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Human societies are changing where and how water flows through the atmosphere. However, these changes in the atmospheric water cycle are not being managed, nor is there any real sense of where these changes might be headed in the future. Thus, we develop a new economic theory of atmospheric water management, and explore this theory using creative story-based scenarios. These scenarios reveal surprising possibilities for the future of atmospheric water management, ranging from a stock market for transpiration to on-demand weather. We discuss these story-based futures in the context of research and policy priorities in the present day.
Technical Summary
Humanity is modifying the atmospheric water cycle, via land use, climate change, air pollution, and weather modification. Historically, atmospheric water was implicitly considered a ‘public good’ since it was neither actively consumed nor controlled. However, given anthropogenic changes, atmospheric water can become a ‘common-pool’ good (consumable) or a ‘club’ good (controllable). Moreover, advancements in weather modification presage water becoming a ‘private’ good, meaning both consumable and controllable. Given the implications, we designed a theoretical framing of atmospheric water as an economic good and used a combination of methods in order to explore possible future scenarios based on human modifications of the atmospheric water cycle. First, a systematic literature search of scholarly abstracts was used in a computational text analysis. Second, the output of the text analysis was matched to different parts of an existing economic goods framework. Then, a group of global water experts were trained and developed story-based scenarios. The resultant scenarios serve as creative investigations of the future of human modification of the atmospheric water cycle. We discuss how the scenarios can enhance anticipatory capacity in the context of both future research frontiers and potential policy pathways including transboundary governance, finance, and resource management.
Social Media Summary
Story-based scenarios reveal novel future pathways for the management of the atmospheric water cycle.
Considering the 1500+ pages making up the 39 chapters of this work on Chinese economic history from ancient times to the present, this review essay suggests ways The Cambridge Economic History of China contributes new perspectives on economic history more generally and on plausible connections between the pathways of Chinese economic change that begin in the distant past and point toward the future. The essay addresses specifically Chinese elements in its economic history and identifies the ways in which nineteenth- and twentieth-century engagement with Westerners contributed to the Chinese economy’s future development but in no comprehensive manner explain how modern Chinese economic change took place. Among the highlighted features of Chinese economic history that chapters of this work make visible are the persistent presence of state efforts to manage and shape economic activity forming a distinct tradition of political economy and the long-standing awareness of many of the relationships between population, agriculture, and the natural environment.
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has led to significant strain on front-line healthcare workers.
Aims
In this multicentre study, we compared the psychological outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic in various countries in the Asia-Pacific region and identified factors associated with adverse psychological outcomes.
Method
From 29 April to 4 June 2020, the study recruited healthcare workers from major healthcare institutions in five countries in the Asia-Pacific region. A self-administrated survey that collected information on prior medical conditions, presence of symptoms, and scores on the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales and the Impact of Events Scale-Revised were used. The prevalence of depression, anxiety, stress and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) relating to COVID-19 was compared, and multivariable logistic regression identified independent factors associated with adverse psychological outcomes within each country.
Results
A total of 1146 participants from India, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam were studied. Despite having the lowest volume of cases, Vietnam displayed the highest prevalence of PTSD. In contrast, Singapore reported the highest case volume, but had a lower prevalence of depression and anxiety. In the multivariable analysis, we found that non-medically trained personnel, the presence of physical symptoms and presence of prior medical conditions were independent predictors across the participating countries.
Conclusions
This study highlights that the varied prevalence of psychological adversity among healthcare workers is independent of the burden of COVID-19 cases within each country. Early psychological interventions may be beneficial for the vulnerable groups of healthcare workers with presence of physical symptoms, prior medical conditions and those who are not medically trained.
Maarten Prak's Citizens without Nations merits praise for what he has added to our understanding of early modern and modern European history. He presents persuasive arguments and evidence for how variations among early modern European cities and their citizens together with subsequent variations among relations between cities and state shaped the modern relations between European national states and their citizens. Prak also extends the concept of citizenship to China and the Ottoman Empire where neither the ideological, nor the institutional features of European citizenship existed by discussing Chinese and Ottoman urban social, economic, and political practices that in early modern Europe relate to citizenship. Such a move makes invisible the early modern ideological and institutional foundations of the Chinese and Ottoman practices he recounts. It additionally creates the problem of determining how, if at all, what he calls Chinese and Ottoman citizenship mattered to nineteenth-century Chinese and Ottoman subjects as they encountered for the first time Western notions of citizenship. In order to write global history, we need more studies of Chinese, Ottoman, and other histories, which explain the changing political architecture of relations between people and those who ruled them to complement what Maarten Prak's fine study of citizens without nations gives us for European history.
Commenting on Christopher Bayly's Remaking the Modern World, 1900–2015 is a bittersweet exercise. My assignment for this forum is to consider Remaking the Modern World, 1900–2015 from the vantage point of China studies. I will do so by framing my remarks with respect to some of the ways this major South Asia historian took his expertise into larger projects, the last of which is the volume under discussion.
This chapter discusses the basic mechanism of global industrialization with reference to how local resource constraints were eased through the introduction of modern technology and institutions in core regions of the world. The adoption of a multipolar perspective implies a degree of departure from the existing literature. The chapter reviews the early modern European economic development from a reciprocal comparative perspective. According to Eric Jones and others, Europe as a region achieved a series of major technological and institutional innovations, worth calling the 'European miracle', between 1400 and 1800. In describing postwar economic development up to 1980, Harry Oshima stressed the common socio-environmental characteristics of monsoon Asia, stretching from East and Southeast Asia to South Asia. The character of the Asian path originates from the unique environment, with differences between East Asia and South Asia. The chapter speculates whether ongoing industrialization will be a threat to global environmental sustainability.
This chapter considers the global social and political context that a common climate-induced general crisis in the seventeenth century set for economic activities. It explores the parallel and distinct dimensions of the expansions of early modern commerce in Europe and East Asia, elements of which are central to the changes in the consumption behavior of Europeans that is a basic trait of the European industrious revolution. In China, the absence of corporate elite identities found in both Europe and Japan meant that the passage of merchant wealth into literati elite status faced fewer institutional barriers. For England, being a high wage economy provided the economic rationale to develop laborsaving machinery. The shift from commercial capitalism to industrial capitalism is also the moment when data for workers adding hours to their daily routine become available. The direct evidence for workers extending their work hours comes from Britain and from a longer working day coming as industrialization begins between 1760 and 1820.