ALBERT

Description: Study region Eight river catchments within Central Asia. Study focus The limited amount of water resources is already an issue in the Central Asian region, and climate change may be crucial for water availability and development of countries in the region. This study investigates potential climate change impacts on water resources in Central Asia to the end of the century by focusing on eight river catchments with diverse natural conditions located in different countries. The eco-hydrological model SWIM was setup, calibrated and validated for all selected catchments under study. Scenarios from five bias-corrected GCMs under Representative Concentration Pathways 4.5 and 8.5 were used to drive the hydrological model. New hydrological insights for the region The results show an increase of mean annual temperature in all catchments for both RCPs to the end of the century. The projected changes in annual precipitation indicate a clear trend to increase in the Zhabay and to decrease in the Murghab catchments, and for other catchments, they were smaller. The projected trends for river discharge are similar to those of precipitation, with an increase in the north and decrease in the south of the study region. Seasonal changes are characterized by a shift in the peak of river discharge up to one month, shortage of snow accumulation period, and reduction of discharge in summer months.

Description: Goals and pathways to achieve sustainable urban development have multiple interlinkages with human health and wellbeing. However, these interlinkages have not been examined in depth in recent discussions on urban sustainability and global urban science. This paper fills that gap by elaborating in detail the multiple links between urban sustainability and human health and by mapping research gaps at the interface of health and urban sustainability sciences. As researchers from a broad range of disciplines, we aimed to: 1) define the process of urbanization, highlighting distinctions from related concepts to support improved conceptual rigour in health research; 2) review the evidence linking health with urbanization, urbanicity, and cities and identify cross-cutting issues; and 3) highlight new research approaches needed to study complex urban systems and their links with health. This novel, comprehensive knowledge synthesis addresses issue of interest across multiple disciplines. Our review of concepts of urban development should be of particular value to researchers and practitioners in the health sciences, while our review of the links between urban environments and health should be of particular interest to those outside of public health. We identify specific actions to promote health through sustainable urban development that leaves no one behind, including: integrated planning; evidence-informed policy-making; and monitoring the implementation of policies. We also highlight the critical role of effective governance and equity-driven planning in progress towards sustainable, healthy, and just urban development.

Description: Tillage is a central element in agricultural soil management and has direct and indirect effects onprocesses in the biosphere. Effects of agricultural soil management can be assessed by soil, crop, and ecosystemmodels, but global assessments are hampered by lack of information on the type of tillage and their spatialdistribution. This study describes the generation of a classification of tillage practices and presents the spatiallyexplicit mapping of these crop-specific tillage systems for around the year 2005.Tillage practices differ by the kind of equipment used, soil surface and depth affected, timing, and their pur-pose within the cropping systems. We classified the broad variety of globally relevant tillage practices intosix categories: no-tillage in the context of Conservation Agriculture, traditional annual, traditional rotational,rotational, reduced, and conventional annual tillage. The identified tillage systems were allocated to griddedcrop-specific cropland areas with a resolution of 5 arcmin. Allocation rules were based on literature findings andcombine area information on crop type, water management regime, field size, water erosion, income, and aridity.We scaled reported national Conservation Agriculture areas down to grid cells via a probability-based approachfor 54 countries. We provide area estimates of the six tillage systems aggregated to global and country scale. Wefound that 8.67 Mkm2of global cropland area was tilled intensively at least once a year, whereas the remaining2.65 Mkm2was tilled less intensely. Further, we identified 4.67 Mkm2of cropland as an area where ConservationAgriculture could be expanded to under current conditions.The tillage classification enables the parameterization of different soil management practices in various kindsof model simulations. The crop-specific tillage dataset indicates the spatial distribution of soil managementpractices, which is a prerequisite to assess erosion, carbon sequestration potential, as well as water, and nutrientdynamics of cropland soils. The dynamic definition of the allocation rules and accounting for national statistics,such as the share of Conservation Agriculture per country, also allow for derivation of datasets for historical andfuture global soil management scenarios. The resulting tillage system dataset and source code are accessible viaan open-data repository (DOIs: https://doi.org/10.5880/PIK.2019.009 and https://doi.org/10.5880/PIK.2019.010,Porwollik et al., 2019a, b).