Actors engaging in a diverse set of environmental protection activities are experiencing serious difficulties executing their mandates during armed conflict, leading to environmental harm that could otherwise have been mitigated. This article examines to what extent the international legal and policy framework can ensure the protection of environmental protection actors during armed conflict. It is argued that environmental protection actors can be seen either as part of civil defence organizations or as humanitarian relief actors, and are therefore covered by special protections under international humanitarian law. However, two main challenges remain: (1) despite these existing provisions, environmental protection actors may still face access and safety issues during armed conflict, and (2) within this framework, environmental protection activities must be linked to civilian needs and cannot be conducted based on ecocentric motivations. To overcome these challenges, the article introduces the concept of “environmentarian corridors”. Environmentarian corridors would allow for the unimpeded movement of environmental protection workers and resources through contested territory and into emergency areas to protect the environment. They would also serve to increase awareness about obligations to protect the environment and would help to ensure the safety of environmental protection actors during armed conflict, as the role and mandate of these actors is explicitly accepted by stakeholders. Additionally, environmentarian corridors offer potential for conducting environmental protection activities on ecocentric grounds. The article concludes by advocating for stakeholders to employ the provisions and concepts articulated herein as a means to further promote and strengthen initiatives aimed at protecting the environment during armed conflict.

Opportunities offered by precision medicine have long been promised in the medical and health literature. However, precision medicine – and the methodologies and approaches it relies on – also has adverse environmental impacts. As research into precision medicine continues to expand, there is a compelling need to consider these environmental impacts and develop means to mitigate them. In this article, we review the adverse environmental impacts associated with precision medicine, with a particular focus on those associated with its underlying need for data-intensive approaches. We illustrate the importance of considering the environmental impacts of precision medicine and describe the adverse health outcomes that are associated with climate change. We follow this with a description of how these environmental impacts are being addressed in both the health and data-driven technology sector. We then describe the (scant) literature on environmental impacts associated with data-driven precision medicine specifically. We finish by highlighting various environmental considerations that precision medicine researchers, and the field more broadly, should take into account.

We report for the first time the effects of vehicle traffic and beachgoer trampling on macrobenthic communities of Amazonian sandy beaches. Sampling was performed during four consecutive months with different beach use intensity in 2017 (before, during vacation, and two months after the vacation period) on three contrasting beaches with regard to disturbance (Urban: Atalaia; Intermediate: Farol-Velho; and Protected: Corvinas) in the intertidal zone along two equidistant transects at seven equidistant sampling stations from the high-tide water mark to the swash zone. At each sampling station, four biological and sediment samples were randomly collected. Also, in each station, the sediment compaction was determined using a manual penetrometer. Physical sediment variables remained constant over time in all beaches, whereas differences were found in sediment compaction over the months. Macrobenthic community differences in density and richness among months were observed at Atalaia and Farol-Velho beaches. In contrast, Corvinas beach remained constant throughout the study period. Furthermore, the vulnerability of the polychaetes Thoracophellia papillata, Scolelepis squamata and Paraonis sp. indicates that they might be potential indicators of recreational activity impact.

Seed retention, and ultimately seed shatter, are extremely important for the efficacy of harvest weed seed control (HWSC) and are likely influenced by various agroecological and environmental factors. Field studies investigated seed-shattering phenology of 22 weed species across three soybean [Glycine max (L.) Merr.]-producing regions in the United States. We further evaluated the potential drivers of seed shatter in terms of weather conditions, growing degree days, and plant biomass. Based on the results, weather conditions had no consistent impact on weed seed shatter. However, there was a positive correlation between individual weed plant biomass and delayed weed seed–shattering rates during harvest. This work demonstrates that HWSC can potentially reduce weed seedbank inputs of plants that have escaped early-season management practices and retained seed through harvest. However, smaller individuals of plants within the same population that shatter seed before harvest pose a risk of escaping early-season management and HWSC.

China's overcapacities in manufacturing industries, including pollution-intensive industries, served as an important motivation of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The popular Pollution Haven Hypothesis (PHH) therefore expects that the initiative will lead to the relocation of polluting industries from China to the recipients. Focusing on the implementation by local governments, we argue that actual outcomes of the BRI depend on the way local states and businesses respond to the BRI in accordance with their preferences. Through investigating industries’ actual responses to the BRI, we found that pollution-intensive industries have not relocated but rather expanded exports to the BRI countries. This has two implications: on the one hand, it alleviates the overcapacity issue in China and helps sustain the economic performance of the industry; on the other hand, it results in more pollution within Chinese borders and aggravates the environmental challenges facing the country.

Footprint has become a common term in environmental research in Antarctica, yet after 25 years there is still no certainty about what it refers to. In relation to Antarctica, the closest definition has been ‘the spatial extent and intensity of disturbance’. Yet there is still confusion around what a ‘disturbance’ footprint is actually measuring. This is evident within Committee for Environmental Protection documents, in which there have been over 80 mentions of footprint, with at least eight different meanings, since 1998. To improve clarity in its use by both scientists and policymakers, we first examine the development of the term footprint, how it has been applied, and its usefulness in applications such as interpreting ‘minor or transitory’ activities. We then identify and define a suite of footprint types (disturbance, building, contamination, non-native species, noise, visual, visitation, risk, carbon, ecological, and human), with the aim of developing a common understanding of what the term refers to. Our goal is to ensure the concept of footprint can be a useful environmental tool to facilitate progressing environmental protection.

The need to ensure food safety has been recognized in China and the ‘Green Food’ system is used to restrict the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides in its certified products. There has been limited study of the environmental impacts associated with the production of green food certified (GFC) products in China. In this study, life cycle assessment was used to evaluate environmental impacts of GFC cucumber cultivated under a greenhouse system in the suburbs of Beijing relative to conventional cultivation (CON), with the aim of identifying the key areas of potential environmental burden in cucumber cultivation. Eight environmental impact categories are considered, including global warming potential, energy depletion (ED), water depletion, acidification potential, aquatic eutrophication (AEU), human toxicity (HT), aquatic eco-toxicity (AET) and soil eco-toxicity (SET). Results showed that the environmental index of the GFC cucumber system was higher than that of the CON cucumber system. SET, EU and ED were identified as the main potential environmental impacts in cucumber systems, largely caused by fertilizer use on the farm. The potentials of HT and AET in GFC cucumber were lower than those in the CON system, mainly due to the reduced use of chemical pesticides. The agricultural input of plastics was the main contributor to energy depletion in both cucumber cultivation systems. Potential approaches to mitigate the environmental impacts of cucumber cultivation include increasing the fertilizer use efficiency, avoiding use of animal manure with high heavy metal content and recycling of plastics under the GFC cultivation system.

Chironomid communities were studied in a sediment core collected from Lake Moreno Oeste, located in Nahuel Huapi National Park. A major change in midge assemblages occurred at ∼AD 1760, which was characterized by a decrease of “cold taxa” including Polypedilum sp.2 and Dicrotendipes, and an increase of “warm taxa” including Apsectrotanypus and Polypedilum sp.1. These taxa are likely related to climatic conditions concurrent with the end of a cold period at ∼AD 1500-1700 and the beginning of a drying climate at ∼AD 1740-1900 in northern Patagonia. Coarse tephra layers had low midge diversity; however they did not disrupt the climatic trend as the community recovered rapidly after the event. Since AD 1910, after the increase in suburban housing, fish introduction, and the construction of a road, there was an increase in the relative abundances of taxa typically associated with the littoral zone, such as Parapsectrocladius, Riethia, Apsectrotanypus, and some Tanytarsini morphotypes. The main change in the chironomid community appears to be associated with long-term climate change. At the beginning of the 20th century, other site-specific environmental factors (catchment change and fish introduction) altered the chironomid assemblages, making it more difficult to understand the relative importance of each driver of assemblage change.

Objectives: Traditional economic evaluations for most health technology assessments (HTAs) have previously not included environmental outcomes. With the growing interest in reducing the environmental impact of human activities, the need to consider how to include environmental outcomes into HTAs has increased. We present a simple method of doing so.

Methods: We adapted an existing clinical-economic model to include environmental outcomes (carbon dioxide [CO2] emissions) to predict the consequences of adding insulin to an oral antidiabetic (OAD) regimen for patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) over 30 years, from the United Kingdom payer perspective. Epidemiological, efficacy, healthcare costs, utility, and carbon emissions data were derived from published literature. A scenario analysis was performed to explore the impact of parameter uncertainty.

Results: The addition of insulin to an OAD regimen increases costs by 2,668 British pounds per patient and is associated with 0.36 additional quality-adjusted life-years per patient. The insulin-OAD combination regimen generates more treatment and disease management-related CO2 emissions per patient (1,686 kg) than the OAD-only regimen (310 kg), but generates fewer emissions associated with treating complications (3,019 kg versus 3,337 kg). Overall, adding insulin to OAD therapy generates an extra 1,057 kg of CO2 emissions per patient over 30 years.

Conclusions: The model offers a simple approach for incorporating environmental outcomes into health economic analyses, to support a decision-maker's objective of reducing the environmental impact of health care. Further work is required to improve the accuracy of the approach; in particular, the generation of resource-specific environmental impacts.

Protected areas are one of the main tools for biological conservation worldwide. Although they have contributed to an increase in fish abundance and alleviated the impacts of fishing on marine ecosystems, the impacts of fishing and of protected areas in freshwater ecosystems are less well known. We compared fishing productivity and fish assemblage descriptors of two distinct protected areas designated for sustainable use of natural resources and an unprotected area in the Tapajós River, in the Brazilian Amazon. Two hypotheses were tested: (1) fishers from protected areas have higher catch per unit effort than those from unprotected areas; and (2) fish assemblages in protected areas have higher biomass, abundance, presence of target species, species richness, fish size and mean trophic level than those in unprotected areas. A total of 2,013 fish landings were recorded and two surveys were undertaken to sample fishes. Eleven environmental parameters were quantified to distinguish between effects of environmental heterogeneity and protected areas. The catch per unit effort of fishers was higher within protected areas than in unprotected areas, suggesting that protected areas reduce the levels of fishing pressure and increase fishing productivity. However, the fish assemblage descriptors were correlated more with environmental variables than with protected areas, indicating a relatively weak effect of protected areas on fish communities in lakes. The results highlight the importance of considering the influence of environmental heterogeneity in fish conservation programmes, and the positive effect of protected areas on fishing productivity in freshwater environments.