments are likely to alter mosquito risk we provide essential information to guide upgrading and resilience programs.

Despite the growing evidence on the associations between greenspace and violent crime, there is a lack of research on the urban greenspace's influence on the associations between ambient temperature and violent crime. This observational study examined the risk differences by community's greenspace level using various greenspace indicators. Our time-series analysis modeled the associations between daily mean temperature (&#xb0;C) over two lag days (lag0-1) and daily counts of violent crime during summer (May-September) in each ZIP code in Chicago, IL (2001-2023), adjusting for confounding factors. Our random-effects meta analysis analyzed estimated the pooled relative risk (RR) at the 80th summer temperature percentile compared to the reference temperature (10th percentile) across the ZIP codes. Our meta-regressions analyzed how the ZIP code-specific relative risks (RRs) differ by the number of parks, sum of park areas, percentage of vegetated area, percentage of recreational vegetated area, vegetation density (30 m), percent tree coverage, and percent street-level tree coverage aggregated at the ZIP code level. A total of 1075 959 counts of violent crime were included in our analysis. We found 8% (95% CI: 7%-10%) higher risk of violent crime incidents when the daily mean temperature was at the 80th percentile (25.9 &#xb0;C) compared to the reference temperature (8.6 &#xb0;C). The pooled RR was significantly lower in ZIP codes with the highest vegetation density (RR = 1.085 [95% CI: 1.040-1.131]) compared to those with the lowest vegetated density (RR = 1.124 [1.088-1.162]). The RR was significantly lower in ZIP codes with the highest percentage of tree coverage (RR = 1.088 [1.046-1.132]) compared to the ZIP codes with the lowest percentage of tree coverage (RR = 1.123 [1.086-1.162]). The observed results indicate that greenspace can be beneficial in reducing the associations between heat and violent crime. The results should be considered in urban greenery planning and policies to reduce violent crime.