Narrow Results

SINGAPORE – NUS Researchers Uncover Potent Parasite-killing Mechanism of Nobel Prize-Winning Anti-Malarial Drug.

SINGAPORE – Robotic Glove Invented by NUS Researchers Helps Patients Restore Hand Movements.

UNITED STATES – Study Reveals Environment, Behavior Contribute to Some 80 Percent of Cancers.

UNITED STATES – Probing the Mystery of How Cancer Cells Die.

UNITED STATES – Liver Hormone Works Through Brain's Reward Pathway to Reduce Preference for Sweets & Alcohol.

UNITED STATES – How Three Genes You've Never Heard of May Influence Human Fertility.

UNITED STATES – Researchers Find Link between Processed Foods and Autoimmune Diseases.

UNITED KINGDOM – Is Evolution More Intelligent Than We Thought?

UNITED KINGDOM – Unravelling the Genetics of Pregnancy and Heart Failure.

SWITZERLAND – New Global Framework to Eliminate Rabies.

CANADA – Droughts Hit Cereal Crops Harder Since 1980s.

TAIWAN – Discovery of Key Autophagy Terminator that Contributes to Cell Survival and Muscle Homeostasis.

Climate models predict more weather extremes in the coming decades. Weather shocks can directly reduce crop production, but their effect on food markets is partly buffered by storage and supply responses that can be complex and nuanced. We explore how inter-hemispheric trade and supply responses can moderate the effects of weather shocks on global food supply by enabling potential intra-annual arbitrage. Our estimates of this effect in the case of wheat and soybeans suggest that it may be considerable: 25–50% of crop production lost to a shock in the Southern Hemisphere is offset six months later by increased production in the North. These results have implications for the potential effects of climate change on global food markets, for how we model these interactions and, possibly, for the design of trade and production-related policies that aim to leverage this inter-hemispheric buffer more effectively.

We synthesize the interconnected impacts of Texas’ water and energy resources and infrastructure including the cascading effects due to Winter Storm Uri. The government’s preparedness, communication, policies, and response as well as storm impacts on vulnerable communities are evaluated using available information and data. Where knowledge gaps exist, we propose potential research to elucidate health, environmental, policy, and economic impacts of the extreme weather event. We expect that recommendations made here — while specific to the situation and outcomes of Winter Storm Uri — will increase Texas’ resilience to other extreme weather events not discussed in this paper. We found that out of 14 million residents who were on boil water notices, those who were served by very small water systems went, on average, a minimum of three days longer without potable water. Available county-level data do not indicate vulnerable communities went longer periods of time without power or water during the event. More resolved data are required to understand who was most heavily impacted at the community or neighborhood level. Gaps in government communication, response, and policy are discussed, including issues with identifying — and securing power to — critical infrastructure and the fact that the state’s Emergency Alert System was not used consistently to update Texans during the crisis. Finally, research recommendations are made to bolster weaknesses discovered during and after the storm including (1) reliable communication strategies, (2) reducing disproportionate impacts to vulnerable communities, (3) human health impacts, (4) increasing water infrastructure resilience, and (5) how climate change could impact infrastructure resilience into the future.

Sharing of risk knowledge for extreme events is taking place against a backdrop of changing societal communication patterns, in which the flow of information is increasingly multi-directional, within and between individuals, wider communities and a variety of authorities using online media. We present qualitative findings from the CASCADE knowledge exchange project and a case study, from a flood risk area, on the role of social networks using such ‘new’ media as engagement tools in building resilience to flooding. The data emerged from a workshop held in 2018, together with a study into changing communication practice in the Thames Valley near Windsor, UK. It was found that engagement is occurring both during events, as an emergency management tool, and between events, often linked to strategic management such as flood defense and related planning. The qualitative findings were analyzed to investigate whether knowledge and information sharing in emergencies may lead to co-operative sharing between emergencies. According to evidence from workshop discussions across the seminars, and empirical evidence from the flood risk zone, social networks formed and/or enhanced using new media can help promote consensus but also have the potential to accentuate distrust and divide managers and the community at risk. Relevant factors were the nature of the risk faced, nature of event-related protection activity, whether extreme weather events were occurring or had occurred in the recent past, and sociocultural aspects such as the degree of general engagement of civil society, linked to location. There is a possibility that new media may thus reinforce existing power structures, including acknowledged paternalistic attitudes by management authorities and pre-conceived ideas from at-risk communities. In terms of the contribution that social media can make toward the goal of social learning for resilience, the specific role of online social media as a communication tool continues to evolve. It was noted from the workshop that there is a potential for producers of information to act also as consumers (the ‘prosumer effect’), but gaining benefit from this trend requires some changes to existing interaction patterns within and between risk management authorities and communities. More investment may be required in forms of engagement that build relationships of trust, using ‘traditional’ (face-to-face) approaches.

This chapter studies how a well-defined environmental concerns factor influences the equity performance of US energy firms and whether or not this influence differs for renewable and non-renewable energy firms. We construct the environmental sentiment factor and seven sub-group environment-related risk factors using the Dynamic Factor Model econometric method. Then, we estimate stock abnormal returns from well-established asset pricing models to measure firm equity performance. We use an unbalanced panel of 448 US energy firms at the monthly frequency from January 2004 to October 2016. First, we find that all US energy companies show negative abnormal returns in the sampled period, that is the actual returns were lower than expected. Renewable energy firms had higher company value, since renewable energy stocks had lower abnormal returns. We also find that the abnormal returns of renewable energy stocks mainly come from environment regulation risks, while the abnormal returns of non-renewable energy stocks are more sensitive to the measure of public environmental concerns and extreme weather conditions. Consequently, we find that holding the level of environmental related risks constant, non-renewable energy stocks command relative lower abnormal returns.