ALBERT

Description: This chapter provides an overview of the transhumanist movement, its origins, its main figures and its main positions. It then highlights the fact that transhumanism shows little concern for environmental issues, as it is mostly focused on individual bodies, health and longevity. Finally, this chapter examines how transhumanists activists or related academics address contemporary ecological disasters, focusing on the human engineering hypothesis first, and then the “good Anthropocene” and its connections with some aspects of the debate on solar geoengineering.

Description: The debate on how to evaluate and manage risks focuses on three major strategies: (Renn O. EMBO Rep 8:303–305, 2007, Renn O. Risk governance. Coping with uncertainty in a complex world. Earthscan, London, 2008a; Stirling A. On ‘Science’ and ‘Precaution’ in the management of technological risk. Volume I: synthesis study, report to the eu forward studies unit by European Science and Technology Observatory (ESTO), EUR19056EN. IPTS, Sevilla. Available at: ftp://ftp.jrc.es/pub/EURdoc/eur19056IIen.pdf, 1999): (1) risk-based approaches, including, numerical thresholds (NOEL standards, performance standards, etc.); (2) reduction activities derived from the application of the precautionary principle (examples are ALARA, i.e., as low as reasonably achievable, BACT, i.e., best available control technology, containment in time and space, or constant monitoring of potential side-effects); and (3) standards derived from discursive processes such as roundtables, deliberative rulemaking, mediation or citizen panels. Experience demonstrates that there is no simple recipe for assessing, evaluating and managing risks. In view of complex cause-effect relationships, diverse attitudes and preferences as well as variations in interests and values, risks must be considered as physically as well as socially heterogeneous phenomena that preclude standardized evaluation and handling. Therefore, a coherent concept for evaluation and management is needed that ensures the integration of social diversity and multidisciplinary approaches into institutional routines and standardized practices. The main objective of this paper is to explore the potentials and the limitations of an approach to risk assessment and management that has been labelled the “precautionary principle”. In its most simple version, precaution requires risk managers to err on the safe side. This includes rather accepting false negative (that risks are less severe than assumed) than false positive assessments (that risk are more severe than assumed). However, such a simple definition does not specify to what degree false negatives are socially tolerable, nor does it allow a discussion about future benefits that could potentially compensate for uncertain risks. The following sections will review main positions on precaution and point out the present practice in the European Union, which has adopted the precautionary principle as a major legal guideline for its risk management practice. The paper concludes with suggestions for aligning the precautionary principle and the concept of responsible innovation.

Description: Policy advice for dealing with major crises has focussed on two concepts: resilience and sustainability. The article introduces the term resilience and explains its application in different disciplines. Furthermore, it explores the relationship between resilience and sustainability, illustrates the various concepts that are associated with each term and suggests an integrative approach that is based on the ideal of maintaining critical services for reaching humane living conditions for present and future generations based on fair distribution rules and inclusive governance processes.

Description: Strain energy from tectonic loading can be partly released through aseismic creep. Earthquake repeaters, repeatedly activated brittle fault patches surrounded by creep, indicate steady-state creep that affects the amount of seismic energy available for the next large earthquake along a plate contact. The offshore Main Marmara Fault (MMF) of the North Anatolian Fault Zone represents a seismic gap capable of generating a M 〉 7 earthquake in direct vicinity to the mega-city Istanbul. Based on a newly compiled seismicity catalog, we identify repeating earthquakes to resolve the spatial creep variability along the MMF during a 15-year period. We observe a maximum of seismic repeaters indicating creep along the central and western MMF segments tapering off toward the locked onshore Ganos fault in the west, and the locked offshore Princes Islands segment immediately south of Istanbul in the east. This indicates a high degree of spatial creep variability along the Istanbul-Marmara seismic gap.

Description: Emission inventories are a critical basis for air quality and climate modeling, as well as policy decisions. Non-methane volatile organic compounds (NMVOCs) are key precursor compounds in ozone and secondary organic aerosol formation. Accurately representing NMVOCs in emission inventories is crucial for understanding atmospheric chemistry, the impact of policy measures, and climate projections. Improving NMVOC representation in emission inventories is fraught with challenges, ranging from the lack of (long-term) NMVOC measurements, limited efforts in updating emission factors, to the diversity of NMVOC species reactivity. Here we take an initial step to evaluate the representation of urban NMVOC speciation in an emission inventory (EDGARv4.3.2 and EDGARv6.1) at the global level. To compare the urban measurements of NMVOCs to the emission inventory estimates, ratios of individual NMVOCs to acetylene are used. Owing to limitations in measurement data and grouping of NMVOCs in emission inventories, the comparison includes only a limited number of alkanes, alkenes, and aromatics. Results show little to no agreement between the ratios in the observations and those in the global emission inventory for the species compared (r2 0.01–0.20). This could be related to incorrect speciation profiles and/or spatial allocation of NMVOCs to urban areas. Regional emission inventories show better agreement among the ratios (r2 0.43–0.70). The inclusion of oxygenated species in NMVOC measurements, as well as greater global coverage of measurements could improve representation of NMVOC species in emission inventories, and a mosaic of regional inventories may be a better approach.

Description: The international UN Climate Change conferences known as “Conferences of the Parties (COPs)” have an enormous convening power and are attended annually by tens of thousands of actors working on climate change topics from a wide range of perspectives. In the COP spaces outside of the formal negotiations, the communication culture is dominated by “side events,” a format that relies heavily on conventional presentations and panels that can be informative, but is generally not conducive to mutual engagement, reflection, or dialogue. There is an urgent need for new dialogue formats that can better foster learning and community-building and thereby harness the enormous latent potential for climate action represented by the diverse stakeholders that gather at the COP. Against this backdrop, and drawing on our experience with the development and implementation of the Co-Creative Reflection and Dialogue Spaces at COP25, COP26, and COP27, we make recommendations for further developing the communication culture of the COPs. At the level of individual sessions, we provide recommendations for designing participatory dialogues that can better support reflection, interconnection, and action orientation. In addition, we offer guidance for scaling up these practices, for instance through networks and communities of practice to support a shift of the overall communication culture of the COPs. Our recommendations focus on interactions and exchanges that unfold outside of the formal negotiation sessions, with a view toward enabling and accelerating transformative action by non-state actors.

Description: This paper presents a study on the predefined-time (PdT) and practical PdT synchronization of competitive neural networks (CNN) in the presence of different time scales and external disturbances. Two types of external disturbances, which satisfy Lipschitz or bounded conditions, are investigated respectively. The new PdT and practical PdT stability theorems are derived in singularly perturbed systems, where the final residual set is given in detail. By employing the newly derived stability theorems, novel autonomous controllers are designed without relying on a continuous linear term and time scale parameters, while enabling PdT or practical PdT synchronization for drive-response CNNs. Additionally, upper bounds for the settling time are estimated, allowing for adjusting the predefined synchronization times regardless of the initial conditions. Finally, numerical simulations are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the main results.

Description: Understanding the ongoing investments in coal-fired power plants requires an analysis of the political economy. Here, we conduct a computational analysis of 212 interviews from 12 countries on the political economy of coal using topic modelling (TM). Our study highlights relevant topics by actor group and country. While most topics are similarly distributed across all actor groups, we find distinct clusters of countries in which similar topics play important roles. For example, in Indonesia and India, sustaining low electricity tariffs is brought forward as a reason to invest in coal, whereas in South Africa and Kenya the civil society is considered instrumental in the choice of coal or alternatives. To validate our findings, we compare them to outcomes of qualitative case studies and to papers grouping countries based on quantifiable factors. As this study is among the first to apply TM to interview data, we thereby highlight strengths and challenges for such application and the interpretability of results. We argue that topic models are effective supplements to qualitative case studies, particularly when analysing large amounts of text.

Description: Driven primarily by variations in the earth's axis wobble, tilt, and orbit eccentricity, our planet experienced massive glacial/interglacial reorganizations of climate and atmospheric CO2 concentrations during the Pleistocene (2.58 million years ago (Ma)–11.7 thousand years ago (ka)). Even after decades of research, the underlying climate response mechanisms to these astronomical forcings have not been fully understood. To further quantify the sensitivity of the earth system to orbital-scale forcings, we conducted an unprecedented quasi-continuous coupled general climate model simulation with the Community Earth System Model version 1.2 (CESM1.2, ∼3.75∘ horizontal resolution), which covers the climatic history of the past 3 million years (3 Myr). In addition to the astronomical insolation changes, CESM1.2 is forced by estimates of CO2 and ice-sheet topography which were obtained from a simulation previously conducted with the CLIMBER-2 earth system model of intermediate complexity. Our 3 Ma simulation consists of 42 transient interglacial/glacial simulation chunks, which were partly run in parallel to save computing time. The chunks were subsequently merged, accounting for spin-up and overlap effects to yield a quasi-continuous trajectory. The computer model data were compared against a plethora of paleo-proxy data and large-scale climate reconstructions. For the period from the Mid-Pleistocene Transition (MPT, ∼1 Ma) to the late Pleistocene we find good agreement between simulated and reconstructed temperatures in terms of phase and amplitude (−5.7 ∘C temperature difference between Last Glacial Maximum and Holocene). For the earlier part (3–1 Ma), differences in orbital-scale variability occur between model simulation and the reconstructions, indicating potential biases in the applied CO2 forcing. Our model-proxy data comparison also extends to the westerlies, which show unexpectedly large variance on precessional timescales, and hydroclimate variables in major monsoon regions. Eccentricity-modulated precessional variability is also responsible for the simulated changes in the amplitude and flavors of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation. We further identify two major modes of planetary energy transport, which played a crucial role in Pleistocene climate variability: the first obliquity and CO2-driven mode is linked to changes in the Equator-to-pole temperature gradient; the second mode regulates the interhemispheric heat imbalance in unison with the eccentricity-modulated precession cycle. During the MPT, a pronounced qualitative shift occurs in the second mode of planetary energy transport: the post-MPT eccentricity-paced variability synchronizes with the CO2 forced signal. This synchronized feature is coherent with changes in global atmospheric and ocean circulations, which might contribute to an intensification of glacial cycle feedbacks and amplitudes. Comparison of this paleo-simulation with greenhouse warming simulations reveals that for an RCP8.5 greenhouse gas emission scenario, the projected global mean surface temperature changes over the next 7 decades would be comparable to the late Pleistocene glacial-interglacial range; but the anthropogenic warming rate will exceed any previous ones by a factor of ∼100.

Description: Sustainability research emphasizes the importance of intervening with both individual and organizational behaviours as well as the systems that shape them to create sustainability transformations. However, to date there is a lack of studies that bridge the divide between small case-based interventions and global systems at broader scales, and the complex interactions across scales and processes. This paper works with a leverage points framework to consider systems transformation. It focuses on four individual sustainability interventions in the textile sector and explores how they are embedded within a complex set of nested systems, and how these connected systems shape the transformative potential of the interventions. By using an onion metaphor for systems with several onion layers representing the current textile sector and its multiple connected and nested systems, we integrate and reflect across four in-depth case studies, conducted over a period of 3 years, using a range of empirical research approaches. The findings show that the studied interventions all target multiple deep leverage points within their target systems of production and consumption. All are limited in fulfilling their transformative potential by a range of barriers that we trace back to the economic and policy and regulation systems that they are embedded within. The economic system enforces a paradigm of consumption-based growth, and the policy and regulation system fails to either support change, or restrict unsustainable behaviours. Our findings demonstrate the need to think across systems scales to understand leverage points and transformative change; our nested systems approach is one way to do so. We outline two promising pathways for sustainability transformations: (1) focussing on how to create spillover effects of favourable interventions in sub-systems to push outwards against the constraints of the current policy and regulation, and economic systems; and (2) by targeting actors and interventions within the policy and regulation and economic systems to create change in the paradigms and design they embody and enforce on the systems nested within them.